Chapter 70

70

"Just couldn't leave well enough alone, could you?"

Dale couldn't move. The bastard had shoved his fist into Dale's face, and Bruce Tyler was younger, bigger, fitter, and far more evil than Dale could ever hope to be.

Dale had tried to fight him, there along the road, but he'd still been rattled from the accident.

Tyler had pulled him out of the truck too easily. And tossed him in the back of his van. With that damned .45 pointed right at him.

"You are lucky I am a passivist, Dale. A passivist. Do you know what that means? Tell me, in your own words."

Dale complied. How could he not? That asshole pointed the handgun right him. "What are you planning?"

"Well, see, I want to know who started this entire mess up here. I know it wasn't good old Morry. Nor was it that dipshit mayor Grady. He really was incidental. Not my problem at all. I even know it wasn't that Art Talley either. Clever of you to convince good old Clive and Jasper that it was. Those boys…dumb as a box of rocks between them. I am definitely not happy with good old Clive, Dale. Not happy at all. Either of those boys, actually. Hurting my precious nieces that way."

Dale knew what he meant. Clive Gunderson, the former sheriff, had shot Phil Tyler's daughter. A nurse, who had worked with Sierra. Been friends with her. The girl had barely survived. And Jaser Grady had attacked another one of Bruce's nieces, when the girl had been almost nine months pregnant. "Are you on some sort of vigilante vendetta thing?"

"Who me? No. Well, not for my nieces. Their fathers and brothers and husbands can handle that. Me—well, Morry helped kill the woman I will love until the day I die. You can understand that right? Since…you have your darling Michie and everything."

The way he said Dale's wife's name told him: this bastard knew. He knew.

About Michelle. About what Michelle had done.

The woman Dale would die to protect. "What are you planning to do?"

He'd asked it already, but…never had he felt so helpless. His hands were bound. There was a damned gun pointed right at him.

And a madman held his fate in his hands.

"Why, I am going to take you back to where this started. See, I have been watching you all along. I know what you had planned. I know where you keep everything, too."

He laughed.

Dale had seen many men come through the courts. Seen some that were downright evil, some that were mentally ill, some that just made bad choices—but something about Bruce Tyler chilled him to the bone.

He was mission oriented.

Dale was terrified what that mission actually was.

That's when he saw it—the pole barn in the distance.

Bruce was taking him right back to where he had just been.

Why?

"Almost there, pal. Almost there. I just can't wait."