The Strong Silent Type

by Marie Ferrarella

  Teri stared at him. “Where are we going?”

  “To never-never land,” he said between clenched teeth. There she went, asking more questions, butting heads with him at every turn. Why couldn’t she just be cooperative and pass out like any normal person in her place would have?

  Teri blinked. “A joke. You made a joke. I must be dying. Is it that serious?”

  Hawk sighed, trying hard not to jostle her any more than he had to. He didn’t even look at his partner. “If I said yes, would you shut up?”

  She wanted to thread her arms back around his neck to secure herself, but she felt that if she didn’t keep pressing her hand against her side, everything would come tumbling out. “Now you’re starting to hurt my feelings, Hawk. And just when we were getting so close, too.”

  “We’re not getting close,” he informed her tersely, taking the next set of stairs down. “I don’t get close.” And because there was a real danger of that happening here, he put out a special effort to keep her at arm’s length.

  Deep down, he didn’t really believe that, she thought. It was just something he’d talked himself into. “Even the Lone Ranger had Tonto.”

  This time he did look at her. “I’m not interested in having anyone.”

  She thought of the way the women at the precinct looked at him when he wasn’t paying attention. Which was all of the time.

  “Oh, well, that’s a shame, because there are plenty of people interested in having you.” Determined not to let him know how much this was hurting, she pushed harder against the wound praying it would stop radiating pain.

  He almost slipped and told her she was delirious again, but stopped himself in time. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  She gave him that smile, that knowing, almost smug smile that said she was privy to some kind of inside information that he wasn’t. The one that never failed to test the parameters of his temper and find him seriously lacking. The one that got under his skin no matter how much he tried to keep it out.

  “You know,” she said in an almost breathless manner that concerned him the moment he heard it, “for a police detective, you’re not very observant. Female people,” she finally elaborated. “You don’t seem to notice all the heads that turn whenever you come into the room, partner. You definitely raise blood pressures.”

  He gave her a look that would have silenced a babbling brook, but had no effect on her. “You’re raising mine right now.”

  She chose to interpret his comment the way she knew would drive him crazy. “What a lovely thing to say, Hawk.”

  “It wasn’t meant to be.”

  Why did five flights feel so endless? She was surprisingly light, even in boots and a winter jacket, but he was being careful not to jostle her any further, and that took time and effort. He wasn’t happy about having to hold her against him like this. He had her so close, the blood from her wound had gotten onto his clothing.

  It wasn’t the blood he was concerned about. With a little cold water, a lot of soaking, blood washed out. It was breathing in that cologne of hers—the one she swore she didn’t wear—that was getting to him. It made the closed-in area of the stairwell almost suffocating for him. He responded to her in ways he didn’t want to even think about.

  In ways he didn’t want to respond. He couldn’t think of her as a woman, he reminded himself.

  He couldn’t not.

  Teri took a deep breath. The dizziness was beginning to pass slightly. Maybe she was getting her second wind, she reasoned. She looked at Hawk. “Let me walk down the rest of the way,” she said. “I don’t want you naming your hernia after me.”

  This wasn’t even up for discussion. If he let her try to stand up, he was fairly certain she was going to go down like a stone. He would have bet his next month’s pay on it.

  “You weigh twelve and a half pounds—don’t worry about it.”

  She wasn’t exactly worried, but this definitely had the makings of something he was going to use to his advantage throughout their partnership. “This isn’t something you’re going to let me live down.”

  She was out of her head, wasn’t she? he thought. Other partners had rapports where there was a certain amount of give and take, of banter. He would have liked nothing better than to spend his time with her in completely silence except for the dispatch radio.

  “This isn’t something I ever intend to talk about. Ever,” he underscored.

  She tried to guess at his reason. “Don’t like people reminding you that you’re kind?”

  “Don’t like people being pains in the butt,” he countered.

  Jack Hawkins was a hard nut to crack, she thought. But here he was, being nice to her. He could have waited for the elevator, could have waited for the paramedics to arrive on the roof, for that matter, instead of taking it upon himself to carry her down five flights of stairs to the ground floor. Six if they counted the set of stairs that had led from the roof to the fifth floor. Which meant the big lug cared.

  “You can huff and puff all you want, Hawk, but I’ve got your number. You’re not the big bad wolf you pretend to be.”

  Reaching the final landing, he paused long enough to look her right in the eye. She had to get over this noble image of him she was trying to paint. It got in his way.

  “I don’t waste my time pretending.” So saying, he pushed down on the door handle with his elbow, opening the door that led out into the lobby.

  Hawk could protest all he wanted; she knew better. But she played along, her mouth curving. “What you see is what you get, huh?”

  He didn’t bother looking at her. Instead, he walked by the doorman, whose mouth dropped open when he saw the wounded woman in Hawk’s arms. “Right.”

  “Wrong,” she countered just as the ambulance came into view.

  Seeing journey’s end, Hawk almost sighed with relief. Not long now.

  The doors of the stark-white vehicle with its red letters popped open. One of the two paramedics assigned to it jumped out.

  Hawk deposited her inside the rear of the ambulance.

  “She’s all yours,” he announced, backing away with his arms slightly raised, like a rodeo star who had just tied up a calf. “Best of luck to you.”

  A ray of panic flashed between the shafts of pain vying for possession of her. He was leaving.

  “You’re not coming?”

  If he didn’t know any better, he would have said she looked scared. But if he’d learned nothing else these very long nine months, he’d learned that Theresa Cavanaugh did not get scared. Or, and this was probably more likely, if she did, she never showed it.

  “Someone has to fill in the reports.”

  Hawk began to walk away when he saw her wince as the paramedic slid off her coat. There was blood everywhere, spearing on his guilt. If it hadn’t been for her pushing him out of the way, he would have been the one with the wound. And, more than likely, his would have been more serious. He was taller than she was. It didn’t take much of a stretch of the imagination to realize that the bullet would have probably found its way into his gut.

  The encroaching panic continued spinning out its web, swirling around her. She saw the way Hawk looked at her wound and guessed at what he was thinking, if not saying. She shamelessly used it to her advantage. “We caught the bad guys, Hawk. The paperwork can wait for a couple of hours.”

  The paramedic was administering to her wound, bandaging it up as quickly as possible. Hawk averted his eyes from the exposed area, giving her her privacy. “Why do you want me to come with you?”

  She could lie. She could make a joke about it. But right now, she needed to have him come with her. To chase the specters away. So she went with the truth and hoped it would work.

  “I need someone to hold my hand,” she told him honestly. “I never liked hospitals. People die in hospitals.”

  He wasn’t sure if she was putting him on again or not. But there was a look in her eyes that didn’t allow him to retreat the way h
e wanted to. He couldn’t just abandon her.

  Hawk looked around the area. The so-called suspects had been placed in the back of a squad car that was about to pull out. There was protocol to follow, he reminded himself.

  The paramedic was urging her onto the gurney. “Only the good die young,” Hawk informed her. “I’ll catch up with you.”

  To his surprise, she said nothing. She only continued looking at him. Continued looking even as the paramedic closed the doors, severing eye contact.

  “Ah, hell,” Hawk bit off, shaking his head. Spinning around on his heel, he looked around until he saw a face he recognized. Quickly, he crossed to the heavyset detective. “Hey, Mulrooney, tell Mr. and Mrs. Wong that I’ll be back to take their statements after they’ve had a chance to pull themselves together.”

  Mulrooney looked surprised that Hawk wasn’t on his way back upstairs. “Where are you going?”

  Hawk clenched his teeth together. He didn’t like having to explain himself, especially when he was having trouble understanding is own motivation.

  “My partner’s been shot. I’m heading out to the hospital to make sure she’s all right.”

  Again Mulrooney nodded, this time looking at the ambulance that had just peeled away, its siren going full blast. He grinned broadly. Everyone liked Teri Cavanaugh. The same couldn’t be said about her partner. “Trade assignments with you, Hawkins.”

  Hawk made no answer. Given his choice, he would have liked to take Mulrooney up on that. The latter had the better end of the deal.

  Muttering a few choice things under his breath, Hawk hurried to his car.

  Her side throbbed wildly to the beat of the 1812 Overture by the time the ambulance pulled into the parking lot behind Aurora Memorial Hospital’s ER. Even so, Teri braced herself as the paramedic went to open the rear doors.

  This was the hospital where they had brought her uncle Mike the day he’d been shot.

  This was the hospital Uncle Mike had died in.

  The shooting had happened less than a month after her mother’s car had crashed through the guardrail and gone over the side, to be submerged in the river. Teri had been twelve at the time and the two events combined had overwhelmed her almost completely. She’d come away with a lasting phobia of hospitals.

  That same phobia was alive and well now, fifteen years later, even though she knew that logic dictated that she come here to be treated.

  Logic was one thing, but superstitious and phobias didn’t understand logic.

  “You better lie down.” The paramedic who’d treated her placed a hand on her shoulder, intending to help her get comfortable.

  She stiffened as if she’d been shot again. There was no way in hell they were going to strap her down to the gurney, not while she was conscious.

  “I can get out on my own power.”

  She didn’t want to be held down while they wheeled her in, not as long as she could walk. There was something helpless about being pushed in through the electronic doors, not being able to move a muscle.

  She pressed her lips together, her body tense, her side stinging like crazy as the rear doors opened, braced for the inevitable wave of fear to hit her with the force of a tidal wave.

  What she wasn’t prepared for was to see Hawk standing there when the doors opened.

  Chapter Three

  H e came.

  The words vibrated in her brain, bringing with them a wave of relief and happiness. Teri waved away the paramedic who’d just tried to get her to lie on the gurney.

  “I’ll sit, but I won’t lie down.” She looked at Hawk who stepped back as the gurney was brought out of the ambulance. The dread drained out of her. She didn’t have to face going in alone. “Did you forget something?”

  “Yeah, my better judgment.” He’d seen the relief that had leaped into her eyes, so intense that for a second it stopped him in his tracks. What was that about? Was she actually afraid of hospitals? He hadn’t thought she was afraid of anything. It was part of the woman’s appeal.

  The paramedics were pushing her through the doors. And Hawk was not fading back into the parking lot—he was coming in with her. “What about the statements?” she asked.

  “I told Mulrooney to tell the victims I would be by later to take them.”

  There were nurses and attendants scattered throughout the rear of the ER. Hawk flashed his badge at the one closest to them. The tall woman in dark green livery immediately pointed the paramedics to an open bed.

  “We,” Teri corrected him. “We would be by later.”

  There was brave, and then there was stupid. Cavanaugh had crossed the line. “Thinking of going somewhere, Superwoman?” Before she could answer, he asked, “Don’t you think that you’ve done enough damage to yourself for one day?”

  Again she waved back hands that reached out to help. “I can do this,” she told the nurse who eyed her dubiously. Bracing herself against the mattress, she slid off the gurney and onto the hospital bed. Her body hated her for it. “It’s not like I stood there, daring the guy to shoot me. Hawk. I took a bullet for you.”

  Guilt corkscrewed into him a little further. “Yeah, you did.”

  Sitting on the bed, she read the look in his eyes. “And you feel guilty, don’t you?”

  “Guilt’s not in my file folder.” He wasn’t about to have her poking around in his head, thinking she could read him. There were things there she couldn’t see.

  Teri laughed shortly. “Don’t tell me that. I’ve seen it often enough on the faces of my brothers to know guilt when I see it.” Pain dragged spiked shoes across her side. Teri waited to catch her breath. It wasn’t easy. “No need for guilt. You would have done the same for me.” And then she surprised him by taking hold of his hand in hers. “Thanks.”

  The simple gratitude he both saw in her eyes and heard in her voice stirred something within him and made him uneasy. He shrugged her words away.

  Emotions of any kind, other than cold, steely anger, made him uncomfortable. They always had. He’d never had any outlet for them. The parents he’d once wanted so desperately to notice him, to get themselves clean and turn him and them into a real family, had rejected him. They had ignored him for as far back as he could remember. Instead, they had more interest in the drugs that could remove them from their world and take them to somewhere he had no desire to go.

  Even as a kid, he’d known that drugs were bad. He’d watched firsthand as first his father, then his mother became firmly entrenched—because of drugs—in the land of the living dead.

  He’d attempted, in his own way, to make his parents come around. He’d cooked, cleaned and tried to take care of them. There were tiny glimmers, moments when he thought things were finally on the right path, but in the end, all his efforts came to nothing.

  When he was just twelve, a drug dealer, enraged because his parents were into him for several hundred dollars, had killed them both. Snuffed out their lives without so much as a peep from either for them. They were that far gone into their make-believe worlds.

  And he had seen it all through the crack created by the doorjamb and a closet door.

  He’d tried to wake them, knowing even as he desperately shook his mother, then his father, that they were both dead. And he’d been the one who had called 911 to report their murders.

  Any shred of childhood he might have still possessed died with his parents that day. He’d become a man with all the burdens, all the sorrows that entailed. A man within a boy’s body, but still a man.

  Which was why he had such a hard time in the system, a hard time trying to adjust to strangers, some of whom did their best to make him feel at home. Strangers who thought their rules applied to him. They didn’t realize that it was too late for him. He didn’t fit into a family structure anymore.

  That door had closed for him when he was twelve.

  He’d grown up isolated, insulated, not needing anyone or anything and not allowing anyone to need him.

  So what was he
doing here, letting this woman hang on to his hand as if it were her tether back to life as she waited for a resident doctor to examine her? Why wasn’t he back at the apartment complex, taking down statements, doing his job? That was what he was good at—detective work, not comforting.

  Hell, he wouldn’t be able to comfort someone if his life depended on it. He just didn’t know how. So there was absolutely no point in trying.

  Yet Cavanaugh seemed glad to see him, glad to hang on to his hand as if it were some kind of talisman that could keep her safe. Her hand felt small within his. It made him want to protect her.

  “You looked scared.” He finally answered her earlier question.

  He knew it wasn’t the right thing to say, but it was why he was here. He saw no point in sugarcoating, or lying. He’d used lies to survive on the street when he’d run away from his last foster home. When he’d wound up living in an abandoned warehouse with another kid named Tierney. Used lies until the lines between reality and fantasy became completely blurred for him. He wasn’t about to go there anymore. The path back always became hard to find.

  Teri’s first instinct was to say, no, she wasn’t scared. The only thing that scared her was having harm come to the members of her family. Beyond that, she was pretty much fearless—like the rest of them.

  But her reaction to hospitals, to what they represented to her, wasn’t logical. It wasn’t anything she wanted to explain to Hawk. “I don’t expect you to understand.”

  The nurse had returned to take her pulse, then asked her a couple of quick questions, all of which went down on her chart. “How’s the pain?” the woman asked.

  “Not good,” Teri muttered.

  “This’ll help.”

  Before she could ask what she was referring to, the nurse had given her an injection. Leaving to dispose of the needle, she returned with a starched hospital gown and deposited it on the bed.

  “Here, put this on. Someone’ll be here with you shortly.” With that, the woman promptly disappeared again.