Silver-Tongued Devil (Portland Devils Book 1)

by Rosalind James

  Blake hung up himself, then made his stiff-legged way back to Emergency. The nurse said, “Good. You’re back. The doctor wants to talk to you,” and pushed a button on her phone. “Go take a seat,” she told Blake as she dialed.

  Another lurch of fear, another fierce effort to shove it back down. The guy with the cut hand was gone, and only his wife and the mother and toddler were still in the room. Blake didn’t sit—bending his knee was going to hurt—but leaned against the wall instead and tried not to think.

  It was a long ten minutes before the doctor, a youngish guy in scrubs and a stethoscope, came out of the back. “Who’s with Dakota Savage?” he asked.

  “Me,” Blake said.

  “We’ve admitted her,” the doctor said.

  Blake was about to answer, about to ask, but the automatic doors at the entrance were opening, and Russell came in. Evan was behind him, holding Gracie in a car seat. Both men’s faces were set, the way a man looked when he was trying not to show the fear. Blake said, “Wait one” to the doctor and motioned the others over.

  The doctor looked between the three of them and asked, “Who am I talking to?”

  “Me,” Blake and Russell said at once. After a second, Blake said, “Him.”

  “Dakota’s my daughter,” Russell said.

  “We’ve admitted her,” the doctor told Russ. “She’s doing well, but we’ll keep watching for respiratory distress for a while. If she still looks good later this afternoon, we’ll discharge her. She’s on oxygen, and we’ve got warm IV fluids going into her, but that’s standard, so not to worry. It’s good the water was on the cold side, actually. That will have diverted oxygen to her organs. Her heart’s sounding good, and she’s breathing all right. She’s coughing, but that’s normal. Tell me what happened as far as the drowning. How long was she under?”

  Everybody looked at Blake. He said, “She got trapped on the bottom of the lake. I saw her dive down and not come up, so I went after her. She stopped kicking right when I got there. I saw it. That must have been when she lost consciousness, but it didn’t take me too long to get her out, I don’t think.” He explained the rest of it as quickly as he could, tried not to relive those minutes, and failed.

  “Sounds like you moved fast,” the doctor said. “Explains why she isn’t worse off. She was lucky.”

  No, she wasn’t, Blake thought.

  The doctor left, and Evan and Russell took off to find Dakota’s room. First, though, Russell asked Blake, “You OK?”

  “Yeah.”

  Russell looked at him hard, and Blake didn’t allow his gaze to shift away. Finally, Russell put a hand onto his shoulder and said, “Thanks.”

  “You can’t say that, Russ,” Evan said. “You don’t know if it was an accident.”

  “I don’t think it was,” Blake said.

  Evan’s eyes were hard, and his face was harder. He said, “You were on the boat with her. Alone. She almost drowned. How could that happen? Dakota’s a great swimmer.”

  “He pulled her out,” Russell said. “You heard him.”

  “I don’t get it,” Evan said. “I don’t buy it.”

  Somebody else was coming through the front door. A woman in a khaki uniform. And it wasn’t the sheriff. It was a deputy.

  “I don’t have time for this,” Blake said. “Something was wrong out there, yeah. I’m going to find out what, and I’m going to find out who. Right now, somebody needs to go sit with Dakota. That was a bad time. She needs her dad.” He saw the woman at the desk beckoning them over, her crooked finger imperious, and told Russell, “The nurse over there wants Dakota’s info, but whatever her insurance doesn’t pay, I’m covering.”

  “Why’s that?” Evan shot back.

  “Because it was on my property,” Blake said. “Because it’s my responsibility.”

  Which meant he had things to do before he saw Dakota. He went to meet the deputy.

  It took him a while to get the sheriff. He was still going around with the deputy when Jennifer showed up, dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, her hair in a ponytail, a paper bag in her arms. When she came over to where Blake was still leaning against the wall, the deputy said, “Excuse me. We’re not done here.”

  Blake said, “Sorry, but as I’ve mentioned, I’m not talking to you. Please call your boss.”

  Jennifer said, “Hi, Shari. Sorry. He’s really pigheaded. You’d better just do what he says.”

  Shari—the deputy—said, “That’s not how it works.”

  Jennifer said, “I know. I’m just telling you. He’s polite, so you think he’ll come around, but he won’t. You’re talking to a brick wall. Save yourself the time and trouble.”

  Blake wasn’t sure whether to be insulted or grateful. He decided on “grateful” when the deputy said stiffly, “I’ll be back in a minute,” moved a ways away, and started to make a call.

  “Thanks,” Blake told Jennifer. He stood up straight, because it looked weak, leaning against the wall like that.

  “No problem,” she said. “Everything’s in here. I threw in some toiletries, plus a flannel jacket and a towel once I heard what happened out at the resort. Hospitals are always cold, and shock makes you colder.”

  “Oh. Thanks.” He hadn’t realized it, but he was cold. He’d been cold since he’d jumped in the lake, and he’d never warmed up.

  She dug in the bag, handed him a cellphone, and said, “Temporary solution. I’ll order you a legit replacement once I get home, and you’ll have it tomorrow. The security guard who found your boat for you—Logan—also found your phone on the beach. It was dead. You said ‘dead,’ but it was really dead.”

  “Did you ask him to do the other thing?”

  “Yep. I did.”

  “Good.” Blake palmed the phone and immediately felt better, less unmoored. “Dakota said I needed to give him a raise.”

  “You probably should. He’s better than most of them you’ve got out there. Just out of the service.”

  “How do you know everything?”

  “It’s a gift.” She handed him the paper bag. “I put a few numbers on your phone already. Mine, mainly. If you need anything else, or to reach anyone else, call me.”

  “Thanks.” He tried to think, to focus. “About you getting home. I said I’d fix that.”

  He started over to the nurse’s desk, but Jennifer said, “I’ve got it. My mom’s waiting for me. One second, though.” She went over to talk to the nurse herself, engaged in some lively conversation, and two minutes later, came back with an icepack and handed it to him. “Go get changed before the sheriff gets here. You’re freezing. And put this on your knee and sit down, for Pete’s sake. You look like you’re about to collapse. Call me and tell me what the sheriff says. Otherwise, I’ll be going nuts finding out from my sources.”

  Despite everything, Blake had to smile. “I can tell I’m going to have to give you a raise, too.”

  “Don’t get carried away. You’re already overpaying me. I don’t want you to regret it.”

  She left, Blake got himself changed, and he felt better, or at least warmer. When he came out to the waiting room again, Milo Sawyer, the sheriff himself, was sitting in one of the uncomfortable plastic chairs beside his deputy, tapping a pen against his knee in a rat-a-a-tat-tat that said he was already wasting his time.

  Same blonde hair, same athletic build as his relatives. Probably the same arrogance, too. Blake’s antagonism flared up a notch, and he hadn’t even talked to the guy yet. He was ready to take this out on somebody, though, and it could start now.

  No, it couldn’t. Dial it back, or you’ll get nowhere. “Hi, Sheriff,” he said, limping across the room—Jennifer was right again, damn it—and putting out a hand. “Thanks for coming. We’ve got a problem.”

  Sawyer shook hands, but he didn’t look happy about it. “That’s what you said. My deputies are fully empowered to act, and around here, we don’t treat people different just because they have a few dollars.”

  Yeah,
right, Blake didn’t say. Tell that to Dakota.

  “Maybe you’ll tell me what went on out there,” Sawyer said. “All I heard was, Dakota Savage was on your boat, and she ended up half-drowned. Which is what Deputy Johnson is here to talk to you about.”

  Blake stared at him, for once lost for words. It seemed Evan wasn’t the only one who could put a different spin on this. “Maybe you’d better ask Dakota what happened,” he finally said.

  “Uh-huh. Could be we’ve thought of that already. Could be we’re doing it, too. This is law enforcement, and it’s our job.”

  “You’ve got somebody up there with her, harassing her. She was drowning.”

  Blake went to stand, and his stupid leg wouldn’t do it. He grabbed hold of it to haul it up, but Sawyer snapped, “Sit down. You got me out here because you had something to say. That’s good, because I’ve got something to ask. If Dakota’s story matches yours, you’ve got nothing to worry about.”

  Blake sank back down and held the ice pack onto his knee, forcing himself not to grit his teeth. It wasn’t from the pain. It was from the frustration, but Sawyer wouldn’t know that. “Good,” he said. “Go.”

  Sawyer asked, and he answered. The sheriff ran him through the sequence of events one way, and then he did it another. Over and over, trying to trip him up. The deputy took notes, and Blake knew it was to check his version against Dakota’s. None of it was welcome. This wasn’t what he needed the sheriff to be focusing on.

  Sawyer finally said, “I’ll get back to you if I have any more questions. That’s it for now.”

  Blake said, “No. It’s not. I did it your way, and now I need you to listen. Dakota got caught on something under those logs that shouldn’t have been there. I need to know what it was. I need it out of there, obviously, but I also need to know how it got there.”

  “That’s why you brought me out here?” the sheriff asked. “Because there’s something on the lakebed that hung her up, and that’s a criminal act?”

  “Those logs were only put in place a month ago,” Blake said, holding onto his temper. “There was nothing on the lakebed then. Nothing that could grab somebody the way she was grabbed. I had to pull hard to get her out of there. How would that happen, right under the logs at the edge of my swimming area? That’s too big a coincidence.”

  “Uh-huh.” Sawyer didn’t sound convinced. “We’ll take a look.”

  Blake wasn’t going to be able to stifle his impatience much longer. “I’d appreciate it mightily if you’d take that look right now. As in right now. I’ve got a resort opening up in about ten days. It’s going to bring a whole lot of money to this town, and we’ve already hired a whole lot of folks, too. If somebody gets hurt, they’re going to sue. If it’s bad enough, it could even close us down, and that’s a lot of households losing their jobs. A lot of voters.”

  Sawyer’s stare was hard. “So this is about you not getting your ass sued. I should’ve known. I’m surprised you haven’t taken it on yourself to find out what happened, since you’re so ready to think it’s a conspiracy.”

  “I hear there’s a thing called chain of evidence,” Blake said. “Whoever did this—I don’t want anything getting in the way of sending his ass to jail. Excuse my language,” he added belatedly to the deputy.

  She said, “I’ve heard the word.”

  “But that’s why,” Blake continued, “I’ve had a guy watching that shoreline since it happened. Making sure nobody tampers with whatever’s out there. I’ve noticed news spreads fast around here.”

  “Or covering your ass,” Sawyer said as if Blake hadn’t spoken. “Making sure we’ll think something out there did catch Dakota up, and you didn’t try to drown her yourself.”

  Blake breathed out the steam. “You go on and think that if you want. Dakota’s up there telling your guy what happened to her. Not sure how you’ll get around that. Meanwhile, I want somebody out there investigating, and I want them now. I want video. I want analysis. If I don’t get it, I’ll do my own investigating, and I’ll spread it around that it’s because you wouldn’t. I don’t think that’ll go over big.”

  “You don’t threaten me,” Sawyer said. “I’ve been sheriff here for seven years. I’ve got a reputation. I’ve got history. You’ve got nothing but a big mouth and too much money.”

  “Yep.” Blake didn’t try to stand up this time. Falling over wouldn’t look good. “But I do have those.”

  When the sheriff and deputy finally left, taking his brand-new phone number with them along with a reluctant agreement to call him with an update, Blake thought, Dakota, and hauled on his knee again to stand. He was the only one in the waiting room now, the lady with the toddler having disappeared sometime during his clothing change.

  He went over to the nurse behind the desk again, said, “I want to guarantee that payment for Dakota’s bills,” and pulled his wallet out of his back pocket.

  She took his credit card and said, “The doctor will see you now.”

  “Huh? I don’t need to see the doctor.”

  She inclined her head toward the back of the room. Blake turned around, and there the guy was, his arms folded across his chest. Same guy, with no customers. Dangerous.

  “Yeah,” the doctor said, “I know. It’s just a flesh wound. Come back here and let me take a look at it anyway.”

  Blake said, “I know this knee. It’s my knee.”

  The doctor said, “You’re not making a whole lot of sense right now. Get back here before I decide I need to MRI your brain.”

  Blake went, which didn’t turn out to be any more fun than he’d expected, and ended up the way he’d expected, too. After a whole lot of prodding and manipulation that upped the pain quotient way too much, he’d been told it was his MCL, which he could already tell, and that he probably needed another MRI “to be on the safe side,” which he already knew. He’d answered, “Yeah, I figured you’d say that,” with only a moderate amount of sarcasm.

  He came out with some pain meds—carefully non-narcotic—his knee wrapped in an elastic bandage, and a couple more ice packs. He’d thought about refusing the meds, but on the way over to the main wing of the hospital, he stopped at a drinking fountain and swallowed the first pill, because damn, that hurt.

  He was going to be crashing soon. But first, he needed to see Dakota. He needed to see her bad.

  When she saw Blake walking through the door like a peg-legged sailor, all Dakota could say was, “Oh, no. Blake.”

  He stopped. “What?”

  “Your leg. What happened?”

  “Nothing happened.”

  “What do you mean, nothing happened? I can see that something happened. How?”

  She was trying to yell at him, but her chest hurt, and she couldn’t. She was all over the place, and it was scaring her. When she’d been lying here, trying to figure it out, and the deputy had come in and sent Russ and Evan away, and she’d realized what he was asking her, if Blake had tried to drown her… she’d wanted to shout then, too. She’d wanted to demand to see Blake.

  Had she done that, though? No. Instead, she’d cried. She’d started sobbing so hard, in fact, that Russell had come bursting in like the posse, with Evan right behind him, still holding Gracie. Savior with a baby carrier. After that, the deputy had taken her over it again and again, and she’d nearly cried again, remembering her terror. She’d wanted to be strong, and she hadn’t been able to be strong enough.

  The deputy hadn’t sounded like he believed her, no matter how many times she told him. Now, Blake was here, but he was hurt? She lay in the bed, immobilized by the IV in her hand, the clip on her finger, and the stupid oxygen tube in her nose, and tried to explain it to him. “You didn’t come, and they said… and now your leg…”

  “She’s going off again, Russ,” Evan muttered from her left side.

  “Yep.” Russell heaved himself to his feet on her right. “Come on. Let’s go get breakfast. We’ll bring back some coffee for you all. Maybe a cinnamon roll. C
innamon roll sound good, Blake?”

  “Dakota, though,” Evan said. He’d stood, too, with Gracie, who was still in her carrier. Three men hovering around, and nobody was even giving her a friggin’ hug? Couldn’t they tell that was what she needed?

  Russell said, “I guess Blake can take over for a little while. He needs the chair anyway.”

  Dakota wiped her face with a tissue. She couldn’t even be a drama queen when she’d almost drowned, apparently. Not if there was nobody to listen. The thought was making her tear up again, stupid as it was, or maybe that was Blake. Why was he just standing there?

  Because she had a plastic tube in her nose, which was also running. Her hair was like seaweed, and she’d gotten stuck in his lake, somehow, diving too deep, had nearly drowned herself, and had practically gotten him arrested for attempted murder. Those could be a few powerful reasons.

  It had been such a wonderful night, and it had turned into a nightmare. Blake had hurt his leg again getting her out, and his beautiful boat…

  He came to sit beside her, ignoring the others, took her hand, and said, his voice so tender, “Come on, baby. Don’t cry. It’s all right. It’s all over.”

  That was all it took. She was weeping for good. Russ was practically hauling Evan out the door, and she was crying all over Blake. “Sorry,” she got out through the tears, then started to cough and couldn’t stop. Blake was on the bed, his arm behind her, looking panicked.

  She stopped coughing at last, picked up the water glass from her table, and took some sips. “It’s just… it’s… sorry. It’s so stupid.” She put the glass down. “I can’t… seem to keep it together.” She tried to laugh, and blew her nose again. “They kept asking me these questions. They thought you drowned me. I kept saying, no, I got tangled up. But I couldn’t explain it well enough, because I still can’t figure out what happened. And your leg. What’s wrong with your leg?”

  “Aw, baby,” Blake said. He got another tissue out and did some more mopping up on her face. She was lovely, obviously. “No. I’m all good, and you didn’t do anything stupid. My knee sure is feelin’ it, though. Seems to me you could scoot over a little and let a guy hold you for a minute. Then I could put ice on this knee, and I could pretend I wasn’t resting too.”