Cape Rage by Ron Corbett

Author:Ron Corbett [Corbett, Ron]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Thriller, Mystery, Suspense
ISBN: 9780593440384
Google: AevFEAAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0593440382
Barnesnoble: 0593440382
Goodreads: 179548494
Publisher: Berkley
Published: 2024-03-19T05:00:00+00:00

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The room has the smell of a motel room that hasn’t been rented in a long time: trapped air and moldy carpeting, moist heat and dank water. There are juice glasses atop an apartment-sized fridge with paper lid-covers coated in dust. The television has a UHF cable taped to the wall and the two beds have mattresses so badly sunken they look bowed. There is a wooden nightstand between the beds and a rotary-dial phone atop the stand. Tourism brochures for Twin Falls and a nature preserve called Craters of the Moon are stacked next to the phone.

Carter puts down the duffel and takes off his jacket. He starts to unbutton his shirt and when he is done, he hangs it carefully over the back of the one chair in the room. A metal desk chair without the desk. He hangs his jacket over the shirt. The gauze around his chest has turned a tallow color.

“I should change that dressing,” the girl says.

“All right,” he says and sits on the bed. She takes a cloth bag from her suitcase and heats a washcloth in the sink. She pulls out six strips of bark, looks at what is left and wishes she had brought more. Cedar may not be easy to find anymore. She doesn’t know. She closes the bag, gets the washcloth and begins peeling off the tape holding the gauze. She works slowly, quarter inch by quarter inch, stopping whenever there is too much resistance, rubs again with the cloth.

When the dressing is off, she heats the cloth again and cleans the wound. It has started to close, new skin growing along the black ridge of burned flesh. The new skin looks white and fragile. Ringing the hole the way it does, it looks to the girl like a skiff of ice on the shoreline of a lake.

“Looks like it’s healing all right.”

“It feels better. Cedar, is that what you’re using?”

“It’s a wonder tree.”

She takes out the roll of gauze and tape that had been in a first aid kit in the Jeep and begins redressing the wound. After a time, Carter asks, “What is it you want to ask me?”

“Why do you think I want to ask you something?”

“Because you bite your lip when you want to ask a question. If you haven’t asked it yet, you bite your lip.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“I suspect it’s not just about asking questions. I think you do it when you’re impatient…. Haven’t spent enough time with you to know for sure.”

The girl doesn’t answer. Carter continues. “You want to ask me a question about the ranch, about what I needed to do back there?”

“That how you see it?”

“That’s how it was. Do you know what Huey would have done to you? Ruby wouldn’t have been able to stop him. She wouldn’t have even tried…. Billy would have been worse. He would have found you too. Closest cabin to where I’d been shot? He would have gone looking, and he would have found you.

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