Ultimate Thriller Box Set - Crouch Blake (лучшие книги без регистрации txt) 📗

Laura held up her badge toward the camera. She heard a whirr inside the camera, didn’t know what that was about. She waited for what seemed like eons before the gates rolled back and she could drive through.

The moment the wheels of her 4Runner touched onto the property, Laura’s stomach clenched. She should have known all those memories would come back. Sitting cross-legged on the ground, waiting, the cold seeping up through the seat of her jeans, her eyelids getting heavy.

Starting to fall asleep and not wanting to, because she’d been here three nights in a row and just knew the mare would foal tonight.

The lane headed south toward the river between the over-arching trees. Laura realized the wall and the gate were window-dressing—the property had deteriorated. It looked downright shabby.

The sound of a car engine jarring her from sleep. It scared her. She was safe on the Ramsey property, at least she thought she was, but her parents didn’t know she was here and Julie Marr had been kidnapped not far from here.

Laura noticed that some of the trees on Alamo Farm suffered the same fate as others along the Rillito River; a lowering water table as the city grew put them in deep distress. Bare limbs stuck up through the green summer growth, and the mesquites were snarled with mistletoe. The irrigation ditch alongside the road, once brimming with water, was dry. She’d heard on the news that Betsy Ramsey was killed in a car accident a couple of years ago. Clearly, no one had used the hunt course since then. It had dried up and blown away—the jump rails lying on the ground, their colors faded to the brown of the earth. A dusty halo of grass and high weeds poked up through the threadbare dirt.

The droning of the engine, coming closer.

Laura drove into an S turn bottoming out in a dark copse of mesquites and walnut trees. Now the lane ran parallel to Fort Lowell Road, going west. On one side was a windbreak of Aleppo pines, and on the other, a dry field. The white board fences remained, but the pastures where Thoroughbreds had once grazed were overgrown with more weeds.

Looking toward the end of the lane, she got a shock.

The stables were gone.

The big cottonwood tree—which gave the farm its name—remained, but the stables with their spacious box stalls and paddocks had been ripped out. Knocked down, bulldozed, scrap lumber stacked in a haphazard pile. Weeds growing up around a mountain of torn green asphalt shingles, splintered white wood, pipe fencing.

Gone.

1987

Headlights appeared at the far end of the lane and barreled up the road, cones of light illuminating the farm trees.

Wide awake now. And scared. Something about the violence of the way the visitors came, flooring the car up the dirt road. Heart thumping, Laura stood up and melted into the shadow of the cottonwood tree beside the mare’s stall, uncertain what to do.

The headlights turned in at the house. Car doors slammed.

Laura listened to the rustling of the night creatures, a cricket chirping. Voices drifted out of the house—angry and male. She couldn’t hear what they were saying.

Two loud cracks came close together—like an ax splitting firewood. Her disbelieving ears told her it was something else. The door banged open and she heard running footsteps. Car doors slammed. An engine roared to life.

The car slewed around in a fountain of dust, headlights pinning the mare in her stall before it rocketed back down the tunnel of trees.

Laura waited a few minutes, but they didn’t come back.

She crept up to the hedge dividing the barns from the side yard of the house, followed the path to the open gate and went through, heading for the back door. Partly open, the door was almost obscured by a cloud of bougainvillea until she was right on top of it. Remembering what she’d seen on TV, she pushed the door wider with her forearm, not her hands. So she wouldn’t leave fingerprints.

She thought about what the foreman, Rafael, had told her. Both Ramseys were out of town for the summer and their son was house-sitting during their absence.

The kitchen light was on. She tiptoed through the house. “Mr. Ramsey? Are you all right? It’s Laura Cardinal. Are you there?”

The carpet in the hallway was surprisingly old, plush and white, and still had vacuum marks. Footprints made deep impressions. She walked around them. The footprints led toward the last door at the end of the hall. Light spilled out from the open door.

Inside the room was a king-sized bed, the rich teal-green and white bedclothes piled up. Two mean-looking black iron dogs glowered at the foot of the bed.

It smelled funny in here. A burning smell.

It felt funny, too. Like the air had been sucked from the room. What she had thought were bedclothes now materialized into a pale torso and arm, hanging down off the bed, mostly covered by a pillow. On the carpet beneath was an irregular blotch, as if someone had stomped a raspberry Popsicle into the carpet:

Blood.

25

Not as much blood as you would think.

Laura remembered fumbling for the phone (even now she lamented the fingerprints she had probably covered up) and punching 911.

She didn’t touch him. Not because she had knowledge that moving him could make him worse, but because she didn’t want to touch him. As if death and dying would rub off on her.

All these crime scenes later, the best thing she had ever done in her life was not to do something.

Now Laura let the car idle and stared at the remains of Mrs. Ramsey’s stables.

She remembered the way it was: Everything in its place. The raked breezeway, the whitewashed tack room, the stable colors. Everything was in green or in a combination of yellow and green: the horse blankets, coolers, saddle blankets, buckets, leg wraps, even the rub rags. Everything. Yellow and green.

Now it looked as if the stables had been torn limb from limb like an animal. Ripped apart by a hungry beast and left to rot in the baking sun.

Sadness seeped down into a place she had thought was sealed up tight.

She was sorry she’d come.

She drove on, turning in at the house. The one-story California mission style home built in the twenties looked the same, except there were bars on the doors and ramps and railings for a wheelchair. The grounds were neatly trimmed, the lawn as green and groomed as a billiard table. Bougainvillea, hibiscus, bird of paradise, royal palm, and agave grew in profusion. Mission cactus forming a tall border around the lawn.

Beautiful.

The cars out front were different. Instead of Mercedes, BMWs, and Jay’s Range Rover, there was a large half-van half-SUV that Laura assumed Jay drove and an ancient Honda Civic.

This time she went to the front door.

She wondered what Ramsey looked like now. Seventeen years was a long time, and she knew just from what she’d read on the Internet last night that quadriplegics suffered from many side effects, many of them life-threatening. She had thought that being paralyzed meant you couldn’t walk, couldn’t move certain parts of the body. Thought of it as dead wood, but reading the articles made her realize that the body was still living tissue, and because it could not do what it was meant to do, there were grave repercussions.

What was he like now? She remembered him whacking a tennis ball, the sun shining on his blond hair, his lean, muscular body darkly tanned against his white shorts. The few times he looked at her, she thought she saw a spark of interest. Flattering herself that a college boy might be attracted to her.

Laura assumed that after all this time the quadriplegia would have taken its toll. Jay Ramsey was in his late thirties now. Galaz had told her he was a C6-7 quadriplegic, having suffered a break between the C6 vertebra and the C7. According to Galaz, Ramsey had pretty good control of most over his upper body, including use of his hands. His life expectancy wasn’t much shorter than the life expectancy for anyone.