The FBI Thrillers Collection

by Catherine Coulter

  He heard a car door slam, but couldn’t see where. He whispered nonsense to Sean, heard his boy sob, felt his small body heave, pressed very tightly against his father’s body.

  God, that bastard could have shot his son. He called out, “Miles?”

  Miles’s voice was out of breath. “I’ve got Keely and Sam. We’re down, about twelve feet behind you. Is Sean all right?”

  “Yes, just scared to his bones, like I am.”

  Savich heard voices, lots of them, some screams. Not all that many people in the park, thank God, but enough.

  Savich was sitting on the ground, his back against the oak tree, rocking Sean back and forth in his arms, holding him as close as he could.

  Not thirty seconds later, Sherlock was in his arms, Sean sandwiched between them, and she was whispering against his chin, “Thank God you’re all right.”

  “I’m fine, sweetheart.” He sounded all calm again, but he didn’t let her go.

  Savich heard Katie say, even as she clutched Keely tightly against her, “Hey, Sam, that was the sort of excitement I’d hoped we’d seen the last of in Jessborough, wasn’t it? Did you dive behind a garbage can?”

  “There sure are lots of bad guys, Katie,” said Sam, who was plastered against his father’s side, and blinked at her. He shook his head, “There wasn’t a garbage can close. Papa grabbed up me and Keely. We were over behind that big tree.” He paused a moment, his forehead wrinkled. “Who’s after me this time?”

  “Someone who heard you were bad,” Keely said, and, bless her heart, she reached out and punched him.

  “Sam, I don’t think anyone was after you this time,” Miles said. “You guys okay? Really?”

  “You promise, Papa?” said Sam.

  Smiling, Miles picked both of them up, then reached out his hand to Katie. Like Sherlock and Savich, they stood close for a very long time, at least until their hearts slowed.

  Katie said, “I called nine-one-one. They’ll be here any minute now.”

  Sherlock said, “I spotted a late-model white Camry screech out of here. I got four numbers off the license plate: WT twenty-seven—that’s it.”

  Miles and Savich looked at each other. Savich said, “Looks like the women took care of things.”

  As for Katie, she needed to get to a bathroom, fast.

  38

  Nearly three hours later Katie and Miles tucked the kids into their beds. It was only seven o’clock at night, but both Sam and Keely had just folded down, an adrenaline crash.

  As they walked back down the long corridor to their bedroom, Miles said, “They’re out like lights, thank God. Amazing.”

  “Yeah. Keely was gone before I read the first page of her story. She only talked a little bit about the shooting in the park.”

  “Same with Sam, thank God. Did you see Sean fall asleep in his father’s arms? A good thing, since Savich wasn’t about to let him go. And the worry in Sherlock’s face, damn, this isn’t good. Why did this happen? For God’s sake, we were in the park with the children.”

  “Miles—”

  “Dear God, I know the kids seem okay right now, but what about tomorrow, the next day? I think it’s smart to use a real light touch, making it all seem like an adventure, getting the spotlight off Sam. I sure hope it works. Sam didn’t act like he was freaked out again, not like he was in Jessborough. And Keely seemed all right, too.” He shuddered. “Somebody after Savich or Sherlock, I guess.” He began emptying his pants pockets on the dresser top. “Since they weren’t after Sam, it’s just got to shove away at least some of the fear, don’t you think?”

  “Yes, I think you’re right. Miles—”

  “You know, Katie, I’ve never seen Savich freak like this before. He was white as a sheet and didn’t even want to give Sean over to Sherlock. This asshole trying to shoot him right there in the middle of a park, Jesus, he could have killed Sean. He could have killed any of us, even Sam and Keely.”

  “Miles—”

  He set his wallet on the dresser, looked over at Katie who was standing by the bathroom door. “Yes?”

  “Maybe the asshole wasn’t necessarily just after Savich or Sherlock.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Katie slowly slid her arms out of her leather jacket, pulled it down, and let it slide to the floor. She lifted up her long gray sweatshirt and he saw the blood covering her upper thigh. “It could be that the asshole was after me.”

  He couldn’t take it in, just couldn’t. He stood there like a block of wood, staring at all that blood. Then his breath whooshed out. “Oh Jesus, oh God, you’re hurt.” He was at her side in a moment, his face flushed red, his hands shaking. “Why didn’t you say anything? You didn’t say a single word! I’m getting you to the emergency room. I can’t believe you didn’t tell me, that you sat through all the questioning with the cops, and didn’t say a thing. No, just keep quiet and don’t faint on me.”

  “I won’t faint. It’s not bad, the bullet just grazed me, on the side of my hip. If you could just help me off with my jeans we could take a look.”

  “Shut up. So that’s why you excused yourself to that public bathroom in the park, that’s why you left Keely with me, oh damn.” He came down on his hands and knees in front of her and unzipped her jeans. He eased them down real slow and easy. She’d ripped off the bottom of her sweatshirt and wrapped it around her upper thigh. It was bloody, but not fresh blood, he didn’t think. “I’m not going to undo it, it might start bleeding again.” He got to his feet, helped her pull up her jeans again. “I’ll tell Cracker that we’re leaving the house for a bit. Stay put, Katie.”

  While he was gone, Katie took a couple more Tylenol. When Miles got back to her, looked at her white face in the bathroom mirror and saw the Tylenol bottle, he didn’t say a word, just picked her up in his arms and carried her out to the car. “It’s funny how it hurts more now that I’ve told you about it. Isn’t that strange?”

  She was breathing light shallow breaths, obviously hurting even though it was just a graze. Jesus, a bullet had gone through her. He just couldn’t take it in. And she hadn’t said a word.

  Katie appreciated that Miles was really careful when he fastened the seat belt.

  “Hang in there, Katie, the hospital’s only about ten minutes away.” It was hard not to floor the accelerator, but he didn’t want her flying forward.

  At a red light, he smacked his hands on the steering wheel. She saw the pulse pounding in his neck. He was angry, very understandable. “Okay, I can’t stand it any longer. Give me one good reason, Katie, just one good reason why you didn’t tell me.” His voice was low and perfectly cold, not a bit of inflection. She wondered if he ever yelled.

  She felt a sharp stab of pain that held her quiet until it eased.

  “Well, are you going to say anything?” Now, she thought, that was close to a yell. She nearly smiled, but couldn’t.

  She got hold of herself and said, “The children. I just couldn’t let Sam and Keely see that I’d been shot. They’ve been through so much, particularly Sam, I just couldn’t do that to them. If I’d been shot bad, Miles, I would have hollered, but it’s just not that bad. I figured it could wait until we took care of the kids. I know it was unfair of me to spring this on you.”

  “Yeah, right, real unfair.”

  Sarcasm was good, she supposed. She said, “I went to the women’s room in the park, tore off some of my sweatshirt, pulled down my jeans and wrapped it tight around my hip. Really, it looked to me like a flesh wound, the bullet went right through me. I’m not going to die, Miles.”

  “You’d better not or I’ll really be pissed. So would Sam. So would Keely.”

  “I don’t want them to know about this.”

  He gunned the Mercedes into the hospital parking lot, and swerved into the circular turnabout in front of the emergency room, figuring they’d get instant attention, and so they did.

  He held her hand when the nurse pulled down her jeans and untied the strips of
sweatshirt she’d wrapped around herself. The piece of sweatshirt that was directly over the wound was soaked with blood. She didn’t touch it. Miles was ready to yell when Dr. Pierce came barreling into the cubicle in the next instant, out of breath. “Hey, I hear we got a gunshot wound,” he said, and looked down at Katie’s hip. “Would you look at that. I heard about the shooting, Mr. Kettering, but they said it had to do with the FBI. They didn’t say anyone was injured. I don’t understand why she didn’t see a doctor right away.”

  “We’ll talk about it later, Dr. Pierce,” Katie said. “Please, just clean me up.”

  “This is going to hurt a bit, Mrs. Kettering.” He managed to get the rest of the sweatshirt off the wound, but of course it had stuck and Katie almost yelled at the pain.

  But she hung in there, squeezing Miles’s hand really hard when the nurse used alcohol to clean off all the dried blood.

  “The bullet appears to have gone through the fleshy part of the side of your hip, Mrs. Kettering. You two know, of course, that I’ll have to report this.”

  “Yes, of course,” Miles said. “You wondered why we didn’t come to the ER immediately. Well, my wife didn’t want our children to know she’d been shot and that’s why we’re here now.”

  “Not very bright of you, Mrs. Kettering.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I just bet you’d choose to let your kids see you dripping blood if you had a choice.”

  Dr. Pierce paused a moment, then slowly nodded. “You’re a cop, aren’t you?”

  “A sheriff. I know when a wound is bad and when it can wait awhile. Nothing to hit here in my hip except fat, and that always grows back without a problem.”

  Miles said, “Call Detective Raven at DC Metro. He’ll tell you all about it. I’ll bet he’ll also want to smack my wife around a bit.”

  “Okay. Mrs. Kettering, I can see this hurts. We’re going to start an IV, give you some morphine. You’ll want to go to sleep on the examination table in just a minute or two. Then I can clean up this wound and stitch you together. I don’t think you’ll be needing any X rays. Hold on to your husband’s hand real tight. That’s it.”

  She sucked in her breath, and it was done. He left her for a moment; undoubtedly he was going to call Detective Raven.

  An hour later, Katie was walking slowly out of the hospital, supported by Miles.

  “You’re going to be okay,” he said, more for himself than for her, Katie thought, as he very carefully fastened her seat belt. “The doctor said you were lucky. Now, don’t move.”

  “I won’t.”

  When he was driving out of the parking lot, Katie said, “Thank you, Miles. I know this was a pain in your butt as well as mine, but, well, thank you.”

  “You’re my damned wife. You think I’d dab some iodine on your hip and go to sleep?”

  He was angry again. If she hadn’t felt so dopey, her brain cotton, she would have laughed. “Where are we going?”

  He turned to face her for a moment. “To the all-night pharmacy to get the Vicodin prescription filled. You’re to take a couple every four hours for a day or so.”

  “I really feel fine.”

  “That’s the morphine talking.”

  “I understand how you would get really upset what with all that dried blood on my hip.”

  “Don’t even start with me, Katie. I am so pissed at you—”

  “That’s all right, just so long as we keep this from the children.”

  Miles sucked in a deep breath. “Tomorrow, after I’m sure you’re up to it, we’re going to discuss who might have shot at us. I’ll bet that’s what Detective Raven is wondering. Count on him coming by tomorrow, along with half the FBI.”

  “Bring them on, Miles.” She closed her eyes and drifted off. She wasn’t aware that he’d stopped at the all-night pharmacy. She hadn’t awakened when he’d undressed her and tucked her into bed.

  She wasn’t aware that he held her hand until he woke her up at two o’clock and fed her two Vicodin. He held her hand the rest of that long night.

  The next morning, the lovely morphine was a hazy memory, the pain in her hip all too present. When Miles held out two big pills to her, she took them without a fuss.

  “Oh, no,” she said, “where are the kids?”

  “I’ll take care of the kids. It’s still early. When they’re up, I’ll tell them that you’ve got a bit of a stomach bug and to leave you alone until you decide to appear. Okay?”

  “I can tell you’re a parent. You’re good. Thank you, Miles.”

  He paced the room in front of her, then turned back to face her. “Katie, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about this. I think you did the right thing. We don’t know how Sam and Keely are going to be this morning, how yesterday’s trauma will affect them, but I do know that if they knew you’d been shot, it would be much worse. So thank you. Now see that you heal while I think about how I’m going to keep the police away from you as long as possible.”

  “I’ll be just fine. Say early afternoon?”

  She fell asleep ten minutes later with just a pinch of pain in her hip.

  Miles stood a moment in the doorway, then looked down at his watch. It was only six-thirty in the morning. The kids would be up any time now. He hated lying to them, but not this time. He hoped they could carry it off. He didn’t want to see any more blank pain in Sam’s eyes for as long as he lived.

  39

  At eight o’clock that evening, only three hours after leaving Detective Raven down at Metro Headquarters in the Daley building, Savich came to stand in the kitchen doorway, watching Sherlock wipe spaghetti sauce off Sean’s mouth. Sean quickly replaced it with the next spoonful. What with all the excitement, they’d gotten home very late, and Sean was hungry, tired, and really hyped up. As for Sean’s parents, they both hoped some of Savich’s spaghetti would put him out. Savich said to Sherlock, not taking his eyes off his boy, “Are you ready for something you’re not going to believe?”

  Sherlock straightened midswipe. “I heard you talking on the phone to Miles. What’s going on?”

  “The shooter today. It seems he wasn’t after me. He was after Katie.”

  “After Katie? What do you mean?”

  Savich didn’t say anything for a moment as Sean clattered his spoon to his plate, climbed down from his chair, and made a beeline for his orange plastic ball in the corner. They both, for a moment, listened to him tell the ball that he was going to bounce it, good.

  When she looked up at him, Savich said, “He shot Katie.”

  “What? How? But that isn’t possible! She never said a word, she never acted wounded, she—”

  Savich leaned his head back against one of the cabinets, closed his eyes. “He shot her in the hip and she managed to hide it from all of us. The bullet went in and through. She’ll be okay. Miles called from the emergency room while the nurse was getting Katie into a robe. Turns out she didn’t say a word about it until after they’d gotten home and put the kids to bed. Then she tells him. He’s still so shaken up he could barely speak straight.”

  “She’s really okay?”

  “Yes, soon to be out with a smile on her face from the morphine. Just a couple days rest, and she’ll be fine.”

  Sherlock picked up a hot pad and hurled it across the kitchen. It calmed her and didn’t make any noise to frighten Sean. “I don’t believe this, Dillon. It’s ridiculous, just plain dumb. She’s wounded and doesn’t even let on? No, that can’t be right, it can’t.”

  “She didn’t say anything because she didn’t want the kids any more frightened than they were. If you think about it, you can see Katie’s point. It was an adult decision, hers to make, I guess.”

  Sherlock’s heart was still pumping wildly. She threw another hot pad at the wall, calmed herself down. “It was brave of her.” She drew in a deep breath. “I hope I would have the presence of mind to do that. But wait, Dillon, if the shooter hit her—”

  “That means I wasn’t the target. Or, I really was the target,
and he could have shot at her first, for the fun of it.”

  Savich straightened, shrugged. “Maybe he, whoever he is, just wanted to scare us. At this point, any guess is as good as any other. Who knows, it might have been a random shooting.” Neither of them believed that for an instant.

  Savich picked up Sean, who was tightly clutching his orange ball, and walked to the front window in the living room. He stared out into the calm dark night. A storm was expected to hit Monday, winter coming with a grand announcement. And the temperature would plummet. Sean dropped his ball, watched it roll under an end table. He then spoke in his father’s ear and patted his face, telling him things he understood, like good spaghetti—“I think Sean just said he wanted a puppy.”

  It was so ridiculous that for a moment Sherlock actually laughed and kissed her son’s sleepy face.

  She saw the strain on Dillon’s face, saw the restless movement of his hands, saw the scars on his hands and fingers from his whittling. She knew he’d been caught off guard by the same devastating feelings she had felt when that bullet had come so close to him and to Sean. It made her want to scream and cry at the same time. He said finally, as if he’d been holding the words inside but they now had to come out, “This was too close, Sherlock, far too close. Sean could have been killed.”

  Of course she agreed. The corrosive fear, the sense of absolute impotence—she nodded but didn’t say anything, just moved closer.

  Sean’s head now lay on his father’s shoulder. Savich lightly smoothed his back, cupped his head. She saw a spasm of fear cross his face. He said quietly, “I’ve been giving a lot of thought today to what I’ve been doing nearly all my adult life—being a cop. What if . . . what if, because of me, some crazy kills my son? It would be my fault, Sherlock, no one else’s, just mine, and it would all be because of what I choose to do for a living. I couldn’t live with that, I just couldn’t.”

  “No,” she said slowly, her eyes still on his face, “neither of us could.”