“Stevens. Walter Stevens.” He looked at them with angry contempt in his eyes. “You going to question him?”
Henderson’s mouth dropped open. “Hey, isn’t that the—?”
“—security guard who found the first body,” Tony ended his partner’s thought. Damn, he’d never made the connection. The last names were different and there was no mention made of the relationship.
The back of his neck began to prickle. Tony hurried for the door. He heard Henderson trotting right behind him.
“You go to Stevens’ apartment, see if he’s there,” Tony instructed Henderson.
Henderson stopped and doubled back into the office. The address was noted down in the case file.
“Where are you going to be?” Henderson wanted to know.
Anderson was cursing in the background. Tony ignored him.
“I’m going to the hospital,” he told Henderson. “Sasha should have called me by now, or at least answered her cell phone. Something’s not right.”
Tony called several more times as he sped to the hospital. Frustrated because he kept getting her voice mail, he called the hospital switchboard. They put him through to the maternity ward. The nurse who finally answered informed him that he had “just missed Dr. Pulaski. She just left.”
Without calling him, he thought. That meant she was going to take her car back to her apartment.
Why the hell couldn’t she listen?
He tried to tell himself that he was allowing his natural pessimism to get the best of him and that everything was all right.
The uneasy feeling was almost unmanageable.
“Walter, why are you doing this?”
Staring down at the small handgun in the security guard’s hand, Sasha struggled to sound calm. She had to find a way to stall until someone came. Someone had to come. There were so many cars here, waiting for their owners. All she needed was for one of them to arrive. The odds were on her side.
If only luck was.
Walter Stevens tightened his grip on the firearm. “Don’t play dumb, Dr. Pulaski. You know why I’m doing this. I’m doing it for Gloria Jean. For my Jeannie.” His expression hardened. “Because no one else will. That pompous ass she was married to was glad to be rid of her. All he wanted was to make money off her death.” Hatred dripped from every word. It didn’t take much of a stretch to envision the last name on Walter Stevens’ elimination list. “She was a wonderful, sweet girl. And smart.” For a second, he could have been any father, bragging about his daughter. If not for the gun in his hand. “Did you know they made her teacher of the year at her school three years in a row?” And then anger contorted his features. “No, you wouldn’t know that. All you saw was someone to practice on.”
Was that what he thought? Was that what had festered in his chest, finally prompting the man to go off the deep end? “Walter, it wasn’t like that.”
Her words seemed to bounce off him. “Sure it was. Otherwise, you would have waited for the specialist to come.”
But that was just the point. She had to make him see that. “There wasn’t time, Walter. Gloria Jean was going to die if something wasn’t done quickly—”
He cut her off, shouting, “She died anyway, didn’t she?”
“Yes,” she agreed heavily, never taking her eyes off the weapon that was trained on her. “She died anyway.” Sasha thought of her parents, of how they would feel if she died here tonight. They’d already been through so much in their lifetime, she wasn’t going to let that kind of grief touch them if she could help it. “Walter, we did all we could. You have to believe that. You said that Gloria Jean was a good person—”
“She was,” he snapped, fury coming into his eyes.
Sasha kept her voice low, calm. It was the only chance she had. “Then she wouldn’t want you to do this. To kill people in her name.”
But he shook his head, as if shaking off her words. “I have to. It’s all I got left. To make you people pay for killing my little girl.” With his left hand, he dug into his pocket. Walter pulled out the carefully folded note he’d printed out on his machine the night after he’d killed Tyler Harris. “Here, take this,” he ordered. “Hold it in your hand.”
She already knew what it was. “No.”
Her refusal incensed him. “I said take it!” he shouted. Taking a step forward, he shoved the paper at her.
Sasha swung her purse at him with all her might. Trying to ward off the block, Walter toppled backwards and fell down. Sasha took off, running as fast as she could back toward where she’d come. If she could just get back to the next level, street level, she’d be all right. There’d be people there. People who would come between her and the deranged security guard.
She just prayed that the man wouldn’t have a complete meltdown and start firing at people at random.
Why hadn’t she called Tony and waited for him? She made herself a promise to apologize. If she lived long enough.
As she rounded the corner, Sasha heard the squeal of brakes and the sound of a car traveling at a high speed. For a second, she wasn’t able to discern if the noise was coming from behind her or in front of her.
Was Walter going to run her down?
And then she saw it, the low-slung sports car coming directly at her. At the last minute, the driver swerved. Tires screeched as the car came to an abrupt, sudden halt.
Tony had always said it could stop on a dime.
Leaning over, he threw open the passenger door. “Sasha, get in!” Tony ordered. The smell of burning rubber permeated the air.
Her heart pounding, she could have cried. Quickly, she did as he instructed, pouring herself into the passenger seat. Idling, the car rumbled, like a bull pawing the ground before charging.
Tony’s facade cracked. “Are you all right?” he demanded.
She nodded her head vigorously. She was fine. Now that he was here.
“It’s Walter. The guard,” she gasped, her lungs aching from the cold air she’d dragged in as she’d run. “He’s the hit-and-run victim’s father and he’s the one who’s been killing everyone.”
“I know.”
He could have kicked himself for not knowing sooner. For not suspecting. But the man had looked like an overgrown Christmas elf and his suspicions had been lulled. Stupid, Tony reprimanded himself. His oversight had almost gotten Sasha killed.
Tony searched her face, her body, looking for wounds, not bothering to hide his concern. “Did he hurt you?”
Sasha realized that there were tears in the corner of her eyes. Tears of relief, of tension. She blinked them back.
“No, but he was going to. He has a gun, Tony. With a silencer.” As she said it, she realized that explained why she hadn’t really heard anything that night when Angela had been killed only a few feet away from her. The security guard had used a silencer. “He wanted me to take the note, the same one you found all the other victims holding in their hand.” With effort, she forced herself not to think about what had almost happened. And then another thought assailed her. “Tony, he’s still out there.”
“Yeah, I know.” The next moment, Tony got out of the car. He paused only long enough to give her a warning look. “Stay here.”
She was about to negate the order. There was no way she was going to let him confront the deranged security guard alone. But before she could get out of the vehicle, Walter suddenly appeared, coming around the corner. His gun was drawn and aimed straight at the windshield.
Sasha cried out a warning. “Tony!”
Tony’s weapon was drawn before he ever completed turning away from her. He held it steady in both hands, his eyes trained on the guard. “Drop the gun, Stevens.”
Walter stopped walking. “She needs to die, Detective. Just like the others did.”
“There’ll be no more killing, Stevens.” It was an edict, coldly issued. “Now drop the gun,” he repeated.
Walter’s hands trembled slightly as he continued to hold the weapon. “Don’t you see? She ki
lled my daughter.”
“She tried to save your daughter,” Tony countered. “The hospital records showed that your daughter sustained multiple injuries from the car accident. She was bleeding internally in half a dozen places.” He was making it up as he went along, using what he could remember from a Discovery Channel program he’d once seen. “No one could have saved her.”
“You’re lying!” Walter shouted, growing agitated. The gun shook. “Lying to protect her. She has to die. They all have to die.”
Walter let loose with an anguished cry. He raised his gun higher, aiming it straight at Sasha’s head. Uttering a curse, Tony fired. The bullet struck Walter dead center in the forehead. Just the way the guard had executed all the other victims.
A second shot rang out, this one coming from Walter’s gun. The security guard fired the weapon as he went down, a stunned expression frozen into his features.
Sasha bolted from the shelter of the vehicle, rounding the engine until she was next to Tony’s side. Frantically, she scanned him for any signs of a wound.
“Are you all right?”
Tony nodded. “Yeah.”
She closed her eyes, uttering a silent prayer of thanks. When she opened them again, Sasha crossed to the body lying on the ground a few feet away from them.
“He’s dead, Sasha,” Tony called after her. He holstered his weapon, knowing he was going to have to turn it into Internal Affairs until all the facts about the shooting were duly taken into account.
Sasha felt the man’s neck for a pulse anyway. There was none. Steeling herself, she passed a hand over Walter’s lifeless eyes, closing them. “I had to be sure.”
Tony joined her and slipped an arm around her shoulders. She was trembling, he realized, even though she was struggling not to show any emotion. “To stop the nightmares?” he guessed.
“Because I’m a doctor,” she corrected. “And if he was alive, I took an oath to keep him that way.”
Tony thought that was rather ironic, seeing as how the man had been trying to kill her. In her position, he didn’t know if he would have been able to think that way. Not about someone who had gone to such lengths to try to eliminate him.
A sigh shuddered its way out of his throat as he placed a call in to dispatch to apprise them of the situation.
He was vaguely aware that the uneasy feeling haunting him all day was gone.
“I can’t believe it’s really over.”
Sasha sank down on a stool beside Tony, a mug of hot tea in her hand. It was more than three hours later and they were finally in her apartment. She’d gone to the police station with him, insisting on giving her statement now instead of in the morning the way he’d suggested. There was no way she was going to allow this to linger. She’d wanted to purge as much of the incident as she could before going home.
The moment she and Tony had walked into the apartment, her sisters had surrounded her. They’d fussed over her as much as she would allow them to. She’d answered their questions and assured them more than once that she was all right. Tony was about to take his leave when she’d stopped him, asking him to remain a few more minutes.
That had been Natalya and Kady’s cue. To their credit, they’d taken it quickly and retreated back into the bedrooms from which they’d emerged.
Natalya had paused to give her an extra hard hug. “We’ll figure out how to sugarcoat this for Mama and Daddy in the morning,” she whispered. All three of them knew that their parents would be after them to move back home.
Sasha had smiled and nodded. “I’d appreciate the help.” Natalya had always been the more creative one of the three.
Tony had sat quietly, studying his coffee mug until her sisters finally left them alone. And then he looked at her, trying not to think of the way things could have gone tonight. Focusing only on the fact that she was alive and out of danger.
“It’ll take some time for you to get it out of your system,” he warned. “Sometimes our emotions won’t accept what our minds tell us is really true.”
She raised her eyes to his. Her intuition told her that he wasn’t referring to the fact that there was no more need to be afraid. “You’re talking about your wife, aren’t you?”
He began to deny it, then shrugged. Wasn’t much point in doing that. She seemed to be able to see right through him. The next moment, he realized that that didn’t scare him any more. “Among other things.”
She smiled, affection in her eyes. “I had no idea you could wax so poetic.”
He laughed shortly. That wasn’t what some people called it. “I have my moments.”
“Yes,” she said softly, running the back of her hand across his cheek, creating all sorts of tidal waves inside his stomach, “I know.”
Tony knew he should be leaving. Closing this chapter of his life and going back to the routine that he knew best. Being a cop. He didn’t belong in her life. She was too good and he was too jaded.
And yet, he found himself reaching for her. With his arm hooked around her waist, he drew her onto his lap. She nestled in, adding more friction to the already existing tidal waves.
“I guess you’ll be relieved not to be needing a bodyguard anymore.”
He couldn’t quite read the expression on her face. It was a cross between whimsical and thoughtful.
“Oh, I don’t know about that. New York City is a pretty dangerous place at times. A woman can’t be too careful these days.” And then she smiled into his eyes. “A little extra protection would be very welcome.”
He shouldn’t be thinking what he was thinking. Shouldn’t allow himself to grow optimistic. But he did. “It would?”
“Uh-huh.” She only half succeeded in looking serious. “Any idea where I might be able to find that kind of protection?” She laced her fingers around his neck. “The kind that would be available at odd hours of the day or night?”
Tony nodded, never taking his eyes off her face. “I think I know just the guy.”
Sasha’s smile widened. “I was hoping you’d say that.”
He never missed a beat. “Henderson’s been looking to pick up a little extra cash.”
About to kiss him, Sasha pulled her head back. “Henderson?”
“Yeah.” And then, unable to help himself, Tony grinned. “I’m just going to have to tell him to find someone else to guard. That this body,” he tucked his hands around her, “is spoken for.”
He’d had her going for a second. Paying him back, Sasha whacked his shoulder with the flat of her hand. He looked at her in surprise. “That’s for Henderson.”
He laughed, pulling her even closer. “I’ll deliver it when I get a chance.”
He didn’t make it sound as if he was going anywhere anytime soon. “Planning to be busy for a while?”
“For a very long while,” he told her, as he began to lower his mouth to hers. “Say like the next ten or twenty years.”
Sasha looked at him pointedly. “Ten or twenty years? That’s all?”
“We’ll negotiate.”
Tony tasted her laugh against his lips and felt rays of hope and sunshine spread out all through him as he deepened the kiss.
In his mind, he amended the length of time to forever.
ISBN: 978-1-4268-6856-6
HER LAWMAN ON CALL
Copyright © 2007 by Marie Rydzynski-Ferrarella
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