Page 87 of Liar, Liar

“Nothing!” he said, louder than he’d expected, then clamped his teeth shut and decided not to listen to the nagging voice in his head or the ghost of Granny or any other unwanted recriminations. He had work to do. With the barest of supplies.

Inside the zippered pack, he found a packet of antiseptic wipes and another of antibiotic cream, some large sterile gauze patches, gauze roller strips, and tape. Not the quality of a hospital ER, but good enough. For tonight.

He washed his hands under hot water, using soap from a dispenser, then tore open the sterile paper envelopes so he could extract the gauze the second he needed it. After cleaning the raw flesh with hot water and the antiseptic wipes, he was able to view how deep the snippers had cut. All the way through muscle to the bone—his damned femur. “Bastard,” he muttered again with another dark thought for Crenshaw; then he focused on adding antiseptic and antibiotic ointment before binding the wound with a compress and two of the largest sterile pads. He hoped to hell he didn’t bleed through. As soon as he was finished, he tested the leg.

It worked. He could walk and bend, without too much trouble. And if the pain was great enough, he had pills he could use, but those painkillers were trouble; they dulled him, and he still needed that razor-sharp edge. Nor did he take the aspirin in the kit. He needed his blood to clot, couldn’t risk thinning it.

He tested himself again, stepping on the leg and walking. It hurt like hell, but he’d suffered through worse. For now, it would hold up if he didn’t strain it too much.

How the hell was he going to accomplish that?

Somehow, he’d have to figure it out.

He had more work to do. First his chest. He tore off his shirt and saw four large, evenly spaced scrapes running across his chest, higher and deeper on his left side; the merciless tines had cut through hair, skin, and muscle and driven down toward his gut. At least the wounds were no longer bleeding. He cleaned them as best he could, bandaged where he needed to; then he looked at his face in the mirror.

Ugly gashes.

Bruising and deep scrapes.

One nostril in tatters, the eye above swollen. He hoped that wound was superficial, but he couldn’t be certain as he couldn’t see out of it.

The bastard had nailed him, but good. Going out during the day would be a problem. He couldn’t cover the damage. From this point forward, he’d have to go out only at night, then come up with some logical accident to explain what had happened when he finally had to face people again.

But the current job was far from finished.

There was still Remmi Storm to deal with.

He felt a slow, cold smile crawl across his face as he realized that finally he would get some revenge.

Some of his own back.

He couldn’t wait to kill Remmi.

CHAPTER 25

Trudie was dead. Dead!

And Ned . . . he probably wouldn’t make it, either.

Remmi was sick as she and Noah drove away from the hospital where her ex-stepfather was clinging to life by a dwindling thread. At least that’s the feeling she’d gotten from the staff who had surrounded him. They hadn’t been allowed to visit him, of course. He’d already had emergency surgery, was slated for more, and would end up in the ICU, possibly under police guard.

“You okay?” Noah asked as they’d walked out of the brightly lit hospital and into the parking lot to the Subaru.

“No,” she said. She never would be. Seeing Ned and Trudie, two people close to her mother long ago, shot, covered in blood on the lawn of their own home—Trudie shot in the back, gunned down; Ned, battered and beaten, his eyes never opening. Was Remmi okay? No way. She hadn’t been “okay” before, and she certainly wasn’t now.

She stared through the windshield and felt cold to the marrow of her bones, despite the heater blasting warm air from the vents. Noah was driving. She hadn’t put up much of a fight after the interviews at the station. They’d been kept apart, been driven in separate vehicles from the ranch to the Sheriff’s Department, where they’d been questioned more intently, each in a private room with detectives from Sacramento and San Francisco. The ordeal had taken hours before they were taken, together this time, back to the Crenshaw ranch to pick up Remmi’s car; crime-scene techs were still working there, and a deputy was guarding the scene, while two news crew vans circled the end of the drive. A reporter and cameraman had been poised to talk to them as they left, trying to flag down the car, but they hadn’t stopped. Noah, who had snagged the keys from her, had shaken his head at the dogged blond reporter and sped onto the main road. Remmi had been thankful for his sudden lead foot. No way had she wanted to discuss anything with the press.

However, she had insisted on visiting the hospital, and Noah had agreed. Then, after they’d been denied access and any real information on Ned, they’d left, and Noah had swung the Subaru into an InN-Out Burger, where they’d picked up hamburgers and fries before the place shut down at one in the morning.

So now he was at the wheel, and they were driving across the dark waters of the bay, the lights of San Francisco glittering like jewels on the hilly peninsula.

They’d tried to talk, to discuss what had happened, but after spending hours being grilled, they hadn’t spoken much since leaving the hospital, each engrossed in their own unsettling thoughts, left to wonder why this had happened.

Tired as she was, the questions kept running through Remmi’s head: Why were Ned and Trudie killed? Was it because of the book? Had to be, right? The timing couldn’t be ignored. And what about that book? Why had Trudie d

ecided to write it, or at least publish it, now? It would have taken a year or more to put together probably. Who had helped her? And what about Ned and Trudie—her mother’s first husband and once best friend? How had they gotten together? And Noah, why in the world had he turned up now, in the middle of all of this?

She glanced at him again. He looked serious, his profile thrown in relief when cars driving in the opposite direction passed, the beams of their headlights flashing over the interior. For a second, she closed her eyes and thought how her life had changed in the few, short days since Karen Upgarde had taken that fateful leap.

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