by Jane Graves
Damn.
He ran back, grabbed his rifle, spun around, and raced back to the door of the barn. He aimed at the house and squeezed off four shots in quick succession. Alex heard the bullets hit a metal mark. Murdock lowered his rifle with a satisfied sigh.
“Got the box on the back of the house where the phone lines come in. She won’t be calling anybody now.”
Then his expression grew worried again. He turned to Alex. “Does she have a cell phone?”
Alex didn’t respond.
Murdock tossed the rifle aside and pulled a knife out of his pocket, then he picked up a semiautomatic pistol that had been sitting beside him on the hay bale. He flipped open the blade of the knife and walked around behind Alex. Murdock put the gun right at the back of his neck, and for a moment Alex thought he intended to make his a quick death after all.
To his surprise, though, Murdock sawed through the rope several inches above where his hands were bound. The sudden release, when his arms had been stretched over his head for so long, sent pain rocketing through Alex’s arms and shoulders. Murdock shoved him from behind and sent him sprawling onto the ground.
“You’re going in there with me,” he said. “She might shoot at me, but not if you’re in the way. Now get up.”
Alex came to his feet, breathing hard, his wrists still bound in front of him.
“Turn around.”
Alex did, and Murdock grabbed him by the back of his collar and shoved him out the barn door, pressing the gun into his back at the same time.
“Don’t want her deciding to take potshots out the window, now, do we? If she does, you’ll be the one she hits first.”
“She’s got the upper hand. You have no idea where she’s hiding in that house.”
“Yeah, but once she thinks I’m going to blow your head off, I’ll just bet you she’ll come running.”
They walked across the yard and reached the spot where Val had fallen. Alex looked down at the pool of blood. She’d managed to get up and get into the house. But had she managed anything else?
“Open the door,” Murdock said.
Alex pushed the sliding door open and Murdock shoved him inside. Val wasn’t in the den. Thank God.
“Val!” Alex shouted. “Wherever you are, stay put!”
“Don’t think you want to do that, Val,” Murdock called out. “Not when I’ve got a gun pointed right at his head. Now get your ass out here, or he’s history.”
Murdock pushed Alex ahead of him through the den to a doorway leading down a hall and peered around it. Then he dragged him to the kitchen doorway and did the same.
Alex listened. Nothing. Either she was staying put as he’d told her to, or she didn’t have the strength to move.
Or she was dead.
No. He refused even to think it.
He looked down at the carpet near the sofa and saw blood drops, then spotted a blood smear on the doorway leading out of the room about shoulder height. That gave him hope. At least she’d been walking.
“What now, Murdock?” Alex said. “You’ve got a hell of a murder scene in progress here. Blood everywhere. Try explaining that to Reichert.”
“He won’t be back here until next month. Got plenty of time to clean things up.”
“This is a big house. She could be hiding anywhere.”
Murdock shoved Alex down to the sofa. “Get out here, Val!” Murdock shouted. “If you don’t, I’m going to blow his head off!”
Suddenly Alex heard the sound of the door sliding in its tracks again, and a loud whap as it smacked all the way open. A man in uniform stepped inside, his weapon drawn.
“Police!” the man shouted. “Put your hands up!”
It couldn’t be. Stanley?
Murdock whipped around. The deputy squeezed off a shot, echoed by a shot from Murdock’s gun. Stanley missed.
Murdock didn’t.
Stanley took a hit in the upper leg. His weapon went flying, and he fell to his knees in the pile of broken glass just inside the door, clutching his thigh.
Alex leaped off the sofa and rushed Murdock, but he was a stride too far away. The man whipped his gun back around and Alex slid to a halt. Then Murdock edged over, picked up Stanley’s gun, and stuffed it into his pants.
“Aw, shit!” Stanley shouted, clutching his leg. “I did it again!”
Murdock looked at him with confusion. “Did what?”
“Screwed up,” he said, gritting his teeth with pain. “I should have waited. Damn it, I should have waited until they got here!”
“Until who got here?”
“The cops from Ruston and Wendover. They’re going to be beating down that door any minute, and what are they going to find? Me bleeding all over the floor.” He closed his eyes and shook his head painfully. “I’ll never live this down. Never!”
“Cops are coming?” Murdock said. “How many?”
“I don’t know. Seven, maybe eight. And every one of them is going to laugh his head off and tell me what a fuckup I am. Again.”
Murdock shot Alex a nervous glance. “Call the woman. Get her in here right now!”
“Just once I wanted to pull something off myself,” Stanley went on. “A big arrest. Something important. Hell, right about now I’d have just settled for not getting shot!”
“You’re going to get shot again if you don’t shut your mouth!”
Murdock was starting to get a little agitated, a little out of control, and for good reason. The seven or eight cops on the way could throw a serious wrench into his plans. Alex inched closer. If the guy really lost it, he just might get a little careless, and Alex had no intention of missing even the smallest window of opportunity.
Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw Val sitting on the floor, peering around the doorway of the hall that led to the front entry. His heart leaped, only to clench in fear when he saw her bloodsoaked clothes, her ashen face.
No! Go, sweetheart! Get out of here!
She slipped back around the door. He wondered if she’d found a weapon, then wondered if she’d have the strength to use it even if she had.
She was alive. She was still alive.
A moment later, he heard a sound toward the front of the house. Murdock evidently heard it, too, because he turned in that direction.
“Hey!” Stanley shouted.
Murdock whipped back around.
“Why don’t you do it, you son of a bitch? Just shoot me! I really don’t give a damn. Not anymore. I’m sick to death of being the brunt of everybody’s jokes. I’ve had it! When they come beating on that door, I’d just as soon be dead!”
Alex inched closer to Murdock. He’d known that Stanley was incompetent, but he didn’t figure him for crazy. The last thing he should be doing was baiting a guy like Murdock, especially with his backup on the way.
All at once Alex heard a loud whack coming from the direction of the front entry of the house, followed by four more whacks that sounded like a battering ram was plowing right through the door.
“They’re here!” Stanley shouted.
Murdock whipped around when Stanley shouted, pointing his gun away from them. Alex lunged for Murdock, smacking him in the chest with his bound hands. Murdock stumbled backward and Alex fell on top of him. His gun tripped across the carpet. Alex rolled to his left, slapped one of his hands down onto the gun, then rolled again and rose to his knees. Murdock sat up and pulled out Stanley’s gun that he’d shoved into his waistband.
“Drop it!” Alex shouted. “Drop it right now or I’ll blow your fucking brains out!”
Murdock dropped it.
“Back away!”
He did. Alex came to his feet, anger surging through him. With his hands tied, he couldn’t get hold of Murdock’s gun, so he gave it a kick and sent it sliding on the carpet back toward Stanley, who picked it up.
“Facedown on the ground!” Alex shouted. “Hands behind your head!”
Murdock complied.
Still Alex stood over him
, breathing hard, the gun pointed at the back of his head. He thought about what Murdock had done to Val. How he’d put her through hell last night, then tried again to kill her today. Hatred and disgust for everything this animal had done surged inside him, blinding him to everything except the desire to see him dead.
“I ought to blow your fucking head off,” he said through clenched teeth, his mind growing dark. “Save the state the cost of throwing you back in prison.”
“Alex!” Stanley said.
“I could do the world a favor and just blow you away right here,” he said, shaking with rage. “Nobody would ever know the difference. Nobody would ever know that it wasn’t self-defense.”
“Alex, don’t!”
“I could splatter your brains all over this floor, and you’d just be one more fucking slimebag who got what was coming to him. How does that sound? Are you ready to die, Murdock? Are you?”
“Alex!” Stanley said. “He’s a murderer! You’re not!”
Still tense with fury, his body shaking with anger, Alex continued to hold the gun on Murdock. Somewhere in the back of his mind, Stanley’s words started to take hold, but it was several seconds before rationality finally crept in again. He lowered his weapon, his hands still trembling.
He’d almost killed Murdock.
He felt light-headed for a moment, unable to believe just how close he’d come to pulling that trigger. Never in his life had that kind of feeling come over him, a feeling that had nearly driven him to kill somebody in cold blood. Now he knew what it felt like to love a woman—to love her so much that he’d kill anybody who tried to hurt her.
He knelt down beside Stanley and held out his hands. “Get me untied.”
The deputy tried to untie the rope that bound Alex’s hands, but it was pulled too tight. He slipped his hand into his pocket, pulled out a pocketknife, and eventually managed to saw through it.
“Okay, Stanley,” Alex said, yanking Murdock’s hands behind his back and using a piece of the rope to bind them. “Where’s your backup?”
Stanley looked at him with a shaky expression. “Uh … no backup.”
Alex blinked. “But you said—”
“It’s just me. I was going to call for backup when I heard shots. I didn’t have time to call anyone. I just … I just turned around and came back.”
Alex blinked with disbelief. “So all that crap about the cops beating down the door …?”
“I was b-bluffing.”
Alex just stared at him. “Bluffing?”
“It was what you told me to do, wasn’t it? I saw Val peeking around the corner, and I could tell she caught on because she knew I hadn’t had time to call anyone. I just hoped she could distract him somehow. Pretend to be the cops storming the place.”
“You told this bastard to shoot you! Are you nuts?”
“I was afraid he’d heard Val. I was afraid he was going to go to the front door. I had to do something.”
He pulled the knot tight around Murdock’s wrists, then stood up. “Watch him.”
Stanley raised his weapon again. “I will.”
“How’s the leg?”
“Okay. I don’t think it’s that bad.”
Alex raced into the kitchen and yanked open drawers until he found dish towels. He ran back out and tossed one to Stanley.
“Fold it up. Hold it against the wound. Hard. And don’t move it.”
Then he dashed to the front door and found Val slumped against the wall, a fireplace poker still clutched in her hand. His heart hit his chest with a painful thud.
Blood. There was so much blood.
“Alex? Oh, Alex, oh, God—” She reached out and clasped his hand. “You got him, right?”
He knelt beside her. “Yeah, sweetheart. We got him.”
He pulled the fireplace poker from her hand, trying not to panic. Blood covered the front of her shirt, her arm, her palm where she’d held it against the wound. No wonder Murdock had been fooled into thinking she was dead.
He put his arm behind her back, pulled her around, and laid her down on the tile floor. He pulled up her shirt and saw the wound. Fortunately, the rifle Murdock had used was a smaller-caliber weapon than the one he’d used in Tolosa. It was a clean bullet hole four inches below the top of her shoulder—too high to have hit her heart, too lateral to have hit her lung. Alex felt a small flush of relief. Then her eyes drifted closed.
“Val?”
She stirred a little, but didn’t answer, and Alex felt a tremor of panic. She’d lost blood. A lot of it. He had to stop the bleeding and get her to a hospital.
He just prayed he did both those things in time.
chapter twenty-nine
The next two hours were pure agony for Alex.
Stanley told him that the nearest hospital was nearly fifty miles away in Wendover and would take at least an hour to reach. That was too long.
After packing and wrapping Val’s wound to stop the bleeding, Alex called for help. He finally reached a trauma center in San Antonio, and they dispatched an AirLife flight. Then Alex gave the phone to Stanley, who called the cops from Ruston to come pick up Murdock and haul him to jail.
For the next thirty minutes, Alex put pressure against Val’s wound. He managed to stop the flow of blood, but she’d lost so much already that he knew she was in danger. She drifted in and out of consciousness, and he was helpless to do anything but hold her and pray.
The cops from Ruston arrived to take Murdock away just before the AirLife flight arrived, and Stanley filled them in on the situation. Then the paramedics took both Val and Stanley aboard, telling Alex that because it was a trauma situation and not merely a transport, he couldn’t accompany them. When the emergency personnel hooked Val up to fluids and monitors and God knew what else, he could see the worried looks on their faces. He kissed her good-bye even though he wasn’t completely sure she knew he was there. Then watched the helicopter climb into the night, its lights eventually disappearing in the distance, and he prayed that it wouldn’t be the last time he’d see her alive.
He ran back to Val’s van to make the trip to San Antonio. As he drove down the highway, it seemed as if he were moving into an endless darkness that he might never emerge from. And through it all, images of Val’s face as she lay on that gurney, pale and unconscious, filled his mind. The very thought that he might have lost her ripped his heart in two. His heart. Up until a few days ago, there hadn’t been enough evidence anywhere to convict him of having one of those.
He counted every mile he put behind him, until finally he saw the city lights of San Antonio in the distance. Twenty minutes later he was pulling into the hospital parking lot, his stomach knotted with a sickening mixture of anticipation and dread.
As he entered the hospital, he couldn’t get the worst-case scenario out of his mind. What if Val had lost her life to save his? How could he ever live with that?
He went to the front desk of the emergency room. “Valerie Parker,” he said to the woman behind the desk. “They brought her in on an AirLife flight. Can you tell me her condition?”
The woman stood up. “Are you a family member?”
Alex’s heart lurched. “No, just a friend. Please tell me—”
“Is your name Alex?”
He stopped, startled. “Yes.”
“She was asking for someone named Alex.”
For a moment Alex couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. “Where is she?”
“They’ve taken her to surgery. Now that they’ve got her stabilized, it’s just a matter of repairing the damage from the bullet wound.”
Alex felt such a flush of relief that he thought for a minute that his legs weren’t going to hold him up. He put his palms against the counter until the feeling passed. Val was alive. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, feeling a tremendous amount of tension slip away. She was going to be okay.
“But you don’t look so good,” the nurse said.
“No. I’m fine. Believe me. Can you
tell me about the deputy sheriff they brought in with her?”
“Gunshot wound to the leg. All they had to do was extract the bullet and debride the wound. He’s in a room now, probably sleeping.”
“Good. I’ll see him in the morning.”
“You can go up to surgery and wait for her there, if you want to. Third floor.”
Alex headed upstairs, stopping only to phone Dave to tell him that the real killer was in custody. The relief he heard in his brother’s voice almost matched his own. Then he told Dave about Val and let him know that he’d probably be staying in San Antonio for several more days.
Then Dave warned him that until Murdock was in custody in Tolosa, Alex was still suspect number one, and that he still had a legal mess to work out when he came back to town with the bail-jumping and the breaking-and-entering charges. In light of the identity of the real murderer, though, he told Alex that he didn’t think Reichert would be gung-ho to press charges on the latter. Alex didn’t give a damn about any of that. Those problems seemed so petty compared to what he’d gone through in the past few hours that he merely told Dave to boot Millner into action. Then he hung up the phone and concentrated on the only thing that mattered right now.
Val.
An hour and a half later, a doctor came out to the waiting room to tell Alex that everything had gone just fine, and that he could come in to see her. He stood up, relief washing over him. But he wasn’t going to relax completely until he’d touched her again. Held her hand. Kissed her. Told her how crazy she was for trying to save his life.
And how much he loved her for doing it.
Val opened her eyes, but it was a minute before she realized where she was. In a hospital. In a very ugly gown. Hooked up to about a thousand tubes and needles. Her shoulder was bandaged and her hair was stuck up inside some weird paper cap that rubbed against her forehead.
Then she turned and saw Alex. For a moment she thought he must be a dream, but then she reached out her hand, and he enveloped it in both of his. He felt strong. Steady. In control. Which meant that she didn’t have to be.
“Alex,” she said weakly. “You’re finally here.”
“I had a long way to drive. By the time I got here, they’d already taken you to surgery.”
