by Karen Leabo
“I don’t know. I might have lost him.”
“Please, let’s hope so.”
With the last bit of oomph the Vette had, Ryan drove off the road and into the dense vegetation, hoping to hide the car. Even if he’d fooled Denny momentarily, the jerk would eventually figure out what had happened and come this way. If he saw the disabled car and figured out Ryan and Chrissy were on foot, they would be easy targets.
With a scraping of branches against the Vette’s once sparkling blue paint job, the car came to an abrupt halt. Ryan looked behind him. They would still be visible from the road to someone looking, and they’d left tire tracks in the soft shoulder. Damn.
“Now what?” Chrissy asked. She’d recovered somewhat from her momentary burst of panic.
“We hoof it.”
“To where?”
“I know the area, vaguely. We’re only about three or four miles from my sister’s house. We’ll go there and call the cops.” If Josette had a phone. The one and only time he visited his sister since she moved out here last year, he remembered, things had been pretty primitive.
“I wish we had some way to defend ourselves,” Chrissy said with a shiver as she opened the passenger door.
“Wait a minute. I think we do.” Ryan opened the glove box. There was the blue steel pistol he’d taken away from Denny two days ago. He’d forgotten about it until now.
“Do you know how to use that thing?”
“No, but it couldn’t be all that complicated.” He examined the pistol, trying to figure out if he was supposed to cock it, wondering how many bullets were still in it. Denny had fired off one shot, he remembered.
“Here, give it to me,” Christine said impatiently.
“Excuse me?”
“I know guns. My father taught me how to shoot.”
He stared at her in disbelief. When he didn’t immediately hand her the gun, she took it from him.
“This is a Glock nine-millimeter automatic.” She expertly popped out the magazine and examined it. “Terrific, we have four bullets.”
“Make ‘em count,” he said ominously, deferring to her obvious expertise. Who’d have thought pretty, feminine Chrissy could be a gun-totin’ mama?
She tested the weight of the gun in her hand, adopted a shooting stance, peered down the gun’s sight at an imaginary target. “Okay, I’m ready. Should we wait here for him and use the car as a barricade, or...?” Her voice trailed off as she stared at Ryan. Or rather, at Ryan’s shoulder.
“What?”
“There’s blood on your jacket.”
He looked down, only then noticing the dull pain in his shoulder, the tingling in his arm. There was not only blood, but a large hole, as well. And one to match it on his back.
He pulled the jacket aside. Chrissy made a gurgling noise of obvious distress. His pale blue shirt was soaked with blood.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said, really noticing the pain now. “I’ve been shot.”
Chapter 14
Christine felt every drop of blood drain from her head to her feet. Ryan had been shot! He was standing there in front of her with a gaping hole in him and blood dripping down him like some horror-movie special effect.
She felt dizzy.
“C’mon, Chrissy,” he cajoled, “now is not the time to turn into a Victorian maiden and faint on me. I need you.”
“B-but... Hospital. We have to get you to a hospital!”
“Yes. And that means finding a phone. And we might want to get out of the middle of the road before Denny comes back.”
The reminder of the danger they were in, aside from Ryan’s injury, galvanized her into action. He was right. Of all times, right now she most needed a clear head.
“We need to stop the bleeding, or at least slow it down,” she said practically. She was already pawing through her suitcase, looking for something with which to make a suitable bandage. She came up with a T-shirt and a scarf. “Take off your jacket. Hold this shirt against the wound, and I’ll tie it on with the scarf.”
“Never mind the scarf,” he said. “I’ll just hold the T-shirt in place. The bleeding has already slowed down a lot. The bullet must have come through clean, and I don’t think anything’s broken.” He wiped up some of the blood with the T-shirt, then flipped the folded shirt over and pressed it against the wound. “It’ll be okay,” he said gently, touching her arm. “Let’s just go. The sooner we’re away from here, the better.”
They kept near the road at first, ready to leap for cover in the woods if they heard a car coming. But then the trees thinned out, and they found themselves in a crop field of some sort. Beans, maybe. Christine wasn’t sure. But they decided to veer farther from the road. If a car came by, they would have to drop down and lie flat, hoping the scrubby little plants concealed them.
That eventuality happened not once, but three times, during the next few minutes. Each time, they would fall to the ground, flattening themselves as much as possible. Christine would ready the gun, just in case. Each time, the car that passed by was not Denny’s. Each time, Ryan was slower to get up.
“Let’s go back to the road and try and flag down the next car,” Christine said.
Ryan shook his head. “The next one might be a red Firebird. Come on, we’ll make it.”
“Then let’s not worry about finding your sister’s house. The first place we see, okay?”
“Yeah, okay.”
They decided to get away from the road altogether and cut across the countryside. Christine kept hoping they would stumble across a farmhouse, a gas station... something. But they didn’t.
After about twenty minutes, they hit another road, this one dirt. “I know where I am now,” Ryan said. His speech was slightly slurred, and he had become increasingly unsteady on his feet.
Chrissy worried that he might pass out. She didn’t know how much blood he’d lost, but it looked like a lot. What would she do if he suddenly stumbled and fell, unable to continue? She would have to drag him, she supposed. She couldn’t just leave him on the side of the road while she went for help.
After the next fifteen minutes, he was leaning on her shoulder, breathing as if he’d just run a marathon. “How much farther?” she asked, having given up hope of simply stumbling upon civilization.
“Not...far,” he answered, almost panting. “Mailbox... up ahead. See?”
She did see! Oh, thank God, it couldn’t be more than another eighth of a mile. She put her arm around Ryan as he stumbled along beside her.
The rusty mailbox, it turned out, was at the end of a long, winding driveway. Chrissy was beginning to think there was no Josette, no house, indeed no people anywhere in this godforsaken part of the country. But finally she saw it—and a pitiful thing it was, listing to one side, paint peeling, two windows boarded up.
“Your sister lives here?” she asked, almost hoping they had the wrong house.
“This’s the place,” Ryan said. “There should be dogs barking.”
Chrissy didn’t hear any dogs.
“She has hunting dogs,” he insisted.
Oh, Lord, was he delusional? Had the blood loss made him so disoriented he’d led them to the wrong house? It didn’t matter, she supposed, as long as someone lived here, someone who could help them. But she had her doubts. She didn’t see any cars or lights. More importantly, she didn’t see any telephone or electrical lines leading to the house.
Ryan took the creaking porch steps one at a time, slowly, leaning on the banister on one side, Christine supporting him on the other. When he reached the porch. he took a series of deep breaths and seemed to draw strength from them. “I’m okay now. I can make it.” He walked up to the door and knocked loudly.
No one answered. Christine wasn’t surprised.
“Are you sure this is the right house?”
“Yes.” He knocked again. “Josette? Josie? Honey, if you’re in there open up, it’s Rye.” He turned to Christine and whispered, “She’s kind of reclusive. So
metimes she doesn’t come to the door.”
Ryan’s explanation gave Christine a chill. Sounded as if Ryan’s sister were a bit of a strange bird, living by herself in this hovel, refusing to answer the door. But after repeated knocking and calling, it became apparent that Josette, if she lived here, was not home.
Christine didn’t hesitate. Ryan was weaving on his feet. If she didn’t get him somewhere safe, and fast, he was going to pass out on her. She took the gun from the waistband of her jeans and used the butt to break a window.
“Chrissy, careful!” Ryan said.
She punched out the rest of the glass, reached inside and flipped the stiff lock. In moments she was climbing through the window into the house’s dim interior. She ran to the door, opened it and pulled Ryan inside.
Finally she felt safe. At least Denny wouldn’t have a clear shot at them.
But her optimism didn’t last long. This house was obviously abandoned. What little furniture was left was covered with sheets. The light switch, when she flipped it on, produced no results.
Christine whisked a sheet off a chair by the window and guided Ryan to it. He sank down with a sigh.
“Oh, that feels good. Is there a phone?”
She knew without even looking. “No. But we can rest, and clean that wound properly, and then figure out what to do next. If you’ll keep an eye out that window, I’ll take inventory here, see what we can make use of.”
Surprisingly, the house was clean. Not much dust. Whoever had lived here must have vacated fairly recently. The pantry contained a few foodstuffs. The primitive gas stove hissed when she turned it on, and a match safe hanging on the wall was full of matches.
The first thing Christine did was fill an old pot up with water from the sink—hand-pumped well water—and set it on the stove to boil. Then she ran upstairs to have a look. There was a bed, a sorry old thing, to be sure, but it would have to do. A linen cupboard yielded a pile of old sheets, clean, if a bit musty, and a wool blanket. No pillows, though. She quickly made up the bed, then grabbed another sheet and brought it downstairs.
The water was just beginning to boil. She tore the sheet into strips and dropped them into the bubbling water. Sort of like cooking pasta, she thought.
“You look like you know what you’re doing,” Ryan said from the kitchen doorway.
“I assure you, that is strictly an illusion. I’ve read in historical novels about people boiling sheets for bandages. that’s all. Thought I’d give it a try. Here, sit down before you fall down.” She pulled a rickety chair out from an old formica kitchen table.
“How will you dry the bandages?” he wanted to know.
“Hmm, I hadn’t thought of that.” It would take hours to air-dry the wet strips of cotton. “Well, I’ll use these boiled ones to clean the wound. I don’t have to, like, remove any bullets, do I?”
“No. The bullet is lodged in the Vette’s dashboard.”
“Phew... Good, okay. Then I’ll use this other part of the sheet that I didn’t boil for the bandage. It’s a clean sheet.”
“Maybe we should just leave it alone,” Ryan said. He pulled the blood-soaked T-shirt away from the wound and looked down at it. “Blech.”
“Is it still bleeding?” she asked, steeling herself as she came closer to have a better look. “Take off your shirt, for heaven’s sake, so we can see what we’ve got.”
“Are you sure you want to know?” But he followed her orders.
Christine turned off the stove. The sheet scraps had boiled long enough, she decided. After carrying the whole pot over to the table, she plucked one strip of cotton out with her fingernails, held it out of the water until it had cooled enough that she could handle it, then used it to scrub her hands.
“You do know what you’re doing,” Ryan said.
“I wish I did.”
She cast the first strip aside, then used the remaining strips to wash away the blood. Ryan winced every so often, but he didn’t make a sound.
“I’m sorry if I’m hurting you,” she said. Every time she wiped blood off the wound itself, it oozed more, though Ryan had been right about its not bleeding a lot. The bullet must not have severed any major blood vessels.
“Amazingly, it doesn’t hurt that much.” he said. “You’d think a bullet wound would really, really hurt.” Despite that reassurance, perspiration had popped out on his forehead and upper lip.
“If only I had some kind of disinfectant. Alcohol or peroxide or something.”
“Now that would hurt,” he said.
“I found a bottle with a few drops of cooking sherry in it,” she said. “Do you suppose—”
“No way. You’re not basting me with cooking sherry. Just bandage it. As soon as we get to a hospital, they’ll fix it up right. All I want right now is to not bleed all over everything.”
“Okay. One bandage coming up.” She tore off another section of sheet and folded it to make a thick pad. The small entrance wound in his back wasn’t bleeding, so she placed a smaller pad on it. She had Ryan hold the bandages in place while she used longer, thinner strips to tie them down. She wrapped them across his shoulder at a diagonal, around the other side of his neck, under his arm. Then she wrapped more strips straight across, under both arms.
By the time she was done, he looked like a half-baked mummy.
“Are you sure all this is really necessary?” The complaint lacked any real bite. Instead, he was looking at her with definite amusement, and something else. There was a sudden heaviness between them, like they’d both been immersed in warm honey.
She shook off the feeling. She must be imagining things. “The bleeding won’t stop unless the bandage is pressed tightly against the wound,” she argued reasonably. “And I don’t think you should use your right arm, either.” She was already fashioning a sling from the last bit of the sheet.
She was leaning over him, fumbling with a knot at his left shoulder, when she felt something on her ear—something warm and sensual. Startled to realize Ryan was kissing her, she could think of no reasonable way to respond except to go perfectly still...and enjoy it. Of all the strange times to find pleasure, this had to be the strangest.
“Mmm, sorry, Chrissy,” he murmured drowsily, kissing her neck now. “After all that touching, and you being so near, I couldn’t resist.”
“Uhhh... Ohhh, Ryan, stop.”
“Really?”
All right, so only an idiot wouldn’t have read the reluctance in her request. “At least until I finish this stupid knot.”
“Deal.”
She pulled back so that she could see his face. Was this part of his delirium? She still wasn’t sure whether he was thinking straight. She wasn’t even sure this was really his sister’s house, and not some stranger’s.
He smiled, a little bleary-eyed, then grew serious. “You’re being so good to me, Chrissy. It’s a lot more than I deserve.”
“What was I supposed to do, let you bleed to death on the side of the road?”
“I dunno. But all this seems above and beyond.”
“Maybe I like you, okay?” she snapped. “Though God knows why. You can be real annoying.”
Ryan submitted to her ministrations, but only grudgingly. Her touch was incredibly gentle and soothing, not to mention arousing. He wouldn’t have thought it possible, but even with this gaping wound in his shoulder, he was more fixated on her touch and his reaction to it than on the pain.
He’d probably taken advantage of her kindness by kissing her, but he hadn’t been able to help himself. She was so close, and she smelled so good. But it was the look of concern in her green eyes that went right to his soul.
Despite her denial, there was something more going on here than just kindness, or responsibility. She was... protecting him. Caring for him. During that seemingly endless hike from the car to this house, she’d looked at him with such worry, such anxiety, that he’d begun to wonder who was in more pain.
No one had ever looked at him like that bef
ore. Of course, he’d never been shot before, either. New experiences were abounding.
She finished the knot, then straightened up and put a couple of feet of distance between them, as if she were afraid he would make good on his promise to stop kissing her only until she finished the sling. It was probably a good thing his reflexes were a little bit dulled, because he would have made a grab for her. His judgment—if he’d ever had any where Chrissy was concerned—was dulled, too.
He couldn’t stop looking at her. She was flushed and disheveled, her hair was coming out of her braid, her lipstick was long gone, she had a gun stuck in the waistband of her jeans, like some desperado—and she’d never looked more beautiful, or sexier.
Mostly sexier.
“I think you should go upstairs and rest,” she said. “I’ll make us something to eat. Then maybe we can figure out our next move.”
Ryan knew what he wanted his next move to be. Hmm. Maybe when his shoulder didn’t hurt so bad. Now that the immediate danger was at bay and his adrenaline rush had diminished, a throbbing pain had set in.
She helped him to his feet. It was humiliating how weak he was, how wobbly. Gratefully he put his arm around her. She was strong, so much stronger than she looked at first glance. She’d tackled the gore of his bullet wound without blinking. He might be dead if not for her actions.
“Got any aspirin?” he asked, without much hope.
“Hurts, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll check my purse as soon as I get you to bed.”
They’d reached the stairs. He positioned himself between her and the wobbly banister and began his laborious path upward.
“Oh, Ryan, I’m sorry I got you into this. You could have been killed.”
He laughed. “Sweetheart, I definitely got myself into this. Don’t take the credit.”
“I’m the one who insisted you drive me to Raleigh.”
“I wanted to do it. Anyway, it was my idea to leave the interstate. I’m sure that’s what Denny was waiting for—a chance to isolate us, do his thing with no witnesses. He might have been following us from the time we were at my place.”