Close Range Christmas by Nicole Helm (ebook reader for laptop TXT) 📗

the boy. Then there’s your own relationship, which... Well, it’s hard enough to make those decisions when you’re settled and married. It’s a balancing act. It’s—”

“Is now really the time to lecture me on all the ways I’m going to screw it up?”

“No time like the present,” Duke said. He almost sounded cheerful, but Dev supposed that’s because he was distracting himself by trying to scare the bejesus out of Dev. “Besides, you’ll both screw it up. That’s the beauty of life if you think about it. Everybody makes mistakes, so it hardly makes yours the end of the world like you’re so prone to do.”

“I’m not prone to do that,” Dev muttered. “Much.” But before he could analyze how right Duke might be, his attention was drawn to a difference in the snow. There were still footprints here, but the snow was packed differently. He could see where the cops had gone on, following the prints.

But there was something off here, even if he couldn’t figure out what. “Do you see this?”

Duke studied the snow too. “Something isn’t right. Is it packed in?”

“Seems to be. But that’s a heck of a lot of packing.”

“Unless...” Duke trailed off, but he lifted a gloved hand and pointed a little ways off. After an area of packed snow, there were two indentations. Like snowmobile tracks.

“Let’s be careful where we walk,” Dev said, starting to head that way and trying to avoid marring any tracks. After just a few steps, he saw a dark stain of red between the indentations. It was a narrow trickle following the path of the mobile.

Dev looked at Duke, who already had his phone to his ear. “Jamison. We found something. Don’t know how far your deputy friends are ahead of us, but can you radio them back? They’ll be able to see our trail and follow us.”

Duke hung up and they kept walking.

“Better watch out for an ambush, boy.”

Dev looked around. It was an open field. Though the land rolled a bit here and there, with the snow it would be almost impossible to hide.

The snowmobile tracks curved around a swell of land. Duke and Dev slowed in unison as they rounded the tiny hill. The red dribble of blood stopped behind the swell, where Dev could spot hair.

He held out an arm and stopped Duke, but Duke shook his head. “I don’t think that’s a live one.”

Dev let out a breath and then they walked closer, the body coming more into view. He didn’t recognize the man, though he was clearly dead. A giant arrow was coming out of his chest, and he didn’t move. His unseeing eyes just stared at the bright sun above.

Attached to the body, via the arrow, was another piece of paper. Duke swore. Dev moved closer to read the note, being careful not to disrupt any more of the scene.

Craig Timothy

Crimes:

Armed robbery, rape, first and second-degree murder, but most of all—failure.

Sentencing:

Death by lethal injection.

—AW

“Seems to me a man with all these notes, who can disappear or send other people to do his dirty work, would choose people less likely to fail.”

Dev would agree, but he thought about what Sarah had said. That this was just a game. Or maybe unrelated to the Wyatts. Maybe Anth simply wanted to get rid of these men for whatever reason, and this was the way to do it. Maybe he wanted to confuse them, or just scare them by showing them what he could do.

Too many options, but so much failure didn’t make sense. It had to be planned. It had to be purposeful. Which put Dev even more on edge than he already was.

“Dev.” Duke’s voice was especially grave, and when Dev looked back at the man, Duke nodded toward the corpse’s hand.

There was a folded up piece of paper, but clearly printed on the part Dev could see was his brother’s name. Gage Wyatt. Just like Sarah had predicted.

“Let’s go find the cops,” Dev said grimly.

Chapter Twelve

By the time Dev and Duke returned to the house, Sarah had read and reread the notes left for Jamison and Cody. Now she had a third note to read. Gage, just as she’d predicted.

“Oh, allow me,” Gage said when Dev said he was going to read it to everyone.

“It’s just a picture. The cops took the original to see if they could lift some prints off it.” Dev handed his phone to Gage. Felicity sat down, Claire squirming in her lap.

Sarah thought the way Claire was cheerfully babbling at Felicity helped ease some of Felicity’s tension now that her husband received the specific threat.

“‘Gage Wyatt. Crimes: The subject has been the perpetrator of a wide variety of crimes since childhood. Manslaughter. Battery. Treason. Escape from custody and sentencing. Attempted patricide.’” Gage smirked. “Hard to argue with that one.”

“What’s the sentencing?” Sarah encouraged him. They’d all followed the same lines, and the sentencing was always the clue to how they were going to be attacked.

“‘Sentencing: For these acts, I do hereby sentence Gage Wyatt to death. This will be meted out at the judge’s discretion through the method G. Wyatt saw fit to use on his own father.’ Signed AW.” Gage handed Dev his phone back. “Well, unless he plans on dragging me off to a cave somewhere, I think I’m safe.”

“Don’t say that,” Felicity said. She’d gone more and more pale as Gage had read the note and his last little quip hadn’t helped. But Felicity had been there when Ace had tied Gage up in a cave in the Badlands. She’d been the one to save Gage from Ace.

“It doesn’t make sense anyway. I didn’t try to kill him. He tried to kill me. Felicity is the one who shot him.”

“We keep running into a lot of things not making sense,” Dev said grimly. “I imagine we’ll meet a few more before this is all over. We need to keep being diligent, but the current challenge is going to be getting Sarah to her