by Beverly Bird
“Oh, no,” Kate breathed, “please, God, no.” Please don’t let me have killed an angel! She scrambled into the van, going on her hands and knees to the front.
Raphael got off one shot as the gunman raced toward the south side—the short side—of the alley. And he missed. He was already turning to the van when his finger squeezed the trigger. That damned fool crazy woman who never listened to a word he said was inside the van! If anyone else was still in there, she was as good as dead.
He was going to lose her.
Raphael dove for the rear doors of the vehicle. He crab-walked to the front fast and found her there in the shadows, leaning against the back of the passenger seat. She was crying. And there was blood.
Words crammed in his throat and went unspoken. His knees felt weak. But there was no one else in the van.
“Easy, easy.” He sat beside her.
“I k-k-killed her.”
Kate turned a grief-stricken face to him. The tears she had shed the first night she had stayed with him had been gulping, wrenched from her as though she’d fought each and every sob hard. Now her cheeks were slick and wet and shiny. Tears rained from her eyes, unabashed. The sight tore at something inside him, then Raphael looked at the dog.
The dog. He’d forgotten about the damned dog. But she had given more thought for the beast than to herself.
He wanted to choke her. He wanted to crush her to him and hold her, needed to feel every pulse of her life. He found his voice again. “Let me see her.”
Kate eased Belle from her arms into his. So much blood. But, Raphael saw instantly, it was all the dog’s. It was on Kate’s hands, her forearms, but nowhere else. It seeped steadily from the dog’s tan and black nose.
Above that nose were two very baleful black eyes. This, Raphael thought, was one mighty angry Chihuahua.
“Okay,” he said hoarsely. “Here. Take her back and just sit tight.”
“Where are you going?”
“I’m going to drive. We need to find a vet.” He climbed forward into the driver’s seat. He turned the key in the ignition and stomped his foot an extra time on the gas pedal as Kate had warned him to do. The engine coughed to life and they rolled.
Raphael had no idea where to go. And that struck him as uproarious. Relief clogged his blood and made him feel nearly crazed with the need to laugh. Kate was alive. But the dog, that irascible little beast, had been shot in the nose, and somehow he had to find a veterinarian in the welter of Philadelphia’s streets at eight o’clock at night.
He turned the van onto Callowhill for no particular reason, then he hit the brakes hard and stared.
“What?” Kate cried, her breath catching as she was thrown forward into the back of the passenger seat.
“It’s a vet.”
“That’s what we’re looking for!”
“Ain’t it, though.”
It was on the corner, its red neon sign hitching and straining to warm up and shine fully as though someone had just turned it on. It read 24-Hr Emergency Animal Service. There was a parking space right in front of the place. In Philadelphia. On Callowhill. Off Twelfth.
Raphael dropped the van into the parking spot. There wasn’t time to dwell on it. Kate was already scrambling out the rear doors, the dog cradled in her arms. She ran for the clinic.
Raphael followed her inside and looked around. The place was deserted. He looked at a clock on the wall behind the desk. It was 8:03.
The way he had it figured, an emergency veterinarian would do most of his business during hours when folks’ regular veterinarians were closed. This place should have been rocking, but there wasn’t another animal to be found. Raphael listened, but there weren’t even any barks, snarls or meows coming from the door that led to the rear of the building.
A moment later, a woman wearing a crisp white lab coat came through the door. She was young and pretty and cheerful. “Hi. Have a problem?”
Kate thrust Belle at her. “She’s been shot. In the nose.”
The veterinarian took the dog quickly. She examined the wound, then she nodded. “Come on in the back. We can fix this.”
Kate scurried after her. “Is she going to die?”
“Probably not, if you got her here in time. It looks like blood loss will be her biggest problem.” She looked over at what stained Kate’s arms and hands as though measuring. Kate looked at herself, as well, and gave another small cry.
Raphael finally began to follow them. He caught up with them in an examining room. The dog was laying flat on her side, but her gaze locked on Raphael when he entered, and those beady little eyes were still glaring. “Hey, beast, I got you here, didn’t I?”
Belle’s gaze seemed to tell him that he had done no such thing. But there was not so much as a growl from her.
Kate gave a small, distressed sound. “She’s got to be dying,” she said again.
“No, no,” the vet assured her. “The wound’s superficial. We’ll sedate her, then just clean it and stitch it up. The worst case scenario is that her muzzle might look a little…crooked now. She seems to have lost a small piece of it.”
The dog moved her eyes to look at the woman with a pained expression.
“I don’t know that she needs to be sedated,” Raphael said. It was true. For the first time since he’d had the misfortune to cross the dog’s path, Belle was completely, complacently quiet.
“But the antiseptic will cause a sting,” the vet said.
Belle’s ribs rose and fell in a hefty, long-suffering sigh.
The vet filled a needle and set about injecting it. Immediately, the dog came to life, twisting her head around, and growling. The woman jerked her hand back. “This is a problem. Normally, I would muzzle her so I could work on her without being bitten. But it’s her muzzle that’s the problem.”
“If I were you,” said Raphael, “I’d just do what needs to be done, and I’d do it in a hurry.”
The dog lay quietly once the woman reluctantly put the needle down. The vet cleaned the wound. Once Belle’s lip curled back, showing her teeth at the pain, but she didn’t struggle or wriggle. Raphael watched, feeling another headache coming on. Then he stared. “Do that again.”
“What?” the vet asked, startled.
“Not you. The dog. Do that again. Snarl.”
Both the vet and Kate looked at him as though he had lost his mind. Raphael had. He knew that. But when the dog had pulled her lip back like that, he’d seen something in her incisors. He thought he had.
Belle growled again obligingly. And Raphael knew he was right.
“Don’t lick,” he said shortly. “Do you hear me, dog? Lick your chops and I’ll kill you myself.” He grabbed his cell phone from his pocket.
Kate’s jaw was hanging open now. The vet was looking alarmed.
“There’s skin in her teeth,” Raphael explained. “Look for yourself.”
Kate leaned closer. Belle kept her lip curled back nicely and held it there.
“This dog is amazing,” the vet murmured.
“Yeah,” Raphael muttered. “You ought to try taking her for a walk.”
He raised a watch commander at headquarters. “I need a crime tech,” he said, “as fast as you can get one to Twelfth and Callowhill.” He looked at Belle’s mouth again. The fairly good-size piece of flesh was still stuck there, between her teeth. “Good…uh, dog.”
Her tail thumped once.
“I’m a cop,” he said to the dazed veterinarian.
“A detective,” Kate clarified with a bite to her tone, and he sent her a withering look.
“I’m bringing in someone to take that out of there and preserve it as well as possible,” he explained.
Kate’s eyes widened. She understood. It was just like in books, in movies. “DNA.”
Raphael nodded and rubbed at the headache building behind his forehead. Damned if the dog wasn’t going to nail this gunman almost singlehandedly. It was one for the books.
Not that he’d ever t
ell anyone about it.
Chapter 13
When they returned to Raphael’s, Kate went straight to the shower. She stood under the steaming water and watched the blood sluice off her skin to spiral down the drain. She felt the heat melt her bones. Or maybe it was just exhaustion that had her legs feeling hollow.
She groaned as she turned her face into the spray and wondered how much more of this she was going to be able to stand. She’d long since moved past amazement and dismay over what had happened to her life. McGaffney had been killed. Betty Morley had been knocked unconscious. Belle had been shot. And someone wanted her dead. Kate could handle all that. But her bodyguard was a different issue entirely.
Somehow, she thought, in the middle of everything else, Raphael had changed all the things she’d taken for granted about herself. She’d survived Jeff Migliaccio—the hard way. She’d learned to be happy with what she was—efficient, talented, capable. Then Raphael had pushed her away in the middle of that kiss—I wasn’t going to do that, he’d said—and the ache had come back, somehow even worse than before.
For the first time in her life, she wanted to be someone else. Not even Jeff had had that shattering effect on her.
But for the first time in her life, she cared more than sense that this man didn’t want her.
Kate got out of the shower. She dried off wearily and snagged his bathrobe from the back of the door. There’d been no room in her overnight case for her own, not if she’d wanted to bring along a few days’ worth of clothing. She shrugged into it and belted it, then she reached for the door handle to go downstairs and check on Belle.
The dog was on the sofa, ensconced upon a cushiony pile of pillows. An inch-long line of crisscrossed thread ran down the side of her snout. A bowl of food lay by her side—she hadn’t even had to use her dissipated strength to stand and eat. Raphael had all but anointed her, he was so happy about getting that skin from her teeth.
“What are you doing?” he asked sharply.
Kate started a little at the tone of his voice. She looked at him quickly. He was standing at the living room window. He held a can of beer in his hand.
“Oh.” She sighed. “I could use one of those.”
“What?” His expression darkened even more.
“A beer. Is there another?”
“You want a beer?”
“What’s wrong with you? You’re talking in questions.”
Kate went to the refrigerator to look for herself. She was pretty sure she had seen a few in there the last time she’d poked around. She collected one and returned to the living room. Then he startled her all over again.
“What are you up to?”
Kate paused with the can to her mouth. She cut her gaze to him out of the corner of her eye, then she drank. The beer was ice cold and mellow. Almost instantly, she could feel it loosen some of the knots inside her. She put it down carefully on the coffee table.
Something was bothering him. But she didn’t have it in her right now to deal with it. “I’m going to bed,” she decided.
“The hell you are. You’re not going to sashay out of here without an explanation.”
Sashay? “An explanation for what?” she asked incredulously.
He waved his hand in a wild gesture. “For that!”
Damn it, Raphael thought, he couldn’t take any more. His nerves were already stretched out like rubber bands because of a convoluted case that he was damned if he could figure out because the chain of events was breaking all the tried-and-true rules he knew. And maybe because he wasn’t paying as much attention to the details as he should have been. He’d been missing things from the start.
And that, of course, was all her fault.
She’d invaded his life, his home, filling it with the scent of pizza and whatever lemony stuff she used in her hair. Woman smells. A woman had a way of changing the very atmosphere when she moved in with all her woman stuff, he thought.
He could deal with that. He had been dealing with it. He’d been doing fine at ignoring it, that first kiss aside. And hell, that kiss had only happened because she’d been coming apart on him. He wouldn’t think about the other embrace they’d shared.
Now, tonight, she’d gone and damned near gotten herself killed. And somehow, that changed everything.
“You could have gotten yourself killed!” Raphael shouted. “Of all the damned, stupid, idiotic, female things to do, that took the cake!”
Kate’s mouth fell open.
“Jumping into the van like that! What the hell got into you? Did it even once occur to you in that—that female brain of yours that somebody else might have been inside that vehicle? Just because one goon jumped out, that didn’t mean there wasn’t another one still in there!” Air filled his muscles again just thinking about it. “And all because of a dog!”
For the first time in hours, Belle’s head shot up and she growled.
“You’re shouting,” Kate said.
“I’m not shouting! I’m making a point!”
“You’re shouting at me.”
“Well, pardon me for assaulting your sweet little female ears.”
Kate rubbed one of her earlobes. “You’ve also said female like it’s some kind of affliction three times in the last two minutes.”
“The hell I have.”
“Yes, you have.”
“Then go layer-up, for God’s sake, and stop parading around like that!”
Kate went still. Something churned in the pit of her stomach. For a moment, she thought the single swallow of beer she’d had would come up.
She had never paraded in her life. And she was finished with “layering-up.” What purpose did it serve, anyway? With that last kiss in his kitchen, Raphael had pretty much made it clear that there was nothing about her that could drive him past control.
She went to the table for her beer and drank again. Raphael watched her move. She did it with deliberate grace. Her motions were precise, but somehow fluid anyway. He knew she was angry. Spots of hectic color had bloomed on her cheeks. But would she let it rip? Of course not. She only got crazy over that damned dog.
He wondered if he was trying to make her angry, to push her to that uncontrolled edge again. Or maybe he was hoping that she would push right back until he found the edge. Either way, he knew he was crazy. But he remained furious with her anyway.
For the first time in all the days since she’d been here, she’d come bouncing out of his bathroom damned near naked. In his robe, and nothing else. It was the straw the camel just didn’t need, Raphael decided. She’d treated her own life like it was about as valuable as fool’s gold, then she left her underwear in his bathroom. Now she was swigging his beer like a sailor. What the hell was he supposed to do about that?
“Get dressed,” he said, his voice dropping a decibel if only because it was strangled.
“No! I just told you. I’m going to bed.”
He didn’t want to know what she’d be wearing when she did, if she was planning on taking that robe off again to do it. “Nobody walked the dog.” She’d have to put clothes on for that. “You should walk the dog.”
“She did what she had to do in the vet’s office.”
He’d forgotten that.
“You’re acting…bizarre,” she said, frowning.
The words speared into his ears like driven nails. He was acting bizarre? He was fully dressed, and an occasional beer wasn’t out of the question for him. He was the same man he always was, whereas she was behaving like someone he’d never met before in his life.
Raphael crossed the room without realizing he had done so. He stopped in front of her, close to her, standing over her…and she looked up, her mouth slightly parted in surprise.
It would have been so easy to sink into her all over again.
Four inches, he thought, and his mouth would have been covering hers again. Now he knew how she tasted. Now he knew how quickly she could hurtle to that edge he wanted so desperately to drive her over. He hear
d her breath shorten. Her eyes widened.
Raphael swore.
He jerked away from her and went to the kitchen. His brain was pounding and his blood was too hot, rushing too fiercely. He grabbed another beer and pressed the can against his forehead.
Raphael stood very still in the kitchen and waited for the sound of her footsteps going up, then his bedroom door snicking shut behind her. It was a routine he was getting used to. Then there would come the metallic roll of the lock turning. But this time, there were the footsteps, then nothing else happened.
Thirty seconds passed, then a minute, finally two. Raphael left the kitchen and went cautiously to the stairs. He looked up. The door was open a crack. The bedroom was dark inside. What was this all about?
Maybe she was scared. Maybe she didn’t want him to have to break through a door to get to her if anything else happened. It made sense. And instantaneously, with vicious force, everything inside him screwed tight all over again.
Oh, yeah, he thought, this was getting out of hand. Unfortunately, he had no idea what to do about it anymore.
Only two men within the PPD had known that Kate was going to take the Spellman job on Wednesday night, Raphael thought the next morning. He had known. And he had told Fox. He would have trusted Fox with his life—he had, in fact, on a few occasions. No leak had come from him. Therefore, Raphael decided, it had not come from the PPD. That meant that it had probably originated from someone in Kate’s Dinner For Two network. It had been one of her clients or one of her employees.
It was time to start running down those lists.
He stood in the dining area of the kitchen where a table should have been and watched her over the rim of his coffee mug. She was relaxed this morning, he thought. She had left his bathrobe somewhere in his room, and he was thankful for small favors. Now she wore cutoff jeans and a white T-shirt as she made breakfast—omelettes, he thought, from the look of things.
He wasn’t sure which was worse. The T-shirt was thin and he could make out the outlines of her bra beneath it. Therefore, she wore underwear today. That was good. The almost nonexistent proportion of those shorts was not.