“Let go of me!” he protested, struggling to break free.
“After what you’ve done?” Ace asked, incredulous. “You’re damned well lucky I don’t hit you again—or put as many bullets in you as you did my father.”
“Police! Hold it right there, all of you!” boomed a familiar voice, a split second before Ace was blinded by the light of a pair of bright tactical flashlights. “Keep your hands up where we can see them!”
“Can you lower the beam, at least, for pity’s sake?” Sierra asked, squinting as a uniformed male officer relieved her of the weapon she was holding. “I can’t see a thing.”
Moments later the blinding beams were redirected. Ace, too, willingly surrendered the weapon he’d been holding as soon as Spencer, who appeared to have come without his K-9 this time, cuffed the suspect’s hands behind his back and patted down his pockets.
“Not that I’m not glad to see you,” Ace asked his distant cousin, “but how on earth did you manage to find us out here?”
“The hospital had already called to report what they knew, so we were on the lookout. Then one of the guides from Hidden Arizona Jeep tours got worried and called when he saw two cars speeding up to Gila Gulch this time of night,” Spencer said. “Are you two both all right?”
“More or less,” Sierra said.
“No thanks to him,” Ace said, scowling at the prisoner, whose murderous brown eyes burned into him. Familiar brown eyes, somehow, reinforcing the suspicion that he knew this man, or once had. “I caught him in my father’s hospital room, where he’d just wounded the private duty guard—”
“Killed the guard,” Spencer reported grimly. “We received a radio dispatch updating us that the poor man passed away in surgery.” Turning a harsh look toward his prisoner, he added, “So now you’ll be facing murder charges.”
His bleeding jaw clenching, the suspect turned away his sullen face.
“Just like he meant to finish off my father,” Ace said.
“After what he did to my family, I only wish to hell I had killed him!” the prisoner erupted, struggling against Spencer’s grip to spit in Ace’s direction.
“That’s enough of that,” Spencer warned, jerking him backward firmly. “We can finish this conversation at the station, O’Neill. If you’ll come with me, we’ll—”
“To your family?” Ace demanded, talking over Spence. “What the hell—who are you?”
“Don’t you get it, Colton?” the suspect ranted. “My mother worshipped your old man—thought he hung the moon, even after he utterly destroyed our family, taking advantage of her with their sordid workplace affair.”
“You getting this?” Spencer asked the uniformed officer, who was holding up a cell phone.
The younger cop nod
ded, which Ace took to mean that he was recording the unprompted outburst. He was dimly aware, too, that Sierra had stepped in just behind him, to lightly grip his arm and shoulder.
“Easy,” she warned, perhaps worried he might be considering throwing another punch at the shooter’s face.
But right now Ace was too rattled by what the murderer was saying to focus on anything else. “What sordid affair?” he demanded, racking his brain to think of anyone, any woman his father had worked with at Colton Oil with whom he might have been involved.
“And it would’ve served him right if I’d paid him back for breaking up my parents’ marriage,” the shooter went on, “and driving away the father that I loved, by finishing what I’d started and making it look like you’d actually done the deed before killing yourself over his dead body.”
“You—your mother...” Ace’s eyes widened as a memory suddenly sprang to life—the image of a mop-haired kid, seemingly always underfoot, and then in later years, a teenager dragged along despite his obvious reluctance, to the annual summer employee barbecue events his family had hosted for years. A kid Ace mentally connected to his father’s devoted longtime assistant, the always capable Olive O’Neill, who had succumbed to lymphoma several months ago.
“Wait, I know who you are,” Ace blurted. “It’s Kyle, right? Kyle O’Neill. Olive’s son—” The one he’d heard more recently who could never seem to keep a job and still spent most of his days locked in his bedroom shooting up virtual opponents in video games. “I’d been meaning to reach out to you, after the funeral, to see if there was anything you needed.”
But then all hell had broken loose within his own family.
“But you were always too busy, weren’t you, with your fancy parties and resort meetings, too damned important, playing the big shot over at that damned company, weren’t you? All of you! My mother was good enough to work for your father all her life, to destroy her own marriage for him when he was lonely between his divorce from Selina and when he finally married Genevieve—”
“Then he didn’t—he wasn’t breaking his own marriage vows?” Ace didn’t know why, under the circumstances, that came as such a relief, yet somehow it did matter to him.
“That’s all you care about. Your own father’s precious reputation, his so-called honor, not my mother’s.”
“Of course I’m concerned, and I’m sorry I didn’t make the time. I’m sorry, too, for what happened with her and with your family. It’s a sad thing, but still, that gave you no right to—”
“You’re just as bad as your father was, making his excuses when I went to the boardroom and demanded that he hand over all the raises that my poor, stupidly deluded, foolishly loyal mother had always been too meek to ask for while she was alive.”