He crouched by Keith, rolled him over. Keith’s face was slack. Checking his cousin’s pulse, he found it steady. Good … good. Didn’t want the guy dead. He hadn’t ever been a problem, after all. The tranquilizer would keep him under for hours, but Keith would be just fine.
Rising, he opened the screen door, checked the back door … locked. He used the butt of his gun to break the glass.
After all, no point in being quiet now, was there?
* * *
On winding country roads, ten miles could take forever. Ten minutes might as well be two hours. Ezra pushed his car as fast as he could, fear blistering through him, turning his gut to ice, his blood to acid, and his mind into a tangle of horror.
What if …
What if …
“Stay safe,” he whispered, thinking of his wife.
He’d just found her. He couldn’t lose her already.
Other deputies, whoever could be spared, were already heading to his house. But nobody would do a damn thing until he was there. Not when Lena was involved. Fuck … Lena.
“Please God …”
Lena buried her fingers in Puck’s fur. The dog was trembling, but not with fear. Every now and then, a soft growl would escape. The dog might understand fear, but he reacted to her fear more than his own. And right now, he was pissed.
“Hush,” she said, keeping her voice low. “Hush now.”
She was hiding in a closet. A fucking closet, like a child. It infuriated her.
Tucked behind boxes and clothes and coats, Nia had said she wouldn’t be seen from the door as long as she and Puck didn’t move. But Lena didn’t know how much longer she could stay there, frozen in terror, not knowing what was going, locked in and cut off.
This, here, was horror.
This, here, was helplessness.
Puck’s body stiffened. Lena sank her teeth into her lip.
The floorboards just outside the door creaked.
Nia, her hands resting under her face, dust tickling her nose, lay under Lena’s bed, staring as the feet moved across the floor just outside the hallway.
Lena was in there. Helpless. Vulnerable. Yeah, she had the dog with her, but the dog couldn’t stop a speeding bullet, couldn’t tell her to run—
Fuck—
Carefully, she eased out from under the bed, still watching those feet. He was opening the closet door now. She’d be on the other side of the bed in a second, and unable to see him. Closing her eyes, she said a quick prayer. That she’d live through this, and if she didn’t … well, maybe this would make up for some of the mistakes she’d made lately.
There were other things she wanted to include, but then a sound caught her ear.
An engine.
The crunch of gravel.
No time—
Shoving to her feet, she took off running.
Carter Jennings whirled around and caught her arm as she passed by him. She swung out, catching him in the nose with her right fist, and the sound of cartilage crunching was sweet. “Let go of me, you son of a bitch!” she snarled as he jerked her close.
Then she fell silent as he pressed the muzzle of a gun against the underside of her chin.
“Hello, Nia.”
She spit at him.
With a cool, polite smile, he lifted a hand to backhand her. She blocked that one, but she couldn’t move fast enough to block the next one and that hand? It held the gun. The metal of the gun grazed her face. Fiery pain exploded. She bit her lip to keep from crying out, tasting blood.
“Where are the others? Where is Lena?”
“She had a date with the Easter Bunny,” Nia snarled. “Get off of me.”
He hit her again, this time in the belly. Air exploded out of her and she doubled over, sagging to the ground.
“Where is she?”
“I’m right here, you son of a bitch.”
Lena stopped in the doorway and let go of Puck. “Puck … attack.”
She might not be able to see, but she could feel the intensity of a madman’s gaze on her.
Puck snarled and the reassuring presence of his body was gone.
Ducking back behind the closet’s wall, she closed her eyes, tried to breathe. Over the roar of blood in her ears, she could hear Puck snarling, a man screaming.
Then there was a whimper, a familiar whine.
No—
Hope wrapped her hands around the baseball bat she’d found in the makeshift home gym. It was ironic—supposedly she’d used a baseball bat to pound on Law, but she stood there needing to use one now and she didn’t even know how to hold it. She flinched as she peered around the corner, saw Puck waver, then fall, his big golden body motionless.
“Stupid mutt,” Carter growled.
When he kicked the dog, Hope bit her lip to keep from crying out, focusing on his shadow. When it shifted, she peeked out, saw him turning toward Nia. She was on her knees, trying to get up, clutching her belly.
As he reached for her, Hope moved.
She swung clumsily—she’d never make it on a baseball team, but it connected with his head and she watched as he hit the floor. Without waiting another second, she turned toward her friend.
“Lena, it’s Hope. Come on, we need to get downstairs.”
Lena appeared in the doorway of the closet, her face streaked with tears, her eyes glittering.
“Nia, can you walk?”
“Yeah.” It came out on a pained gasp. “Can run if I had to.”
Still clutching the bat, she held out a hand to Lena. “Take my hand.”
“Puck—”
Seconds that lasted an eternity. The other deputies fanned out behind him as Ezra crept up the first few stairs, listening. He heard Hope’s voice, then Lena’s, and Nia’s—thank God.
“I don’t know, but we have to get out of here.”
“But—”
“I’ll get him,” Nia said. “Just get the fuck down those steps, Lena.”
Ezra didn’t know if he wanted to kiss Lena, hug Nia, spank them both—
The stairs squeaked and two seconds later, he saw Hope and Lena. Hope gasped when she saw him, opened her mouth, but he lifted a finger, pressed it to his lips and gestured to the deputies waiting behind him.
Until he knew the situation, he wasn’t advertising his presence, wasn’t letting anybody know he had deputies crawling out of the woodwork now. Silently, he gestured for his men to part and he pointed toward the door.
Hope nodded her understanding.
He stared at Lena—saw her pause as she came down the last step. She lifted a hand, reached out. It came within an inch of touching him. Then she sighed and continued to walk, her shoulders trembling, tears continuing to fall.
Ezra didn’t watch her as she left the house. Instead he started the slow climb up the stairs, avoiding the areas that squeaked, placing each foot carefully. The skin on the back of his neck was crawling. He wanted to yell at Nia to get the hell out, wherever she was—
Then the stairs squeaked. He saw her foot through the wooden slats. Heaving out a sigh of relief, he opened his mouth.
“Had to get the dog, didn’t you?”
Nia felt the muzzle of the gun against the back of her head. Her arms ached from the strain of holding Puck’s weight, her head throbbed and she wasn’t breathing all that well. Her ribs, they hurt.
Looking down at Puck’s limp body, she sighed. “Yeah. What can I say … he hates you as much as I do. I couldn’t just leave him here.”
The gun pressed harder and she swayed, thrown off balance. She caught herself by shifting a foot to the next step, but she almost pitched forward down the next six steps. Which actually would have been fine with her, if it wasn’t for the dog. She didn’t want to hurt him any more than he already was.
“You should be more careful, considering I’ve got a gun in my hand, considering I’m pointing it at your head,” he snarled. He enunciated each word with a harder push.
She stumbled down another couple of step
s, swearing. “Be careful?” She laughed. “Why? You’re going to kill me anyway.”
He chuckled. “Well, there is that. I’d like to get both you and Lena. Wouldn’t have minded killing Reilly. But you and her? I really wanted you two dead. I might have to settle for you.”
As he drilled the gun’s muzzle harder into her head, forcing her down two more steps, she said, “If you keep pushing me, you’ll have to settle for me with a broken neck—it’s hard to balance here with an eighty-pound dog.”
“Then why don’t you drop it?”
“No.”
She heard an ominous click. Her knees turned to water and she tucked her chin, hunched her shoulders—like that would help.
“I said, drop it.”
“Why?” she asked. She opened her eyes—from the corner of her eye she saw something—through the railing on the second level of the steps, leading down to the floor. Swallowing, she took a deep breath, tried to sound like she wasn’t quite so terrified. “Why should I? We’ve already established I’m dead, right?”
“Well, this is true.” He shoved her with more force this time and she fell, gritting her teeth against the scream and trying to curl her body around Puck’s. The dog fell from her arms and she hit hard on her side, smacking her head against the small table tucked under the little window on the landing. She rolled away, tried to come to her feet, but she barely made it to her knees before he was there.
He fisted his hand in her hair, jerked it back. As he nestled the gun against her chin, he said, “Do you have any idea how badly you fucked things up for me? How much you ruined my life?”
“Not even half as bad as you fucked mine,” she said, panting, trying to breathe around the obscene pain spreading through her. Her side—shit, it hurt. She saw movement—
Nia jerked and twisted, ignoring how much worse that made the pain.
“Stupid bitch—”
“Drop the gun, Carter.”
The sound of the sheriff’s voice was a welcome relief, but Nia didn’t dare relax, barely dared to breathe. Fury blistered through Carter Jennings’s eyes, and the hand he had fisted in her hair tightened until she thought for sure he’d rip it out by the roots.
“Hell, Sheriff, you made good time,” Carter said, a vicious smile lighting his face. He moved the gun away from Nia’s chin, but now it was pointed at Ezra. Not exactly an improvement.
“Let her go. Put the gun down,” Ezra said. He held his own gun, steady and level, his eyes flat. “You can walk away from this. You hurt her, and you won’t.”
Carter chuckled. “But I don’t want to walk away. And I want to hurt her. I can have everything I want.”
Nia’s gut clenched. A man who didn’t care if he lived or died … or a man who wanted to die … was there anything more dangerous?
She swallowed, blinked back the tears. Damn it. She wasn’t ready to die with this arrogant, cruel sack of shit—
“Nia …”
His voice was a ragged whisper, coming from too far off.
She could barely turn her head. Wheeling her eyes to the right, she saw him, standing in the doorway of the house. Law had his arm draped around Remy’s shoulders and the other clutched at the door frame.
Maybe there was one thing more dangerous than a man who wanted to die, and that was a woman who was determined she wasn’t ready to die. As the hard, hot knot of fury settled in her heart, it burned the fear away. Shaking under the onslaught, she shifted her gaze forward, blocked out everything. She didn’t care about the deputies crowding in behind Ezra, didn’t care about Carter.
She only cared about Law.
Carter shouted something at Ezra.
Ezra only shook his head in response.
Nia didn’t know what they were arguing about, didn’t care.
She had a shot, maybe only one, right then, while Carter was focusing on something other than her.
Fisting her hands, she swung up, catching him between the legs. At the same time, she surged to her feet as hard, as fast as she could, putting that extra momentum into it.
She wrenched away from him and stumbled toward the steps as Ezra lunged for Carter. Sobs threatened to choke her, tears—fear, relief, both—blinded her. But she didn’t need to see just then.
What she wanted, needed, was standing in the doorway and his hand reached out and caught her the minute she was close enough.
“Law.”
“Shh … it’s okay.”
She pulled back long enough to glare at him. “You fucking idiot—you were shot and you’re telling me, it’s okay?”
But then, she pressed her head against his chest, shuddering.
Maybe it was over …
“Put it down,” Ezra snarled.
Nia had caught Carter off guard, but the man either had no balls or they were made of steel, because before Ezra could even reach him, he had recovered enough to point the gun at Ezra.
“I’m not going to jail,” Carter said. His voice was polite. Almost pleasant. His blue eyes were vague and blank. And in the dim light of the house, his naked scalp gleamed as smooth as a babe’s. “I always planned to end it if it ever got that far, and I’m not changing that plan now.”
He still held the gun pointed at Ezra, his hand rock-steady, like he could hold that position all night.
Nobody could, though. Guns were heavy—nobody could stay that way indefinitely.
“Come on, Carter. You don’t want to end it this way. Don’t you want to see Roz? Your wife? You love her, right?”
“Of course I do. And that’s a nice try, but no. I don’t want to see her enough to let you arrest me, Ezra.” He gestured toward the steps with the gun. “Why don’t you just go on downstairs now?”
“You know I can’t do that.”
“Hmm.” Carter frowned, his brow creased like he was thinking very, very hard. Then, slowly, he smiled.
A chill raced down Ezra’s spine.
Carter’s finger tightened on the trigger. “You know, you never were one I’d planned on killing, Sheriff. I had no problem with you. Never had a problem with Dwight, either. But he got in the way, there at the end. Just like that idiot Carson did. So I had to take care of him. Now you’re in the way. So …”
“Don’t, Carter,” he warned. His life started to flash before him. Damn it—he’d made himself a promise, more than a year ago. He wouldn’t take another life. God—
“I’m sorry. But you’re in my way,” Carter said, his voice so polite, so reasonable.
Ezra squeezed the trigger.
As Carter dropped to the ground, Ezra sagged against the railing.
Yeah. He’d made himself a promise, all right. Back when he’d been forced to kill his own partner. It was that action that had led him on the winding road to this small town, to this very house, in fact.
“Ezra!”
Hearing Lena’s voice, he looked up. If he’d only stood there, frozen by guilt, he would have been taking a life anyway. It just would have been his own instead of a killer’s. Sighing, he looked at Carter Jennings. There was a neat hole between his lifeless eyes.
“I guess I’m not in the way now,” he murmured.
Then he headed up the stairs. He had one gigantic mess to clean up, but first … he needed to hold his wife.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FOUR
“REMY.”
Dawn was still just a distant thought. In the cold, bright lights of the hospital, he couldn’t hide from the truth anymore, although he was trying.
He also couldn’t hide from Hope, it seemed.
She’d tracked him down to the small chapel and when he looked up and met her eyes, he knew she wasn’t about to leave him alone, either.
As she rested a hand on his shoulder, he reached up and covered it with his. “Did you let the doctors look you over?”
She eased down on the small wooden bench next to him. “No need. He never even touched me.” She brushed his hair back from his face, studying him with worried eyes.
“Are you okay?”
Remy laughed bitterly. “Okay? I just found out my cousin was a killer. A brutal one.” He paused and then said, “You know what one of the deputies told me? They found what they think are human ashes in the workshop, darlin’. Ashes.”
“Ashes … how?”
“The kilns.” He looked over at her and said softly, “Last year at Christmas, he gave my mother this bowl.
It had the most amazing glaze—it shimmered, almost like it was alive. She asked him how he had come up with such a unique glaze. She’d done some pottery herself in college and she was in awe—apparently he did something really, really special.”
He stopped, let his mind adjust to the horror. It was going to come out, all of it. “You know what he told her? He was using a special blend of ashes in some of his glazes. Ashes, Hope. He said it gave the glazes a special luster, a life of their own.”
She went white. “Oh, God. Remy.”
She went to slip her arms around him, but he came off the bench, shaking his head.
“No. For God’s sake, how can you stand to touch me now, Hope?”
Silence. It was a heavy, awkward silence, broken only when he turned to look at her, making himself ask, “I guess maybe you don’t want to, now that you’ve thought about it, huh?”
“Don’t be an idiot,” she snapped. She stood and jabbed him in the chest with a finger, hard. “Why shouldn’t I want to touch you? You had nothing to do with what he did. Did you know what he was doing? Did you help him? Did you cover for him?”
“God, no!” He stared at her, horrified.
“Then why should my feelings for you change?”
He shook his head, still so full of the horror, the shock. He couldn’t think. She shouldn’t be near him now, shouldn’t touch him.
Her hands, small, but so strong, closed around his shirt. “Damn it, you bastard.” Hope shook him. “I love you. I’ve spent my entire life waiting for somebody like you and if you think I’m going to let somebody like Carter interfere with that, then you better get that out of your head now.”
If You Know Her: A Novel of Romantic Suspense Page 30