Read Online SHATTERED by Alice Sharpe - Free Book Online Page B

across the yard, though she was moving fast.
    “Were you followed?” he asked again.
    “I don’t think so,” she said. “I was really careful.”
    “Then how could whoever this is wind up here, of all places?”
    The answer was slow in coming, as though she had to reach deep inside to drag it up her throat and push it out of her mouth. “Maybe Mom told him this is where I was headed.”
    Nate took her arm and propelled her into the house. There was no better target on a dark night than someone standing still while holding a light. Two such someones just upped the odds.
    He closed and locked the door. “Sarah, you need help,” he said as he set his lantern down on top of the counter-high divider between entry and living room. “You know that, right? You were willing to risk asking your father. Can’t you extend that trust? Let me help you.”
    “You promise you won’t arrest me?”
    “I can’t arrest anyone in Nevada,” he said. Or anywhere else.
    “You can make trouble for me and I can’t afford the luxury of time to straighten things out. I have to find what I came for and return it to Reno or get back there and try to reason with someone who strikes me as really unreasonable.”
    “Reason with the person who’s been taking potshots at us? Do you really think you can?”
    “I don’t have any other choice. I can’t find the coins.”
    There it was—the object of her search was coins. “Valuable coins?”
    She turned her head, her jaw set in a stubborn line.
    “For heaven’s sake, Sarah, just spit it out.”
    Her next look was defiant. “Okay. Yes, coins.”
    “Old coins? Doubloons? Come on, give me a break,” he pleaded.
    “Silver coins my great-grandfather collected.”
    “A lot of them?”
    “Scads.”
    He stared at her and finally took a deep breath. “I’m waiting. Define scads. ”
    “Rolls of them,” she said. “All stacked into three-gallon coffee cans. Dad told me stories about how Grandpa stood in line to buy them when they were first minted. My grandfather passed them along to my father, who refused to put them in a bank because he wanted to keep them close by. He wouldn’t even spend them, just liked knowing he had them. ‘Rainy-day coins,’ he called them, even after the ranch started going downhill and he had to sell the horses. His truck is broken-down, the house is falling apart... Exactly what kind of rainy day was he waiting for?”
    “I don’t know,” Nate said uselessly.
    “At any rate, each silver dollar is worth at least two or three hundred dollars. I’ve looked everywhere, but I can’t find them.”
    “And you need this silver to do what?”
    She set her lantern on the fireplace hearth, then plopped down on an ottoman, landing in a heap. She raised both hands in a hopeless gesture and mumbled, “Save my mother. She’s in big trouble with some very bad people.”
    “What kind of trouble?”
    “She’s addicted to gambling, Nate,” Sarah said with a darted look to his face as if admitting a flaw in her own personality. “This time she got into a real mess when she burned up her credit lines with even the semireputable lenders. She had to go to this loan-shark guy.”
    “I take it that’s the guy you think is shooting at us?”
    “No, the loan shark is a man named Jack Poulter. He would never dirty his own hands.”
    “Now I’m confused,” Nate said.
    “Poulter demanded payment. When Mom admitted she didn’t have enough to repay him, he warned her that no one walked away from debts owed him. She said something like, ‘You can’t get blood out of a turnip.’ I gather he disagreed with her. Still, she thought she’d charm her way out of it.”
    “Really? Loan sharks aren’t exactly famous for allowing someone to screw around with them.”
    “You don’t know my mother. I think she just thought he’d view the whole thing as a big mistake and let it go.”
    “But he didn’t.”
    “Of course not. He disappeared from the front line, so to