Under Threat by B.J. Daniels (reading the story of the .TXT) 📕

she tapped on his driver’s-side window, he jumped. His expression changed from surprise to relief. He motioned for her to go around to the passenger side.

She shook her head and motioned for him to get out of the truck.

He put his window down partway, letting out a nose-wrinkling gust of cheap aftershave and male sweat. “It’s warmer in here.”

“I’m not going to let you get cold.”

Dillon gave that a moment’s thought before he whirred up the window, killed the engine and music, and climbed out.

Lucy had considered the best way to do this. He had his motivation for asking her out. She had hers for being here. Everyone knew about Dillon and Chase’s fight. The two couldn’t stand each other. So whom would the marshal’s first suspect be if anything happened to Dillon?

She tossed down the blanket she’d brought onto the bed of dried pine needles. Dillon reached for her. He would be a poor lover, one who rushed. “Not yet, baby,” she said, holding him at arm’s length. “Why don’t you strip down, have a seat and let me get ready for you. Turn your back. I want this to be a surprise.”

It was like leading a bull to the slaughterhouse.

“Well hurry, because it’s cold out tonight,” he said as he began to undress. She’d brought her own knife, but when she’d seen his sticking out of his boot, she’d changed her plans.

The moment he sat down, his back to her, she came up behind him, grabbed a handful of his hair and his knife, and slit his throat from ear to ear. It happened so fast that he didn’t put up a fight. He gurgled, his hand going to his throat before falling to one side.

She stared down at him, hoping he’d done what he promised and lost the report on her fingerprints. Her only regret was that she hadn’t gotten to see the surprise and realization on his smug face. He’d gotten what was coming to him, but she doubted he would have seen it that way.

As she wiped her prints from the knife and stepped away, she kicked pine needles onto her tracks until she was in the woods and headed for the small creek she’d had to cross to get there. She washed her hands, rinsing away his blood. She’d worn a short-sleeved shirt, and with his back to her, she hadn’t gotten any of his blood on anything but her hands and wrists.

She scrubbed though, up to her elbows, the ice-cold water making her hands ache. She let them air-dry as she walked the rest of the way back to her vehicle. Once she got rid of the shoes she had on, no one would be able to put her at the murder scene.

The moment Mary saw her father’s face, she knew something horrible had happened. Was it her mother? One of her brothers or someone else in the family? Chase? She rose behind her desk as her father came into her office, his Stetson in hand, his marshal face on.

“Tell me,” she said on a ragged breath, her chest aching with dread. She’d seen this look before. She knew when her father had bad news to impart.

“It’s Dillon Ramsey.”

She frowned, thinking she’d heard him wrong. “Dillon?”

“You weren’t with him last night, were you?”

“No, why?”

“He was found dead this morning.”

Her first thought was a car accident. The Gallatin Canyon two-lane highway was one of the most dangerous highways in the state with all its traffic and curves through the canyon along the river.

“He was found murdered next to his truck up by Goose Creek.”

She stared at him, trying to make sense of this. “How?”

He hesitated but only a moment, as if he knew the details would get out soon enough and he wanted to be the one to tell her. “He was naked, lying on a blanket as if he’d been with someone before that. His throat had been cut.”

Her stomach roiled. “Why would someone want to kill him?”

“That’s what I’m trying to find out. I’m looking for a friend of his, Grady Birch. Do you know him?”

Mary shook her head. “I never met any of his friends.”

Her father scratched the back of his neck for a moment. “I understand that Dillon and Chase got into a confrontation that turned physical.”

“Chase? You can’t think that Chase... You’re wrong. Chase didn’t trust him, but then neither did you.”

“With good reason as it turns out. I believe that Dillon was involved in the cattle rustling along with his friend Grady Birch.”

Mary had to sit back down. All of this was making her sick to her stomach. “I’d broken up with him. I had no plans to see him again. He’d threatened to ask out one of my tenants.” She shook her head. “But Chase had nothing to do with this.”

The marshal started for the door. “I just wanted you to hear about it from me rather than the Canyon grapevine.”

She nodded and watched him leave. Dillon was dead. Murdered. She shuddered.

Grady Birch’s body washed up on the rocks near Beckman’s Flat later that morning. It was found by a fisherman. The body had been in the water for at least a few days. Even though the Gallatin River never got what anyone would call warm, it had been warm enough to do damage over that length of time.

Hud rubbed the back of his neck as he watched the coroner put the second body that day into a body bag. Dillon was dead; Grady had been dead even longer. What was going on?

He would have sworn that it was just the two of them in on the cattle rustling. But maybe there was someone else who didn’t want to share the haul. He’d send a tech crew out to the cabin to see what prints they came up with. But something felt all wrong about this. Killers, he’d found, tended to stay with the same method and not improvise. A drowning was much different from