The Quiet Seduction

It had been the murder of Judge Carl Bridges that had shaken things loose. The judge had been a powerful man in Lone Star County—a man who had influenced countless lives, Spence’s included. The two had met at a time when Spence had been headed down a dead-end road. He’d been no stranger to juvenile court. Thanks to Carl Bridges he had turned around, worked his tail off, and now, a couple of decades later, had a respectable career as a district attorney to show for it.

It was the judge’s recent murder that had driven Spence on a mission of his own. Alex Black’s finger-prints might have been all over the murder weapon, but someone else had to be pulling his strings. Black wasn’t bright enough to act on his own. Spence was all but certain the punk was being set up to take the fall. He had a pretty good idea who was behind it, but certainty wasn’t enough. He needed irrefutable evidence, and getting that evidence was not going to be easy. Under the circumstances, it might even be hazardous.

There had been a few questionable incidents recently that, taken singly, meant little. The car that had nearly run him off the road last week, he’d put down to a DUI. He’d immediately called the highway patrol, but by the time they’d arrived on the scene, the jerk had evidently gone to earth.

The hang-up calls he’d been receiving late at night he’d put down to kids’s pranks. Even taken together, the incidents weren’t conclusive-enough evidence that the mob wanted him out of the picture to put their own man in place. He happened to know, however, that they had their own candidate waiting in the wings should Spence decide to take early retirement.

On the surface Joe Ed Malone’s credentials were impeccable, educationally, socially and politically. Scratch the surface, though, and he was as corrupt as they came. The mob owned him, from his custom-made toupee right down to his bench-made boots. Spence had evidence in a hidden file, hoping he wouldn’t have to use it, as it implicated several prominent citizens.

God, it was getting hot! Was this the end of November or the Fourth of July? Setting the AC on Arctic Blast, he angled the vents to blow in his face. The fact that he was running late didn’t help. He should have taken the interstate, but he had some thinking to do and he couldn’t concentrate with a fleet of eighteen-wheelers bearing down on his rear bumper.

Once again he checked his watch, then glanced nervously at the sky. Was it only his imagination or was that cloud up ahead several degrees darker?

Sighting a gas station, he checked his fuel gauge. Better to stop now than wait until he was hovering at empty. He should’ve filled up before he’d left town, but he’d had his mind on how to go about extracting the information he needed from a guy who probably didn’t realize the significance of what he knew. Odds were better than even he wouldn’t be able to pull it off, but it was worth a try. When a man was on a rat hunt, he couldn’t afford to pass up a single dark hole.

After topping up his tank, Spence replaced his credit card in his wallet, slid the wallet back into the inside pocket of his suit jacket, then slung the coat onto the passenger seat atop his briefcase and portable tape recorder. Climbing back behind the wheel, he switched on the radio and hit the scan button, searching again for a weather forecast as he pulled back onto the highway.

Given a choice of farm reports, a cooking show or country music, he settled for Willie Nelson singing about an angel flying too close to the earth. There’d be break-in bulletins if any serious weather was headed this way.

He’d been driving less than five minutes when he noticed the ragged bottom of a particularly dark cloud rapidly moving toward him. Despite the heat, he felt a rash of cold prickles down his spine. Weather alert or no, he increased his speed. Not that he was all that eager to reach the state prison. He still hadn’t quite decided on the best tactic to employ, but if things were about to turn nasty, there was a lot more security to be found behind those thick walls than on a wide-open stretch of highway in the middle of cow country. Black skies were bad; greenish-black skies were about seventeen degrees worse.

“Sweet Jesus,” he muttered soulfully, glancing again through the side window. A moment later he began to swear in earnest as an all-too-familiar formation began to take shape. It was a funnel, all right. And unless one of them switched direction in the next few minutes, they were on a collision course.

It was then that Spence saw the boy on a bicycle a couple of hundred feet ahead. Poor kid was frozen, gawking at the twister racing toward him like steel to a magnet. Reflexes kicked in and Spence floored the accelerator, then slammed on the brakes. Not waiting for the car to stop fishtailing, he struggled to wrench open his door.

“Hit the dirt!” he screamed as he catapulted over the hood and dived at the figure standing immobile on the highway right-of-way. A chrome hubcap sailed out of nowhere, missing his head by inches. “Hit the ditch, hit the ditch!” he screamed again, tackling the kid and carrying them both into the drainage ditch just as a blinding wall of sand struck him in the face.

The sudden darkness was suffocating. Unfocused pain splintered through him, then there was nothing but noise and darkness. His first thought was that he was blind. Only gradually did disjointed fragments of awareness begin to drift past.

A kid maybe eight or nine years old… A kid on a bike beside the highway…

Echoes of a nasal tenor voice singing about…

Singing about something or other.

Lying half submerged in a swollen stream of muddy water, he made no effort to hang on to the images, the impressions, dimly aware that sooner or later something would snag and he’d be able to use it to pull himself up and get started on his way to—

To wherever.

In the sudden stillness he heard the sound of a woman’s voice. She was shouting, crying.

Then something whimpered. A dog, maybe a kid.

Himself?

It sure as hell wasn’t Willie Nelson, because he remembered Willie’s voice. That was a start, wasn’t it?

Something raked over his face. It hurt, and he tried to turn away.

Angel flying too close to the earth…

“Wait until I wipe off some of the mud. Don’t try to open your eyes yet.”

He opened his eyes. Tears flushed away some of the grit and he blinked away the dirty film to stare up at the haggard-looking angel leaning over him. She was holding a filthy rag in one hand. “I told you not to open your eyes,” she scolded.

He tried to speak, grimaced and spat out whatever was in his mouth. More mud. He’d been lying on his side in a ditch.

In a ditch?

What the hell was he doing in a ditch?

A voice kept echoing in his head. Someone screaming, “Hit the ditch, hit the ditch!”

Oh. That ditch. Evidently he’d hit it harder than intended. They both had. A kid on a bicycle had been under him, at least he remembered that much. The boy was now huddled a few feet away, pale as wet plaster except for the mud dripping off his hair, his face, his clothes. There was no sign of the bike, but a nice tubular aluminum chair lay on its side a few yards away, along with what looked like the remains of a bombed-out flea market.

Lying on his back, he gazed up at a woman who remained featureless, either because angels couldn’t be seen by mere mortals, or because he was seeing her silhouetted against the sky.

She jabbed at his head again with her rag. Wincing, he caught her arm and said, “What the devil are you trying to do? Damn it, that hurts!”

Major understatement. Various parts of his body were beginning to report in to command central. The message was pain. Agonizing, unfocused pain.

“Mom, what about the horses?” Kid’s voice.

“They’re fine.” Angel’s voice.

He wanted to hang on to both, hang on to something solid until his world settled down again. God, don’t let me throw up!

“Is he going to be all right, Mom?”

“I hope so, hon. Here, help me prop him up.”

“Do you think you can walk?” That was addressed to him, not to Hon, in a soft contralto voice he found oddly comforting.

He felt hands on his shoulders, then one slipped under his back. Something smelled like cinnamon, which was funny, because up until then all he could smell was mud and something green and faintly resinous.

He tried to shift to a sitting position and yelped as pain stabbed his left knee all the way up to his groin.

“Don’t touch him, hon. You might have to go for help.”

“But, Mama, my bike’s gone.”

“Then go home and call nine-one-one.”

“But, Mom—”

Mom the Angel sighed. “What am I thinking? The lines are probably down. I don’t even know if the town’s still there. Oh, God.”

He wanted to tell her to use his cell phone, but the impulse died as he realized the phone was in his car and at the moment, there was no vehicle in sight. Where the hell was his car? Did he even have one?