Chapter 25

One of the advantages of the time differential, Randy thought, was that running on Spearfish Lake time he was fully awake and alert. He was used to getting up early and getting to it, although sometimes it took some coffee to bring himself together. Not this Tuesday morning, he thought as he sat parked up the street from Rachel and Joel's house.

There were plenty of things they weren't sure about, and one of them was the time Joel left for work – from Brayton's investigation they knew it could be a little erratic – or even the direction he went. So, Randy was sitting in an anonymous vehicle, watching in the rear view mirror for whatever happened; one of Brayton's men was the opposite way up the street, and Ruth and his parents were parked on a paralleling street a couple of blocks away.

The flight out of Camden the day before, with a change at Minneapolis – St. Paul had gone smoothly, as had the meeting in Brayton's office. That had been a bit emotional; Brayton had indeed had a lot more photos of Joel and the anonymous hooker, and they were pretty graphic. Randy had glanced at them, as had the rest, but he had no interest in carefully studying them, except to make sure that it was indeed Joel in the photos. They'd discussed their plans on how to handle this meeting, and made a reconnaissance of the neighborhood and Joel's office, in much more detail than Randy had done on his trip in March. Then, there had been an awkward evening of sitting around a restaurant and the motel room, waiting for morning to come.

Randy was hoping – hell, they were all hoping – that this would go off the way they'd planned it. If it did, they were prepared for it. But if Rachel balked, then all they really could do was fold their tents and get out of town. Whatever happened then would be what happened, they'd agreed; it would have been their best shot at dealing with the problem.

It was already later than the normal time that the investigator had reported that Joel went to work; they were almost sure that he would in fact be working. If for some reason he didn't leave the house today there was always tomorrow, although that would screw up their plans to some degree. So, Randy kept his eye on the mirror. It would be easy to see if Joel left, since the BMW was parked in a carport attached to the house.

There! Randy could see the side door of the house open, and see Joel get in the white car. He didn't have a clear view of him but there was no question what was happening. He could see the car back out onto the street; then Randy switched to the mirror on the other side and watched as the BMW approached. Randy's head was in the shadow and it seemed unlikely that Joel would recognize him as he passed, but he ducked down in the seat anyway to make it appear that the vehicle was empty. When he sat up again, the BMW was well down the street.

Randy pulled out his cell phone and hit an auto-dial number. "All right," he said without preamble. "He just left."

"Let's do it," Ryan said. "Time on target, 9:05."

"Works for me," Randy said, then punched off the cell phone and stuck it in his shirt pocket.

Randy waited for a couple minutes, just to make sure Joel hadn't forgotten anything and was coming back for it, then drove around the block to park across the street from Rachel's house just as his parents and Ruth appeared coming from the other direction, with another car behind them. They all got out of the vehicles, although the three men in the second car stayed with the vehicle, as planned. "Well," Ryan sighed, "Here goes nothing."

There wasn't much else to be said as the four of them walked up the sidewalk to the front door and rang the bell. The seconds seemed long until the door opened. In the first glance Randy had of Rachel, it looked as if she'd been crying, and was still trying to pull herself together, but the sight she saw before her wiped a lot of that away. "Dad! Mom! Randy! Ruth!" she cried in sheer surprise. "What are you doing here?"

"We need to talk to you," Ryan replied. "Can we come inside?"

"I guess," Rachel sighed as she opened the door wide. "I sure hope Joel doesn't find out you've been here, though."

"Has there been trouble?" Ryan asked as he led everyone inside. It had been agreed that he'd do most of the talking, at least at the beginning.

"Y-yes," Rachel replied uncertainly. "Joel was, well, he wasn't being very nice this morning. He, well, he wasn't happy with how I made breakfast for him this morning, and, well, he threatened me more than usual."

"Than usual?" Ryan said. "Has he hit you?"

"Not recently, but I was afraid he was going to this morning," Rachel admitted. "He seemed especially nervous about something at work – I don't know what it is. He never tells me anything about that, just how much he needs the money from Grandpa Brent's land. Is that why you're here?"

"Not exactly," Ryan said. "Look, I'll be blunt about this. We know that more has been going on than you've told us about, and that Joel has been abusive to both you and Jared. On top of that, there's been more going on than you probably know about. Where's Jared?"

"At school," she said. "At least he got off to school before Joel got up and started making an ass of himself again. Like I said, I just hope Joel doesn't come back and find you here."

Randy decided to speak up. "In a way I hope he does," he said. "If he gets past the off duty cops that are waiting outside, then I'd like to have a word with him. Unfortunately, those cops seem to know what they're doing."

"I don't understand," Rachel said in obvious confusion. "Why are you here, and why are there cops outside?"

"Mostly so we can have a few words with you without him interfering," Ryan said, picking the ball back up again. "He hasn't been very happy about you talking with us, has he?"

"No," Randy's taller, thin older sister replied. "He doesn't want me talking to you at all. The last time he hit me was after mom called about Randy and Nicole's baby being born. I think he's afraid you'll want me to leave him."

"Well, he got that one right," Ryan said. "And the time has come, especially with what the investigators found out last week. Are you aware that he's been cheating on you, along with everything else?"

"Cheating on me?" Rachel frowned. "No, I didn't know that. Are you sure?"

"Not only are we sure, we have photos to prove it," Ryan said. "And it's more than a one-time thing. The investigators saw four different occasions, and Randy saw another one when he was out here in March. That's why we got investigators on him in the first place, and the lead investigator is outside if you want more details. He's got the photos, if you want proof."

"You're really sure it's him?"

"No question about it. Like I said, you can see the photos if you want."

"But ... but ... I'd like to leave him, I've dreamed of leaving him, but he says that if I try to leave him he'll take Jared and I'll never see him again."

"That's what he's beaten into your head, but that's not what's going to happen. If you left and went nowhere in particular, he'd have a chance at it, but if you come back to Spearfish Lake with us, he won't have any hope of doing anything about it, though he might not know that. He may have some contacts here, but if he tries anything in Spearfish Lake, he's in our territory, and we have all the money we need to hire lawyers if it comes to that."

"You're not kidding, are you?"

"Not in the slightest. We have plane tickets for you and Jared this afternoon, and there's a rental truck parked outside. If we don't have to deal with furniture, we can have the two of you out of here in a couple of hours and out of the state by the time Joel gets off work. That'll make things more complicated right there."

"But he'll come for me in Spearfish Lake," she said in a frightened tone. "I know he will, and then he'll really be mad."

"Let him try," Ryan smiled. "We're mad already, and like I said, he'll be in our territory then. Among other things, we have a court appointment for you for tomorrow morning to get a personal protective order, so if he even tries to approach you in Spearfish Lake he's going to be looking at time in the county jail. Until he realizes we can make it stick, you'll have someone close by at all times who can handle themselves and deal with him. Rachel, ever since Randy was out here in March we've talked about this and tried to examine all the angles. We don't have time to get into all those angles right now, but we've had a couple months to work on this and you've only had a few minutes."

"But how can I leave him? How can I divorce him? He'll take Jared, I know he will."

"That's part of the reason we need to get you back to Spearfish Lake. I don't want to say the judge we'll be dealing with is in our pocket, but I'm sure he'll take the history of abuse into consideration along with a few other things that may not come up in court. We thought about taking you to Nevada for a quick divorce, but we can't protect you as well there, so the safer but surer way is for you to go home with us, even if it's the slower way. Rachel, we're wasting time. We came to get you out of here and away from him. All you have to do is say yes and we can get started."

"My God, this is hard, but yes. I'm just afraid of what he'll do when he finds out."

"Sis," Randy smiled. "He's the one who needs to be afraid, but he's too damn dumb to realize it. If he tries to get physical with you in Spearfish Lake, maybe he'll find out just how afraid he needs to be. We love you, Sis, and we've seen what he's done to you. We want it to end, so the sooner we get started the sooner we have you out of here."

"But what about Jared?"

"As soon as we have the truck loaded we'll take you over to the school to pick him up," Ryan explained, trying to sound firm, but supportive in general. "And then we'll go right to the airport. In a few hours, we'll have you and Jared safe at home. Now, what do you want to take with you?"

"I'd thought that if I ever managed to leave him it would just be with the clothes on my back, and maybe a suitcase," Rachel said, still almost thinking that her rescue was a dream. "I think my clothes, all of Jared's clothes and toys, and not much else. There really isn't a lot. Joel didn't like to spend money on us; he'd rather spend it on himself."

"All right, we have boxes in the truck, let's get going," Ryan said.

One of the things that they'd talked over was that once Rachel had made the decision to leave they had to keep her too busy to have second thoughts until the deed was done. They'd been prepared to have to spend a couple hours on talking her into it, so things had already gone much better than planned. Randy backed rental truck into the driveway until it was almost up to the carport, then went back inside with an armload of folded boxes and a tape dispenser. By then, his parents and sisters were already at work in Rachel and Jared's rooms.