Dust Devil (39 page)

And
I was desolate and sick of an old passion,

Yea,
I was desolate and bowed my head:

I
have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

Non
Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae

—
Ernest
Dowson

For
the first time in a long while, Bubba wasn’t around to see her
safely home after dark, and perversely, as Sarah pulled the heavy
glass front doors of Field-Yield, Inc. shut behind her and securely
locked them, she wished he were here. But he had been called away
from the office earlier, just before closing, and had got tied up in
a neighboring town and never returned.

“
Sarah
honey, I’m sure sorry,” he had said to her on the
telephone more than an hour ago. “But it looks like I’m
not going to make it back home until real late tonight—if I get
back at all. I might have to wind up checking into a
motel
here and driving back first thing tomorrow morning. So I’ll see
you sometime tomorrow afternoon, at the office. You’re still
planning on working half a day tomorrow, aren’t you, darlin’,
even though it’s a Saturday?”

“
Yes,”
she had confirmed. “I’ve just got to take care of some of
this stuff for FYI that Nora hasn’t handled properly. The copy
she’s written for that new radio jingle we’re going to
start running in a few weeks needs work—and the music she
okayed for it is just dreadful. She must have had flirting instead of
farming on the brain at the time.” After chatting with Bubba
about business for a few more minutes, Sarah had hung up, feeling
strangely depressed.

Under
normal circumstances, she would have looked forward to spending a
Friday night alone with Alex, playing Nintendo with him or popping
corn and watching a movie together, which they would have rented from
the video outlet at the Farmers’ Market grocery store.

But
her son had called earlier to ask if he could spend the night at
Mickey Thurley’s house. Mickey was Alex’s best
friend—even though Sarah suspected Alex liked Mickey’s
sister, Heather, equally as well. Jimmie Dean, Mickey and Heather’s
father, had offered to collect Alex in the Thurleys’ new pickup
truck and to bring him home in the morning. So, thinking she would be
spending most of the evening with Bubba, Sarah had agreed that Alex
could go.

Now,
as she walked out to Field-Yield, Inc.’s halogen-lit parking
lot to her Jeep, Sarah wished she had told Alex he had to stay home.
But of course, that wouldn’t have been fair to him. Still, the
thought of going home alone to her dark, empty house was dispiriting.
There was a storm
coming
on, too, she realized as she glanced up at the night sky, where
lightning flashed against the far horizon. The temperature must have
dropped by at least twenty degrees since its high of over a hundred
this sweltering afternoon, because the air was considerably cooler
and the wind had picked up. The rain would be welcome after the
endless dog days of summer, because of which the town was
experiencing a water shortage and the water-treatment plant had been
strained to its utmost. Its equipment was so old and inadequate that
it simply hadn’t proved up to the task of meeting the town’s
demands this summer. As a result, water rationing was in full force,
and people who didn’t have access to a well had been put on a
strict schedule for watering their lawns.

Still,
despite that they needed the rain, Sarah hoped she wouldn’t
lose the electrical power at her old farmhouse, as she sometimes did
during storms. She had better hurry home, just in case, to check that
her flashlight had batteries, that her supply of candles hadn’t
been depleted by the last outage and that she had matches handy.

At
this late hour, the parking lot was practically deserted, only a few
cars remaining besides her own—and they probably belonged to
the night watchman and the janitorial staff. Not for the first
time—especially since her week spent with Alex—Sarah felt
a stab of resentment that in addition to her regular job, J.D. had
burdened her with the advertising and promotion for his senatorial
campaign, even though he had increased her salary handsomely to
compensate for it. And of course, it wasn’t as though he had
singled her out. Evie, who was her father’s personal assistant
at Field-Yield, Inc., had seen her own workload double, too. But
since there wasn’t anything she wouldn’t do for her dear
old daddy, Evie didn’t mind all the extra labor. Sarah wished
J.D. would hire more professionals to run the different aspects of
his campaign, but she knew that was unlikely to happen. J.D. didn’t
like working with anybody he hadn’t known and trusted for
years. He and FYI’s people had built the fertilizer company
into one of the largest in the Midwest, he frequently bragged. They
had put him in the state’s governor’s mansion. They could
damned well put him up on Capitol Hill, too.

Personally,
Sarah thought it was J.D’s folksy, down-home appeal that had
peddled so many bags of his fertilizer, pesticides and other farm
products to thousands of farmers across the Midwest, and that had won
him four years in the governor’s mansion and that would win him
at least one term in Washington, D.C., as well. That—and the
fact that so far, nobody had ever managed to dig up any dirt on J.D.
If there were any skeletons in his background, he had buried them as
deep as it was rumored Papa Nick buried his.

Unlocking
her Jeep, Sarah got in and started the engine, then turned on her
headlights. In moments, she was on her way home, driving faster than
usual, hoping to outrun the storm before it broke upon her. She was
about a mile or so from her destination when some small animal
suddenly darted out from the brush into the road, its eyes gleaming,
terrified, in the glare of her oncoming head
lights.
Slamming
on her brakes, Sarah swerved sharply to avoid hitting the startled
creature, and as she did so, her front tire struck something—a
good-sized stone, an old,
broken
beer bottle, a nail in the road—which caused her to have a
blowout. Fortunately, she wasn’t traveling so fast that she
couldn’t bring her vehicle safely to a halt. But as she slowly
got out to inspect the damage, that wasn’t much comfort. She
stared in dismay at her flat tire and then at the horizon, where
lightning continued to flare, accompanied by the distant rumble of
roiling thunder.

“
Damn!”
She kicked the punctured tire angrily, flow many times in the past
had Bubba warned her something like this was liable to happen? Which
was why he had always insisted on following her home. Only tonight,
when she actually needed him, would actually be glad to see him
pulling up behind her, he wasn’t here!

Sarah
didn’t know what to do. She wasn’t that far from home.
She could walk, try to beat the storm. Or she could attempt to change
the lire herself, which would be a slow and grubby process, during
which she would surely wind up being pelted by a furious downpour. Or
she could, on the cellular telephone she carried in her purse, call
Junior Barlow and have him come change her tire and take the flat to
the gas station he managed. She punched in his number, but to her
dismay there was no answer. He and Krystal must have taken their kids
and gone out for the evening. Seeing no other practical choice, Sarah
finally decided to walk, reasoning that that was the quickest route
home. She took her handbag but left her portfolio in the Jeep, then
locked the vehicle. She was just about to start for her old farmhouse
when a pair of headlights appeared behind her on the road.

As
all of Bubba’s words about drug lords and gangs, tongs and
mobsters and nobody being safe anywhere anymore returned to haunt
her, Sarah felt a sudden blade of fear knife through her. What if the
approaching car belonged not to anybody she knew, but to some
stranger who would knock her in the head, rob, rape and then kill
her? She was, after all, a woman totally alone on a dark, relatively
isolated country road illuminated only by the lightning. Then she
realized how low slung the headlights were, and she thought with
relief that perhaps they belonged to Bubba’s Corvette.

She
had almost been right, she reflected moments later, her heart
slamming painfully in her breast as the long, sleek red Jaguar rolled
to a halt alongside her, its powerful V12 engine idling like the purr
of the large, predatory cat after which the car had been christened.
Orange-glowing sparks flying away in the wind from the lit cigarette
dangling from the corner of his mouth, his dark glance raking her in
a way that made her shiver in the night air, Renzo Cassavettes
drawled coolly, “Well, don’t just stand there, baby. Get
in.”

After
a long moment, as though in a trance, Sarah slowly opened the
passenger door and slid into the seat beside him. Neither she nor he
mentioned the fact that he hadn’t offered to change her tire
for her—which he could easily have done. Dragging on his
cigarette, Renzo slid the gearshift into First and let out the
clutch, propelling the roadster forward.

“
How—how
did you come to be out this way at this hour?” Sarah inquired,
to break the silence that lay heavily between them.

At
first, she thought Renzo didn’t intend to answer. His eyes
appraised her lingeringly again. Then, glancing back
at
the road, he drew another long puff from his cigarette into his
lungs, holding it briefly before slowly exhaling, blowing a stream of
smoke from his nostrils. After that, mindful—as most everyone
who had grown up in the Midwest was—of setting the tall prairie
grass, parched by the summer sun, on fire, he carefully ground the
cigarette out in the jaguar’s ashtray. Then he took a long
swallow from the long-necked bottle of beer he held between his legs
as he drove. Only after all that did he at last speak.

“
Earlier
today, I telephoned FYI to follow up on my interview with you about
J.D.’s senatorial campaign. You weren’t taking any calls
at the time, so just out of curiosity, I asked to speak to big, bad
Bubba. The switchboard operator was kind enough to inform me that he
had been called out of town and wasn’t likely to return until
tomorrow morning. So after I closed up shop for the evening, I
decided that since you were going to be all by your lonesome self
tonight, I’d just head on out your way.” A strange,
mocking smile curved Renzo’s mouth. “And wasn’t it
fortuitous for us both that I did, Sarah?” he asked softly.

A
tremor of fear—and something else—shot through her at his
words. Briefly, she longed to strangle Jolene McElroy, the young,
perky receptionist at Field-Yield, Inc., who blabbed everything she
knew. For if not for Jolene, Renzo probably wouldn’t have been
out on this country road tonight, wouldn’t have been around to
pick Sarah up. And she was beginning to feel uneasily that she would
have been better off walking. Unnerved, she wondered how many beers
Renzo had drunk before driving out here. He had always held his
liquor well, so there was no telling—but tonight he was
obviously out on some reckless edge, brash with whatever it was that
had seized him in its grip.

Although,
earlier, Sarah had wished she had told Alex to stay home, she now
thanked God she had given him permission to spend the night at the
Thurleys’. Otherwise, the boy would have been at the old
farmhouse when Renzo dropped her off—and there would have been
hell to pay. Because the only reason Renzo had thought she would be
all by herself tonight was that, miraculously, he had yet to learn
about Alex. Sarah didn’t know which prospect was worse: the
fact that but for the twists of fate, Renzo might finally have found
out about their son, or the fact that she was truly going to be all
alone tonight—and that Renzo Cassavettes was not only driving
her home, but also behaving in a way that made her think he was, like
the night sky, charging himself up to unleash something dark and wild
and violent.

“
What
kind of follow-up did you want to do regarding J.D.’s
campaign?” Sarah inquired, trying hard to sound calmer than she
actually felt and ignoring his earlier question.

“
Nothing
that can’t wait.” He dismissed her own query as easily as
she had his.

Somehow
she knew instinctively then that whatever he had planned to ask her
about J.D.’s campaign had been only a pretext—that
Renzo’s real reason for calling Field-Yield, Inc. had been to
find out whether or not she was seeing Bubba tonight. And because of
Jolene’s big mouth, Renzo had managed to accomplish what Bubba
would have termed an “end run” around Sarah and Bubba
both.