Instead of moving toward her weapon, she was forced to take a step back.
“No, I don’t!”
“Yes, you do,” he coaxed. “You’re a drug addict. All drug addicts crave that hit, that sweet rush as the drug goes into your vein, then seductively moves all through you. Lisa wanted it.”
“Lisa? Who’s Lisa?” she asked Williams, hoping she could distract him and get him to tell her about the woman. Was that another of his victims? Or was this Lisa the reason he had gone on this killing spree in the first place?
“Just another useless addict,” he said in disgust. His eyes almost blazed as he said, “Like you!”
Williams lunged for her but Frankie managed to jump out of the way at the last moment. Still unable to get to her weapon, she pressed the panic button on the key fob in her pocket, hoping that someone would hear her car alarm and call the police.
Williams put two and two together when he heard the alarm go off. “That’s pathetic,” he jeered. And then he mocked her. “Nobody pays attention to car alarms. Don’t you know that, Lisa?”
“I’m not Lisa!”
“Yes, you are. Yes, you are,” Williams cried more insistently. “We were supposed to get married and then you went on that bender and you left me!” he shouted at her, his face contorting into a mask of dark anger. “Left me standing at the altar like some pathetic fool!”
The rest happened so fast that it became just one huge blur.
Her brain struggled to sort it all out after the fact.
She’d never had the opportunity to lock her front door after Williams had come in. It flew open now, and suddenly Luke was there, aiming his gun at the so-called mild-mannered college professor who was trying to plunge the syringe filled with some narcotic into her arm.
“Drop it!” Luke ordered. “Drop the syringe!”
Rather than do as he was told, Williams flew into a rage and tackled Luke as if they were on a football field. The syringe and gun went flying.
Since he obviously felt the gun gave him a better advantage, Williams made a dive for the weapon.
Grabbing the gun, he aimed it at the woman he thought had betrayed him.
He aimed the gun at Frankie.
At the last moment, Luke managed to keep the professor from killing the woman Williams thought in his delusion was his fiancée. Luke blocked the shot with his own body.
The bullet dug into his flesh. Blood started pouring everywhere.
Frankie had never screamed before in her life. Until this second, she’d thought she was unable to scream, that there was something that almost paralyzed her and kept the sound from coming out.
Terrified, she screamed now. “Luke!”
Ducking, Frankie was able to finally secure her own weapon. Holding it with both hands, from her position on the floor she fired at Williams, hitting him in the chest and the knee.
Chapter 23
Moving quickly, Frankie pulled Williams’ arms behind his back and handcuffed him, looping the handcuffs around one of the sofa’s legs. That way, she didn’t have to worry about him fleeing.
Williams released a torrent of curses, calling her every vile name under the sun. He didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except for Luke, who was lying on her floor, bleeding.
Bleeding and not moving.
Panic filled her as Frankie fumbled for her cell phone. Dialing 911, she held her phone against her ear with her shoulder as she desperately tried to rouse Luke.
The second she heard a voice on the other end, she started talking. “This is Detective DeMarco. I’ve got an officer down,” she cried. “I need an ambulance.” She rattled off both her address and her badge number. “Hurry! Hurry!”
“Backup’s already on the way,” an incredibly calm dispatch officer on the other end told her.
The news caught Frankie off guard. “Who called it in?”
“Detective O’Bannon,” the woman answered.
Frankie dropped her phone as she heard the sound of approaching sirens in the background. She clutched Luke’s hand tighter. “Always one step ahead of me, aren’t you?” Fear had her heart pounding and she could feel tears filling up her throat. “Open your eyes, O’Bannon. Damn it, open your eyes!” she pleaded.
But he didn’t.
Luke continued to lie there, unresponsive and bleeding. Desperate, she tried to stop the bleeding with her hands. Blood seeped through her fingers.
“C’mon, damn you, wake up!” she ordered.
A cold chill swept over her. Luke wasn’t responding. What if he didn’t regain consciousness? What if he died on her?
Her breathing grew shallow and ragged. “Oh, no, you don’t get to make me care about you and then just duck out on me like this. You come back, you hear me, O’Bannon? This isn’t about you, it’s about us. You made it about us, damn it! Now you come back and live up to your promises or I swear that wherever you are, I’ll find you and make your life a living hell. You hear me, O’Bannon?”
She wanted to shake him, to wake him up, but she was afraid that any movement like that would be fatal.
There was a commotion behind her. From the sounds, she could tell that other officers and detectives had arrived, responding to Luke’s call for backup.
Holding his hand, Frankie was afraid to look away. Afraid that if she took her eyes off Luke for even one second, he’d slip away from her and be gone.
“Listen to the sound of my voice, Luke. You stay with me, you hear me? Open your eyes and stay with me! Stay with me,” she pleaded, her tears falling on his face.
And then, as the ambulance arrived, she thought she saw Luke’s lips moving. Her heart slammed against her chest. He was alive! “Luke? I’m here, Luke, I’m right here. Talk to me!”
She lowered her ear right next to his lips so that she could make out what he was saying. The whisper was so soft, she could just barely make it out.
“If...I...stay...will you...stop...yelling...at me?”
He looked as if his chest hurt with each word he pushed out.
“Okay,” Frankie sobbed, tears streaming down her cheeks. “I’ll stop yelling. But you can’t leave me, you hear?”
“Deal,” he managed to get out before he lost consciousness again.
“We’ll take it from here, detective,” the ambulance attendant told her gently, trying to move Frankie out of the way as he and his partner lined up the gurney.
“You’re not taking him anywhere without me,” she said, her voice hoarse. “I’m going with him to the hospital. And to drag him back from the bowels of hell, if I have to.”
“Hopefully, that won’t be an issue,” the other EMT said as he and the first attendant picked Luke up from the floor and placed him on the gurney.
“What about me? I need a doctor!” Williams screamed. “The bitch shot me!”
Frankie glared at the man as the newly arrived White Hawk put fresh cuffs on him after freeing him from the sofa.
“You’re lucky I didn’t disembowel you,” she retorted. The paramedics began to move Luke’s gurney. “We got our serial killer,” she told White Hawk as she hurried alongside Luke’s gurney. “The syringe he tried to use on me is over there.” She nodded in its general direction.
After that, her entire attention was totally focused on Luke.
Except for that one brief instance when he’d whispered to her, Luke remained completely unresponsive as they rode to the hospital.
“But his heart’s beating, right?” Frankie asked the attendant riding in the back with them. “It is beating.” It was as if she said it with enough conviction it would be true.
The attendant smiled sympathetically at her. “Given the situation, I don’t think it would dare not to.”
She knew the paramedic was trying to be kind and lighten
the moment, but she couldn’t get herself to reply. Panic was tightening her air passage.
Sitting beside the gurney, she continued clutching Luke’s hand. “Keep it beating, O’Bannon. You keep it beating, you hear me?” Lowering her voice, she whispered, “Please?”
* * *
A surgical team was waiting for them by the time the ambulance pulled up by the emergency room’s doors. Doing her best not to break down, Frankie continued to hold Luke’s hand as she hurried beside his gurney.
She accompanied him as far as they would let her. And then a towering woman—one of the emergency nurses on duty—materialized to block her way.
“I’m sorry,” the austere-looking woman told her gruffly. “You have to stay out here. You can’t come into the OR.”
“I know that,” Frankie practically snapped at the nurse, frustrated. This was her fault. Her fault. If Luke hadn’t tried to shield her, he wouldn’t have been shot. “But you fix him, you understand?” she ordered the nurse. “You bring him back to me breathing.”
“The doctor’ll do his best.”
“No,” Frankie informed her angrily. “Not his best. He’ll do it. He’ll save Detective O’Bannon. Or I’ll come after both of you.”
Looking a little nervous now despite the difference in their sizes, the ER nurse backed away and went through the OR’s swinging doors.
Weak, drained, unable to stand, Frankie leaned against the wall and then slowly slid down until she was sitting on the floor. She leaned her head against her knees and dissolved into tears.
That was the way Brian Cavanaugh found her, less than half an hour later. Rather than raise her to her feet, the chief of detectives sank down on the floor beside her.
“He’s going to be all right, you know,” he told her kindly, starting the conversation as if they’d been talking for hours. “We’ve got a contract with this hospital that forbids them from allowing any of our people to die, so they don’t,” he concluded, hoping the irrational statement would get a hint of a smile from her. Instead, he watched as tears slid down her cheeks.
Brian slipped his arm around Frankie’s shoulders in a paternal act of comfort. “They’ll fix that boy,” he told her, “and he’ll be good as new.”
“How do you know that?” Frankie challenged, sick with worry. “How do you know that?”
“I just do,” Brian answered quietly. “I just do.”
* * *
In less than half an hour, while Luke was still in surgery, they started coming. The members of his family, by blood and by badge. Word had spread fast. The hallways began to fill up.
“Oh, dear Lord, they brought us another one,” Constance Abernathy, the head nurse on the ground floor groaned as she looked around the area just outside the OR. Recognizing the chief of detectives, she approached Brian in hopes of securing an ally just this once. “Chief Cavanaugh, would it do any good if I asked your people to use the waiting rooms the way they’re supposed to?” she asked.
“You could ask,” Brian replied with an understanding smile. “But I really doubt that it’ll do any good.”
The nurse sighed, shaking her head. “That’s what I thought. Well, at least try your best not to block the doors,” she requested before she retreated.
By the time Luke’s mother knew what had happened, Luke was out of surgery and being taken to the recovery room. She arrived at the hospital just as Luke’s surgeon came out to report on his condition.
The entire area turned as one, their attention focused on the man in green scrubs.
“All I can say,” Dr. Goldfarb said, addressing Brian and the ashen-faced women on either side of him, Maeve and Frankie, “is that he has the Cavanaugh luck. It was touch-and-go for a bit, but we got the bullet and we managed to stop the internal bleeding. He’ll be fine. He just needs some rest.”
Maeve threw her arms around the doctor’s neck. “Thank you!” Then, releasing him from her grasp, she anxiously asked, “Can we see him?”
“He’ll be unconscious for a while, even after he gets out of recovery.” He looked around at the crowded area. “There’s no point in all of you waiting around here through the night. Go home, people. I’ll have his nurse give you a call, Chief,” he said, addressing Brian, “once your boy’s regained consciousness.”
“If you don’t mind, I’ll stay,” Frankie said to the doctor. Her tone told the surgeon that even if he did mind, it didn’t matter. She was staying.
Dr. Goldfarb nodded, sensing that arguing would do no good. “I’ll have someone give you his room number once he gets one.”
“Dear, you look worn out,” Maeve told her kindly when the surgeon had left. “Are you sure you want to stay here at the hospital?”
There was no question in Frankie’s mind that she was staying. “I’ve got no place else to be.”
Maeve sighed and nodded. Turning toward Brian, she murmured, “Looks like my boy’s got himself a stubborn one.”
Brian chuckled softly. “I’d expect nothing less.”
* * *
Frankie set up camp in Luke’s room, prepared to wait as long as it took to see him open his eyes again.
In the midst of her vigil, White Hawk came to tell her that the man who had tried to kill her was being arrested and officially charged not just for her attempted murder, but with the murders of nine women.
“Just thought you’d want to know that it looks like the case is closed. Williams became unhinged with his lawyer sitting right there, screaming that it was all Lisa’s fault.”
She should be feeling better about this than she did, Frankie thought. She’d lived up to her promise to Kris. But all she could think about was being able to see Luke open his eyes. He still hadn’t done that.
“Did you find out who Lisa really was?” she asked White Hawk, since he’d been nice enough to come and give her an update.
“Once we got a warrant to search his home,” he answered. “Apparently, Lisa was his fiancée, just the way he said. She left him standing at the altar. When he went to confront her, he found her on the floor, a syringe in her arm. She’d died of a drug overdose after having been clean for over a year.
“Turns out this Lisa looked just like all the women he’d killed. My guess is that Williams searched out women who had kicked the habit. He tried to make them pay for what Lisa had done to him. Sick bastard,” he commented, shaking his head.
The victory still felt hollow to her. But at least she could comfort herself knowing that Williams wouldn’t be killing any other women. “I second that observation,” she told White Hawk.
About to open the door and leave, White Hawk stopped for a moment and looked at her. “Why don’t you go home, Frankie?” he suggested. “I’ll take over watching him for a while and I’ll call you the minute O’Bannon opens those piercing green eyes of his.”
But she shook her head. “Not that I don’t appreciate the offer, but that’s all right. I wouldn’t be able to sleep anyway. I’d rather be right here—so I can read him the riot act the minute he wakes up for jumping in front of that bullet the way that he did.”
“Could be why he’s still sleeping,” White Hawk guessed, looking at his partner. He patted her shoulder. “Take it easy on yourself, Frankie,” he told her just before he left the hospital room.
With a sigh, Frankie settled back in her chair, prepared to go on waiting indefinitely.
“Is he gone?”
Frankie swallowed a yelp as she bolted upright. For a second, she thought her mind was playing tricks on her. She’d been sitting here, keeping vigil for close to two days now. Other people had dropped in, bringing her food. Eventually, they left, but she had stubbornly refused to go. She’d wished Luke into consciousness so often that she was certain she’d imagined his voice just now.
And then his eyes opened.
She drew in her breath, willing herself to remain calm rather than hugging him as hard as she could. “You mean White Hawk?” she asked. “Yes, he’s gone. You were awake?” She heard her voice go up, but she couldn’t stop herself. “Why didn’t you say something?”
Luke took a deep breath and found that that really hurt. He was going to have to be careful for a while and that didn’t sit well with him. He was used to thinking of himself as invulnerable.
“Because I wanted to talk to you first,” he told her. “Alone.” He had her attention. Now he had to find the right way to say this. “Did you mean all that?”
She had no idea what he was referring to. She’d talked to him a lot in the last two days, hoping to wake him up. “All what?”
“What you were shouting at me just after I took that bullet for you.” He didn’t know if she understood, so he elaborated further. “That you cared about me.”
“You heard that?” she asked him, stunned. At the time she’d been sure that he was at death’s door, cracking it open.
“Yes. I heard you offer to go down into the bowels of hell to drag me back, too.” He smiled and found that at least that didn’t hurt. “Not the most romantic proclamation, but I’ve got to admit, it’s original.”
“If you heard all that, why didn’t you say something?” she demanded. She’d been half out of her mind with worry.
“I wasn’t exactly in any shape to carry on a conversation,” he reminded her.
Her knees felt oddly weak. She had to grip the armrests in order to push herself up out of the chair. “Well, since you’re conscious, I’d better let your family know.” Turning, she began to head for the door.
“I love you.”
That stopped her cold in her tracks. And then her heart accelerated. Frankie turned slowly around to look at him.
“That’s the pain medicine talking,” she told him warily.
“No,” he corrected, “that’s the man who came back from the dead talking. C’mere,” he beckoned her over. She approached him as if she was crossing a layer of thin ice, thinking that, at any moment, she’d go plunging into the water. “I don’t want to waste time anymore, Frankie,” he told her. “I love you and I gather that since you’ve been sitting here for—how long?” he asked.
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