LITMIR.BIZ

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then stripped in the dark and stepped into a hot shower.

      She got out only when the hot water ran cold. Bundled in a threadbare terry robe with the faded family crest embroidered in gold above her breast, her hair bound up in a towel, she sat down at her computer. She needed to relay the news of Everly’s murder to her father. She typed Guiliani’s name, then deleted it and sent the simple missive, short and to the point with no mention of his presence on the ranch after the murder.

      She had to remind herself over and over again that she wasn’t guilty of anything. At least, nothing that could be prosecuted. She had to fight now, to salvage whatever she could. The Bar Naught was all she had ever wanted, the only place she wanted to be.

      She thought of the complications of Matt Guiliani on the ranch. There must be no more slips. No more lapses in her vigilance over her self. He was just an ordinary man and he had no power over her. God help him if he got in her way.

      But as she lay in her bed, willing herself to fall asleep, she realized that in the aftermath of Kyle’s murder, there would likely be no party of big game hunters from around the world, gathering on the Bar Naught next week.

      She sat bolt upright in the dark, her fist held tight to her lips. Kyle’s murder changed everything, like a fire breaking out across the landscape of all her sacrifices and her dreams. It would all have been for nothing that she had come back, only a torment to wake up every morning on the ranch she could never have back.

      MATT RODE UP to the small ramshackle barn at a quarter of three in the morning. His mount was in a nasty temper. He understood. He was in one himself. The pain that racked his body made him want to puke.

      He didn’t have to urge the mare into the barn. He followed instead, pulled the saddle off her back and threw it over its resting place, drew off and folded the sweaty blanket, then freed the horse of the bit and reins. He forced himself to give the sorrel a quick brushing down. He doled out a coffee can’s worth of oats, then shouldered his duffel bag and let himself into the back door of the widow Aimee Carson’s cracker-box-size house.

      His plan to reinvent himself and his assignment was going to take some fancy footwork. If Sheriff Hanifen lost interest in pinning Everly’s murder on Fiona Halsey, he’d start nosing around for other suspects. A stranger arriving in town within twenty-four hours of the murder would provide the sheriff an interesting alternative.

      It could have been worse. In the early planning stages of Matt’s operation to bag Everly and ultimately to destroy The Fraternity, he had planned to book a suite at a fancy dude ranch resort in the area. The idea had been to send Everly the kind of arrogant, in-your-face message that, even as a rogue cop, Guiliani’s significant resources could not be easily discounted.

      At the end, the use of a resort had been rejected. Instead, every resource had been used to find Matt a discreet and anonymous place to stay this first night.

      Aimee Carson’s little spread fit the bill. She knew nothing and wanted to know nothing of what was going on. She couldn’t guess why anyone would pay her to put up a man for one night. Legendary in these parts for keeping to herself, she lived on a tiny homestead outside the town of Kaycee. Her niece was the best friend of Garrett’s wife, Kirsten.

      Staying with the Widow Carson gave Matt room to maneuver. No one, save Fiona Halsey, would ever know he had been within five hundred miles of the murder.

      Matt waited to see if the old woman would get up. After a few moments, he switched on a small tasseled lamp sitting atop a crocheted doily and stripped out of his clothes in the middle of her living room. He didn’t have room enough to turn around in Aimee’s bathroom. He would have preferred a shower, but all she had was a hose to attach to the faucet.

      As he ran the claw-footed tub full of hot water, he caught sight of himself in the tiny mirror over her sink. Even in the dim light and patch of mirror he could see a massive, angry purple bruise stretching beyond the breadth of his lowest rib. But he’d been lucky. He could as easily have punctured a lung.

      He soaked for an hour, listening to the water gurgling down the drain, adding hot water every ten minutes or so. When the dried blood had soaked off his hands, he saw that they were not quite as badly scraped up as he’d feared. It occurred to him that he should at least have washed his hands in the sink of the treatment room.

      It occurred to him that Fiona Halsey might have offered to tend to his hands.

      It occurred to him that his brain had unaccountably migrated south, and the thought didn’t sit well.

      He got out of the tub onto a sweet pink throw rug and took himself off to the living room to towel dry. He pulled on a fresh pair of long underwear, then turned off the light and lowered his aching body onto Aimee’s sturdy baby-blue tweed sofa. He lay there, eyes wide open, thinking through his options until daylight broke.

      The threat Matt Guiliani posed to Everly was as a renegade insider cop gone over to the other side, clever and resourceful enough to have fabricated evidence ruinous to Everly’s reputation among The Fraternity members. He believed it would still work. He had to do two things: first, convince Dex Hanifen that the deal Matt had planned to extort from Everly, to make Matt his partner and heir-apparent, was already signed, sealed and delivered. Second, he had to portray himself through the ether of electronic communications as the man who had eliminated the thieving traitor from the rarefied ranks of The Fraternity.

      He would step fearlessly forward to usurp control of Everly’s empire.

      A deal worth millions was imminent. The summit of international badasses Everly had himself called was set to take place on the Bar Naught in a few short days in the guise of a big-game hunting party. Matt had to act quickly to ensure the meeting came off as planned despite Everly’s sudden demise. The vacuum of power had to be filled, and Matt’s would be the preemptive claim.

      He combed again through the possible suspects in Everly’s murder. He couldn’t entirely rule out random motives or a killer unrelated to Everly’s operations—the woman scorned, an old score now settled. But he still believed the odds were that some local pretender to Everly’s throne, a sharpshooter in his stable of killers, perhaps even Hanifen himself, had taken the shot.

      His own odds of surviving had taken a dive. In seizing control, Matt made himself a far greater target than he would have been with Everly alive.

      Sheriff Dexter F. Hanifen was the big unknown. Where Dennis Geary had served as manager of the Bar Naught and occasional bodyguard to Everly, Hanifen was believed to be Everly’s true lieutenant. The analogy had been drawn more than once to a Mafia don and his consigliere, but Hanifen was more of a functionary than adviser. Everly would never abide a lieutenant so powerful as the consigliere role implied.

      The men expected to gather for the big-game hunting party were the ultimate targets of Matt’s operation. Even their true identities were at this point unknown or unconfirmed.

      Matt believed they would still come, like the heads of all the Mafia families assembling to evaluate the threat and perform their damage control. More likely still, to stop cold the incursion of Matt Guiliani into their death-dealing consortium.

      But behind all his careful planning, his thoughts returned over and over again to Fiona Halsey. He couldn’t displace her for long. She played into every scenario just by her presence on the Bar Naught.

      But he was lucid enough in those sleepless hours to know that on a certain level, it didn’t matter to him where she fit into the mix or what her secrets were. He was caught. His attention was arrested. He wanted to follow the gleam in his own inner eye. He could imagine making love to her, not giving a solitary damn what else went on.

      He would have to be very, very careful.

      AT 5:00 A.M. HE CHECKED his e-mail on his handheld wireless device and found a message from his friend and partner, Garrett Weisz, who had headed up the TruthSayers task force in Seattle for the last five years. The message stated only that Fiona Halsey had e-mailed her father the news that Everly had been murdered. No mention of the fact that Matt had been there.

      Garrett

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