Prologue
He was still behind her!
Heedless of the dark, moonless night, of the winding, downhill road and rain-slicked pavement, of the clumsy vehicle at her command, she jammed the accelerator all the way to the floor.
As if bitten, the truck she had stolen leaped forward crazily and threatened to shoot straight off the road.
Palms sweaty, she white-knuckled the steering wheel…successfully wrestled the cumbersome old rattletrap around a hairpin curve and away from the sheer drop…darted her nervous gaze to the rearview mirror….
Nothing for a moment. Then she saw the twin beams make the turn, as well. The headlights seemed a bit more distant, but still they kept pace with her.
She held her breath, the only sounds filling her ears the rumble of the engine punctuated by worn wipers clack-clacking as they streaked across the windshield.
It came to her then that she would never be free of him. She’d tried everything in her power, and still he was there, a dark phantom, a portent of her future. What little she had left of one, for the distance between his headlights and the truck was closing.
He would never let her go. Never let her get away.
Never let her live.
And she had no one to blame but herself.
Sickness welled in her as she acknowledged the fate that she had brought down on herself. Her chest tightened and the bitter taste of acid filled her mouth. Her eyelids stung as self-anger grew.
“No!”
She slapped the steering wheel so hard her palm stung. She wouldn’t cry. Not now. Not after everything she’d endured.
But the tears flooded her eyes, and even as she swept around another downward curve, she dashed them away with a shaky hand. Only a second’s inattention—that fast!—and the truck veered over, halfway into the oncoming lane. Before she could pull it back in line, her eyes filled again, this time with bright, blinding lights. The windshield wipers swept the image into focus: another vehicle heading straight for her.
An eighteen-wheeler, horn blaring!
Jerking the wheel was her second mistake. The old truck took on a life of its own, skated sideways over the slick pavement. Fear and adrenaline flooding her, she tried to keep her head. Steer into the skid. Brake gently.
Too late.
A tire grabbed the shoulder and spat gravel, while the rear end spun around and off solid ground into nothingness. Her heart skipped a beat as the rest of the truck followed. Flew without wings. For a second, she felt suspended….
Suddenly, a roller-coaster drop whipped her head into the side window and churned her stomach into her throat. Then turned her as the upended truck careened downward.
Free fall…
Touchdown.
The crash sent an explosion along her nerves, straight to her mind. She was straining against the seat belt, her voice catching as she tried to remember a prayer.
To escape the pain, she gladly entered the darkness….
Chapter One
Three miles out of the crumbling town of Silver Springs, Barton Quarrels pulled his four-by-four onto the washboard-dirt ranch road that would throw him back half a lifetime. Everything looked the same, he thought. Worn cedar and barbed wire fences. Yellowing grasses. A handful of mostly white-faced livestock grazing the high desert pasture.
What he feared was that everything would be the same.
His kids had been quiet all the way up from Albuquerque. Sullen, really. They’d get over it. Had to. He was doing this for them.
Well mostly, anyhow.
“Almost there,” he told them. In an effort to engage them, to rustle some little enthusiasm where he knew there to be none, he asked, “So, after you get your stuff settled in your rooms, what do you want to do?”
“Nothing to do out here but count cows,” Daniel mumbled.
“As I remember, you used to like that, ’cause it meant you were on a horse.”
“That’s when I was a kid.”
“Yeah, right. I keep forgetting.”
As far as Bart was concerned, sixteen was far from adulthood, but he needn’t alienate Daniel more. The air between them already bristled with teenage hostility.
Bart stopped the vehicle at the pasture’s barrier, and his son jumped out to open the metal pipe and wire gate. Daniel waited until his father had pulled through the opening before swinging the gate closed and clambering back into the passenger seat. The ritual was one repeated all over the ranch, whose nearly sixty thousand acres were broken down into manageable pastures.
Bart waited until they were once more on the prowl, past the scale house where cattle on the way to market were weighed before being shipped.
Then he tried making conversation again, this time with his daughter. “Hey, Lainey, honey, want to take some photographs around the place this afternoon?” Photography being her hobby.
He glanced in the rearview mirror to check out the twelve-year-old, whose attention was seemingly glued to those boring cows.
“Mom would hate this,” she suddenly said, head churning forward, green eyes exactly like Sara’s boring into the back of his neck. “She’d hate you, putting our home up for sale, making us move.”
Bart tore his gaze from the mirror and put it back where it belonged—on the road. “Your mother didn’t have a hateful bone in her body.”
Unable to help gripping the steering wheel, he couldn’t imagine ever completely erasing the pain of loss that burdened him.
“It’s not too late, Dad,” Lainey continued darkly. “The house didn’t sell yet, so we can still go home….”
“The Curly-Q’s gonna be our home now.”
Ignoring the interruption, the girl insisted, “You can get your deputy’s badge back and everything!”
Not that he’d really lost it in the first place.
Though he hadn’t told his kids—he didn’t want to raise their hopes—Bart had been smart enough to leave himself a safety net, just in case. He’d taken a long-term leave of absence and could go back to his old job as long as it remained vacant. The sheriff hadn’t wanted to lose him and so had promised to stall things, to keep his spot open for several weeks, at least.
Just in case.
But even a city as small as Albuquerque had growing problems that made Bart’s gut quake, not for himself, but for those he loved. He’d lost a wife to violence less than a year ago. He wasn’t going to give up his kids, as well.
After his mother’s death, Daniel had secretly joined a gang and had gotten into trouble defacing the high school with cans of spray paint. Bart wondered what he hadn’t gotten caught at. While he’d made his son swear to quit the gang, he knew the promise he’d wrung out of the boy was illusory. Peer pressure would get him in the end and he’d be sneaking out with his friends again. It was only a matter of time unless Daniel was removed from the path of temptation.
And Bart was willing to do anything to protect his kids…even sell his soul.
He stared out at the devil’s playground.
Rich, volcanic-based