by Julie Miller
Rafe Delgado’s voice dropped to a whisper. “I’m coming in through the patio entrance. I heard something I want to check out. But no visual yet, sir.”
“Keep me posted.”
Tossing the handheld radio back into the gear box at the back of the SWAT van, Michael turned to Edward Kincaid. “At least tell me we’ve got the rest of the clinic evacuated and a perimeter set up.”
Edward nodded. “Your men’s room-to-room check hasn’t turned up anything. The hospital staff and patients in the connecting corridor area have been moved to the far end of the complex. Uniformed officers have the immediate blast area cordoned off and Bomb Squad is ready to go in on your order.”
Everything about their response thus far had gone by the book. “So why don’t I feel any better about this?”
“Because Jillian’s the one trapped inside.” Edward pulled back the front of his jacket and propped his hands at his waist. “I won’t feel good about any of this until I see her out here in one piece.”
Michael fingered the phone that usually served him so well. But a call to Wayne Randolph’s phone had ended up at an answering service that said he wasn’t responding, and a call to Jillian’s phone went straight to voice mail. He couldn’t negotiate with a hostage taker if he couldn’t reach him.
And standing here, supervising reports that told him nothing, wasn’t getting him any closer to having Jillian safely in his arms again. He needed inside that gymnasium. He needed to look Wayne Randolph in the eye and tell that murdering SOB exactly what he could do with his style of loving.
The radio crackled to life as Rafe Delgado buzzed in. Michael’s senses all leaped to attention. “Captain? You’re going to want to see this.”
“MIKE?”
Rafe Delgado stood by the counter in the clinic lounge with his rifle on his hip and his eyes peeled as Michael swallowed his son up in a hug.
“Dad.”
“Thank God you’re safe.” It almost didn’t register that Mike was standing on his feet, hugging him back. He pulled back long enough to drop a spare Kevlar over Mike’s head and closed the straps on either side of his torso. Then he palmed the side of his son’s flushed face, trying to distinguish panic from excitement in his expression. “Where’s your chair?”
“I had to leave it behind. Once I got the braces locked, I could move okay. It’s the getting up and down that’s tough.”
Michael nodded. He’d want details later. For now, it was enough to know he was okay. “Rafe, let’s get him out of here.”
“No.” Mike snatched at his arm, his balance wavering a bit at the sudden movement. “Troy’s in there. So is Jillian and some creep with a gun.”
“I know, son.” Michael stiffened his arm to give Mike something sturdier to hold on to as he took a small step toward the patio exit where he’d come in. “As soon as my men can find a way into that gym, we’re getting her out. We’ll get them both out.”
Mike pulled away and tottered back toward the storage closet where Rafe had discovered him. He shook off Michael’s efforts to steer him back toward the patio. “I know a way in.”
“How?”
Michael followed him into the closet and watched Mike push open a small door in the back. “The same way I got out.”
“YOU LIED TO ME. All these years you’ve been lying to me.”
The duct tape that bound Jillian’s wrists together pricked at her skin and bruised her with every twist and pull as she tried to free herself. The desperate movements stopped abruptly when Dr. Randolph turned and walked toward her again. As far as he knew, she was sitting in the middle of the gym floor beside the leather briefcase with the pipe bomb inside, listening in rapt attention to his wandering diatribe about love and loyalty and loss.
She hoped.
He scratched his temple with the tip of his black steel pistol, dislodging his glasses and forcing him to stop and set them back into place before continuing.
Dr. Randolph had proudly shown her the bomb. Like a professor leading a classroom lecture, he’d patiently described in detail how he’d created it, how he’d learned to be a fairly decent shot in the army and how he wouldn’t hesitate to use either skill if she didn’t do exactly as he said.
“I taught you in rehab that you should never lie to me. I thought you’d learned your lesson.” He pulled the gun from his temple and glanced at it as though surprised to discover he’d pointed it at his own head. But he didn’t seem to have any qualm about pointing the gun directly at hers. Jillian jumped inside her skin, but she had no place to run, no way to fight him as long as her hands were bound like this.
All she had were her words. “I never lied to you, Doc. Maybe those first few weeks in the clinic when you asked me about how long I’d been doing drugs or what was the craziest thing I’d done to get my hands on some coke. But once I was healthy, once you helped me heal, I never told you another lie.”
He shook the gun at her. “You loved me.”
“I never said that.”
The same mouth that had recited a sonnet to her a few minutes ago now spat nothing but contempt. “You loved me!”
When he knelt down beside her, Jillian scooted away. But he caught her by the elbow and jerked her back, peeling off a layer of skin at her wrists. She bit her lip to hide her yelp of pain. But the same lip trembled with fear when he pressed the gun to her forehead and used it to brush her bangs out of her eyes.
“You sent me cards, pictures, letters over the years. Sharing your life with me. Thanking me.”
She couldn’t look into his eyes. She could only follow the gun as he continued to caress her with it. “I was grateful. Your patience and caring turned my life around. I always thought of you as a friend. Maybe the closest thing I had to a father since losing my dad. I’m sure you had other patients who felt the same—”
“A father figure?” He pushed to his feet and paced away again. Jillian instantly raised her wrists to her teeth and tried to cut through the tape that way. “No. It was love. I saw the way you smiled at me each time we met.”
A scuffling noise from the storage closet diverted her attention from the tape. No! She’d warned the boys to stay quiet. If Randolph knew they had an audience now…
“I do love you.” She said the first thing that came to mind, praying she was loud enough to mask any noises the boys made. It might have been true, up until a couple of hours ago when she’d seen him trying to break into her office. “Just not in that way. I loved you…” She swallowed hard so she could speak the lie. “I love you like a friend, Doc. Maybe even like family. But the flowers and the love letters…I never loved you in that way.”
“Lies, Jilly!” The gun swung her way again as he stalked toward her. “All lies!”
He knelt beside her again, but this time to pull the pipe bomb from inside his briefcase and lay it across her lap. Every muscle constricted, trying to draw her body away from the lethal pipe. But there was no escape. The heaviness and instability of the weapon weighed her down, rendered her immobile, trapped her in place next to the man who was running his fingers through the length of her ponytail and pressing kisses to strand after strand as he spoke.
“I was content to love you from a distance because I knew you weren’t ready to be loved. That was always one of the hardest lessons for you to accept, Jilly, dear.” He paused to inhale the scent of her hair and Jillian’s stomach clenched against the urge to gag. “You’ve always questioned your own worth. How many conversations have we had over the years about you feeling like you didn’t deserve to have good things happen to you? You were barely more than a child when you lost your parents. That’s more than most adults can cope with. Yes, you made some bad choices, got involved with Rivers and Rush and other men who never had your best interests at heart. But that doesn’t mean you have to pay for those mistakes the rest of your life.”
Jillian sucked in a shuddering breath and he rewarded her by running his fingers through her hair again.
“So be
autiful. Inside and out.” He stopped playing with her hair long enough to curl the fuse connected to the bomb around his finger and then pull it straight and smooth it out against her thigh. “You should be proud of everything you’ve accomplished, Jilly. I am. You deserve to be happy. You deserve to be loved. I was only waiting for you to be ready to accept me. I waited until you were old enough, until you were confident enough. Then I began to woo you. And how do you repay me?”
He waited until she tilted her tear-filled eyes up to him to answer.
“You gave your love to another man.”
Michael. Yes, she loved him. In his skewed view of reality, Wayne Randolph was exactly right. For years, Jillian always believed she had a debt to pay society before she could love and be loved. He’d helped her finally learn that lesson.
She loved Michael Cutler. And if she ever, ever got out of this gym alive, she would do whatever was necessary to earn his love in return.
“I taught you how to love,” Wayne continued. “I thought our ages would be the thing to keep us apart. And then I see you kissing another older man. We’re supposed to be together. You’re supposed to love me.”
“What are you going to do, Doc?” Jillian asked. “Are you going to kill me for disappointing you?”
“For betraying me, you mean?”
Why had she ever thought the eyes behind those glasses had been kind? “I don’t love you, Wayne.”
“What?”
“I don’t love you.”
The shock of her quietly rebellious words must have distracted Wayne from the sound of a door opening and closing softly behind her.
“Randolph.”
The doctor jumped to his feet, his gun swinging toward that beloved, deep voice at the back of the gym. “You! Get out of here!”
“Easy, Randolph.” Jillian turned her head just enough to see Michael holding up his left hand in surrender as he slowly pulled his gun from his thigh holster and set it on the floor. “I’m just here to talk. I’m Michael Cutler, KCPD. My men and I needed to see what the situation was like in here. See if there was anything we could do to help. Jillian, you all right?”
She didn’t know whether to weep with relief or yell at him to run and get as far away from her as he could. “I have a bomb in my lap.”
“It’ll be all right, sweetheart. Bomb Squad’s outside, waiting for my signal.”
“Sweetheart?” Dr. Randolph took a step toward the unarmed cop. “So you’re the one. You couldn’t keep your hands off her, could you? You couldn’t keep your hands off my Jilly.”
Michael kept his hands in the air, a gesture meant to show he posed no threat, though the uniform and SWAT vest and focused eyes said something different. “I’m a negotiator, Randolph. Like I said, I’m just here to talk. Now I can reassure my men that everything is under control in here.”
“Liar.” Wayne advanced another step. “I’m surrounded by liars. You’re here to get your tramp back.” And another. “You can’t have her!”
“Why don’t you put the gun down and we’ll discuss this?”
“There’s nothing to discuss. Jilly is mine. She loves me. We will be together one way or another.”
“Put the gun down, Randolph.”
He was too close to Michael. Even a lousy shot couldn’t miss at that range. “Michael. Please just leave. I don’t want anyone else to get hurt. Please.”
“I’m not leaving you.”
“Get. Out.” Wayne wrapped both hands around the gun and took aim.
“Put the gun down or I’ll take it from you.”
“Michael!”
“Get out!” Wayne pulled the trigger and Jillian screamed.
“No!”
Michael jerked back against the gym wall and sank to the floor.
“No!” She tried to turn, tried to steady the bomb on her thighs and get to him to help. “Michael!”
Randolph came back and grabbed her ponytail, spinning her around to face him. A million pinpricks of pain stabbed across her scalp, and burned her eyes with tears. “I hate you, Wayne! I hate you!”
He ignored her kicks, ignored her screams, ignored her pain. He pulled a lighter from his pocket and reached for the fuse. “It’s you and me, Jilly. Forever.”
“Randolph! Get away from her!”
“What?”
“Michael?”
Wayne picked up his gun, took aim as Jillian whirled around.
“Drop it!”
Michael already had a bead on Wayne when the doctor fired.
Jillian jerked at each gunshot. Held her breath.
She watched the circle of blood bloom across the front of Wayne Randolph’s jacket as his knees buckled and he collapsed to the floor. Dead.
“Jillian?” Michael was at her side in an instant, his boot on Randolph’s gun, taking no chances as he slid it from his lifeless grasp and tucked it into the back of his uniform. “Sweetheart, you’re not hit, are you?” Then he was on his knees beside her, carefully lifting the pipe bomb and placing it back inside the briefcase. “Jillian, are you hurt?”
His hands were on her face now, running along her arms and down her legs. The shock of the last few seconds hadn’t entirely worn off as she pushed aside his assessing hands and caught his face between her own bound hands. He stilled long enough for her to see the clear, focused strength shining in those dark blue eyes. She shook her head in disbelief. “He shot you.”
“That’s what the body armor’s for.” Michael leaned in and covered her lips in a quick, hard, life-affirming kiss. Then he drew a wicked-looking knife from his belt and sliced through the tape at her wrists, freeing her.
He pulled those same wrists around his neck and scooped her off the floor and into his arms. “I’m not hurt. I can walk.”
“Humor me, okay, sweetheart?”
Jillian tightened her arms around his neck and smiled. “Okay.”
“And do me a favor. Press the button on that radio on my shoulder.” She pushed the button and Michael turned his chin to his shoulder, carrying her back to the closet where she hoped the boys were still safely hidden, snapping orders all the way. “Taylor? Take down that door and get the bomb squad in here now. Trip, I need evac assistance with a wheelchair-bound hostage in the gym. Kincaid? Make sure the ambulance is ready. Delgado? Tell Mike his plan worked. We’re coming out.”
“I UNDERSTAND SURVIVOR’S GUILT, son.”
Michael couldn’t remember the last time he’d had this long or this meaningful a conversation with Mike. Certainly not since the accident and Pam’s death. Sitting together on the back step of the SWAT van while Edward Kincaid supervised the debriefing of everyone in the aftermath of a hostage crisis wasn’t how he’d pictured this breakthrough moment. But Michael wouldn’t have changed the drippy weather or beehive of official activity for anything. His son was finally talking to him.
“You don’t think I would have died in your mother’s place?” he explained. “I’m the tough guy—the one with the dangerous job. She was kind, gentle, loving—smarter than I’ll ever be. There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think it should have been me.”
Mike swiped at the tears in his eyes and nodded. “Steve was the good one. He was being responsible by not drinking. He was being a good friend by taking me home when I’d had too much. I worked hard in the classes I liked and blew off the others. But Steve…he worked hard at everything. He wanted to be a firefighter like his dad. He had something useful to give the world. I was just going to play football. It should have been me who died in that crash.”
Michael wrapped his arm around his shoulders and hugged him to his side. “I’ll argue with you on that one. Grief is a lousy thing to deal with. For months after your mom died, I was just going through the motions. I shut down inside. But then you got hurt, and I kind of woke up from that guilty haze I’d been living in. I realized I had a job to do—the most important one in the world.”
“Being a cop?”
“Being your father.�
� He loosened his grip, and was heartened when Mike didn’t immediately slide away. “You know what else I realized? That I was dishonoring your mother. No, I couldn’t save her. Nobody could. God’s got her now because He probably needed somebody to get his books in order.”
Mike’s mouth tilted with half a grin. “Yeah, she was a freak about organizing stuff, wasn’t she? Classroom parties. Little League fundraisers. The football parents’ booster club.”
“She was a pro, wasn’t she?”
“Yeah.”
Michael caught his son’s last tear with his knuckle and flicked it away. “I finally got my act together and realized mourning your mom, feeling guilty about her death—just going through the motions of living—would really tick her off. Your mom would have wanted me, wanted us, to really live. To make a difference in the world. To do our jobs well. Set goals—achieve them. Make friends. Feel things.”
“Sounds a lot like the way Jillian lives.”
“Yeah.” That was an admission to make. “She’s a pretty gung-ho lady, isn’t she?”
“I was thinking I could do some of that, too. You know, setting goals, making a difference?” Mike locked his braces into place and pushed to his feet. Michael stood, too, intending to help him, but it was pretty clear that moving from a seat into his wheelchair wasn’t a big deal anymore. Another reason to thank Jillian. “I thought about majoring in physical therapy in college, or becoming a sports trainer or coach. Troy and I even talked about how we could open some kind of training center together.”
“Get through high school first.” Michael did his fatherly duty and reminded Mike to keep those priorities in the right order. “I don’t think I’ve ever been prouder of you, son, than I am of you tonight. I love you.”
“Love you, too, Dad.” When Michael started to lean in for another hug, Mike put up one hand and turned his chair with another. Okay. Real world. Enough mush for one night.
And that was when they discovered they weren’t alone. Having answered all of Edward’s preliminary questions, Jillian was standing a few feet away, hugging her arms around her middle. The sprinkle of rain still falling couldn’t mask the tears running down her face.
