Читать книгу Emergency Reunion - Sandra Orchard - Страница 11

TWO

“What am I going to do with you?” Sherri’s boss rested his hip on the corner of his cluttered desk. “Every time I turn around you’re getting into trouble.”

The rain that had started soon after Eddie’s attack now pelted the office window as fast and furiously as her heart pinging her ribs. The ambulance base was a three-strike operation. Not that any of the incidents that had happened to her lately could really be called strikes, no matter how much her boss liked to intimate as much. Yes, she’d left the ambulance unlocked, but not one of their paramedics would have thought twice about leaving it unlocked in that neighborhood. “I’m sorry, sir,” she said.

“I’d like you to take a few days off.”

“That’s not necessary.” The last thing she wanted was free time. The busier she kept, the less time she had to think. To relive her dead partner’s shooting. She swallowed and caught herself wincing at the pain still plaguing her throat courtesy of Eddie’s stranglehold. “I’m fine. Really.” Or she would be if she could shut out the memory of Cole’s concerned gaze searching hers and his husky declaration that he was making her problem his problem.

“You may be fine,” her boss scolded, “but the station’s morale has hit rock bottom. One more incident like this and no one’s going to want to work with you. You know what they call you?”

“Yes, sir.” She lifted her chin. Princess Dark Cloud was actually a step up from what they used to call her—Ice Queen.

He studied her in silence for an unnervingly long moment. “Your partner Dan has convinced one of the sheriff’s deputies that the incidents haven’t been merely unlucky coincidences. Is that what you think?”

Sherri pressed her sweaty palms against her navy blue slacks, debating her response. Her boss wouldn’t want to hear what she really thought. But she heard the way her fellow officers still whispered about the shooting when they thought she wasn’t around. They blamed her for letting Luke die. They didn’t want her here and would do just about anything to drive her to quit. She was sure of it. But she was just as sure that God had let her survive for a reason.

She curled her fingers into fists. “I don’t know what to think, sir. But I assure you I can handle whatever curveballs are thrown at me.” Because there was no way she’d let Luke down a second time.

“Unfortunately, some of those curveballs are turning into boomerangs that are beating us upside the head.”

Tension hummed along her nerves. “Pardon me?”

“Reinhart, the widower whose wife died of a heart attack last month, is demanding an inquest. Claims your refusal to come up to his apartment without a police escort cost too many minutes. Minutes that could’ve saved his wife.”

“Sir, I’m deeply sorry for his loss, but the building was flagged for multiple drug-related incidents. I followed protocol.”

“Yes,” he said, but didn’t sound pleased about it. No doubt thinking if it hadn’t been her in that ambulance, he wouldn’t be facing an inquest.

“Any paramedic would have done the same. Did Dan say otherwise?” The men liked to be cowboys, but she’d thought they’d learned their lesson after what had happened to Luke. If she and Luke had followed protocol that morning, he might still be alive. Her chest tightened at thoughts of other choices that might have kept him alive.

Her boss shrugged. “Not in so many words.”

A rap on the door made her jump, but not nearly as fitfully as her insides trampolined when Cole stepped into view.

His gaze narrowed in on her cheek and his eyes darkened.

She finger-combed her hair over the butterfly bandage binding the cut his brother had given her.

“You must be Donovan.” Her boss beckoned Cole in. “You can use my office to question Sherri. Her shift is covered, so take as long as you need.”

Sherri nodded, straining to appear cooperative when everything inside her wanted to bolt.

He stepped through the door, and the room seemed to shrink, much like the crisply ironed shirt straining at his muscular shoulders.

She looked away, not wanting to notice how good he looked in a uniform. Not wanting to imagine that concern for her had etched those creases into his brow.

He might say her welfare came first, but she’d stopped believing in fairy tales long ago. Never mind how princelike he’d seemed today. He’d do the same for any innocent person. He was here to question her about the incidents, not to get reacquainted.

The sooner she told him what he wanted to know, the sooner he’d be on his way.

As her boss stepped out of the room, she sank into a chair and grasped for a light tone. “You’re his dream come true. If everything that’s happened goes on the record, he’ll claim I should be put on administrative leave for my own safety until you can figure out who’s behind everything.”

“Sounds like a smart move to me.”

“No,” she said firmly. “It’s not.”

His eyebrow arched curiously. “Why’s that?”

She tapped her fingers to her lips, fighting to rein in her galloping pulse. She couldn’t tell him that her days off were worse. That she’d rather fight off a drug-crazed kid than— She cut off the thought and casually slid her fingers from her mouth to tame an invisible strand of wayward hair. “Because I need every shift I can get if I’m going to qualify for the next flight medic job that opens up,” she improvised with the same story she’d used on her parents to justify taking extra shifts. Once she got the flight medic job, things would get better. There wouldn’t be so many reminders.

Cole smiled, the corners of his eyes crinkling in that way that used to make her heart flutter.

She silently groaned at the realization that it still did.

“A flight medic, wow! I can’t help feeling a little proud that you took my advice.”

The warmth in his voice did funny things to her insides. That and the fact he remembered his murmured, “You’d make a good paramedic,” that day she’d treated his swollen knuckles.

“It’s good to see you doing so well.”

She pasted on a smile and nodded. “So what brings you back to Stalwart?” She glanced at his left hand, but his fingers were tucked out of sight. “You married? Come back to settle down?” Her cheeks heated. Why on earth had she asked him that?

His gaze darkened. “No, working law enforcement and marriage aren’t a good mix.”

“Hah,” she scoffed. “I have several happily married uncles and cousins who would loudly disagree.”

“Appearances can be deceptive.”

Resisting the urge to massage her bruised throat, she sat up straighter. Yeah, she knew all about keeping up appearances. “Then you’ll understand why I don’t want these incidents blown out of proportion. Because, between you and me, I’m pretty sure I’m just being hazed.”

“Hazed?” Cole’s eyes widened. “But you’ve already been on the job a couple of years. Haven’t you?”

“Almost three.” She pressed her lips together, wishing she’d kept her mouth shut. Hazing had seemed like an innocuous way to say her colleagues didn’t want to work with her.

Cole studied her too intently as he pulled a notepad and pencil from his shirt pocket. “How about you tell me what you remember about each incident?”

She exhaled, relieved that at least he hadn’t pressed for reasons for her hazing suspicions. “I’m not convinced they can be called incidents. Dan is overreacting. Nothing has happened to me that hasn’t happened to any other paramedic at one time or another.”

“Difference is they keep happening to you.”

Yeah, okay. There was that. “They were incidental things like being called to an address that didn’t exist or being propositioned by a half-doped patient who claimed he’d never called an ambulance.”

Cole flinched as if the thought of some creep pawing her made him feel sick.

“Nothing I couldn’t handle,” she stressed, trying not to squirm under the intensity of his troubled gaze. The reaction of the other paramedics, who’d slapped her on the back and complimented the Ice Queen for kneeing the loser in the groin, had been easier to handle. Ironically, their hazing probably had helped her tough it out when she’d felt like quitting as much as they wanted her to.

“When did the incidents start?”

“I can’t say for sure.” The whispering had started first. Luke’s death had been the tipping point for her colleagues. He’d been a good man, a true friend. And the only paramedic who hadn’t griped about teaming with her after she’d gotten her first partner fired for drinking on the job.

“You did the right thing,” he’d said the first time they’d driven to a call together. He hadn’t said what he was referring to. Hadn’t needed to. She wasn’t sure if he’d ever known how much those five little words had meant to her, because they’d never talked about it again.

“Sherri?”

She jerked her attention back to Cole. “Um.”

“Can you give me dates, addresses, descriptions?”

She stared at Cole, taking a moment to register his question. “I’d have to pull out my reports.”

“Are they handy?”

She rolled her eyes.

“Okay, we’ll worry about that later.”

No, there couldn’t be any later. With Eddie’s attack, her boss’s innuendoes and Cole’s unexpected charge back into her life, she was scarcely handling now. She pushed to her feet. “Just a second and I’ll grab them.” As she tugged the coil-bound book from the top shelf of her locker, her Bible toppled to the floor, spilling a month’s worth of church bulletins and inserts at her feet.

She quickly stuffed all but one back into her locker and rejoined Cole in her boss’s office. Handing Cole the pamphlet for Teen Challenge, a faith-based residential program that helped young men and women overcome addictions, she said, “I found this while I was grabbing my call journal and thought it might be something you’d want to look into for Eddie. Some of the men that are in the program spoke at our church last week. It’s turned their lives around. If you could convince Eddie to go—”

“I don’t want to send him away,” Cole said gruffly. He glanced at the pamphlet then slipped it into the back of his notebook. “I appreciate the suggestion,” he added, his tone gentler this time. “Helping him is the reason I came back to Stalwart.”

Of course it was. Sherri glanced away, focused on the world outside, blurred by the rain streaming down the window. In the months after he’d left, her imagination had read too much into his surprise parting gift, let alone the gratitude that had been in his eyes after that world-tilting hug. But when months turned into years, the truth eventually had sunk in. Not that it would matter anymore now. She couldn’t afford to let anyone get close.

“If I’d been here for Eddie in the first place...” Cole continued, but then shook his head and motioned to her call journal. “Tell me about the other incidents.”

She skimmed the entries and offered several examples, a few of which she had to admit that even she couldn’t see the guys pulling. She closed her journal. A lot of them may have been purely random occurrences.

Cole looked up from his notepad. “Is that all of them? Your partner mentioned your ambulance being hit.”

She frowned. “That couldn’t have been deliberate.”

“Where your safety is concerned, I don’t want to take any chances.”

She gulped at the determination blazing in his eyes. Did he mean her safety in particular?

Bothered that she cared one way or the other, she glanced away. She just wasn’t used to having an ally in her corner, at least not at work. Her family was great, but between the veteran firefighters and deputy-sheriff cousins and uncles, she preferred not to talk shop around them.

“Tell me about the accident,” Cole prodded.

“Oh, right. Um, it happened last week. A pickup sideswiped our ambulance as we turned on to County Road 15. There’s a police report on that one.”

“Did they arrest the driver?”

“No. The pickup was stolen. They found it abandoned down the road.”

“Did you get a look at the driver?”

For the first time she realized what Cole was really asking, had been trying to get at all along—could this guy have been his brother? This wasn’t about her at all. Not really.

“Sherri?”

“No, I didn’t.” She squinted at the window, picturing that night. “He was wearing a hoodie. That’s all I remember.” Was it any wonder the driver hadn’t seen her turning off the side road with his hood up like that? The collision couldn’t have been deliberate.

“Were you hurt?”

Cole’s anxious tone didn’t help her churning stomach, but she managed to shrug as if it was all in a day’s work.

He looked over his notes, his eyes as stormy as the sky. “Can you think of any reason why someone would target you?”

I let my partner die. She didn’t say it, just shrugged again.

“A patient or maybe a family member of a patient who blames you for a death?”

She gasped.

“I take it you’ve thought of someone?”

“Rolph Reinhart has demanded an inquest into his wife’s death due to delay in treatment. But he’s over eighty years old. I can’t see him doing any of—” she motioned to the notebook he was writing in “—those things.”

“I’ll talk to him. Can you think of anyone else?”

She racked her brain, flipped through her call journal. “No, no one.” For the most part she’d been fortunate with outcomes. Not like Luke who’d been threatened by a shooting victim’s fellow gang members when the victim hadn’t survived. They’d claimed Luke was tight with their rival gang and had deliberately let their man die.

“How about a jealous ex-boyfriend?”

She snorted. “No.” She’d broken up with a guy or two over the years, but none had ever caused trouble.

“A rival then? Maybe a woman who—?”

“No.”

He squinted at her, clearly perturbed by her certainty. “Your fellow paramedics are not behind these incidents, Sherri. Your partner was the one who urged me to investigate.”

“Could’ve been to throw off suspicions.”

“You obviously didn’t see his face as he treated that cut on your cheek.” Cole grazed his fingers across the hair she’d nudged over the bandage.

She inhaled reflexively.

Big mistake. With him so close, she could smell the spicy scent that instantly transported her back to her sophomore year—and the dreamy guy living next door.

“Why are you so convinced your coworkers are behind these incidents?”

She sprang from her chair and walked to the window, regretting that she’d said anything. Out on the street a woman fought to right her umbrella, turned inside out by the wind. Sherri could so relate. Dan’s protective outburst had been out of character, but maybe the guys had merely opted to try another tactic to derail her. “Do you think Dan would’ve asked the police to investigate if these incidents had happened to him or one of the other guys?”

Cole didn’t respond for a long time.

She sneaked a peek over her shoulder at him.

He, too, was watching the woman wrestling with her umbrella. “You think it’s because you’re a woman that they’re trying to scare you into quitting?”

She let out a humorless laugh. Close enough. “You’ve got to admit that it’s a lot more palatable than thinking some faceless stalker is after me.”

“But what if you’re wrong?”

* * *

The next night Sherri’s “faceless stalker” comment was still replaying in Cole’s head as the compulsion to stick close to the ambulance base and keep an eye on her warred with the need to visit his brother.

He didn’t blame Eddie for refusing to talk to him yesterday after the way he’d let Zeke manhandle him. He probably should’ve bailed him out of jail himself instead of leaving it to their father, but he’d hoped the brief taste of life behind bars would scare him straight.

Cole slid into his truck and stared at the drug rehab pamphlet Sherri had pressed on him yesterday, still a little stunned that she’d been more concerned with getting his brother help than fretting over her own situation. It had physically hurt to look at her black eye and the cut his brother had sliced in her cheek. The least he could do for her was get to the truth about the suspicious incidents on her shifts.

Reinhart was definitely out as a suspect. The man was on oxygen 24/7, but he had a son, a son Cole had yet to catch up with. As for Sherri’s suspicions of her colleagues, he hadn’t gotten the sense from any of the other paramedics that they resented her or had any other reason to haze her.

Then again, besides her partner, no one he’d interviewed had seemed concerned that the rash of incidents involving her was anything more than coincidence. Even her uncle, a sergeant in the department, hadn’t known about them until Cole mentioned them. Apparently, Sherri hadn’t breathed a word about the incidents to her family.

Cole tucked the pamphlet she’d shared into his glove box. He wasn’t surprised that her uncle couldn’t imagine anyone having a reason to deliberately target someone as caring as Sherri. Eddie certainly didn’t have one.

At least no reason that Cole knew of. But he didn’t really know his brother anymore. Which was what he’d come to town to change. Cole started his truck and headed toward the old family home. He’d let himself get sidetracked long enough.

As he turned on to their street, Cole’s palms started to sweat. He hadn’t faced his dad in seven years and wouldn’t today if he could avoid it. He parked his truck a few houses shy of the driveway so he could slip out the back if Dad made it an early night with whatever woman he was dating these days. He shrank back at sight of Sherri’s parents exiting the neighboring house. He waited until they’d locked up and driven off, then hurried past.

From the corner of his dad’s lot, Cole cut across the lawn, expecting to kick up clouds of dandelion fluff with every step. But under the forgiving cover of twilight, the place looked surprisingly tidy.

Maybe Eddie’s arrest had drummed some responsibility into Dad. The TV flicked on in the living room, and Dad settled on the couch. Alone. No date.

Cole clasped the porch stair rail. The green paint crumbled off in his hand and an odd sadness twisted in his chest. Painting the rails had been his and dad’s spring project for as long as he could remember. That and tinkering on the old Camaro.

Bypassing the porch for the moment, Cole rounded the corner of the house to peek in the garage. He rubbed a clear circle in the dingy window. The Camaro was still there. He wondered if Dad ever worked on it with Eddie.

Being the youngest, Eddie had always been more of a mama’s boy, which was probably why it’d almost killed Mom when he’d chosen to stay in Stalwart with Dad. Cole couldn’t blame Eddie for not wanting to leave his friends, but if he’d heard how Mom had cried herself to sleep every night, maybe he wouldn’t have minded making new friends.

The ones he had here sure hadn’t done him any favors.

At the sound of a bedroom window sliding open, Cole ducked behind the hedges that hugged the base of the house and the memory of a much younger Sherri playing hide and seek in his yard whispered through his mind. As an only child eager to join in their games, she’d helped bridge the wide age gap between him and his brother on lazy summer afternoons. A backpack thumped the dirt under the window. Then, clad in a black hoodie, Eddie perched on the window ledge of the darkened room.

Cole’s temper flared. Eddie wasn’t supposed to be out after dark—a too-little-too-late curfew had been imposed by Dad, who clearly wasn’t paying any better attention to what his youngest son was up to than he had before Eddie’s arrest. As his brother jumped to the ground, Cole resisted the urge to read Eddie the riot act here and now, opting instead to see where he headed.

Eddie darted behind the garage and re-emerged a second later pedaling his bike.

Cole waited until he’d turned onto the street and had gotten a few houses ahead before he jogged back to his truck. When Eddie reached the corner, Cole pulled his vehicle onto the street at a crawl. This could be the break he’d been hoping for. Eddie had refused to snitch on his drug sources, but something told him his little brother was about to lead him straight to them.

Eddie crossed street after street heading toward the west side of town, seemingly oblivious to Cole’s truck trailing a block behind him. Halfway up Belmont, Eddie ramped the curb and swerved to the back of a squat bungalow.

Parking in front of the playground a few houses shy of Eddie’s destination, Cole’s internal radar ratcheted to high alert. The neighborhood was one of the older ones in town. The postage-stamp lawns appeared neatly kept for the most part. But it didn’t take his brother showing up here to tell him something about the neighborhood wasn’t right. It was a Friday night, and the streetlights hadn’t kicked on; yet, there wasn’t a kid to be seen.

Cole quickly circled to the far end of the playground where soccer fields bordered the backs of the houses for the rest of the street. A discarded cold medicine package caught in the fence reinforced his suspicions that the guy Eddie came to see was a drug dealer. If he’d been driving his cruiser, he could’ve checked the system to see if they’d had any recent trouble in the area.

As he sprinted to the back of the house Eddie had targeted, the wail of a distant ambulance roused concerns for Sherri. But he couldn’t trail her ambulance, let alone do a thing to protect her until he got his brother out of here.

Peering past the detached garage between him and the house, Cole spotted Eddie picking his way up the back steps of the dimly lit bungalow. Its blinds were drawn, and Cole had no illusions the owner would welcome his arrival.

The wood of the dilapidated veranda groaned under Eddie’s weight.

Gripping the chain-link fence, Cole scrutinized the backyard for booby traps. Drug dealers could be sickly creative about safeguarding their privacy.

The veranda’s wooden floor suddenly cracked, and Eddie dropped out of sight, yelping like a whipped pup.

“Eddie?” Cole hissed.

A low groan rose from below the porch.

With one last visual sweep of the backyard, Cole vaulted over the fence. Monitoring the windows for signs of movement inside, he edged toward the house.

Eddie’s head bobbed above the splintered wood.

“What were you thinking?” Cole hissed, offering him a hand out.

Eddie startled at Cole’s hand in his face, but a burst of light from a nearby window got him moving. As he cleared the rotted floorboard, a pill bottle tumbled from his pocket.

Cole confiscated the drugs and stuffed them into his jeans pocket.

“Hey, that’s mine!”

“Only if you want to land yourself back in jail.”

At the scrape of the door’s dead bolt, Cole yanked Eddie into the shadow of a nearby bush. A second later the door cracked open.

From his vantage point, Cole couldn’t make out anything more than the guy was over six feet and had a pistol clamped in his fist.

He hovered in the doorway a long moment, his pistol aimed at the hole in the porch floor, then pulled the door shut again.

As the dead bolt clicked once more, Cole caught sight of Eddie’s bike propped against the side of the garage. No way had the man missed it. Cole dug his fingers into the fabric of Eddie’s hoodie. “We’ve got to get out of here, now.” Then, he’d worry about figuring out a way to shut this place down. One that wouldn’t land his brother in jail.

Or worse, on the wrong end of a vindictive drug dealer’s gun.

Eddie whirled the opposite direction. “My bike.”

Cole tightened his grip. “Forget the bike.” He hauled him across the driveway, scarcely giving him time to keep his feet under him, and plunged into the cover of the hedge edging the property.

Eddie slapped branches from his face. “What are you doing here?”

“Saving your hide. Now move.” He gritted his teeth to hold back a lecture. He intended to give it, but first he needed to put a good mile between Eddie and this place. Finding a sparse section, he shoved Eddie through the bushes into the next yard. “My truck’s at the park.”

The wailing ambulance he’d somehow stopped hearing blasted around the corner and braked at the foot of the driveway. At the sight of Sherri jumping from the passenger side, his heart lurched. He dug out his keys and slapped them into Eddie’s hand. “Wait for me in the truck.”

By the time Cole pushed back through the hedge, Dan and Sherri were rolling a gurney toward the drug dealer’s front door. “Wait!”

Motion-detector lights flicked on, exposing a suspicious mass in the branches of the tree in front of the house.

“Get down!”