No Kind of Hero (Portland Devils Book 2)

by Rosalind James

  “It would be,” Michelle said, “if you were. I thought we’d drop you off a ways away. And if we get Gracie back, which I fully expect to do once I tell April how sorry I am about how hard this has been for her, and how soon the hearing will be and how I’m sure she’ll end up getting Gracie most of the time—which will scare her to death—and a few other things I have in mind, we’ll drop April back at the house and pick you up a ways away again.”

  “What am I doing in the meantime?” Evan asked. “Why am I here?”

  “Well,” Michelle said, “Beth and I thought you might want to hit this Chris. But do it outside the house. Fingerprints.”

  Talking about the plan had helped Beth calm down, and so had her mother’s bulletproof confidence. When her mom had laid it out like that, she’d actually started to believe that it might work. Evan was sitting back there, his hope and his fear both strong enough to touch. It had to work.

  She was nearly to Liberty Lake when the GPS told her to turn right. “County road,” she told her mother and Evan, amazed that her voice came out so level. “He’s out in the boonies, just like April’s girlfriends said.” They were following the GPS along a two-lane road lined with pines and interrupted by the occasional gravel driveway. “No neighbors.”

  “Good,” Evan said, his voice sounding all the way dangerous. It had been a bad idea, this part. What if he actually hurt the guy? What if he were prosecuted?

  Her mother had said, when she’d voiced her doubts, “Men don’t talk about these things. Of course this Chris won’t press charges. He’d have to stand there in court and say that Evan hit him and he couldn’t defend himself, and his buddies would laugh at him.”

  “Mom,” Beth had said, “that’s not necessarily how it works.”

  “It’s how it works in Idaho,” her mother had said.

  “It’s Washington.”

  “Same thing.”

  She was still worrying about it when Evan shouted “Stop!” So loudly that she jumped, and the car swerved. She hit the brakes, screeched to a halt, and said, “What?” with her heart beating out of her chest.

  “Turn,” Evan said. “U-turn. Now.”

  She was doing it, only then registering the truck that had passed them while she’d had an eye on the GPS and her mind on the future. A pickup truck.

  “Damn,” Evan said. “I need to be driving. Floor it. Go.”

  It was a forty-five zone, but Beth stepped on the gas. Fifty, fifty-five, and she could see the pickup ahead.

  “No,” Evan said. “Floor it. Now.”

  She wanted to shut her eyes. She didn’t. This wasn’t the plan, though. What were they doing? The speedometer was at sixty, sixty-five, the SUV hurtling around the curves, and they were coming up fast on the pickup.

  “What now?” she asked.

  “Tail him.” Evan sounded grim, like he was planning to do something terrible. Have her run the truck off the road or something. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be at all. They were going to get in trouble.

  Something was wrong with the pickup, too. As she watched, it swerved across the center line, then overcorrected and headed toward the shoulder before it straightened out.

  “Drop back,” Evan said, but Beth was already doing it. If she didn’t, she was going to hit the truck.

  “Goodness,” Michelle said. “What on earth is he doing?” The pickup was slowing now, swerving again. Two heads seen through the truck’s back window, the driver much taller. Moving toward each other, then away again. Another swerve, and the truck was bouncing onto the shoulder, coming to a halt.

  Evan was shouting, “Stop!” But Beth didn’t need him to. She was pulling in behind the pickup even as the passenger door opened and a slight figure dropped to the ground, then stumbled in the gravel. A blonde, holding a wailing baby under its arms. A blonde baby. Gracie, being swung awkwardly through the air as the girl ran onto the road, back toward Beth’s car.

  A baby with blood on her face.

  The driver’s door opened, and something came sailing out into the middle of the road. It bounced, and the contents spilled across the asphalt. A purse.

  Beth was out of the car even as she registered what was happening, and her mother was right behind her. But Evan, somehow, was ahead of both of them. Running past the blonde even as Beth caught up to her, registered the red mark on her cheek, the eye that was puffed closed. Michelle was there, taking a screaming Gracie from the girl’s arms, the pickup was gunning its engine, but Evan was at its window. Pulling something—somebody—half out. His fist landing once, twice, and again. Then shoving the figure back inside. Shouting.

  Beth wanted to go to him, but the girl. April. And Gracie. Her mother, though, had Gracie already. Had her cuddled tight, was walking back to the car, talking to her as if none of the rest of it existed. But April just stood there in the road. Skinny jeans, high-heeled sandals, pink tee, flaxen hair to her shoulders. Petite to the point of fragility. Bruised, stumbling, and crying. Beth got to her, because there was nobody else to do it. They were choking in a cloud of black smoke, the pickup was roaring off, and Evan was coming back. Running again.

  Beth thought, One thing. Do the next thing. She picked up the purse and its scattered contents, walked April back to the Audi with her arm around the girl, and said, “All right. You’re all right. We’ve got you. We’re going to help. We’ve got you now.”

  It was a rescue, she thought dimly as she helped April into the back seat of the car. A bizarre one, not what they’d planned at all. Her mother was in the middle seat, fastening a still-wailing Gracie into her car seat. The baby’s screams shattered the air, and a trickle of bloody fluid ran down her neck as she arched her back, flailed her arms, and cried.

  Beth told April, who was crying almost as hard as Gracie, “Sit there. Fasten your seatbelt.” And then she slammed the door and ran around the car as Evan got to the rear door. As he put his hand on his baby girl’s cheek, then turned to Beth and said, nothing in his face or eyes like anything she’d ever seen before, “Get in on the other side. I’m driving.” And she did.

  Evan was on autopilot. Driving. Thinking, Coeur d’Alene. He knew where the hospital was. He knew where the ER was. Twenty minutes.

  Gracie wasn’t crying, but April was. He asked Beth, “Gracie.”

  She said, “She’s drinking her bottle. My mom’s giving it to her. I don’t think it’s . . . maybe not as bad as it looks.”

  “Ask her,” Evan said. “Your mom.” April was still sobbing, and he should care, but he couldn’t care now. He hadn’t even hit that asshole hard enough to knock him out. Hard enough to make him bleed, though. He wished it had been harder, but he’d had to go.

  Beth was leaning back over the seat, but there was too much crying going on back there. Gracie’d started up again, and Evan couldn’t hear. Beth sank back into her seat and said, “Gracie’s hot again. But my mom says . . .” She took a breath, and her voice was steadier when she said, “If she were really bad, she’d be limp. Crying’s good, she says.”

  “What’s wrong with her face? Where’s she hurt?” Keep the car on the road. He was ten miles over the limit. He hoped he’d be pulled over. He wanted an escort.

  “My mom thinks it’s her eardrum. Gracie’s. That it ruptured. That’s where the blood’s coming from, she says, and that makes sense. April, though . . . he had to have hit her.”

  “Yeah. I saw.”

  Beth was silent a moment, and then she asked, “Did you hit him hard?”

  “Not hard enough.”

  “Should I call the cops?”

  He couldn’t think. “I don’t know. What do you think? Don’t we need a story? Before, we sort of had a story. What’s our story now?”

  April was still crying, Michelle was still talking to Gracie, and the baby was still sobbing, but Beth focused. Finally, she said, “We found out from her friends that she was with this guy and that she might be in trouble, that he might be abusive, so we went to see if we could help
her, and help Gracie. We saw them driving erratically. He threw April and Gracie out of the truck, and he struggled with you, and we thanked God we were in time. All of which is true.”

  “OK.” He had to slow now. Endless traffic in Coeur d’Alene, inching from one red light to the next on the highway like always, but even worse than usual today. A sunny Sunday afternoon, everybody going to the mall and to the lake and nobody getting out of his way. But every journey ended sometime, and at last, he was turning into the hospital’s emergency entrance.

  “Stop here,” Beth said. “You take Gracie in, and my mom will take April. Tell my mom the story on the way in. April will tell them the same thing. She’ll have to. The boyfriend, the baby. She’ll blame it on him. I’ll park and come find you.”

  It was a good thing one of them was thinking.

  He hadn’t reckoned on one thing. When he finally got his arms around his baby girl again? When he was unfastening her from her car seat and she turned that tearstained little face to him, reached out her arms for him, and sobbed her one word?

  “Da da daaa.”

  Finally, he was picking her up, and she snuggled her head into his shoulder and hung on tight. Her sobs eased, turned to hiccups, and he about lost it. He had to take a moment, and he had to take a few deep breaths, too.

  “Let’s get them inside,” Michelle told him. Still sounding like a general, but maybe a general who was being compassionate to her wounded troops. He followed her through the automatic doors, and the nurse took a look at Gracie and April and got Gracie into the back first.

  “I don’t know how it happened,” Evan said when the nurse had wiped the blood and fluid from Gracie’s face, her neck, her chest, had taken the baby’s temperature, and had come back with 102.5. Evan was trying not to shake, and he was having to hold himself so rigid to manage that, he could barely speak. “Her mother had her. She’s here too. In another room. The boyfriend beat her up, I think. We found them in the road. I mean, April and the baby. The boyfriend was throwing them out. Of the truck.”

  The nurse gave him a long look, which wasn’t a huge surprise, said, “The doctor will be here in a minute,” and left. To call the cops, he was sure. Fine by him.

  “Perforated eardrum,” the doctor told him ten minutes later, when Evan was holding an exhausted, too-warm baby again, and she had her head buried in his neck again like he could make it all go away. “But that looks and sounds worse than it actually is. They usually heal up without too much trouble. The infection caused fluid buildup, which caused pressure behind the eardrum, which caused it to rupture. She’ll be hurting less now, though, that that pressure’s eased. I’m going to give her an injection of an antibiotic to be on the safe side. After that, keep on with the amoxicillin and follow up with her pediatrician. Why wasn’t she getting her medication?”

  Evan explained again. It was easier the second time. And by the time the cop showed up, which was no surprise at all, he’d calmed down some. He had Gracie changed into clean clothes from the diaper bag he’d brought, and if he’d had a bad moment when he’d put her bunny outfit on her and had had to stop a minute, grab the edge of the table, and hang on? Nobody had seen that.

  He spared a thought, now and then, for what was going on with April. But Beth and Michelle would be with her. Of that, he was sure. And somehow, they would be making it better. They’d be making it work.

  Beth had expected to hate April. But how could you? She was so fragile, so frightened, and so battered. She needed somebody to hold her while they waited for her to be called into the ER, and there were only Beth and her mother here. So Beth held her, ran her hand over the stick-straight flaxen hair, and said, “You’re all right now. We’re not going to leave you.”

  “G-G-Gracie,” April sobbed. “I thought . . . it wasn’t how I thought. I didn’t know.” Which didn’t make much sense, except that maybe it did.

  When the nurse finally opened the door and called April’s name, Beth asked her, “Do you want to go in alone? Or do you want us to come?”

  “Please come with me,” April said. “I don’t want to . . . go alone.” So they did.

  When they were in the room and the nurse was sponging at April’s scraped cheek, and Beth was on one side of the bed holding her hand, her mother asked the girl, “Do you want me to call your parents? To get your mother here?”

  “No,” April said, then gasped as the nurse hit a tender spot. “Please. Not yet. I’m so . . . I don’t want them to know what happened. I don’t want anybody to know. I was so stupid.”

  The nurse said, “Doctor will be right in,” and left, and Beth kept holding that slim hand and knew what Evan had felt. Nobody was more protective than Evan, and nobody had ever seemed in more need of protection than April.

  The doctor came, eventually, and said, “Ice and ibuprofen, and in a few days, you’ll be fine. The hospital social worker will be stopping by, and the police are coming too.” And April cried.

  The police did come, two of them, and Beth ended up sitting beside April on the bed, her arm around her, while the female officer questioned her. April didn’t want to tell them Chris’s name, but Beth did. His address, too, and she had the satisfaction of watching the male officer step away to call it in. April said, “He’s going to think I told. He’ll be so mad. He’s going to be so mad at me, and I . . . I . . .”

  Michelle said, “Don’t you worry about that. You’re not going to be anywhere he can find you. We’ll see about that.”

  The female officer looked at Michelle as if she were wondering who the heck she was, then told April, “There are shelters and resources for you.”

  “I don’t want to press charges,” April said. “Please. I can’t.”

  “I’m sorry,” the officer said, “but you don’t get to choose about that. You’ll be protected.”

  “The other thing,” Beth said, hardening her heart. This girl—this woman, because that was what she was, even though she didn’t seem like it—wasn’t a fit parent for Gracie, and they needed to get that established. “You should know that this all stems from an . . . well, it’s not an abduction, but it’s a custody dispute. April left her boyfriend and child when the baby was three weeks old, and when her ex began the process to go after custody recently, that’s when she and Chris came and took the baby. They took her out of her father’s front yard, and they took her when she was sick with a serious infection.” All right, maybe it had been serious and maybe it hadn’t. It was serious now. That blood running down Gracie’s neck, her wails . . . Beth was going to see that blood and hear those wails when she closed her eyes tonight, and what was worse? Evan was going to be doing the same thing. And that was the absolute opposite of fair.

  The officer said, “And you would know this how?”

  “I’m in a relationship with the baby’s father,” Beth said. The cop looked at her in surprise, and Beth said crossly, “and I’m an attorney. And none of that is mutually exclusive. The baby was in trouble, and April’s in trouble. I saw her boyfriend throw her out of a truck on the side of the road while she was holding her baby. I saw him hitting her in the truck. While she was holding the baby. What kind of a monster would I have to be not to care about that?”

  “All the same,” the officer said, “We’ll be taking these statements separately. Why don’t you go out to the waiting room, and Officer Jenkins will come talk to you.” She looked at Michelle. “And I’m guessing you’re somehow involved also.”

  “I’m Elizabeth’s mother,” Michelle said, at her most regal. “Yes, I witnessed this person Chris assaulting April, and so did the baby’s father. He’s here in the hospital, and you’ll want to talk to him as well. You’ll also want to see the condition of the baby.”

  “Thank you,” the officer said, her lips tightening. “We’ll be questioning everybody, yes.”

  Gracie. Somehow, Beth had pushed Gracie to the back of her mind. Now, she stood up and said, “Mom. I need to see how Evan is. I need to see Gracie.”
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br />   April said, “Don’t leave. Please. I need somebody here. Please. I can’t do this. And my face hurts. It hurts so bad.”

  Michelle said, “I’m happy to stay.” It was a staredown, then. Michelle won, but Beth wasn’t surprised. Her mother usually did.

  She didn’t see her mother again for almost an hour. By that time, she and Evan were in the hospital cafeteria. Gracie had fallen asleep in her father’s arms as Evan had been giving her a bottle, and now, Beth was holding her so Evan could eat a sandwich. The light was changing outside, in the window well planted with greenery that was probably meant to be soothing. Because somehow, it was evening.

  Beth was almost too tired to be tense anymore, and she thought Evan probably felt the same. His T-shirt was streaked with his daughter’s blood, and every time Beth looked at it, she felt sick all over again.

  When Michelle walked through the doors, of course, she looked no different than she had that morning. How did her mother do it?

  Evan looked up and said, “What’s going on? Where’s April?”

  “With the social worker,” Michelle said, sitting down beside him. “I’m here for a minute, that’s all. And to get the car keys, because I’m going to drive her to the shelter, and I’ll stay here tonight. Tomorrow, I’m going to take her shopping for new clothes and toiletries and get her settled. And for the record,” she told Evan, “I don’t think much of your choice. I understand Battered Women’s Syndrome—I ought to, since I’ve run the annual fundraiser for the women’s shelter for the past four years—but honestly. I can’t think she ever had much strength of mind. There’s her leaving, for one thing.”

  “Yeah,” Evan said. “I figured that out.” He actually smiled some, too. “Glad she’s getting some help, though. I don’t think her parents are a whole lot better. But what about Gracie?”

  “She’s going with you, of course. And yes,” Michelle added before Evan could say anything, “I gave April the papers, and—” She reached into her purse, pulled out the proof of service, and handed it to Evan. “April made it more than clear that she can’t take Gracie. In fact, she begged for you to take her back. Again—not mother material.”