Free Jack Stone - Wild Justice by Vivien Sparx Page A

the police,” the woman explained, and Stone did not correct her. The man pulled the door wider open and stood watching Stone with vacant sad eyes.
    “Do you have news about our daughter?” the man asked. His voice was weak and tremulous. He had been weeping. Stone knew their pain.
    “No, sir. Not yet,” Stone said. “I just have a question.”
    “What is it?”
    “I wanted to know if Margie owned a suitcase.”
    The couple in the doorway didn’t move, didn’t exchange questioning puzzled glances, and didn’t hesitate for a moment.
    “No,” the y said together.
     
    Fifteen.
     
    Stone stood on the intersection of Main Street and looked up at the sun. It was mid-morning, and the temperature was still rising. He could feel the heat, baked into the concrete path, rising back up through the soles of his boots. Then he looked over his shoulder at the shop fronts, and then along the ribbon of road that led back to the Highway and Lilley’s diner. There was a hot breeze on his face, coming in gusts that flattened his shirt against his chest and whipped up the dust on the sidewalk. He stood for a few minutes and watched the sky. Clouds were beginning to stack up across the distant horizon, like a dark angry scar.
    Stone sighed, set his jaw, and just started walking.
    It was three miles to the turnoff – not a long walk. Not a walk that bothered him , even in this heat. He strode out, keeping his eyes on the verge.
    He didn’t know what he was looking for. If the two missing girls had been walking this way, then maybe they would have left footprints. It hadn’t rained for months in these parts – but Windswept wasn’t called Windswept without good reason, he guessed. So the chances of finding footprints, or tire tracks in the dirt were practically zero. But he walked the road anyhow, because it was a lead, and because he was accustomed to following dead-end leads.
    On foot, the desert wasn’t anywhere near as flat or featureless as Stone had thought. Speeding past at sixty miles an hour from a car’s window, the wide pan of red earth looked bland and smooth, but now he was at ground level, he saw the way the desert undulated in rolling ridges and hollows, and how peppered the ground was with twisted scraggly brown shrubs and thorns and cactus. This wasn’t a wasteland, Stone realized – it was the kind of place that people could get lost in – or buried in.
    N ever to be seen again.
     
    Sixteen.
     
    Stone reached the junction where the road from Windswept met the highway without seeing anything that might be a clue to the disappearance of the two local girls. Then walked the extra distance to Lilley’s diner, and came through the door with red dust on his jeans and over his boots.
    There were three customers in the diner; a young couple sitting at a table by the windows, holding hands and staring into each other’s eyes like maybe they were on their honeymoon, and a middle-aged man wearing denim overalls. He was at a table on his own, with farming brochures spread out across the counter-top. Lilley was leaning over the man’s shoulder, pouring him a coffee refill from a stainless steel pot.
    She looked up, saw Stone in the doorway, and her face went through a whole rush of emotions, from delight, to embarrassment, to concern, and finally back to delight again. Self-consciously, she tucked a loose tendril of hair behind her ear, set the coffee pot on the table and wiped her hands on her apron.
    “What are you doing here?” she came to him, drew him to one side of the counter.
    “I went for a walk,” he said. “Have you got a Coke?”
    She frowned. “You walked all the way here for a Coke?”
    “No. I walked all the way here looking for leads on the roadside that might be connected to the disappearance of your two local girls. As a separate issue, have you got a Coke?”
    She handed him a can from a low refrigerator that was concealed behind the serving counter.
    “Did you find anything?”
    Stone