The Girl In The Sand Read online

  Contents

  Title & Copyright

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Epilogue

  The Violet Darger series

  THE GIRL IN THE SAND

  Violet Darger Book 3

  Tim McBain & LT Vargus

  Copyright © 2018 Tim McBain & LT Vargus

  Smarmy Press

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Prologue

  The city throbs around her. Burning bright all night long.

  Emily walks the bustling Strip, thinks about getting home to the kids, tastes that faintest touch of yeast clinging to the place where her tongue meets her throat.

  Neon signs shimmer above as always, flashing like strobe lights. The casinos make it plain enough that the party never ends — not in Las Vegas. The lights speak a pulsing language even the drunkest tourist could understand.

  And they do.

  Mobs of them clutter the sidewalks. Hawaiian shirts. Fanny packs. Fresh faces adorned with gentle expressions. Soft eyes like a cow's, she thinks.

  Not like the locals she deals with. The wolves.

  She navigates her way through the mob, turning sideways at times to squeeze through gaps in the wall of humanity. Twisting. Weaving. Darting.

  Music blares everywhere, and the chatter of the crowd rises to match its volume. Loud enough to make her brain quiver and chime like a rung bell, but she keeps going, keeps going.

  And before long the harsh glow falls behind her. The crowd thins. The sound fades.

  She checks her phone.

  She had told the babysitter, Vanessa, that it’d be an early night, that she’d be home before Austin’s bedtime. It’s going to be close.

  And then it hits.

  A block and a half away from the Strip, away from the bustle and the lights and the streams of tourists and degenerates, it hits her how tired she really is. Almost drunk with it.

  It always works this way. The stimulation of downtown Vegas provides that little extra sizzle in her head, that drip feed of adrenaline to keep the full brunt of the exhaustion at arm's length. As soon as the sizzle fades, the fatigue washes over her, pulls her under, mutes her tongue and makes her legs shaky beneath her.

  The few drinks she had at the end of the night surely didn’t help matters. Gabriela would be so pissed if she knew. Drinking on the job, Emily?

  On the other hand, it was Coors Light. Did the thimbleful of alcohol in that fizzy rocky mountain water even count as a real drink?

  In any case, the beers seem to be helping her exhaustion along, feeding the sleepy feeling now that she’s away from the crowd. The depressant finally depressing. She thinks of all possible depressions, alcohol is the great depression, no?

  Her head grows heavy, eyelids sag, and her motor skills diminish rapidly. Still, she won’t be sick tonight, she thinks. That’s something. Five silver bullets aren’t enough for that.

  And, anyway, it could be worse. The girls who work down here tend to get hooked on a variety of pills and powders. She's proud that it's only the drink for her. Same as it was before she got here.

  The thought tumbles in her head as it often does during this walk home from work: How did she get here? A Stanford graduate living in the slums of Las Vegas, doing what she does? How did her life lead to this?

  She waits at the corner, her neck struggling to hold her head up, eyelids drooping and smudging her vision, refracting everything so it snaps in and out of double.

  So she doesn't entirely trust the blurred image of the Don’t Walk sign across the street, the one that won’t quite hold still, but it’s OK. She can watch the cars, watch the other pedestrians.

  The light changes, and she falls in with the trickle of foot traffic crossing the way. No problem. She stumbles a little, but it’s all good. For now.

  Alas, the crowd seems hell-bent on dispersing. The fledgling mob splinters further at each intersection. Within two and a half blocks, she’s on her own.

  She banks to the right and moves into a residential zone, little adobe houses packed as tightly as possible. Quiet and dark and dead at this hour. Strange that just minutes ago she was encased in a throng of writhing human bodies, fanny packs touching like bumper to bumper traffic, and now she’s alone.

  The faintest chill in the air grips her around the waist, slides its cold hand past her hip to touch the small of her back. She adjusts her shirt, but it’s no help. Cold night. Crisp.

  And then she hears it.

  The car engine grinds, slowing as it creeps up behind her.

  Her skin crawls along the nape of her neck. This doesn’t feel right.

  The car glides up beside her, engine growling out threats. She can see it out of the corner of her eye. A lurking darkness that matches her pace.

  She hears the window retract into the door, the faintest whine and friction, but she keeps her eyes straight ahead, picks up her pace a little.

  The driver is going to say something. Something sexual, maybe. Or something menacing, something suggesting violence. Any second now. Isn’t he?

  Now the engine revs, the guttural whir hitting some higher note, and the car speeds up, passing her.

  Not a car, she sees now. A truck. Either way, it moves on.

  She takes a deep breath, watches the red of the taillights tint the world with their crimson glow.

  Thank Christ.

  She feels her abdominal muscles relax, her teeth unclench, her fingernails retract from her palms.

  The truck jerks into a driveway four houses up, however, and she stops walking. Waits. Holds her breath.

  The machine’s movements are somehow aggressive, she thinks. Savage.

  She sways a little, some detached part of her finding her fear humorous — the part that tells eve
ryone that of course they’re safe, of course nothing bad will happen, that it’s childish to be scared.

  The driver’s side door opens, the truck’s cab shielding most of the rising figure from her view and the shadows swirling around what little she could see.

  He was looking at her. She could tell that much.

  A man. Tall.

  And the rest unfolds in slow motion.

  He walks around the truck, hands raised in front of him in a disarming gesture that seems odd and out of place in this after-dark scenario. He speaks, but she has retracted into some simpler version of consciousness that is entirely incapable of comprehending language.

  Watching. Waiting.

  Without thought, her fingers dig in her pocket until they find her phone. She grips it a moment, sweaty fingers clenching the cool plastic shell, but it squirts out of her hand like a fish.

  The figure draws closer. Closer. Closer.

  She blinks. Looks again.

  Yes.

  The face is familiar. Smiling.

  She can't quite place him, but once more the context clues are enough. This is someone she knows. Someone she can trust.

  It must be. It must be.

  He’s close now. Smiling, like he’s glad to see her. She knows him, has seen him before.

  She never sees the punch. The looping hook that catches her on the side of the jaw and tilts not just her skull but all of reality, snaps the whole world hard to the right.

  To her, it’s a twitch of his shoulders. A white flash.

  And pain.

  And she slides along with the tilt, a violent lurch of gravity that pulls the ground right up to meet her. Someone’s front yard, or what serves for one here in the desert. A bed of mulch surrounding a feathery mesquite tree.

  Her fingers claw at the wood chips. And she’s moving. Running. Before she really knows what’s happening.

  The reality settles in slowly: It was him. He hit her. It had to be him. But why?

  Her mind leaps to place him. So many faces in her line of work. They all blend together after a while, become one face, one mask. Featureless and unknowable.

  Or maybe she just didn’t want to know them anymore.

  She veers off to her right as the panicked thoughts gush through her head, stumbling over the curb and spilling onto the asphalt, her steps going choppy as she loses her balance. Again the ground jerks up toward her, smashing into her knees and elbows hard enough to rattle her bones, rough blacktop scraping away swaths of flesh.

  And she hears him. Footsteps clattering toward her. Echoes ringing out everywhere.

  She scrambles like a panicking squirrel, little jittery gallops that skitter her over the ground and get her to her feet. Her gait wobbles, stutters, sends her on a careening path.

  But she’s upright, gaining speed, climbing the curb on the other side of the street.

  Moving. Moving. Moving.

  And then he’s on her.

  His arms loop around her waist as his chest collides with her back. Her shoulders pitch forward, lifting her feet off the ground, and they float together, weightless and out of control.

  He pulls up, rocking back onto his knees, rolling to his left and driving her shoulder-first to the ground with incredible force. Hugging her against him as their hurled bodies swish through a display bed of exotic grass, drifting over another Vegas lawn, wood chips flung everywhere.

  They stop at last, her face down with his bulk resting on her legs, and the inertia is overwhelming. Jarring and violent. Like she was just in a car crash.

  All is still for a beat. Her chest heaves, breath rushing into the void in her torso.

  She feels his body slide up her back, cold and hard and reptilian.

  A vicious punch cracks the back of her head, a thock sound filling her skull, reverberating, her cranium vibrating like a struck tuning fork. The sound overwhelms reality.

  Her consciousness cinches up into something small, all of existence squeezed into a tiny box, a little compartment separated from the rest of the world. Tunnel vision. She looks out of the tiny opening, can just make out a patch of wood chips.

  And the ground before her recedes. Wilts into darkness.

  Chapter 1

  The palm trees lining the boulevard whipped in the wind. Violet Darger had seen the massive thunderhead looming in the distance from the plane, and now the storm was closing in on the city. From the air, the mass of clouds had looked as solid as stone. A strange roiling mountain that flashed like a strobe.

  She thought she’d feel better once the plane touched down — that the gnawing anticipating in her gut would calm itself — but that wasn’t the case. And she knew it wouldn’t go away until the question was answered: What was she doing here? Loshak had called and told her she needed to be on the next flight to Las Vegas, but he’d refused to say more than that over the phone.

  Her partner was always being cryptic like that, and just now she didn’t find it to be the most endearing trait of his. What she couldn’t decide was whether Loshak’s evasiveness was business as usual, or if he hadn’t wanted to say what was going on for a reason.

  Her gut had been telling her all along that Loshak had been keeping something from her. Something big. All that crap about coming out to Vegas for some criminology conference she’d never heard of. A pile of horse shit.

  And the more she wondered, the louder a single name echoed in her mind, no matter how fiercely she tried to quiet it.

  Leonard Stump.

  The name of the most-feared serial killer in Darger’s lifetime had rooted itself deep in her thoughts, putting out new creeping shoots like some kind of carnivorous plant.

  Of course, 5-7 adults were reported missing every day in Las Vegas — over 200 a month. And that was a number that didn’t include potentially double that in unreported cases from marginalized communities, mostly prostitutes. That left a lot of possibilities for their case here, didn’t it? It could be anything from a serial murder case à la Stump to something on the scale of human trafficking. But thanks to Loshak, she had no idea what she was heading into.

  She reached a traffic light at the northern edge of the city, and the land opened up before her. There were no trees here, just low desert scrub and dusty-looking foothills in the distance. After the colored lights and rows of palmettos along the Strip, the landscape here felt barren. Vast and empty. The steel-blue sky cast a grayish light over everything. It leached the color from the world, leaving it pale and bloodless.

  Thunder boomed and crackled, sounding like the mountains around her were being cloven by a great hammer. On average, there were only about a dozen rainy days per year in Las Vegas, and naturally she’d arrived to find they were getting hit with their biggest thunderstorm in years. What luck.

  The first few drops of rain splatted on the windshield as she steered onto the highway. The cars heading the opposite direction were drenched, wipers on full blast. A bolt of lightning forked against the dark stain of the clouds, and then the storm was on her. A full driving rain that battered against the roof of the car and splashed onto the road.

  The downpour itself and the extra wet kicked up by the tires of the cars in front of her made visibility on the road absolute hell. If not for the glow of taillights, she wouldn’t have been sure she was still on the road. As it was, the lights looked like glowing orbs hovering over the concrete.

  Darger considered pulling onto the shoulder until the storm had passed. Aside from the fact that she could barely see past the hood of her own car, the amount of water on the road made hydroplaning a real concern. She’d already gone by half a dozen other drivers who’d decided to wait it out. But no. She didn’t want even five minutes delay. She was already behind. As if driving through this monsoon wasn’t stressful enough.

  She wrapped her fingers a little tighter around the steering wheel and fixed her eyes ahead.

  The mountains to the west had disappeared behind a veil of mist and clouds and rain. The barren feeling of the
desert closed in on her, making her feel cut off from the rest of the world.

  Rocketing along at 70 mph, she figured she might as well be the only person left on the planet, but then she changed her mind. She might not be alone at all.

  Her eyes shifted to her purse, to the little box within, waiting to be used.

  A pregnancy test.

  Chapter 2

  Emily drifts in the black nothing of unconsciousness. Numb. Peaceful. Removed from the reality of her abduction.

  Random dream images flit and bob up from the blackness in pulses, painted on the surface of her psyche and erased almost as quickly, gone before they can coalesce into any kind of narrative.

  No story. No sound. Just a flicker of pictures fading in and out.

  She sinks deeper into the nowhere, into the big nothing. Finds it tranquil. Almost totally still. Not unpleasant.

  A woman’s voice speaks from somewhere beyond the darkness, interrupts her slumber.

  “Probably ought to wake up, you know.”

  The voice is harsh. A little bitter. Familiar. Emily knows right away that it’s Gabriela, even if it takes the conscious part of her mind a moment to grasp this fact.

  “Emily. Open your eyes.”

  Gabby sounds serious. A hard edge to her tone.

  Emily tries to obey the order, but her eyelids won’t oblige her. She can feel them. The thin flaps of skin that shield her from the real world, the tiny muscles she can’t quite command, the lashes all mashed together and unwilling to budge.

  Now the smallest quiver of panic worms its way into the nowhere place, breaking up the stillness that seemed so peaceful a moment ago. This is not good.

  The first layer of reality invades her brain.

  She is sleeping, to some degree dreaming, and she needs to wake up. The realization flares in her head, brightens, and finally settles over her.

  Just like that, the nothing shifts from a peaceful void to something hostile. Something holding her against her will. Trapping her in the dark.

  Paralyzed.

  And her mind focuses on the blackness. The nothingness. Really seeing it instead of drifting in it without thought.

  She hears the little snick of Gabriela lighting a cigarette. Can hear the tube of tobacco impeding her friend’s words as she speaks again.