Deserves to Be Dead Read online

  Blackness pulled at her vision.

  Her finger curled over the trigger of her service weapon.

  “For Christ’s sake.” Drake scrambled for his gun.

  She shot him twice in the chest.

  • • •

  VIRGIL SHOUTED DOWN AT THE Feds, “He’s gone up the gravel road, away from the county road.”

  The SWAT team, in the light of the fires, started jogging up the road toward Weeks’s cabin.

  “He’s not there anymore,” Johnson muttered.

  He and Johnson crashed through the brush on the bluff, waded the shallow river, and ran down the road to the dude ranch, where everybody staying at the ranch, Katy, her siblings, and her parents, were all standing on the edge of the golf course, looking at the fire in the sky.

  Jim Waller called to them as they passed, “Is that the Drake place? What’s going on up there?”

  They didn’t bother to answer, but piled into Johnson’s Cadillac and headed out to the highway.

  “Gotta be a right turn,” Johnson said.

  A mile up the road, they found Pescoli sitting next to the right front wheel of her Jeep. She was holding a tissue next to her eye, showing a little blood. Up the road, they could see Drake, spread-eagled in the headlights of his Jeep.

  He and Johnson jumped out of the Cadillac and they hurried up to her. She was white faced, her eyes a little glassy, but she answered.

  “I’m not bad. I shot him twice, maybe three times. He thought we had him. He had nothing to lose by trying to take me out.”

  Her hand was shaking a little.

  “He was right about that,” Virgil said and saw the smashed-up Jeep and the body lying in the grass near the shoulder. “You check him?”

  “Enough to know we don’t need an ambulance,” she said, chalk white, her voice distant, almost disembodied. She cleared her throat and focused on Virgil, as if seeing him for the first time. “I wish we could have taken him alive. I wish we could have gotten him in court.”

  “Probably better this way,” Johnson said, avoiding looking at the corpse. “What if he’d gotten off? If what everybody says is true, the cocksucker deserves to be dead.”

  He and Regan both gave Johnson a look, and he muttered, “Okay. Sorry about that ‘cocksucker.’ ”

  Virgil stood up from checking the body and looked at Regan and Johnson.

  “But you’re right. He deserves to be dead. And now he is.”

  More from this Series

  Dig Here

  Faking a Murderer

  Footloose

  Honor & . . .

  Midnight Flame

  Past Prologue

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental

  Copyright © 2017 by Lisa Jackson, LLC and John Sandford

  Originally published in 2017 in MatchUp by Lee Child

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  First Simon & Schuster ebook edition July 2019

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  ISBN 978-1-9821-3964-3