You Don't Want To Know - By Lisa Jackson Page 0,168

asked.

“Not yet,” he admitted, “but he’s here, on the island. I can feel it. I just can’t prove it . . . yet.” He didn’t add that he’d thought he’d caught a glimpse of the bastard, but like smoke, Reece had disappeared before Dern could reach the spot where he’d seen him. He’d been riding near Sea Cliff. Dern had a feeling Reece was holed up in the old asylum, but there were just too many places to hide for Dern to find him or even where he was camping out. The trouble was that Reece knew the place like the back of his hand. Once Dern had proof that Reece was there, he would call the police. He just wouldn’t tell his mother until after the fact.

“Don’t hurt him,” she begged, and Dern knew he’d have to lie. Again. Well, hell, he was getting good at it. Had years of practice.

“I’ll do my best.”

“Promise me, Austin. You have to bring Lester in alive. He has to be safe.”

“If I can.”

“Promise me!” she insisted, her voice rising, and he thought of her in her wheelchair, staring out the window, her fingers gripping the arms. “If I could, I’d be there with you, but I can’t, so you have to do this for me. For us. Our family.” Her voice broke, but he knew she was dry-eyed. She’d learned not to cry years before.

“I promise, Mom,” he finally said, though he was certain they both knew he might not deliver.

“Don’t get the police involved. They’ll . . . they’ll shoot to kill and you know it.”

She was referring to his own stint as a cop. It had been short-lived, but he knew the police, too, wanted to catch Reece and bring him to justice. “I know they’ll do their best.”

“Oh, Austin. Don’t let them—”

“I’ll try to bring him in alive. Get him safe.”

“Thank God.” She sounded so relieved and his heart twisted a bit. “Just go find your brother.”

He hung up with that same hollowness in his soul he felt whenever he talked to her. She was dying, prematurely, but living on borrowed time according to all the doctors.

He knew it.

She knew it.

Reece knew it, too. That’s why he’d surfaced again, taken the chance and contacted a mother he’d barely known, a woman who had let a rich, if abusive, father take away her firstborn. Lester had been a wild boy of four when she started a new life with a new man who wasn’t much better than the first, but a man who gave her a second son whom she’d named Austin, for the town to which she’d fled.

Lester Reece had then grown up privileged and educated, but he had suffered at the hands of his father and a series of stepmothers who were more than a little responsible for his criminal ways, at least according to his defense team at his trial.

Dern, on the other hand, had been raised in a relatively stable, if poor household with his other siblings. His old man, a ranch hand who had taught his boy his trade before taking off when Dern was ten, had been a hard-drinking, hardworking man who seemed to like horses better than people.

To this day, Dern never knew what happened to him.

When his mother, a few years later, had taken up with a new man, a stepfather Dern didn’t care to know, he’d moved out. It wasn’t until much later, when he was doing his time in the service overseas, that he’d learned the truth. Reba, facing her first serious health scare, had written him, finally explaining about her first short marriage and the child she hadn’t seen in over a quarter of a century, a man who was accused of killing his ex-wife and her friend, a man who was dangerous.

She’d felt guilt for abandoning him, but Dern had thought Lester Reece was best left alone. He didn’t need to meet this half brother who had a tendency to cut up women.

Then Reece had been caught, tried, and sent to the mental hospital. Good riddance, Dern had thought.

Until the son of a bitch escaped and pulled the best damned disappearing act in recent history. And now his dying mother wanted to know that he was safe and not hurting anyone else.

So that was Dern’s mission.

He looked at the dog again, frowned, and opened his bottle of Jack once more. With one finger pointing at the dog, he took a long pull, felt the whiskey warm his throat,