Six-Gun Showdown Read online

  Not just any old lie, either.

  But one that’d crushed Jax and the rest of his family.

  “You were a fool to trust Cord,” he finally managed to say. Jax shoved his thumb against his chest. “You should have trusted me instead.”

  She huffed. Not an angry sound, but more like stating the obvious. “We weren’t exactly in a good place, Jax.”

  That was the wrong thing to say. A new wave of anger came. “You’re sure you didn’t die because you didn’t want to face the divorce?” Or maybe because she hadn’t wanted to face him?

  Her eyes narrowed when their gazes connected again. “No. It was to save Matthew and you.”

  Jax didn’t have time to figure out if he believed that or not. Because he heard something he didn’t want to hear.

  Belinda’s voice.

  “Jax, are you all right?” the nanny called out.

  Belinda was on the back porch, peering into the garage. She could almost certainly see him, but probably not Paige. Paige kept it that way by stepping into the shadows.

  “Tell her to go back inside,” Paige insisted.

  Jax opened his mouth to ask why, but because he was watching Paige so closely, he saw the urgency slide across her face.

  And the fear.

  “I’m fine,” he told Belinda. “Just checking a few things before I head to the office.”

  He waited to see if that’d be enough or if he truly would have to tell her to go inside. But thankfully, it worked. Belinda went back in and closed the door.

  “What happened?” Jax asked Paige. And he didn’t need his lawman’s instincts to tell him that not only had something happened...

  Something had gone wrong.

  “What made you come back now?” he pressed.

  The fear in her face went up a significant notch. “I think the Moonlight Strangler is on his way here to draw me out.”

  All right. That upped his concern, too. A lot. “And how exactly would he do that?”

  Paige’s mouth trembled. “The Moonlight Strangler is coming after Matthew and you...tonight.”

  Chapter Two

  Paige stood there and waited for Jax to react to the news she’d just delivered.

  And he reacted all right.

  He turned, ready to bolt inside the house. To protect Matthew, no doubt. But Paige took hold of his arm to stop him.

  “Just listen to what I have to say,” she insisted. “I don’t want to give the Moonlight Strangler a reason to fire shots into the house.”

  He slung off her grip. “Neither do I, but I’m not going to stand here while he goes after my son.”

  Our son, she nearly corrected, but Paige figured that was a different battle for a different time. They had to survive this one first.

  “The killer likely knows I’m here,” she explained, hoping it would get Jax to stay put. “I figure he’s watching me. Somehow. Maybe with cameras. Maybe he’s out there somewhere in the woods with infrared equipment. He’s been watching me for the past three days, though I haven’t spotted him yet.”

  Jax’s eyes narrowed. “And even though you knew he was watching, you brought him here, to my doorstep?”

  She had no trouble hearing the anger in his voice. Or seeing it on his face. “I didn’t have a choice.”

  “There’s always a choice,” he snapped.

  They weren’t just talking about her being here now, but all the other things that’d happened between them. Again, another battle, another time.

  Paige stopped him again when he tried to bolt. “The killer would have come here no matter what I did because he knew he’d be able to use Matthew and you to get to me.”

  He went still. Not in a good way. But in that calm, almost lethal way of a lawman who’d just heard something he didn’t want to hear. “And how the heck do you know that?”

  “Because he’s sent me several texts. And, yes, I’m certain they’re from the Moonlight Strangler because he knew details about my attack that hadn’t been released to the press. In the last one he sent, he said if I didn’t meet him tonight at 9:00 p.m., then he’d go after Matthew and you.”

  That was still nearly two hours away.

  Not much time to pull off a miracle. But it might be enough time to bring all of this to an end. An end that would keep Matthew and Jax out of danger.

  Jax stood there, obviously processing that, and cursed again. Glared at her, too.

  She deserved the profanity and the glare. Deserved every drop of rage that he wanted to sling at her. Because he was right. She had turned his life upside down. Her precious little boy’s, too.

  “If you knew the killer was watching you, following you, then why hide here?” Jax asked.

  She’d known that question was coming. Others would, too. “Because I didn’t want to pull Belinda or your ranch hands into this. I’m not hiding from the killer. I’m hiding from them. That’s why I parked by the creek and walked here.”

  Paige was thankful no one on the ranch had spotted her. Even though she’d altered her appearance, someone could have recognized her. Especially Belinda. They’d known each other since childhood, and a change of hairstyle wasn’t going to fool anyone for long.

  “At the time I faked my death,” she continued, “I thought I was doing the right thing. I thought I was trusting the right people.”

  “You mean Cord,” he snarled.

  Paige hated that Jax was aiming his venom at Cord. Because Cord was the one person she was certain had kept his promise to make sure Jax and Matthew stayed out of harm’s way.

  But someone else had betrayed her.

  Paige hoped she got a chance to discover who’d done that and deliver some payback. First, though, she had to protect Matthew—and Jax if he’d let her.

  “After the attack, I went to a safe house in the Panhandle,” she said. “Not an official safe house,” Paige corrected, “but it was a place for me to recover and get back on my feet. Then, I moved to an apartment in Houston. That’s where I’ve been, where I probably would have stayed, if I hadn’t started getting those texts from the Moonlight Strangler three days ago.”

  “And those texts just appeared without any kind of warning or sign that the killer knew you were alive?” His voice stayed a snarl.

  “Yes. I’m still trying to figure out how he learned that.” She gave a heavy sigh. “Look, I know you have a lot of questions, but they have to wait. We have to put Matthew’s safety first.”

  He couldn’t argue with that, but mercy, she was dreading those questions. Dreading even more that she didn’t have the answers that Jax wanted to hear.

  Jax cursed again before he glanced around the garage, the yard and the back of the house. “I don’t want you inside. I don’t want Matthew seeing you yet.”

  “Agreed.” Though it broke her heart to say that.

  Jax’s eyebrow lifted, and he got that look, the one that condemned her as a mother.

  “I want to see him and hold him more than I want my next breath,” Paige clarified. “But if I go inside, it might give the killer a reason to try to get in there, too. He warned me not to try to hide behind my son.”

  As if she’d do that.

  But she would have to draw Jax into the middle of this. Paige couldn’t see a way around it.

  “If I’d thought I could make Matthew safer by going inside with him, I would have already been in there,” Paige added.

  That stirred Jax’s jaw muscles, but thankfully he didn’t try to bolt toward the house again. However, he did take out his phone, and he moved into the shadows of the garage, his attention nailed to the house.

  “I’m texting Belinda to tell her to lock the doors and set the security system,” Jax relayed to her. “I’ll tell her it’s just a precaution, that a prisoner has escaped. And then I’m calling for backup.”

  Paige didn’t stop him from sending the first text. She wanted the house locked down. But she did stop him from texting his brother Jericho. Jericho was the sheriff, and while
he would ultimately get involved in this, now wasn’t the time. Ditto for Jax’s other two brothers, Chase and Levi. They were both lawmen, too, and having them here could make a bad situation worse.

  “Hear me out before you involve your brothers in this,” she said. “After I got those messages from the Moonlight Strangler, I knew he wasn’t going to back down until he had me. I’m the one who got away, and he wants me dead.”

  “I’m listening,” Jax said when she hesitated.

  Paige hadn’t hesitated because she thought he wasn’t listening, but rather because she wasn’t sure how to say this. Best just to get it out there. “If I’d thought it would keep Matthew out of danger, I would have just surrendered to him. Would have let him finish what he started.”

  Jax cursed again. “Do you hear yourself? You’re talking about suicide. What you should have done is gone to the cops. Or to me.”

  “I did come to you, tonight,” she whispered. “You won’t be thanking me for that, though, but it was the only way. I want this monster dead, and I want you to kill him for me.”

  He gave a crisp nod. “Tell me where he is, and I will,” Jax said as if it were a done deal.

  It was far from being a done deal, though.

  “He wants me to meet him tonight at nine on the bridge at Appaloosa Creek. I’m sure he already had the area under some kind of surveillance before he told me it was the meeting place. He said if I show up with anyone but you, then he’ll start a killing spree. One that will involve our son.”

  She gave him a moment to let that sink in. It didn’t sink in well. The fire went through his already fiery blue eyes. Actually, plenty of things about Jax fell into the fiery category. All cowboy, even with that badge clipped to his belt. Hot cowboy, she mentally corrected.

  Even now, after all this time and water under the bridge, Paige was still attracted to him. Something she shouldn’t be remembering. Not when she had more important things to deal with.

  “That’s why you can’t involve your brothers,” she added. “If they go rushing to the area, he’ll know.”

  “How?” he snapped.

  “I’m not sure. Like I said, I suspect long-range cameras. Of course, that means he has the resources to set up something like that without being detected.”

  His stare drilled into her. “Who is he?”

  A heavy sigh left her mouth. “I honestly don’t know.”

  No one did. The Moonlight Strangler had murdered more than a dozen women before he’d finally made a mistake and left his DNA at a crime scene. There’d been no match for the DNA in the system, but there had been a match of a different kind.

  To Jax’s adopted sister, Addie.

  “As you know, Addie doesn’t remember her father,” Paige said.

  Of course, Addie had been just three when she’d been found wandering around the woods near the Crocketts’ Appaloosa Pass Ranch. When no one had come forward to claim her, Jax’s parents had adopted her and raised her as their own along with their four sons: Jax, Jericho, Chase and Levi.

  “As fraternal twins, Cord was the same age as Addie when he was abandoned, and he doesn’t remember anything, either,” she went on.

  Something Paige had in common with Addie and Cord since she, too, had been left at the hospital when she was a baby. Of course, she hadn’t been abandoned by a serial killer.

  He got quiet again, but not for long. “Did you see the Moonlight Strangler’s face when he tried to kill you?” Jax asked.

  This was one of the other questions she’d expected, but Paige had to shake her head and hope she could say the words without having flashbacks or a panic attack.

  “He hit me with a stun gun when I was getting into my car in the parking lot of the CSI office in San Antonio,” she said. Her words rushed together, spilling out with her breath. “He was wearing a mask so I never saw his face. He said some things to me...cut me and strangled me until I lost consciousness.”

  Jax pressed his lips together for a moment. “What things did he say?”

  That required her to take a moment. Things that were hard to repeat aloud, though they repeated in her head all the time.

  And in her nightmares.

  “He said if he hadn’t managed to get to me, then he would have kidnapped Matthew to draw me out.” There. That was the worst of it. The absolute worst. “The next thing I remember after that was waking up with a San Antonio cop leaning over me.”

  “The cop who helped you fake your death,” he mumbled. “Along with Cord.” Jax took the venom in his voice up a notch.

  Probably because Cord was obsessed with finding and stopping the Moonlight Strangler. But Paige thought maybe she heard something else in Jax’s voice. Perhaps a little jealousy. She recognized it because she felt that same ugly emotion when Jax said Belinda’s name.

  “It’s not like that between Cord and me,” she volunteered.

  His glare didn’t soften any. “Then how is it exactly? Why don’t you tell me?”

  Well, this was a can of worms that she’d hoped to delay opening. The emotions of it were still too raw, and Paige wasn’t sure she could tell him without choking on the words. But Jax had to know. Because it was hearing this that would hopefully get him to cooperate with her dangerous plan.

  “When the killer was strangling me,” she said, but then had to stop to fight back the images of that nightmare. Always the images. “He told me my birth mother was one of his first victims and that he was killing me to make sure her spawn didn’t live another second.”

  Judging from the way his eyes widened, Jax hadn’t expected that. “And you believed him?”

  “No. But the DNA test I took later proved otherwise.” That required another deep breath. “According to the test, my birth mother was Mary Madison. Her body was found just a few days after I was abandoned in the hospital. I didn’t learn any of this until after I’d faked my death.”

  “His victim’s daughter,” Jax said. He did some deep breathing, too, and she could almost see the wheels turning in his head. “That’s why he came after you?” But he didn’t wait for her to answer. “Then why hasn’t he gone after the children of his other victims?”

  She had to shake her head. “Maybe my birth mother’s murder was more personal to him? Or he could believe I know something about him that the others don’t.”

  “Do you?” he asked, and it sounded like some kind of accusation.

  With good reason.

  Cord wasn’t the only one who’d become obsessed with finding the Moonlight Strangler. She had as well, and even though Paige had dismissed it as part of her job as a crime scene investigator, it’d been more than that. She’d felt it bone deep.

  And she’d been right.

  She wasn’t just searching for a killer who had eluded the cops for nearly thirty years. Now she knew that she’d been looking for the man who’d murdered her mother so she could stop him from killing again. Of course, the obsession had come back to haunt her and just might cost her everything.

  “I don’t know anything about his identity,” she continued, “but I do know how to stop him.”

  However, it would cost her big-time. The trick was not to have that cost spread to Matthew and Jax.

  Paige checked the time. The minutes were ticking away. “I heard you tell Belinda that you were going to the sheriff’s office, so she’ll be expecting you to leave soon. I suspect you were going to analyze the voice mail I left you.”

  Jax nodded. “I thought maybe it was a hoax.”

  Of course he had. Because he hadn’t thought she was capable of doing something like faking her own death. “I left the message because I thought it would lessen the blow of you seeing me.”

  He looked her straight in the eyes. “Nothing could have done that.”

  True. But she’d had to try. Just as she had to try now.

  “So, your plan is to...what?” he asked. “Go to the Appaloosa Creek Bridge and meet a killer who’s hell-bent on finishing you off?”

&n
bsp; Hearing it spelled out like that didn’t help, but Paige tried to push her fear aside. “I’m sure he’d like to finish you off, too. I can’t think of another reason he would say I could bring you along.”

  Jax stayed quiet a moment. “But you’re thinking I can kill him before he can get to me?”

  Bingo.

  He gave her a flat stare. “Of course, the only way I’d get a chance to do that is for him to get close enough to murder you.”

  Yes. There was no way around that.

  “He’s never shot anyone before.” Not that Paige knew of, anyway. “He’ll want an up-close-and-personal kill, like the others.” Something that tightened the knot in her stomach. A knot that’d been there for nearly a year since the Moonlight Strangler attacked her.

  Jax’s next round of profanity was even worse than the others. Before he could tell her a flat-out no, that there was no chance this was going to happen, Paige interrupted him.

  “If I could think of another way out, one that didn’t involve you, I’d take it. But I can’t risk him coming after Matthew. And neither can you.”

  Jax didn’t agree with that. Didn’t argue, either.

  “He said we’re to leave our guns by the side of the road before we approach the bridge,” Paige explained. “He has to know that you’ll be carrying some kind of backup weapon. That’s why I believe he’ll use a thermal scan.”

  “He wouldn’t be able to see a gun on thermal scan.” Jax closed his eyes for a second, shook his head. “But he would be able to see the outline of one.”

  “That’s why it can’t look like something he’d recognize as a weapon.” She took the plastic syringe from her pocket. “Hopefully, it’ll look like an ink pen, but it’s filled with enough sodium thiopental to incapacitate him in less than thirty seconds.”

  “Sodium thiopental,” he repeated, no doubt knowing that it was a powerful drug that would stop the Moonlight Strangler from moving. It could also kill him, since it was the same drug used in lethal injections for those on death row.

  “I would just try to use it on him myself,” Paige added, “but he left specific instructions that’ll prevent me from doing that.”