“I didn’t tell him anything. I swear I didn’t,” Brooke said. She didn’t know whether Gabe’s arrival was a rescue mission or not.
“How did he know we were here?” C. D. grabbed the front of Brooke’s shirt. “Was that him you just called? I should have known you’re in cahoots with him. Lemme see that phone.” He took her phone, and stared down at the screen.
Brooke wrenched away from the old man. “Think about it, C. D. I had no way of knowing you were here at the lighthouse. And I have no idea what Gabe is doing here.”
C. D. duck-walked away from the window, then stood, his fingers resting nervously on the holster on his hip again. “If you’re lying to me…”
“I’m not.”
They heard the door open below.
C. D. cursed softly. “Forgot to lock the damn door.” He stood looking down the stairwell. “Wynant, I seen you down there. You need to not come up here. I already told Brooke what you’ve been up to. You’re done, asshole.”
“Brooke?” Gabe yelled. “Are you up there with him? Are you okay? Has he hurt you?”
“I ain’t ever hurt a woman in my life,” C. D. called. “You’re the one that bashed me in the head, threw me into the creek, and left me for dead. But the joke’s on you. I’m alive, and I’m fixing to tell the sheriff everything I know.”
Gabe’s footfalls echoed off the brick walls. They heard his labored breathing, and then he stopped.
“Brooke, whatever he’s told you is bullshit. He’s been trying to blackmail me. It’s true, I had some money problems right after Sunny died. I was out of my head with grief, I had no idea about the kind of money she’d been spending. But that’s all it was.”
Could that explain the source of Gabe’s financial distress? Had C. D. overreacted?
“Yeah, right!” C. D. hollered. “How do you explain what happened on the boat the other night? How’d I get that gash on the back of my head?”
More footsteps, and Gabe stopped again. “He’s been trying to blackmail me. Calling me repeatedly. I agreed to meet with him, but once we got on the boat, he started threatening me, waving that gun of his around. He’d been drinking. When I refused to give him any money, he shot at me! He missed, and that’s when I hit him with the beer bottle and took off for the dock. He could have killed me.”
Brooke glanced over at C. D. He’d admitted to taking potshots at park service rangers, so why wouldn’t he have shot at a lawyer he suspected of defrauding him?
“Brooke?” Gabe shouted. “Talk to me. Are you okay? C. D., you just let hergo. She’s not involved in this. Let her go, and you and I will settle our differences.”
She felt C. D.’s fingers dig into the flesh of her upper arm. He released her for a moment, pulling his revolver from the holster.
“I’m fine, Gabe!”
“Shut up, damn you.” C. D. jerked her backward. “Don’t you know he’s a liar?” She flinched as his sour breath sounded hot and low in her ear. “Tell him to get out of here. Get out, and then I’ll let you go.”
“He says if you go away, he’ll let me go,” Brooke called.
“He’s lying!” Gabe yelled back. “If he means what he says, he’ll let you walk down these stairs and leave with me.”
Gabe’s voice echoed in the stairwell. They heard his footsteps, sensed him coming closer.
“Don’t you come up here!” C. D. yelled. His rheumy, red-rimmed eyes darted around the room. His hands shook badly as he tried to slot bullets into the pistol’s chamber. Brooke had the sense that he was coming unglued before her eyes, the raw nervous energy sizzling through every cell of his body.
Agonizing seconds passed, each one marked with the sound of Gabe’s inexorable upward climb.
Brooke’s eyes were riveted on the old man. Right now, he was focused on Gabe, but in his hyper-paranoid state, he might turn the gun on her at any moment. She mentally measured the distance to the stairs, tried to calibrate the trajectory of bullet to human bone and blood—hers, Gabe’s, C. D.’s. She had to do something to pause this nightmare, but she felt paralyzed. Finally, she inched away from him, pressing her back against the wall, trying to slide out of his sight line.
In the next second, the footsteps accelerated. Gabe was running. He burst onto the stair landing, a black pistol aimed directly at C. D.’s head. Startled, the old man scrabbled backward, firing wildly, his bullets ricocheting off the ceiling. Gabe leveled the gun, his finger on the trigger.
“No!” Brooke screamed, lunging toward Gabe, who fired.
The gunshot roared, echoing and bouncing off the brick walls, louder than anything Brooke had ever before experienced. She screamed and watched inhorror as C. D. dropped his gun and fell to the floor, howling in pain. He writhed on the floor, blood pooling from his shoulder.
“Come on. We’ve got to get out of here.” Gabe grabbed her arm and tugged her toward the stairwell.
Brooke pulled away and knelt beside C. D., whose face was already ashen. “We can’t leave him like this.” She grabbed a T-shirt from the mound of C. D.’s clothing and clamped it against the shoulder wound, which burbled blood.
