"Opportunities or desire lacking?"

"Both."

He rolled over on his side and rubbed her back. She stretched and smiled and Stone smiled back as he watched her do this. The braids in her hair had come out and several tresses dangled in her eyes. He carefully moved one away, revealing a green pupil looking at him.

"You ever think about leaving Divine?" he said.

"All the time."

"Why'd you never do it?"

"Scared, I guess. Divine's a little pond but I know it well. Hard to prove yourself all over in a new place."

"I suppose."

He rolled onto his back.

She curled next to him and slid her leg up and down his. "You ever think about settling down somewhere?"

"Lots of times. In fact I thought I had the place to do it, but it turned out it wasn't."

"What happened?"

"It just wasn't."

The phone rang. Abby looked at the clock. "Who could that be at this hour?"

"The hospital?"

"I just talked to them before we had breakfast. And to Danny. He was okay."

"Maybe it's the restaurant. People want their breakfast at Rita's." Stone was glad of the change in the conversation's direction.

"I already called there too. I got my helpers opening the place."

She climbed over Stone and snatched up the phone. Stone put a hand on her butt and gave her a gentle squeeze. She smiled, grabbed his hand and gave her backside a hard slap with it. Then she let go.

"What? Um." She glanced at Stone. "No, he's not here. Right. If I see him I could ask him, sure. Okay, right."

She put the phone back in the cradle, pulled a pillow into her lap and sat cross-legged facing him.

"Who was that?"

"Charlie Trimble. He heard about Danny and what you did. He wants to ask you some questions. And he seemed very determined."

"Great, well, my position hasn't changed. I'm not answering any questions."

"Ben, listen to me. If you don't want to do it, fine. But if you keep saying no to Charlie he's going to start digging. And unless you've got nothing you care about him finding, it might be smart to just talk to him. That way he can focus on what happened here instead of on you."

Stone opened his mouth and then closed it. "How come you're beautiful and smart? That's hardly fair."

"Just the luck of the draw, I guess."

"You have his number?"

"Yes, or you can just go to the newspaper. It's around the block from the restaurant. Can't miss it."

"Call him and tell him I'll be there sometime this afternoon."

He rose to get dressed.

"This afternoon? We can do a lot in that amount of time," she said playfully.

"As great as that sounds, I've got something I really need to do."

"What's that?" she said, sounding a little hurt.

"I'll let you know if I find it."

He finished dressing and drove Willie's truck back to the trailer. A few minutes later, after a thorough search, he found the bottle of Tylenol. It was empty. Had Willie taken the last few pills but forgotten? Were they oxycodone tablets? But why leave an empty medicine bottle in the drawer? As he looked around at the mess Willie Coombs called home, he concluded an empty bottle left in a drawer in this pigsty was hardly compelling evidence of anything. But still, it might be important. Maybe this was what Shirley Coombs had been looking for.

He pocketed the bottle, left the trailer and started to climb in the truck.

The next instant Stone lay unconscious on the ground, blood seeping from the wound in his head.

CHAPTER 39

STONE ROSE SLOWLY to a sitting position, his limbs shaky, his head throbbing and his belly queasy. He touched the knot on his head. The blood was dried solid over the wound. He'd been out for a while, apparently. He sat on his haunches for a bit, breathing slowly, trying to keep from puking.

He finally staggered to his feet and looked around. Or tried to. He could move his hand a foot in front of him and be unable to see it. He put a hand up and it nicked the hard, low ceiling.

He was in a cave. He breathed in and nearly gagged. No, he was in a mine. A coal mine. He took a few tentative steps forward and then stopped.

Rattle-rattle.

Stone took a slow step back from the sound. It seemed like more than one snake actually. Standing in the pitch black with rattlesnakes within striking distance probably constituted a pretty decent nightmare. Most people would have been frozen to the spot, waiting to be bitten and die. Stone was not stupid, so he was scared. But he wasn't paralyzed. He moved both arms out from his sides. One hand brushed wall, his left nothing but air. He leaned toward the left and his fingers now grazed the rough side of the mine. That the mineshaft was not very wide was not much help since he couldn't exactly walk on walls. He reached up again and his hand hit the low ceiling. Rattlers could not see very well in the dark, he knew. But they could register his body heat and also sense any movement he made from the vibrations on the ground.

He was in grave danger of being fanged repeatedly with no way to get out. How long before they found his body? Or his bones? And then it dawned on him. That's why they hadn't just killed him and left his carcass to be found. Here he would die and never be discovered. People would just assume he had left town. No explanation or cover-up required. And yet there was more to it, he sensed. Whoever had done this could have just left him in the mineshaft with no way out; they didn't have to use snakes too. Or they could have just shot him and left him here. There was a desire here to cause not only death, but terror as well. They wanted him to die horribly, and alone, and in the dark. Then the panic did hit him. But not for the obvious reason.

Abby.

He'd been with her. They might know that. They might think he had told her things. What things he wasn't sure. But they might go after her just in case.

Stone felt around the ceiling until his fingers touched what he deduced was a support beam. The beams helped hold up the ceiling, preventing tons of rock from raining down and crushing him, for which Stone was understandably grateful. Yet more important, there was a light cage attached to the beam by a sturdy metal plate. The light obviously wasn't working. Yet he didn't need light, just the cage.

He moved backward, away from the rattles, holding his arm up to the ceiling. Roughly four feet later his hand grazed another beam and another caged light. Four feet later, another.

Figuring that the snakes would've been placed between him and the exit to the mine, Stone slowly moved back toward the sounds. A rattler was deaf so it couldn't even hear its own rattles, but it was an instinctive signal to prey or predator that the snake was there, coiled and ready to strike. With each hesitant step he took Stone braced for the venom shooting into his legs. When he reached the first ceiling beam he'd touched, he reached up and gripped the metal light cage. Praying that it would be strong enough to hold his weight he lifted himself into the air, his legs bent and raised to chest-high. His injured arm ached badly, but he simply focused on what he was doing and willed the pain away. The Triple Six Division had been great at beating that technique into him at the Murder Mountain training facility, because they'd been expert at inflicting all types of agony, both physical and mental.

He swung back and forth and then lunged forward in the air, his hand outstretched like he was working the monkey bars, as he had in basic training. His hand closed around the next metal cage. Keeping his knees high, he let go of the first cage and kept moving. He had no idea if a rattler would strike upward and nail him in the ass, but he also didn't want to find out.