“No,” she said. “You stay over there away from him.”
My mother narrowed her eyes, but she backed up as if sensing that Oakley wasn’t in a playing mood.
“You were there?” I guessed.
My mother didn’t even have tears in her eyes.
“Yes,” she said. “I was there. And I watched that man kill my daughter.”
I looked over at Ford, and he took the hint by pulling his cell phone out and my guess was recording my mother’s confession.
“How about you start from the beginning,” I suggested.
But before she could begin, Ford’s phone started blowing up.
“Shit,” he said. “SWAT call. Gotta go.”
Before either of us could say a word, he tossed me his phone—which was still recording—and hurried away.
“We went over there because I thought it might be a great idea to get a few things to pawn,” my mother started, fidgeting with each word she spoke. “I was in the garage looking through the boxes while Bella was in the bedroom looking through ones in there. We’d entered through the unlocked door in the garage when…”
A cruiser pulled up and none other than Jackson stepped out.
God. Dammit.
“And that man shot my daughter!” my mother bellowed. “He pointed his gun at her, didn’t say a word, and shot her!” My mother got increasingly agitated as she waved her finger in Jackson’s direction. Jackson stiffened imperceptibly, but I saw him reach for the service weapon that was no longer there. The chief had taken it as per department protocol. “Then he set the scene up so that she looked guilty!”
I turned my head to stare at Jackson.
And, while I had my gaze off of my mother for all of two seconds, she pulled out a gun and shot me.
Chapter 20
Today I plan on being as useless as the person that’s supposed to check your order at McDonald’s.
-Text from Oakley to Pace
Oakley
Everything happened fast after Pace’s mother pulled the gun.
“Rana, no!” I cried out.
But it was too late.
Pace, being Pace, tried to intervene, but his mother was dead set on doing what she wanted to do—which was shoot Sergeant Jackson.
She pulled the trigger, and Pace’s body jerked with the force of the bullet ripping through his upper chest.
He went down on his knees almost immediately, the impact of the bullet forcing him down whether he wanted to be there or not. His balance was off, too, and before he had much of a chance to do much of anything, he was flat on his ass looking at his hand which was dotted with red.
Panic coursed through me as I tried to comprehend what had just happened.
That was when Ford—where in the hell had he come from?— hit Rana Vineyard like a battering ram. One second Rana still had the gun pointed in Jackson’s direction, and the next she was on the ground with two hundred and thirty pounds of pissed off Spurlock on top of her.
And let me just tell you, Ford was not nice at all. He didn’t care that Rana was a woman. Not at that moment in time anyway.
He just threw her down and forced her face into the grass as he tried to wrestle the gun out of her hand.
She was a scrappy woman, though, and held onto that gun for all that she was worth, knowing that things hadn’t gone her way.
Jackson, being the asshole that he was, placed his booted foot over her wrist to help.
But, when he did that, all it did was break Rana’s wrist with the force that he’d used.
The gun went off a second time as her finger clenched on the trigger, and Jackson went down for his troubles, taking a bullet to the foot.
I went down on my knees in front of Pace and had the phone in my hand dialing 9-1-1 in the next second.
Ripping my shirt off since it was the only thing I had that I could put pressure on his wound with, I hastily explained to the operator that two cops were shot at my current location and we needed help.
Moments after that, I tossed the phone into the grass beside Pace and pressed my balled up shirt against his chest.
“Fuck,” I breathed as I stared into his eyes.
He was calm.
Really calm.
His eyes were clear and focused, and he was staring straight at me with a look of pure desperation in them.
“I wanted to wait three months and three days to ask you to marry me at your six-month kidney anniversary,” he rasped. “I already have the ring.”
My breath hitched in my chest. “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” he said, sounding tired. “I wasn’t going to give you a choice, though. I was just going to tell you to do it.”
My lips twitched. “Do you think that would’ve worked?”
He shrugged, using his bad shoulder, and he winced, his face going deathly pale as shock started to course through him. “I don’t know…do you?”
“I…” I stilled when his breath stopped coming evenly and began coming in choppy short pants.
Seconds after that, he was on his side and was closing his eyes as his breathing paused for a long moment before resuming.
“Pace!” I cried out, my hand going to his face. “Pace, honey. Pace.”
He refused to open his eyes.
And before I could call his name again, I was physically pulled up and backward as the scene around me descended into utter chaos.
There were cops everywhere, as well as a fire engine and two ambulances.
I stared at the world around me as nearly three quarters of the medics and firefighters went down to their knees to help Pace.
“We gotta get him to the hospital,” I heard one of them say. “No breath sounds on the left side. His lung collapsed.”
Ford, who was holding onto me as well as holding me up, pulled me to one of the ambulances. “Go and sit down. They’ll get him in here in a second.”
I did as I was asked and sat quietly in the corner, hoping I didn’t get in the way.
My eyes were all for Pace who was being loaded onto a gurney and carried toward the back of the ambulance.
When he was loaded, I shoved even farther into the corner as they worked on him.
“Lung’s back up,” I heard someone say.
Everything was happening too fast, and my head was spinning.
I felt something touch my calf, and I followed the bloody fingers to the bloody arm, further to the bloody chest. Fingers, an arm, and a chest that I knew so well that it hurt.
I caught his hand up in mine and smiled down at him.
“Hey,” I breathed. “You’re back.”
He winked.
“Do you think…” He drew in a deep, rattling breath. “That if I die, they can put my other kidney in the freezer for when you need it again?”
My heart shattered into a million tiny pieces.
“No, baby,” I said. “Your kidney will go to waste. I wouldn’t be able to use it…you’ll have to stay alive and use it instead.”
There were tears tracking down my cheeks. Down his as well.
“I’m not sure I’m going to make it,” he admitted. “Something feels different about this time.”
I brought his hand up to rest against my cheek. “You’re going to make it.”
He didn’t contradict me, but his non-answer was answer enough.
He really didn’t think he was going to make it, and he didn’t want me to have false hope that he would.
We arrived at the hospital and Pace’s hand was pulled from mine as he was practically rushed out of the back of the ambulance.
I followed at a much slower pace as I tried to figure out where I should go and what I should do.
I was nearly run over by the other medics that followed us in with Sergeant Jackson.
He was doing much better than my man was.
He had his foot wrapped in gauze, and he was laughing with the medics as if this was an ever
yday occurrence.
“Careful there, murderer,” I sneered as he passed. “Don’t smile too much. Your day is about to get a whole lot worse.”
Jackson’s face went from jovial to glacial.
“What was that?” he asked, stiffening.
I turned to find another cop and handed him the phone that I somehow managed to acquire. “Watch the video on this. Find Ford Spurlock for the passcode. It explains, in detail, how Sergeant Jackson murdered Pace Vineyard’s sister.”
The officer, who was older and looked like he knew his way around assholes like Jackson, nodded his head. “Yes, ma’am.”
But before he took the phone and went searching, he jerked his chin up in the direction of another officer. One that I knew well.
“Justice,” he called out. “Follow ol’ Sergeant Jackson here and make sure that he doesn’t get too excited and leave. I’ll send a rookie to babysit.”
“Yes, Captain Morgan.” Justice jerked his head. “He won’t get out of my sight.”
I didn’t wait to see what he had to say because a nurse touched me gently on the arm.
“Are you Oakley?”
I swallowed hard. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Pace is asking for you,” she said. “He’s agitated, and we believe he has a bullet in his chest. We don’t want him getting more upset, and the meds that we’re administering can’t be given in higher doses because…”
I didn’t wait for her to explain because I could hear Pace calling my name. Loudly.
I started running toward his voice and found him thrashing on the bed as he looked for me.
The moment that our eyes met, he stilled.
“Baby.”
His breathing was hard to listen to. He wheezed and whistled as he took breath into his lungs.
Jesus Christ.
“It’s okay. I’m okay. You’re okay,” I chattered. “Nothing’s happened to me. I’m okay.”
At least, I assumed that was why he was so scared all of a sudden. I’d been with him in the ambulance for the entire way there and hadn’t followed him into the hospital. He’d been worried.
“You don’t have to worry,” I repeated. “Let these people work on you.”
The people were already working on him now that he wasn’t fighting. People were talking. Doctors were assessing. Nurses were bustling.
He breathed in a rattly breath, but his eyes never left mine.
“I’d give up my life for just one of your breaths,” he said. “When I saw her aim that gun in Jackson’s direction, she swung right past your face to do it.”
She had. He was right. I’d felt that moment of fear as she’d swung it.
And that was exactly what he did.
He gave up his life just so I would take one more.
Tears were leaking freely down my cheeks, unchecked and unencumbered. I could feel my shirt collar becoming damp with them.
Then everything just stopped.
His breathing. The grip in his hand. The life in his eyes.
“He’s in V-Fib,” I heard said.
I blinked and backed up as nurse after nurse began bustling around, pushing me farther and farther back.
Suddenly, Pace’s shirt was cut the rest of the way from his body, the useless pieces of material being thrown down into an ever-widening pool of his blood on the floor.
The metal clink-clink of his gold badge hitting the cold tiled floor had my eyes going there, just as his Kevlar vest was tossed into the pool of blood, too.
My eyes went to the Kevlar vest.
The one that’d saved his life.
The one that my father had suggested that I give him.
It was special.
A brand-new vest that was supposed to stop him from being shot—at least where the armor was able to protect him—when there were armor-piercing bullets involved.
And it did its job.
Where the vest was there to protect him.
He’d been shot one time by a .500 Smith & Wesson revolver.
“I need some blood!” I heard a man yell.
I felt dissociated from my body as I walked stiffly into the puddle of his blood and picked up all his stuff.
His vest. His prosthetics. His shirt.
Blood was dripping off of them when I started backing away, pushing myself into the corner of the room.
“Got sinus rhythm,” I heard called.
My eyes went to the man—finally—that had taken my breath away when he’d stopped breathing, and I saw that his eyes were open and searching.
“Pace,” I whispered.
There was no way in hell that he could’ve heard me. None. Not with as much commotion that was going through the small area.
But, miraculously, his eyes turned to me and they smiled.
Even with blood everywhere all over him, he was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.
But then his eyes widened, and I saw the alarm start to shoot through them.
I was honestly scared to look over my shoulder to see what Pace was seeing.
I dropped down to my butt and pulled my legs up to my chest.
When I shifted my body, the body armor that’d been once covering Pace was now mostly covering me.
And that action was exactly what saved my life.
Gunshots filled the air.
People went down.
I felt something hard hit my chest. Felt the burn. Smelled the gunpowder.
My hand hurt.
Why did my hand hurt?
And was it normal for it to be smoky?
I lifted the vest higher and ducked my head.
Another explosion against my body.
***
Trance
“This is utterly a goddamn joke,” I said as I looked around the ER.
Today, when I’d gotten the call that my daughter’s house had been broken into and that someone had been shot where she’d once laid her head, I’d nearly lost it.
I nearly lost it for a second time as I was pulling into town and my son’s ringtone filled my ear. When I’d answered, Ford had told me that someone had shot Pace.
Now I was marching straight into the emergency room as if I owned the place. As if I had every right to be there.
I looked down the hallway, first one way, then the other, and then spotted my son at the end of it talking to another officer.
Justice, my good friend’s son.
I walked straight up to them and said, “How is he?”
Justice and Ford’s eyes both turned to me.
“Shot in the chest, right underneath his collarbone. He would’ve been fine, perfectly in and out, but a bullet fragment sheared off of the bullet and lodged deeper in his chest. When he moved, the bullet fragment nicked his lung and it collapsed. He…”
A commotion on the other side of the double doors we were standing on had us all three looking in the direction of the yelling.
Justice had his hand on the handle opening the door when a series of loud thuds filled the air, followed shortly by an ‘oh fuck.’
When we rounded the corner, it was to find an officer on his face in the hallway, blood smearing the floor all around him. A nurse was on her knees beside the officer, and Justice freaked.
“Runner, where the fuck is Jackson?” Justice barked.
Runner, who I assumed was the cop on the floor, groaned and turned over.
“He just took a metal fuckin’ clipboard to the face,” the nurse said. “He’s not going to be able to talk right now. But make yourselves useful and follow that combative patient that just ran down the hallway…”
“His gun is gone,” I said, feeling sick to my stomach.
All of us got quiet for a few long seconds, then Ford was running.
He didn’t get there in time.
None of us did before the bullets started sounding.
Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang.
I rounded the corn
er in time to come to a skidding halt.
I’ll never forget the feeling.
I was running toward the shooter who had a handgun in both hands.
In one hand, he was aiming the gun down the hallway, and in the other, he was aiming it into the room, firing at the same time.
There were bodies on the floor all around him.
One of those bodies—Pace—was crawling toward a mass in the corner of the room.
Army crawling through his own blood, as a matter of fact, as the shooter had a showdown with the security guard at the other end of the hallway from where he was standing.
He was bleeding from his head. The gauze that was taped to his chest was soaked through with blood, and he looked so fucked up that I was honestly surprised that he was able to move.
But knowing that Pace wouldn’t be moving right now if that lump in the corner wasn’t important to him, I knew that it was my daughter under there.
I could also see shattered glass and exploded plaster behind the lump, indicating that shots had hit extremely close to her at one point in time.
And that lump wasn’t moving.
Not even a little bit.
Justice and Ford pulled their guns.
But before either of them—or me for that matter—could get a shot off, another one rang out.
This one coming from the man that had crawled across the floor to my daughter and retrieved his service pistol from where she’d gathered it up to her along with Pace’s prosthetics, uniform shirt and Kevlar vest.
Jackson went down with a bullet to the shoulder.
Pace fell to the floor, no longer physically capable of holding his head up, and my daughter’s head finally popped up from where she was slumped over.
I’ll never forget the scream that left her throat, either.
Chapter 21
Marriage tip #45—if your wife is folding laundry, don’t ask her when dinner will be ready.
-Unread text from Oakley to Pace
Oakley
“Pace,” I whispered against Pace’s hand. “Wake up, baby.”
He’d been out for a week and three days.
A week and three days of nothing but stillness.
A week and three days of prayers.
A week and three days of terror, uncertainty, and stillness from the man that never sat still, no matter what.
I'd Rather Not Page 19
