The Lawman's Last Stand

by Vickie Taylor

  “Is there any chance this has nothing to do with us?” she asked. “That it’s about Margo’s case?”

  He wished he could have said yes, but it would have been a lie. “If Margo thought there was even the slightest chance something she was working on would put her family in danger, she’d have ordered protection at the house. And she wouldn’t have let the kids within a hundred miles of there.”

  Gigi turned back to the window, and his heart ached for her. Ached for them both.

  “I told you this would happen,” she said. “That they’d find me and someone would get hurt.”

  She turned to him and the glacial facade she’d put on broke, shifted in her tear-shimmered eyes. “You should have listened to me.”

  Shane flexed numb fingers on the steering wheel. “Yeah, I should have listened.”

  The next breath she inhaled was as ragged as a war-torn flag, riddled with holes, frayed and burned around the edges. Still, she drew her shoulders up—his proud little soldier. “Then listen now. I won’t be responsible for any more deaths. When we get to the hospital, I’m leaving.”

  “Like hell,” Shane growled. He whipped the Honda onto the shoulder of the highway. A chorus of horns sounded from behind them as cars swerved around. Turbulence from an eighteen-wheeler passing too close rocked the sedan.

  Shane braced one hand on the headrest behind her, the other on the dashboard in front of her, then leaned across the seat toward Gigi. “You’re not running out on this—on me—now. You’re right. What happened to Bill is my fault. I’ve managed to hurt the only people I ever thought of as family. It’s damn well not going to be for nothing. I’m going to nail the freaking cretin responsible for this, and I need you to do it.”

  “How, Shane? You don’t even know who you’re looking for. You don’t even know where to start.”

  “No, but you do. No way is some bad guy going to all this trouble to get rid of you if you don’t have anything on him. Something you saw or heard that night is important—even if you don’t know it. We just have to figure out what.”

  She shook her head, her brow crumpling in confusion. “But how?”

  “By going over the details. Every sight, every sound, every smell you can remember from that night. But that’s going to take time, and right now I don’t have time. I have to get to the hospital. I have to see Bill, and I have to know you won’t bolt the first time I turn my back to you.”

  Indecision warred in her expression—fear and compassion, guilt and tenacity. A diesel tanker rumbled by leaving the air acrid with exhaust. Determined calm settled on Gigi’s face in its wake. “I won’t bolt—yet. But so help me, Shane. You’d better know what you’re doing.”

  He should have felt relief—he’d gotten what he wanted. She’d capitulated. Instead he just felt empty.

  “Don’t worry. I know exactly what I’m doing.”

  He should. He’d had plenty of practice in revenge. It seemed like only yesterday that he’d brought his last quest for vengeance to an end. But not before it had consumed eighteen months of his life. Now he was starting another crusade. This time he wouldn’t fool himself into mistaking revenge for redemption. He wouldn’t hope that once he’d had his reprisal against Bill’s attacker he would feel whole again; he’d just hope there was enough left of his soul to feel at all.

  Ten minutes later, his defensive walls firmly back in place, he slammed the car door in the parking lot of Phoenix’s University Hospital. “Have you got the Taurus?” he asked.

  “In my purse,” Gigi called, climbing out the other side of the car. She looked back. “What about Oliver?”

  Shane whistled the dog out of the car and hustled toward the hospital in long strides, listening for Gigi’s hurried step behind him to be sure she was close.

  Near the base of the white marble steps that led inside the building, a hedgerow cast a line of shade on a small grassy area. Shane commanded, “Down,” and Oliver obeyed. But as he stepped away, the dog let out a frantic whine. One look at the dog told him he thought he was being abandoned again.

  Impatient to get inside and see about Bill, Shane hesitated only a second. It would have to be enough. His hand lingered on the cur’s scratchy-coated head. “I’ll be back for you boy. I promise,” he said none too smoothly, then walked away, Gigi on his heels.

  At the end of a narrow hall smelling of floor wax and suffering, a tall, thin man with close-cropped light-brown hair and wire-rimmed glasses slumped against a wall, his hands in his pockets. Shane recognized him even before the man raised his head. “Ronnie? How is he?”

  Bill Maitland’s son raised a devastated gaze to Shane’s. Dreading the answer, and Ronnie’s reaction to his presence, Shane hung back, out of striking distance.

  Ronnie had been seventeen and obviously resentful the first time Bill had brought Shane home for dinner. Not that he blamed the kid—he’d intruded on the time and attention of Ronnie’s parents. By the time Shane was spending whole weekends at the Maitlands’, coming to blows was inevitable. One Saturday, when Bill and Margo went on an impromptu excursion to the movies, Ronnie popped Shane in the jaw hard enough to rock him back on his heels. Shane barely pulled his own punch in time.

  He could have pounded Ronnie Maitland, but he didn’t. He was supposed to be older, wiser. Ronnie was eighteen then, but just out of high school. Shane was a sophomore in college. Age and size had not proved to be the biggest reasons he’d held his temper in check, though.

  Shane had looked at Ronnie and in that instant seen the defiant chin he’d inherited from his mother and the deep-pocketed eyes he’d inherited from his father. Ronnie was Bill and Margo’s son, their blood, not him. Shane would never usurp his place in their lives. He had no business trying.

  Since that time, he’d carefully maintained just that little bit of distance from the Maitlands, no matter how they’d tried to draw him into their family goings-on. He held himself apart from them so he would remember who was blood, and who was not.

  This morning, it wasn’t Shane’s deference to Ronnie’s position as family that kept Shane across the hall from him as he talked. It was guilt so burdensome it bordered on shame.

  “He’s in surgery,” Ronnie answered. “They had to wait until they got him stabilized before they could even try to take the bullet out. I don’t know much else.”

  “Were you there when it happened? Did you see who shot him?”

  “No. He was alone. I came by to pick him up—we were all going to the movies, him and Rhonda and the kids and me—” Ronnie’s voice cracked.

  “Where is your family now?” Shane asked impatiently. He felt Ronnie’s pain as well as he felt his own, but he had to make sure no more Maitlands died today. Check that. He had to make sure no Maitlands at all died today. Bill wasn’t dead. Not yet.

  Ronnie raised his head, his gaze unsteady. “Why?”

  “You need to get some uniformed officers on them.”

  “Already done. Mom ordered it by phone from the airplane. She’s on her way back.” His voice didn’t crack then. It was solid. Deadly hard. “What’s going on here, Hightower? What do you know about this?”

  Shane drew up his back, taking a deep breath. He couldn’t tell Ron everything, but he wasn’t a man to shy from his responsibility. “Someone was looking for me, I think. Bill had been trying to help me get in touch with your Mom.”

  “Dammit, Shane!” Ronnie exploded, glaring momentarily at Gigi again, “You involved my father in one of your—”

  At that moment, a man wearing pea-green medical scrubs and a complexion that didn’t look much healthier pushed open a door and padded toward them with little sterile paper covers over his shoes muffling the sound of his footsteps. “Mr. Maitland,” he asked, looking from Shane to Ronnie.

  Ronnie stepped forward. Shane deferred, but didn’t back off. He couldn’t step away without hearing what the doctor had to say. His heart pounded and his throat went dry in the second it took the doctor to speak.

&n
bsp; “Your father came through the surgery without complications, Mr. Maitland. We repaired the damage from the bullet, but we’re concerned about the degree of internal bleeding. He’s stable for now. The next twenty-four hours should tell us more.”

  Shane backed away silently. His throat was still parched and his stomach boiled like an evil cauldron. Bill was stable—but he wasn’t out of the woods. That was all he needed to know. These few minutes while Ronnie got the details from the doctor would likely be Shane’s only chance to see Bill, and he wasn’t going to miss it.

  A uniformed guard leaned on the counter around the nurse’s duty station. Shane swore.

  Gigi took a deep breath. “You stay out of sight. I’ll distract them.”

  “No. You stay with me.”

  “No one knows we’re here. It’s safe. But I can only give you a minute.”

  He knew he shouldn’t do it. He had to look out for Gigi.

  But he also had to see Bill. He nodded tersely. “Just one minute.”

  As he stepped into the doorway, Gigi moved down the hall, spinning in circles and looking lost. “Oh, my. This doesn’t look like the right ward.”

  The guard at the desk straightened.

  Gigi stroked his arm. “Maybe you could help me. I seem to be lost.”

  Shane grinned. It was the guard who was lost. She had him hooked. A minute later, he and the duty nurse both were pointing and waving and giving directions. Shane slipped around the corner.

  Inside Bill’s room, Shane stared in horror at the withered figure lying still on the bed. He’d expected the tubes dripping lord-knew-what into his system and the hissing ventilator and beeping monitors, but he hadn’t expected—couldn’t conceive of—Bill’s deathly stillness and quiet.

  Bill Maitland had an infectious passion for life. Bill had a way of making everything around him bigger, brighter, clearer—a trait he shared with his wife of thirty-one years, Margo. In that way, they were both like older versions of Gigi.

  At least he had been until today. The alabaster-skinned man on the bed with a tube in his nose and another in his throat bore little resemblance to the friend Shane knew.

  Seeing him like that, there was only one thing to do. In a gesture as foreign to him as picking out a Mother’s Day card, he reached out and took Bill’s hand. He rested his fingers on the man’s palm. Shocked at the cool, dried-leather feel of his skin, Shane wrapped the man’s fingers around his own. In a voice as rough as broken glass, he told Bill to hang on. He wasn’t ready to let go. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

  Looking at his friend, lying so limp, Shane wrestled with a sense of shame as powerful as any he’d felt. And he’d felt a lot in his life.

  He’d been foolish—selfish—to think of Bill as family. He didn’t deserve a family. He had come into life alone and that was how he would leave it. The best he could hope for was to not leave too much wreckage in his wake as he passed through it.

  A flood of emotion filled his passages until he had to open his mouth to draw in a noisy breath.

  He felt as raw as an exposed nerve. Outside in the hallway he heard Gigi chattering nervously with the nurse and the guard. She was getting louder, warning him, he thought.

  “I have to go, Bill.” He hoped his friend could hear him, would know he had come. “I’m sorry.”

  He squeezed his friend’s hand one last time, then let it fall back on the bed, the sight haunting him as he slipped out of the room.

  Three steps down the hall he stopped, wincing and wishing he’d turned the other direction down the passageway. A man built like a linebacker—but showing the effects of some forty-five years of gravity on what had once been an impressive bulk—strode purposely down the hall, shrugging off a brown suit coat and loosening his tie as he walked.

  Shane stopped, holding Gigi back by extending his arm out beside him. “Hugh Fitzsimmons,” he said.

  “Your boss?”

  He never answered. Fitz bore down on them before he had a chance. “Well, well, that was easy. I thought you were going to make me chase you all over the state before I caught up with you.”

  Shane ignored the barb. “Hey, Fitz. How are the kids?”

  Fitzsimmons tugged at his tie, the knot already hanging three buttons down his shirtfront. “They’re teenagers, how do you think they are? They’re driving me crazy. And don’t make nice. You’re hip deep in trouble with me, Hightower.”

  “What are you doing here, Fitz?” Shane asked wearily.

  “Bill Maitland gets shot a few days after you go missing from Utah in a blaze of gunfire and you don’t think I know you have something to do with it? I figured you’d show up here. I just didn’t know it would be so quick.” He shot a glance at Gigi. “This the veterinarian who’s missing from up there, too? There’s a whole town pretty upset about the two of you taking off without a word. Some big-shot corporate type from L.A. named Randall has been calling my office every day, wanting to know what’s going on.”

  So Eric was looking for him. Looking for Gigi, most likely. Mariah would be worried.

  Shane decided to avoid the issues of Utah and Gigi altogether, if he could. “What do you know about what happened to Bill?”

  “I know he took two in the gut, close range.”

  Shane blanched at Fitz’s lack of tact.

  “What do you know about it?” Fitz finished.

  He glanced sideways at Gigi, saw the worry on her face, the tension in her shoulders. He’d promised only to talk to Margo. But dammit, Fitz was going to demand an explanation. His boss was like a bulldog when he got his teeth in a juicy bone like this. But he’d given his word…

  Shane squared his shoulders. “Nothing.”

  Fitz’s face darkened. “Bull.”

  Shane hesitated, feeling the noose tighten. “I’ll fill you in later.” He tugged on Gigi’s elbow, urging her to make a quick escape with him.

  Fitz stopped them both with a booming voice. “You’ll fill me in now, agent, or this pitiful performance you call a career is going to be over before you know it.”

  Slowly Shane turned, feeling like the clock had just struck midnight even though it was just midday. His time was up.

  He finally had to decide once and for all between Shane Hightower the DEA agent and Shane Hightower the man. The choice was easier than he’d expected. Because enforcing the law wasn’t about badges or careers. It was about helping people and standing up for what was right.

  With Gigi, he had a chance to do just that. To keep his promise. To make one last stand.

  Without a moment’s regret, he reached to his back pocket and drew out the leather wallet that had held his badge for the past eight years. Dropping it at Fitz’s feet was easier than he expected. Gigi and Fitz looked down in disbelief. Shane held his gaze level. “This pitiful performance is over now.”

  Fitz’s face squished up so that the bridge of his nose wrinkled. “Then I believe you owe me more than a badge.”

  Anger rose like a hot air balloon in Shane’s chest. He knew what Fitz wanted. And he knew it was a lousy time to give it up. Unfortunately, he also knew he had no choice. His weapon was DEA issue.

  He pulled the pistol out roughly, checked the load and the safety and shoved it at Fitz. His boss’s hands remained at his sides.

  “You sure you want to do this?” Fitz asked in a voice softer than it should have been. As if he didn’t want to hear the answer he knew would be coming.

  Shane physically lifted Fitz’s hand and slapped the gun into his palm. “I’ve been sure for nearly two years. I just haven’t had the guts to do anything about it.”

  As he walked away, it seemed like two decades, two lifetimes. His step was unusually light, as if he’d sloughed more than just the weight of his badge and his gun. He’d sloughed a responsibility he could no longer bear.

  Gigi stepped in front of him as they waited for the elevator, looking shell-shocked. “Are you all right?”

  “Do you still have the revolver in your bag?”
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  She nodded.

  “Then I’m fine.”

  She looked about ready to rebel—he knew that wasn’t answer enough to satisfy her—when a man stepped out of a doorway behind them. Shane automatically reached for the gun that wasn’t there anymore in the moment before he recognized Ronnie.

  Ronnie looked from Shane to Gigi. “You’re leaving?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You saw him already?”

  Shane felt a prick of guilt at sneaking in to see Bill before Bill’s own son had visited him. But what was a pinprick to the open wounds his other faults had left. “Yeah.”

  Surprisingly, Ronnie’s eyes held no anger. Or at least if they did, it couldn’t be seen through the sheen of weariness on Ronnie’s eyes. “Good.” He swallowed hard. “Dad would want you to stop in before you left.”

  Shane could only nod, a sheen of his own rising behind his eyes. He took a step past Ron, but Ron stopped him with a hand on his arm.

  “Tell me what she needs to know to help you,” he said firmly.

  “What?” Shane asked.

  “Mom will be here soon. Tell me what to tell her.”

  Ronnie was offering to help, after what Shane had done? Shane shook his head. “No. She’ll have enough on her mind.”

  “She’ll need something to keep her busy while she waits, or she’ll go crazy.” Ron smiled weakly. “Besides, Mom’ll have both our butts if you walk out of here like this. So tell me.”

  Troubled, Shane looked to Gigi. He saw her mind turn the possibilities. Finally, she nodded.

  “Tell Margo—if she is able—to look into a double homicide in New York some three years ago. A prominent businessman and an assistant district attorney. I need to know who was on the suspect list.”

  Ronnie nodded brusquely, as if glad to have something to do besides wait.

  Shane started to leave, then stopped. “And Ron, tell her to be careful. There may be someone on the inside in this.”

  “You be careful, too.” He looked back and forth from Gigi to Shane. “Both of you.”

  He put out his hand. Shane held his own back only a second, then reached out and clasped the hand of his one-time rival for Bill and Margo’s attention in his own. Ronnie looked at him, his eyes hurting, but warm and intelligent. Caring and not at all grudging.