Witness Rejection Read online

  Titles by David R Lewis

  Nosferati Series (2)

  BLOODTRAIL

  BLOODLINE

  Crockett Series (8)

  FEAR OF THE FATHER

  GRAVE PROMISE

  SITUATIONAL FLEXIBILITY

  ABDUCTED

  WITNESS REJECTION

  Trail Series (6)

  DEER RUN TRAIL

  NODAWAY TRAIL

  CALICO TRAIL

  PAYBACK TRAIL

  OGALLALA TRAIL

  KILLDEER TRAIL

  Stand Alones:

  COWBOYS AND INDIANS

  ONCE UPON AGAIN

  INCIDENTS AMONG THE SAVAGES

  ENDLESS JOURNEY (nonfiction)

  Sneak Peek of Book #6 of the Crockett series, UNDER COVER (The Haunting of Martha McGill) by David R Lewis!

  Read the prologue and first 2 chapters of UNDER COVER at the end of this book.

  Witness Rejection

  (Woman on the Run)

  By

  David R. Lewis

  Smashwords Edition

  Copyright 2008 David R Lewis

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally; and any resemblance to people, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  All Rights Reserved

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. No portion of this book may be reproduced without the consent of the author. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  PROLOGUE

  Doctor Ruby LaCost replaced the Sensor razor in its holder over the sink and gave her head a final rinse with a washcloth. She toweled her pate dry and rubbed it carefully, searching for signs of stubble. Finding none, she massaged her scalp briefly with Oil of Olay and looked into the mirror.

  It could be worse.

  The lid of her left eye hung slackly over the socket, the result of having nothing beneath it to round out its appearance. The sight of it still troubled Ruby. The brow was back to normal, however, as was the shape of the socket and cheek, at least mostly. A slight narrowing of the left side of her face and the sharpening of the cheekbone because of the injuries and infections she’d suffered at the hands and will of Boog Jeter gave her a slightly sinister appearance, she thought. Her ribs and fingers had healed nicely, the scarring around her wrists and ankles had been reduced by cosmetic surgery, all but about fifteen pounds of her weight had returned, her muscle tone wasn’t bad; and, all in all, she was grateful for as much of the old Ruby as she retained.

  Two of her hardest adjustments had been getting used to her false teeth and compensating for her lack of vision to the left. She still had trouble with that occasionally. Her physical therapist said she was doing well, and Ruby had noticed that scanning one hundred eighty degrees with her right eye was becoming more of a habit than a chore. Everyone, Ivy, Clete, Goody, and the others, were pleased with her progress. In moments of reflection, she was, too. The only real problems that remained were the nightmares, and even they had reduced in both number and intensity over the months of her stay at Ivy’s.

  After checking the clock and noting there were only about fifteen minutes left until dinner, she carefully applied makeup to her right eye, more difficult now without a left eye to assist. After that came white hose and three-inch pumps in white patent with a light blue wingtip toe and heel, and a wispy dress in pale blue punctuated by large white daisies. Goody called it her “flower frock.” Ruby twirled slowly in front of the mirror, rather pleased at what she saw. She added lipstick in a pale frosted red and slipped on a dark blond wig in a pixie cut.

  Smiling at her transformation and readjusting her restricted vision to balance on heels while using only one eye, Ruby walked a circle for a moment. She knew the dinner was a sort of LaCost coming out party. Even Marta would be in attendance. She was grateful for everyone’s concern and care, even if she also felt a bit stifled by it. These were wonderful people, truly the finest friends she could have, and all of them would be there. All of them except one.

  Clete and she had resumed their relationship when she’d felt sufficiently well, and it had been some comfort for her, but it was not enough and had soon become mechanical and just stopped. Crockett. Even when Ruby had abandoned Crockett and gone away on her own, in one way or another, she knew she still had him. If not at her beck and call, certainly in patient reserve, waiting as only Crockett could, or would, wait. In her worst times, Ruby clung to the belief he would come for her, counting on the fact that he loved her above all others. And he had, and he did. She never fully realized how much his care and support had sustained her, until he left. In truth, it had surprised her. He had been a constant in her existence for so long, such a stable and enduring presence that, even when she had turned away from Crockett, she had never really contemplated life without him. She felt hollow and abandoned, and it hurt. Several times she’d been tempted to talk with Ivy or Cletus about it, but that wasn’t her style. Several times she’d nearly phoned Crockett, but that wasn’t her style either. Ingrained and automatic control issues wouldn’t allow it to happen.

  Returning to the mirror, Ruby sighed and put on her eye patch. Covered in the same material as her dress, it completed her ensemble. She was ready for the people and she was ready for the dinner. They needed to have the old Ruby back and that’s exactly what she was going to give them. She put on her LaCost attitude, a model’s smile, turned her back on Crockett once again, and headed down to the atrium.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Real Lyle

  The sign on the front of the office read “Higgenbotham Realty, specializing in farms and rural property.” Crockett pulled his truck into the parking lot near Highway 152 and Barry Road, just north of Gladstone, Missouri, and went inside. The one room establishment contained two desks, both littered with papers. The desk near the rear of the room was populated by a small elderly man wearing a gray gabardine suit, a flannel shirt in blue and gray check, and a gray Stetson Stockman’s long oval. The two-inch brim was turned up all the way around. He put down the phone, stood up, and walked toward Crockett as if his feet were sore. His ruddy complexion broke around a careful smile and he stuck out a hand smattered with liver spots.

  “Lyle Higgenbotham,” he said. “What can I do for ya?”

  Crockett returned the smile and took the offered hand. “Call me Crockett,” he said. “And I’m not sure.”

  “Just what I like to hear,” the old man said. “’I’m not sure’ gives me a damn site more room than a list of demands. Set yourself. Coffee?”

  “No thanks.”

  “I got thirty-eight hundred acres with two hay barns, one horse barn, an indoor and an outdoor riding arena, bunch a outbuildings, a thirty-four hundred square foot house, a eleven hundred square foot cottage, a apple orchard and six stock ponds, about fifty miles north a here that you can’t live without. Over three miles a county road frontage, cut by three or four gravel roads, five or six wet weather creeks and two permanent streams. I can gitcha in it for under four million. Whatdaya say?”

  Crockett grinned. “Don’t think so,” he said.

  The old man chuckled. “Too small?”

  “Don’t like apples.”

  “Yer damn hard to please, but I’m not worried. I got a lot of places without apples. We’ll find the
right one.”

  “I need something remote but not too distant from Kaycee.”

  “How distant is too distant?”

  “More than an hour away.”

  “Now we’re getting someplace. What kinda house?”

  “Don’t know if I want one. Maybe just land.”

  “You want to run stock?”

  “No. Just someplace to get away from it all. I spent the last few months down on Truman Lake. It sorta convinced me that I’d had enough of the city for a while.”

  “Where you living now?”

  “In a motorhome at Apex Park off of Highway 40 in Independence.”

  “Motorhome give ya someplace to live if you decided to build.”

  “That’s what I thought. I really don’t care if the land is worth anything or not. I’m just gonna leave it alone anyway. I want someplace I can get back in the middle of and get lost. Hills and woods are fine. I need a hideout. I don’t hunt. I don’t need pasture for any reason. I’m not planning to subdivide or anything. I don’t care about school districts or hospitals, shopping or entertainment.”

  “How big?”

  “I’ve got a little money to spend. All I can get for a hundred to a hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”

  “And ya don’t want no house.”

  “Probably not.”

  The old man thought for a moment while staring at the ceiling, then returned his attention to Crockett.

  “Got a fambly?”

  “Nope. Just me.”

  “Used to be this place,” he said, “north of here a ways. Tell ya the truth, I’m not sure exactly where it was, or even if it’s still available. I never saw it. Eighty to a hundred acres as I recall, mebbe more, stuck in the corner of some government land. It was privately owned and seized by whatever county it’s in for taxes. Not worth a damn. All hills and gullies, full a hedge and seed pine, no cross fencing, only a couple of flat spots on the whole place. Even loggers wouldn’t look at it. Got gravel roads on two sides and, if I remember right, folks had a trailer house on it at one time, just off the road. Been for sale since Plato was a pup. I ain’t never been up that way myself, but I heard about it three or four years ago. Can’t be asking very much for it.”

  “Can you check on it?”

  “Yep. It’s prob’ly not even be around anymore. Leave me your phone number. I think Jerry Lawton used to have it listed, but he died a year or two ago. Let me do some pokin’ around. I’ll find out and call you.”

  “Not worth much, huh?”

  “Not worth a durn.”

  “Sounds perfect,” Crockett said.

  Crockett stopped by a Price Chopper on the way home and picked up some new potatoes and fresh halibut for dinner. When he arrived back at the bus, his neighbors, Bill and Nadine Ray, newly arrived from their alternate park in Florida in an aged and massive Winnebago, were stringing fake Japanese lanterns around the inside of their attached screen room. He’d met them a few days before when they had shown up at his door with greetings and a welcoming cauliflower casserole.

  There was no escape. The acrid scent of a charcoal fire assaulted his nostrils. On the heels of that came an assault from Nadine. Close to a hundred pounds overweight and limping on a hip she was proud to confess was due to be replaced soon, she met him as he climbed out of the truck and peered up at him through hazy eyeglasses with rhinestones on the frames.

  “Well, there you are! Bill and I were wondering where you’d been all afternoon. Got some brisket that’s been slow cooking on the Weber most of the day.”

  Crockett looked toward the screen room and returned a wave from Bill, balanced on a short stepladder and wrapped in tangled extension cord. His madras shorts, sandals, and black socks were inevitable.

  “You’re just as welcome to join us as you can be,” Nadine said, patting Crockett on the arm. “Mel and Louise will be by soon. You haven’t met them yet. They winter in Tucson. They’re coming over for dinner and then we’re gonna play scrabble or Yahtzee. Be a lot of fun and get you acquainted with some of your neighbors. You been here a week and we haven’t seen you hardly at all.”

  Inadequate excuses flitted around Crockett’s head like barn swallows. He grabbed one as it soared by.

  “That’s very kind of you,” he smiled, “but I’m afraid I have to work this evening. Deadlines you know.”

  “Work? What do you do?”

  “I’m a cultural anthropologist,” Crockett went on. “I’m working on an article about nomadic subcultures in contemporary American society. Social and familial customs among the transient and quasi-transient inhabitants of the central and southern United States, actually. It’s a mobile population study.”

  Nadine blinked at him. “Oh,” she said.

  “So, you see, I’m afraid I must keep my nose to the grindstone, as it were. I have to have my paper ready for the Scientific American in less than three weeks. My discipline has just been atrocious and now I’m paying the price for my laxity. Midnight oil and all that. Thank you so much for your very kind offer, but I fear I must decline your generosity. Have a wonderful evening with your friends. Perhaps some other time.”

  He darted inside the Pequod, closed the door, and put his grocery sack on the counter. Nudge “myrrphed” at him from the couch.

  Crockett grinned. “Scrabble tonight after dinner, old man?”

  Nudge yawned and began to clean the fur on his left rear leg. Crockett glanced out the window. Nadine was still standing exactly where he’d left her, seemingly frozen in contemplation.

  Jesus.

  Nudge was finishing the few remaining scraps of broiled fish, the sun had just gone down, and Crockett was up to his elbows in dishwater when his cell phone went off. Soapy suds trickled down his arm when he put the thing to his ear.

  “Mister Crockett?”

  “That’s me.”

  “Mister Crockett, Lyle Higgenbotham. Hope I ain’t botherin’ ya too much this evenin’.”

  “I didn’t expect to hear from you so soon,” Crockett said, dripping on the floor as he stepped around Nudge to grab a hand towel. Absorbed in the fish, the cat didn’t seem to notice.

  “I didn’t figure ya would neither, but my daughter come in to the office a little after you left, an’ I put her on it. That property I was thinkin’ about is still available. It’s up in the Smithville Lake neck of the woods in Hart County, purty close to the Clinton County line.”

  “Land near lakes is expensive, isn’t it?”

  “Higher’n a ‘coon on a phone pole usually. Subdivisions poppin’ up like toadstools. A contractor perched on ever other fencepost. This piece is a little north and west of the lake, kinda outside the boom area. Plus it ain’t nothin’ but hills and gullies, rocks an’ post oak. Quarter of a section. A hundred an’ sixty acres. If they measured acreage vertically instead of on the flat, it’d probably be five or six times that much. County took it for taxes about eight year ago an’ can’t do a thing with it. If they was to sell it, they’d git some cash and tax revenue ever year. Most times things like that is sold at public auction, but I made some calls. Claim it’s worth two hundred thousand. I offered ‘em half that. I reckon, after all the flappin’ and crowin’ is over an’ done with, I can probably git it for a hundred and a half, mebbe not even that much. That’s less than a grand a acre. Ten miles away, land is goin’ for ten or fifteen times more. The way that area is expandin’, a feller might be able to make a good profit down the road a ways. Right now, it’s just more trouble than it’s worth to develop. Wanna take a peek?”

  “Sure.”

  “Why don’t you meet me at the office about eight in the morning. I’ll buy ya breakfast an’ off we go.”

  Crockett kicked at about ten inches of leaf litter and looked at the concrete slab that stretched before him. “I’d have to find somebody to put the right fittings on the septic system and the well to work with the bus.”

  “I know a guy,” Lyle said.

  “Then there’s getting
the power hooked up.”

  Lyle smiled. “Same guy,” he said.

  They were standing by a badly deteriorated gravel lane about fifty yards into the land, a half-mile square of Missouri rocks, clay, gullies and scrub, about fifteen minutes north-northwest of Smithville Lake, off a gravel road that connected to a county blacktop that eventually intersected Highway 169. Crockett wasn’t sure he could find his way back to civilization without help. They’d walked the acreage for the past two hours and his back and leg were complaining. Higgenbotham was at least twenty years his senior and doing fine.

  “Pretty much what you said you was lookin’ for, ain’t it?” the old man said.

  “Pretty much.”

  “If ya had to start from scratch, put in a slab, septic an’ a well, cost ya thirty-five grand or better. Pretty good savings right there, all them things already on site. Lots of deer and turkey. You a hunter?”

  Crockett, remembering his relatively recent training as a sniper with Goody and Clete, stifled a smile. “Nope. I got no use to kill anything.”

  Higgenbotham studied him for a moment. “Had enough a that, huh?” he asked

  Crockett ignored the question. “What would you do with the place if you were me?”

  The old man thought for a moment. “Most a the run-off from this whole section comes through this piece,” he said. “If’n it was me, I’d git a dozer in here an’ put me up a dam, run this lane back another fifty yards or so, and put me up a cabin on what would be the shore of a nice little lake.”

  “A lake?”

  “You betcha. If this land would hold run-off an’ not leak it out ‘cause a all the rocks and deep cuts, you could probably git fifteen acres or more under water. The way all these draws and gullies cut the place up, I speck you’d git at least two or three miles of shoreline an’ a nice pond thirty feet deep in spots.”