Collateral Damage: A Savannah Martin Novel (Savannah Martin Mysteries Book 19)

by Jenna Bennett

  “I got it,” he told me as he brushed past, dumping Carrie into my arms.

  I opened my mouth to protest, but he was already gone, out the door, down the steps, and across the lawn after Pearl. A second later he was swallowed by the darkness, even less visible in the dark than the light gray Pearl.

  “Rafe!” I tried, but of course he didn’t answer. And then Carrie decided to pee, right down the sleeve of my coat, and I ran back up the stairs to the nursery to get a diaper on her before she could do it again.

  It took a minute to wrap her in a diaper and wrestle her tiny, constantly-moving body into a pink sleeper. Then I picked her up and ran over to the window.

  She made a sort of inquiring little noise, and I patted her back, tiny and warm under the pink terrycloth, as I peered out into the darkness. “Just a minute, baby. I want your daddy home safe and sound first.”

  Carrie didn’t say anything else, but I could hear the sound as she stuffed a tiny fist in her mouth and started gnawing on it.

  I squinted into the dark beyond the driveway. Was that a movement over there? A lighter blur moving through the darkness?

  Was that Pearl’s low-slung body headed for home? Or someone else, coming toward the house?

  I had left the front door wide open when I ran upstairs. If someone had managed to get past Rafe, he—or she—could be making his or her way toward the mansion right now.

  I swung away from the window, and just as I did, there was a loud sound out there in the dark, followed by a howl, both of them practically on top of one another. I couldn’t tell whether the howl was animal or human, but clearly someone—or something, like my Pearl—had been shot.

  I dropped Carrie into her crib—she gave a startled yowl, but I couldn’t worry about it right then—and ran as fast as I could into the hallway and down the stairs toward the gaping maw of the front door. “Rafe!”

  There was no answer, of course. I hadn’t expected one. From upstairs I could hear my daughter start to make fretful noises about being abandoned.

  Nothing I could do about that right now. I slapped the light switches down, shutting off all the lights inside and out, and slipped through the open doorway onto the porch. And pulled it shut behind me as I stood there in the dark, feeling exposed, waiting for that metaphorical other shoe to drop.

  It didn’t. Nothing dropped. There was—maybe—a slight rustle of some sort far away, on the other side of the field. Like a person or animal walking or running through dry grass. Then there was a bang in the distance, followed by another. so quickly they were almost the same sound. An engine roared to life on the other side of the field.

  I could hear tires grinding, followed by three or four shots in quick succession.

  They didn’t slow the car down, if that had been the point. I could hear it bumping and grinding across the uneven field, and the sound it made when it got to the road and sped off.

  “Rafe?”

  It hadn’t been him in the car. Not unless they—whoever they were—had wounded him with that first shot, and then loaded him into the car. If so, those last three or four shots would have been aimed at Pearl, who wouldn’t have let that happen without putting up a fight.

  But it was more likely that it had been Rafe emptying a clip trying to stop the car. He was still out there somewhere. I had to believe he was, or I’d lose my mind.

  I raised my voice again. “Rafe!”

  There was a rustle from the darkness. I squinted in that direction.

  At first, there was nothing to see but a pale blur, floating three or four feet above the ground. The little girl inside me, who had grown up on Dix’s ghost stories about things that had happened around the mansion long ago, had a momentary thrill of fear.

  Until they came closer, and I realized what I was looking at.

  My husband—dark shirt, dark pants, dark skin receding into the darkness—cradling Pearl against his chest as he walked out of the fields and toward the house.

  Seven

  ”Oh, my God!”

  I launched myself off the porch and down the stairs.

  “She’s all right.” Rafe’s voice was tight, and I took a step back.

  “Are you hurt?”

  He shook his head. “She’s heavy.”

  She was. A big, muscular dog. And he’d been carrying her a good distance, judging from the speed she’d taken off with. She must have made it well into the field before she was taken down.

  “What happened?”

  I fell back another step as Rafe moved toward the stairs.

  “Bastard shot her.” There was a cold and vicious undertone to his voice that didn’t bode well for the bastard, whoever he was, once Rafe found him.

  “Where? Is she… she isn’t dying, is she?”

  “She’s fine.” He headed up the couple of steps to the porch still carrying Pearl. She was awake, but her eyes were glazed with pain, and she was panting.

  “Left hind,” Rafe said, nodding to the door. “Open that.”

  I scurried in front of him and pushed the front door in. As soon as I did, we heard Carrie’s wails rolling down the stairway from the second floor. Pearl whimpered, maybe because the sound hurt her ears, or maybe just because Rafe had jostled her when he carried her across the threshold.

  “Get some towels and put’em on the island.” He headed down the hallway toward the back of the house without waiting to see if I obeyed. I threw a—sarcastic—salute after him even as I ran for the linen closet to get him what he needed.

  Carrie’s screams echoed in my ears and didn’t help the stress levels of everyone concerned, so after dragging half a dozen thick terrycloth towels out of the closet and spreading them on the kitchen island, I ran up the stairs to rescue the baby. By the time I made it back into the kitchen, cradling Carrie, Rafe had placed Pearl on the towels and was looking at her wound.

  “Oh, my God.” I turned away in instinctive rejection of the blood and torn tissue. My stomach signaled an immediate revolt, and I swallowed hard.

  “Stay by her head,” Rafe instructed. “Let her see you. Talk to her. Try to keep her calm and occupied.”

  I nodded, as I made my way around the island. I crouched to where Pearl’s face was on the same level as mine and crooned at her. “You’re such a brave girl, Pearl. You’re going to be all right, sweetheart. Shouldn’t we take her to the vet, Rafe?”

  I looked up, in time to see my husband poke at the muscle surrounding the bullet wound. I swallowed hard, and Pearl whimpered. “I just want a look first,” he told me, not fazed at all by the blood and the wound. “The bullet’s close to the surface. I think I can get it out.”

  “She’s going to need antibiotics, isn’t she?”

  He nodded. “Yeah. Prob’ly. Just let me take a look.”

  “Make sure she doesn’t bite you.”

  “I carried her here,” Rafe said. “If she didn’t bite me then, I don’t think she’s gonna bite me now.”

  Maybe not. Although— “Her adrenaline was probably pumping then. She might be feeling the pain more now. Can’t we just take her to the vet? There’s an emergency vet in Columbia, I think.”

  He nodded. “Just let me rinse the blood off, and I’ll carry her to the car.”

  “I’ll bring it out of the garage,” I said, turning to the door.

  I ended up feeding my baby in the veterinarian’s waiting room, while Rafe disappeared inside the clinic with Pearl and the vet. Carrie fell asleep in my arms, and I sat there in the silence—there were no other emergencies that particular night, or at least not at that particular time—and held her. The only sound was the hissing of the air conditioner, and by now it was getting late. By the time Rafe finally came back out the door, I was pretty close to being asleep myself, too.

  Until the door opened and he walked out, and then my head jerked up and my eyes opened wide. “Is she all right?”

  Carrie twitched in my arms, and her face scrunched up for a second. Rafe put a finger to his lips and n
odded. “She’s fine. They wanna keep her overnight to make sure the wound don’t get infected. If she’s still fine by the end of the day tomorrow, we can bring her home.”

  I let out a breath I hadn’t been aware of holding—for the past hour and a half or so—and felt like the weight of the world had been lifted off my shoulders. “Thank God.”

  “She’s a strong dog,” Rafe said. “She’s been through a lot. The X-rays showed a lot of old damage from before.”

  Before she was our dog, he meant. While she belonged to Robbie Skinner, who used her for dog fighting and who kept her chained in the heat and the cold under his trailer on the Devil’s Backbone.

  “All healed now,” Rafe added. “Just like this’ll be.”

  “Can I see her?”

  “She’s out cold, darlin’. The vet knocked her out for the surgery, and he’s gonna keep her sedated overnight. She’ll need to wear a cone when we bring her home.”

  Poor thing. “So we can leave?”

  He nodded. “They have the number. If anything changes, they’ll call.” He glanced down at Carrie, nestled into my arms. “Let’s go home and put the baby to bed. It’s been a helluva day.”

  It had. And he’d been tired even before this last adventure.

  “You never told me what happened,” I told him when we were back in the Volvo, going in the direction of Sweetwater, with Carrie asleep in the back. “Pearl heard or smelled something, and took off into the fields. And you followed.”

  He nodded, eyes on the road and his hands light on the steering wheel. But there was tension in his voice. “Somebody was out there. More than one. I’m sure I saw two, maybe three.”

  “Doing what?”

  He shook his head. “Not sure. When they saw Pearl coming—and it wasn’t like they could avoid seeing her; she was running straight at’em, barking her head off—they split up. Pearl started to chase one of’em down, and one of the others shot at her. She stumbled, long enough for the bastard to get away. I was still far behind her by then.”

  “Was it you who tried to shoot them?” Those three or four shots I’d heard.

  He slanted me a look. “Not them, darlin’. I wasn’t trying to kill nobody. Just stop the car for long enough that I could get a plate number.”

  “And could you?”

  He shook his head. “Wasn’t even close enough to see what kind of a car it was. It sounded like a truck, something with a big and powerful engine. But I didn’t see it.”

  “You stopped to take care of Pearl,” I said. “That was more important.”

  He shrugged, but there was anger in that, too. “Bastards.”

  No question. It takes a special kind of jackass to shoot a dog. Especially when you’re trespassing on someone else’s property, and the dog is just trying to protect what’s hers.

  Or in this case, the neighbor’s. We own the lawn, the neighbor owns the fields.

  We drove a minute in silence before I broke it again. “I know you couldn’t see anyone. Or anything. But would you like to make a guess as to what was going on?”

  “My guess,” Rafe said, “with nothing to back it up, is that this was Rodney Clark and one or two of his friends, and they followed me home earlier. Either because they did the damage to your house on Fulton last night, and I was asking questions about it, or for other reasons.”

  Like the fact that they were racists and he was black. Or brown. Or whatever.

  “Are you going to talk to them about it?”

  “I don’t imagine that’ll do any good,” Rafe said. After a moment’s thought he added, “Unless they expect me to. Then it might be best if I do what they’re expecting.”

  “Maybe you should talk to someone about it. Get another opinion. Like Grimaldi’s or Wendell’s or Bob Satterfield’s.”

  He nodded. “I’m gonna have to talk to all three of’em, darlin’. Tammy and Wendell cause they’re in charge of me, and Bob because it happened here, not in Columbia.”

  Of course. Although if either Tamara Grimaldi or Wendell felt like they were in charge of him, it would surprise me greatly. “Tonight?”

  “Sooner’d be better. It won’t take long. And then we’ll put the baby to sleep and crawl into bed.”

  He dropped one hand from the wheel and reached for mine. I tucked it inside his. “Funny thing. That’s just what I want to do, too.”

  “Great minds,” Rafe said, and held on to my hand as we traveled through the darkness toward home.

  It was a bit scary to arrive back at the mansion. As we headed up the driveway toward the big brick building, I kept expecting to hear shots from the left, from the field beyond the driveway, and feel projectiles whiz past my ears. I had heard the vehicle depart earlier—Kyle Scoggins’s truck, at a guess—and Rafe had been close enough to almost see it, so there was no reason to think whoever had been out here had come back in the time we’d been gone. Why would they? But the feeling was hard to shake, and I held my breath as we passed in front of the mansion. It wasn’t until we were safely around the corner and back inside the garage, that I was able to relax.

  “If somebody was gonna take a potshot at us,” Rafe told me, “they woulda hit me and not you. You’re on the inside.”

  “I don’t want them to hit you either,” I said. “And I know it isn’t likely that they’re there. Why would they come back? But it’ll probably be a couple of days before I can drive up to the house without feeling nervous.”

  He nodded and reached for his door handle. “You get the baby. I’ll go open the back door.”

  “So if somebody’s out there with a gun, they’ll shoot you and not me?”

  He didn’t answer, just swung his legs out of the car and slammed the door. I got out on the other side, and unhooked Carrie’s seat. By the time I walked out of the garage, Rafe was already on his way back toward me. “Door’s open. I’ll shut the garage.”

  It was easier to do what he said than argue, so I just hustled myself and the carrier across the grass and into the kitchen. He joined us thirty seconds later, and closed and locked the door behind us. “Safe at last.”

  “You’re doing that on purpose,” I said, and he grinned. I added, looking around, “It’s strange to walk in here with no Pearl to greet us.” Her stubby cropped tail slapping against the pillow and her jaws split in a doggy grin.

  Rafe put a hand on my shoulder. “She’ll be back tomorrow. When it gets light out, I’ll go out and see if I can find anything useful. Something to tell us who these guys are, and what they wanted. Maybe call Bob and have him send a couple deputies over to help.”

  “Tire tracks and footprints and spent shell casings?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t imagine either of’em were stupid to leave anything more incriminating than that. But we have to check.”

  Of course they did. “I’ll see you upstairs,” I told him. “I’ll put Carrie in her bed and meet you in ours.”

  “Works for me. I’ll be up just as soon as I get these phone calls over with.” He headed for the island as he reached for his phone. I took a better grip on the car seat and headed down the hall.

  By the time he came into the bedroom, I’d had time to wash my face and brush my teeth and change into a lacy nightgown. Not because I thought he’d be up for any hanky-panky after the evening we’d had, but because, as Mother would say, once you stop making the effort, don’t be surprised if you lose your husband to someone who tries harder. I could still see Felicia Robinson smiling up at Rafe, and if she had a lacy nightie and an excuse to put it on, I’m sure she wouldn’t hesitate.

  He stopped in the doorway and a corner of his mouth curved up as he took in the tableau. “Baby asleep?”

  I nodded, and had to swallow as his eyes traveled over me from my shoulders to the top of the blanket and back. “She’ll be up in three or four hours, though, I’m sure.” She still woke up once or twice every night to nurse. Tonight, since she’d gotten fed late, maybe I’d only have to wake up once.

  “
Guess I can do what needs to be done in three or four hours.” He shut the door so any noise we made wouldn’t wake Carrie.

  “I know you’re tired,” I said, watching him reach a hand back to grab a fistful of T-shirt at the back of his neck and pull it up and over his head. My mouth turned dry, and I had to clear my throat before I managed another few words. “We don’t have to…”

  I lost my train of thought as visions of abs and pecs and shoulders appeared, outlined in all their glory in the soft light from the bedside lamp. His head popped out the other end of the shirt, and he grinned wickedly. “What was that?”

  I dragged my attention, with some difficulty, up to his face, and saw his grin widen, probably at the dazed expression on my face. “Did you say something, darlin’?”

  “No,” I said.

  “No?”

  “Nothing at all.”

  “Glad to hear it.”

  The shirt hit the floor, and he took a couple of steps forward, and his hand dropped to the button in his jeans, and I stopped paying attention to anything else. If there were people sneaking around in the fields beyond the driveway, they were welcome to do so. I had other—better—things to put my focus on.

  Bob Satterfield beat Tamara Grimaldi to the front door the next morning, but not by much. Bob knocked, and as I opened the door for him, Grimaldi’s SUV turned into the driveway and cruised up to the house. She parked behind Bob’s official vehicle, and got out.

  “Go on back to the kitchen,” I told Bob, “and get yourself a cup of coffee. Rafe’s back there.”

  He nodded and brushed past me on his way across the threshold. I stepped out and closed the door behind me while I watched Grimaldi stand for a second with her back to me and peer out across the fields.

  She glanced at me over her shoulder. “Out there?”