by Kate Aeon
But fire already burned inside of him. He stared at the syringe. Half-empty. Which meant that half of whatever had been in there was in him.
He crawled to Jess, ignoring spreading fire. She lay on the stage, naked, with her service weapon once again in her hand. Blood covered her face, and she stared up at him.
“You got her?” Hank asked.
Jess growled. “Yeah. I got her. Decent throw you did there. Gun landed in my reach. She was going to kill you with whatever was in that needle.”
Hank smiled at Jess, ignoring the pain, knowing that Teri had killed him, and that he simply hadn’t fallen down yet. But Jess had done everything a human being could do to keep that from happening. “It was a good shot,” he said.
And she told him, “I didn’t think you would find me.”
“I had to find you,” he told her. “I love you.”
She stared up at him, and her face was a wonder. “I love you, too. With everything in me. I will love you forever.”
He wanted more time. He wanted to hear her tell him that again, but the burning in his blood was getting worse, spreading through his body. He nodded to the handcuffs. “Where’s the key?”
“I don’t know.”
Most handcuff keys were interchangeable. Jim would have one. Charlie would have one. One of them ought to work.
And then Hank remembered Charlie. Almost to his twenty, wanting to get out and be with his family. Shot. Hank could still hear him groaning, so Charlie was still alive. But how badly was he hurt? “I’ll be right back,” he told Jess, and jumped off the wrecked stage, and clambered over bits of wall and fallen roof to Charlie. Shot through the arm, bleeding heavily, with Jim beside him, calling for backup. Hank breathed a sigh of relief. Charlie didn’t look too bad.
“Handcuff key, Jim,” Hank said. “Fast. And an ambulance. Bitch hit me with whatever poison she was going to kill Jess with. I don’t know how long I’ve got. Jess is okay, though.”
Jim fumbled for the key while he kept the pressure on Charlie’s wound.
Charlie said, “I can get my key, Jim. Just tell Dispatch what happened.”
So Jim passed on the news that Hank had been poisoned.
Hank saw dismay on both Jim’s and Charlie’s faces.
“You’re going to be okay, aren’t you?” Charlie asked.
Hank, whose whole body felt like it was on fire, said, “Probably used up my last life this time.” He managed a left-shoulder shrug, though even that hurt like hell. Charlie pulled out a handcuff key and handed it to him.
Hank went back to Jess. When the handcuffs fell off her wrists, Jess collapsed. Hank caught her and pulled her close and sagged to the floor with her, and she said, “I’m all right. Have to get out of these shoes, that’s all.”
He turned Jess around to face him. “She poisoned me,” he told her. He was having a hard time breathing, and his stomach was starting to churn, and his skin felt like it was bubbling off his body. “I wanted to thank you. For everything. For... bringing the light back to my life.”
“No. You can’t die,” she told him. “You can’t.”
He slid out of his shirt and wrapped it around her. “Not much I can do about it,” he said. “Or you, either. Just hold me until it’s over.”
“No,” she said. “You can’t die. I won’t allow it.” She wrapped her arms around him, and buried her face against his chest. He stroked the back of her hair.
Last mission, he thought. But that was okay. He’d done his part and Jess had done her part. The killer was dead in a corner. He was going to follow the bitch into oblivion, but what mattered was that the good guys had stopped the killer. They’d won. And Hank wasn’t dying alone. Jess was with him, holding him, and he loved her, and she loved him. He could have lived with that if he’d gotten to keep her. He could die with it too.
He’d lived so that he mattered. So had she. They’d done all right.
He kissed her.
“Stay with me,” she said. “Hold on.”
“I’m right here.” The pain was horrible. It was like being doused in gasoline and lit with a match, but he could hear the scream of sirens, and they were getting closer.
Sounding close.
Right on top of him, in fact. Any minute, he thought, I’m going to keel over dead, and Jess is going to be stuck with the irony of help being so close.
Then paramedics were wrapping Jess in a blanket and Jess was clutching Hank’s hand and her eyes were full of tears.
And they were riding in the back of the ambulance, with one paramedic starting an IV on him and putting an oxygen mask over his face and marking the place where Hank said the needle went in.
Pain ate him alive; the angels hovered over him singing something sweet and shimmery. Jess, glued to his side, hung on to his hand. He kept from screaming in agony only by reminding himself that he didn’t want that to be the last thing Jess remembered about him.
Still dying.
But still not dead.
And the pain was hell. He’d never felt worse. But it wasn’t changing. He couldn’t feel it intensifying. He couldn’t feel himself getting numb and fading away, either. And, for that matter, he couldn’t see any tunnel or any white light, and the angels started to sound suspiciously like some sixties girl group singing under the wail of the sirens.
“Jess,” he said as they pulled up to the emergency entrance, “I think that bitch might have mixed up a defective batch of whatever it was in that needle of hers.”
And then he and Jess were inside, with lab techs everywhere and a guy with a portable X-ray machine and a doc doing a local on him and then sticking a big-ass needle attached to a big-ass syringe into the same spot the bitch had hit — a particularly tough bit of scar tissue — and Hank was by that time suspicious of the whole dying thing, even if he did feel sick as hell.
The doc waved the syringe — half-full of brownish liquid — in his face and said, “Bet you’ve never been grateful for these scars before.”
“Not really,” Hank said. “Can’t say I ever got much pleasure from them.”
“They saved your life today,” the doc said. “Encapsulated the poison, kept almost all of it out of your bloodstream, assuming the syringe the paramedics brought in with them was completely full when she hit you with it. Lab’s going to be hours getting a complete breakdown on everything she had in there, but what they’ve called up to us so far would have been enough to kill you three times over, had it been able to go anywhere.”
Jess stood beside him, holding his left hand. Smiling. It was the sort of smile that would see a man safely through hell and lead him all the way to heaven. And she said, “See, I told you that you couldn’t die. We’re supposed to be together.”
Hank could still hear those angels somewhere in the background. They didn’t sound so much like Patti and the Blue Belles anymore. They seemed to be cheering. Or maybe that was Jim and Charlie and the handful of paramedics on the other side of the curtain.
“We are. So marry me already.”
She said, “I thought you’d never ask.”
As weddings went, it was odd. Jess wore an emerald-green dress — one she had to consider, at last, part of a dream come true. Her bridesmaids were strippers, Hank’s groomsmen were martial artists, and Jess’s mother was the only family member either of them had there. But Jim gave her away. Jess was almost certain that Jim was hitting on her mother, something Jess was trying hard not to think about. And the bride’s side of the chapel had a record turnout of men in dress uniform. Her colleagues were celebrating one of their own at the same time that they were saying good-bye.
Hank’s side of the little chapel held his employees, grateful students, friends from the Rangers — and more cops. His family and her family, such as they were.
At the reception, one of Hank’s students caught the garter. Jess didn’t toss her bouquet, though she did pull a flower from it and throw that.
And then they were finished. “You ready to get o
ut of here?” Hank asked her.
“I’ve been ready since we got here.”
They were on their way to the airport, but before the honeymoon, Jess had one final stop to make.
Hank pulled the car into the cemetery and they both got out, Jess carrying her bouquet.
They walked hand in hand to a new grave with a little metal marker where the stone would one day be.
Jess knelt beside the grave and pressed the bouquet’s plastic handle into the freshly laid sod.
“You should have had one of these, too,” Jess said to Ginny. “So you can have mine. I miss you so much, and I would never have found him without you. But I would never have found you without him, either.”
She rested one hand on the sod. “It’s over, and the monster who did this has had as much justice as she ever could have had. If some part of you is still here... know that it’s done. And I’m moving on, now. I did what I set out to do. I brought you home. Now I’m... going to find out if I can be a mother. If I can’t, maybe teach little kids to dance. I can’t pick up where you and I left off, but I’ve found out that I wouldn’t want to. Hank is better than any life you or I could have imagined for ourselves when we started out. And I would never have met him without you. And would never would appreciated him without everything that had come before.”
She stood, and Hank stepped behind Jess and wrapped his arms around her.
Hank said, “Thank you, Ginny. From both of us.”
They stood there for a while, not moving, watching the breeze blow the bouquet’s ribbons around.
And then Jess and Hank turned and slowly walked away, into the bright future they had bought and paid for with a past of shattered dreams.
§ § §
Acknowledgments
2018 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Enormous thanks to Tammi Labrecque, who is the sole reason these stories are not still languishing on my hard drive. Her encouragement and hands-on support and hard work are the reason you read the story that preceded this.
Special thanks to my story formatter and version editor, Ky Moffett, who turned a pile of rough scans from yellowing pages back into a workable manuscript, and found most of the errors caused by the scanning process.
And thanks to my bug-hunters for this second edition. They did yeoman work locating the remaining scan errors, as well as some errors that made it into the first edition, including one physical closing scene impossibility that has, in this version, been moved into the realm of the achievable.
Ava Fairhall, Tracey Jean, Mike Barker, Rebecca Yeo, Janine Gray, Kathryn Smith, Jennifer Javins — you were amazing.
PATREON PATRONS
I want to take a moment to thank my Patreon patrons, whose encouragement, readership, faith in me, and funding have made it possible for me to get back to writing fiction every weekday .
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First Printing Acknowledgements
In the writing of this book, I had wonderful help with my research into police detection, exotic dance, and the world of Army Rangers. For this help, as well as for assistance from my first-draft readers, I would like to thank:
Raymond E. Foster, Jennifer Worthington, Charles Liverhant, Robert Santa Maria, Salem, Russell Gifford, Jim Woosley, Frank Andrew, Scott Bryan, Jean Schara, Sheila Kelly, Emory Hackman, J. Patrick Garey, BJ Steeves, Linda Sprinkle, Bob Billing, and both individuals from the Real Police Forum members and Exotic Dancer Forums members who wish to remain anonymous.
If I’ve missed anyone, I apologize deeply.
And to Claire Zion, for magnificent editing, and Robin Rue, for magnificent agenting, my warmest and happiest thanks.
And the mistakes in this, of course, are all mine.
Author’s Note
While I have done my best to be true to the work of detectives and to actual police procedure, the Atlanta HSCU is my own creation.
About Kate Aeon
I’m a commercial novelist who went indie.
Lots of reasons, all good but none easy. In July of 2011 I walked away from a long (17 years, 30+ novels) commercial publishing career to pursue My Career My Way, and it’s been interesting times ever since.
To help readers keep my books and genres straight, I’ve split off my paranormal romance from my science fiction and fantasy. Kate Aeon is my romance pen name.
Cheerfully,
Holly Lisle (Kate Aeon)
P.S. To find out what’s coming next, and let me know what you’d love to see next...
Visit https://KateAeon.com and join my reader updates. Start with a free story.
Other Books by Kate Aeon
Midnight Rain
Last Girl Dancing
I See You
Night Echoes
