K-9 Recovery

by Danica Winters

  She took his hands in hers and, removing them from her face, she kissed his open palm. “You are incredible.”

  “And so are you,” he said, his voice husky.

  “Let’s find this phone. Maybe it has something about Lily on it. Then we can focus on what we are going to do about us,” she said, though right now she knew exactly what she wanted to do with him and his body.

  “Yes,” he said, rolling up the truck’s window and turning off the ignition before getting out.

  She took the moment to readjust the holster inside the waistband of her pants. She always hated sitting in a car with them, but at least her gun was small and could go unnoticed and unseen.

  “You warm enough?” he asked, grabbing a pair of gloves from his door and slipping them on. “You need some gloves?” He motioned to the cubby in the door where another pair of large men’s gloves rested.

  “No, thanks,” she said, aware that her hands would be freezing if they were outside for any long period of time. She stuffed her hands in her coat pockets. “Hopefully we will be moving enough to stay warm and we will make quick work of getting this phone into our custody.”

  She looked over at the car. “Do you think it’s in there?” she asked, pointing at the window.

  He shrugged. “If it is, there’s nothing we can do without getting a warrant to do a search.”

  “Did you check the phone’s location again? Does it tell you exactly where we can find it?”

  He pinched his lips closed. “Unfortunately, it’s not pinpoint accurate. That being said, it’s going to be close. I’m thinking within five hundred yards of the pin, give or take some.”

  “Do you think you should call in some more deputies? Maybe they can help us look over the area?”

  He took out his phone. “I’ll text a couple of them. If they’re not busy, they can join us.”

  She totally understood. “Maybe they’re bored and would like to pursue a lead with us.”

  He laughed. “They might be. There weren’t many open calls.” He pointed toward his computer inside the pickup. He zipped up his jacket and pulled on his gloves. “On days like these, where there aren’t a lot of calls, I used to look for things like this to do. There are times when I miss being on patrol instead of mostly sitting behind a desk and filling out reports, but I don’t miss the slow days.”

  He reached down and took her hand in his.

  “Right now, I could use some slower days.” Their footfalls crunched in the snow.

  “I hear you there, but for what it’s worth, I’m glad all this brought me to you.”

  “I would have preferred different circumstances, maybe meeting you at a bar or something.” She leaned into him, touching his arm as they followed the footsteps that led from the car and toward a hiking trail. The snow cover was patchy, with swaths that had thawed and refrozen and areas where the powder had completely receded and patches of cottonwood leaves littered the ground.

  The single set of footprints that had led from the mess of footprints around the car soon disappeared and was consumed by the forest. Though they had a lead here, a solid lead to someone who very well could have known what happened to Catherine and Lily, something about the situation still felt strange, off in a way that Elle couldn’t quite put her finger on.

  They walked slowly, searching the edges of the trails for any signs of a discarded cell phone. If Steve had told Philip that they had gotten on their scents, it was more than possible that Philip had discarded the car and the cell phone at this access. It was doubtful that they were actually going to find Philip, but they would do the best they could with the information they had.

  The world smelled of biting cold, tall drying sweet grasses, rotting leaf litter, all mixed into the swirling odor of clean river water. Walking around a gentle bend in the trail, they came to the river.

  A man was sitting on the bank, his head down and his knees up. His arms were outstretched, palms together. He looked at odds with the world in only a black sweatshirt and jeans. She couldn’t see his face, but there were touches of gray in the brunette hair at his temples. His neck had a long scratch on the back that was still bleeding.

  “Hey,” Grant said, calling out to the man.

  The man jerked, and he looked up. His gaze moved from Grant to Elle. His eyes widened as Philip recognized her. “What in the hell are you doing here?”

  Philip reached behind his back and moved his hand under his sweatshirt to a bulge that Elle knew all too well was a gun. She hoped she was wrong; she hoped she didn’t have to do what she had been trained to do in a situation like this, but as he moved the cloth of his sweatshirt back, she saw the exposed black grip and the butt end of a Glock.

  Her hand dropped to her own gun, and in one swift movement she cleared her shirt, drew the weapon, aimed and fired. It all happened fast. A single motion. As the round left the gun, she saw the spray of black gunpowder. She’d never noticed that before with this gun. Was it a dirty round? What kind of ammo had she been using? It was whatever STEALTH had provided. They wouldn’t have used dirty rounds.

  And then she realized she needed to come back to the moment. She couldn’t stop shooting until the threat was completely neutralized.

  When a person was shot, they didn’t stop. Inertia and adrenaline could keep a person moving even if they received a fatal wound. Philip was proving to be the kind of target that she had trained for. She let her finger move forward on the trigger, letting it click to reset, and then she pulled slowly again. It was almost a surprise as the second round left the barrel. She wasn’t sure where she had hit Philip, but she had been aiming at center mass. In training, she was normally never more than a few centimeters off at this kind of range.

  She’d definitely hit him, but Philip pulled his gun. He took aim and she fired again, but as her finger pulled on the trigger, Grant rushed at her from her left and pushed her out of the way, his gun in hand. Shots rang out, but she wasn’t entirely sure who had done the shooting.

  Her Sig Sauer kicked out the hot brass, and it skittered beside her as her shoulder hit the ground.

  Blood. There was so much blood.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The ground was red around Philip where blood seeped deeper into the snow, melting it and diluting the blood further. The man had dropped the gun in his hand when he had collapsed, his muscles going limp in death. The side of his face was pressed into the ground, and his hands were opened at his sides.

  Elle was lying on her back in the snow, and he could make out the sounds of her erratic, amped breathing. He knew that feeling well thanks to the many fights he’d been in while working patrol. That adrenaline hit affected everything.

  At her side was a patch of red blood. She’d been hit. He’d been too slow to help her.

  It shouldn’t have gone anything like this.

  “Are you okay?” Grant asked. “Where does it hurt?”

  She was running her hands over her body, as though even she wasn’t sure where the bullet had torn through her. She had been hit—there was no question about the blood that was pooling around her.

  He wished this had all played out differently. If he had been paying attention to what he should have been paying attention to, Elle would have never gotten hurt.

  “Is he down?” She pointed in the direction of Philip.

  Grant stepped over to him and pressed his fingers against his neck, searching for the pulse. He found nothing. “He’s gone.”

  “That was not at all how I wanted that to go down,” she said.

  She moved to sit up, but as she did, he could tell the world swam around her and she was forced to lie back down in the snow. “I already called dispatch. The troops should be here soon. But it’s a bit of a drive for EMS to get here, so we’re going to have to keep you calm and your blood pressure low. I need to take care of that wound. Stop the bleedi
ng.” He pointed to her midsection. “Open your coat and lift up your shirt.”

  She moved to wave him off, but as she did, she grimaced in pain. Her adrenaline must have been starting to decrease and allowing the pain to set in. “I’m fine. Really,” she said, though he already knew better.

  “Do you have to be stubborn right now?”

  “Do you always have to try and get me naked?” she teased, closing her eyes as she laughed.

  He squatted down beside her and started to help unzip her jacket. The bullet had pierced through the jacket’s shell and the goose down, red with blood, was poking out.

  If only he had reacted quicker, he would have been the one to take the hit instead of her. At least she had been able to draw down on the target; she definitely moved faster than both him and the other man.

  It was easy to see she had spent thousands of hours training for a moment like that. Hell, from her reaction alone, he doubted that this was her first time in a life-threatening situation. Later, he’d have to ask her about it.

  No doubt, somewhere in her contracting past, there were literal skeletons. He didn’t judge her for any of it, but he didn’t envy her, either. Being in a situation like this, where a life was taken and more lives were still at risk, left long-term scars. And he didn’t mean the scars that would be left by any physical wounds.

  “I am going to open up your shirt. Is that okay?”

  She nodded. “I think I’m okay. It hurts but I’m going to make it.”

  She was talking to him, which was a good sign, but he had to see the damage for himself. He gently lifted up the hem of her shirt. On the left side of her abdomen was a dime-size hole. “I’m going to roll you slightly. Just tell me if I need to stop. Okay?”

  She bit her lip but nodded.

  As he moved her, he spotted a larger exit wound on her back where the bullet had passed through her body.

  He was surprised, given the velocity in the range of the round, it hadn’t hit him, as well. In a single shot, Philip could have had them both.

  “The good news is it looks like it went straight through. Hopefully it didn’t hit any major organs, but from where it’s located, I think it’s important that you don’t move and we try to keep you as still as possible.” He laid her back down, flat. Gently, he lowered her T-shirt and zipped her coat back up, trying to keep her as warm as he could.

  “How did the bleeding look?”

  “Actually, it looked pretty clean. The bleeding appears to just be oozing, but make sure to hold some pressure on the wound.” He stood up.

  “What are you doing?” she asked, putting her hands to her abdomen and pressing.

  “I’m going to go grab my medical kit. I’ll be right back. Don’t move.” There was a lump in his throat as he jogged back to his pickup and grabbed his red first aid kit. He could at least stop the bleeding and get her stabilized and ready for the EMS teams when they arrived.

  Yet he couldn’t help the nauseating feeling that he was the one who was responsible for all this happening. It had been his brilliant idea to come out to the middle of the woods, nowhere near emergency care, and then he’d ended up getting her shot.

  If he had only reacted faster. Pulled the second he saw Philip’s hand moving toward the gun. But he hadn’t been completely sure that the man was going for a gun. They hadn’t provoked him, but Grant should have known the shape under the man’s sweatshirt. He’d seen it a million times before, but his hope had run away with his good sense.

  He had promised himself and Elle that he would protect her, and now she was lying out there bleeding into the snow after having taken down a man. And for what? They hadn’t found Lily, and Philip had pulled the trigger before they got any answers.

  Her shooting had solidly been in self-defense and every jury would side with her, especially with him as her witness, but they would still have to sit through endless rounds of questioning and he would have to sit through IA questions and hearings before being cleared. This was going to take so much out of both of them, and all because he had chosen to go on a wild goose chase.

  No. He had just been doing his job to the best of his abilities. He was making choices based on the information they had been able to accumulate up to this point. Sometimes bad things happened, and in this case, inexcusably terrible things, but there was no going back and fixing his mistakes. He couldn’t focus on that right now; instead, he needed to focus on helping Elle in the only ways he could.

  As he made his way back to Elle, he found she had moved and was now sitting up next to Philip. She was still gripping her side. In her hand was a black phone he didn’t recognize. She was tapping away with one finger, and for a moment he wondered if that was in fact the cell phone they had been looking for. But if it was, how had she found it?

  “Elle, why are you sitting up?” he asked, looking at her back where the blood had stained her jacket and was oozing freely from the hole.

  She shook her head, ignoring his reprimand. “I found his phone.”

  “Philip’s? Where?”

  She shrugged as she looked back over her shoulder at him and gave him a guilty smile. “Well, it was ringing from his pocket.”

  “You and I both know you had no business disturbing the crime scene,” he said, walking over to her and opening up his first aid kit.

  He hated to admit it, but if he had been in her shoes, he would have probably done the same damned thing—procedure or not.

  “Business or not, I think you’d be interested to hear that it was Steve on the other end of the line.”

  He stopped and stared at her. “Did you answer it?”

  She nodded. “The number came up as restricted, and when I answered the guy Steve started talking. He said something about Lily, and then, ‘The senator changed his mind. He wants us to keep her safe.’ When I didn’t say anything, I think he got suspicious and he hung up.”

  “But you never spoke?” Grant asked, worried now that if Steve knew they were on the receiving end of that phone call, they could have found themselves in more danger than they were already in.

  “No.” She shook her head. “He didn’t know I was there, I promise.”

  “But he must know something was up with Philip.” His entire body clenched. “And if they were talking about the senator, they must be on his payroll. It’s going to be hard to prove in court, if we ever get them there and get Lily back, but I think the senator may have a whole lot more to do with his wife’s death than he alluded to.”

  “No kidding,” she said, clicking on the phone screen, but it had locked.

  Grant sat down beside her in the snow. “Here, let me get this QuikClot on you. I don’t want you losing any more blood. I can’t lose you.”

  She stopped working on the phone and looked over at him with a gaze he hadn’t seen her give him before. He could have expected hate, disgust or even disappointment after the situation he had gotten them into and the pain he had caused her, but instead she looked at him with what appeared to be love. Those eyes—those beautiful almond-shaped blue eyes—when she gave him that look, he was surprised the snow around them didn’t melt.

  “Lift your shirt. Let me take care of you.”

  She put down the phone and pulled up her jacket and her shirt, exposing the exit wound as he slipped on a pair of gloves. He packed the wound and taped down the gauze, then moved around to her front and repeated the treatment. The entire time, he could feel her staring at him, but he wasn’t sure why and he wasn’t sure he wanted to ask. If he asked and the look in her eyes wasn’t love, it would hurt. And he was already hurting because of the mistakes he had made when it came to her.

  As he put down the last piece of tape, he finally looked up at her as he took off his nitrile gloves and slipped them into his pocket to throw away later.

  “Grant,” she said, her voice soft.

  “Hmm?�
� His fingers moved over the tape one more time as if he was checking to make sure that it was firmly adhered, but in truth all he wanted to do was keep touching her. He needed to touch her skin, to know she was okay, to know she was going to make it through this.

  “Thank you,” she said, touching his face gently with her fingertips.

  “No. I’m so, so sorry.” His voice cracked with all his feelings, feelings he couldn’t make heads or tails of right now. “This happened because of me. If I’d just gotten the drop on him first. Or if we hadn’t walked up from behind him... Hell, maybe I should have just tried to take him down before he drew down on us. I screwed up, Elle, and you are hurt because of me.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t care about a stupid bullet wound. I’m telling you now, I’ve seen things like this happen before—this kind of wound—and I will be all right. If anything, at least I will have a cool story to tell at the bars on a Friday night,” she teased. “But really, this wasn’t your fault. From day one, actually from the day I put my hand on my first pistol, I knew this could happen. I knew the risks. I made the choices.”

  “But I put you in front of the round that hit you.”

  “Technically, you did try to push me out of the way. If you hadn’t, I would probably be in an entirely different situation right now. So, really, you saved my life.” She ran her thumb over his cheek as she looked into his eyes. “I owe you my life, Grant.”

  He was left speechless. All he could do was touch her hand with his and kiss her open palm. He pressed his face into her palm.

  “We need to focus, Grant. I can’t have you feeling bad. Seriously, we need to focus on Lily. When we get back, we can focus on us.”

  Though she was making a good point, he didn’t want to move out of her hand. He pulled back. “Yeah, Lily.” He ran his hands through his hair and down over the back of his neck as he stood up and away from her.

  “Do you think Philip did something to her?” She pointed to the scratch on Philip’s neck. “Do you think that was why he was sitting here, by the river?” Her gaze moved to Philip’s dead body and then out to the icy water.