Читать книгу Shotgun Honeymoon - Terese Ramin - Страница 10

Winslow, Arizona

July 17. Thirteen years ago

The worst nights didn’t start with a body on the ground. They began with a dispute that could end with a body on the ground, possibly his.

Russ Levoie, nineteen, and only three months out of the police academy, had known this going in. He’d seen it up close and personal on the Havasupai reservation where he’d grown up—not in his own family, but in too many of the other families. Poverty begat fear begat the need to numb it begat drinking—or some other form of self-medication—begat dispute begat violence. And the cycle didn’t alter with the scenery, it simply changed addresses. Nevertheless, here he was, headed into a trailer park on his own on a “see the woman” domestic-violence call because no one else was close enough to take it with him. And hot damn, didn’t that just make him feel peachy-safe.

On the other hand, if he’d really meant to feel safe for the rest of his life, he’d have chosen another line of work. But this was all he ever remembered wanting to do. Adrenaline pumping, he parked his car, radioed in his position, alighted and slid his nightstick into place on his left hip before unsnapping the holster flap on his right.

Across the dusty street, he saw a white curtain flutter back into place. The neighbor that had called in, he guessed, peeking out to see who’d arrived. He headed in that direction. The door was cracked open and a hand beckoned him through the chicken-scratch front yard. “They’ve stopped now,” the woman behind the screen said. Her voice was hushed as though in deference to the dusk. She carried a cigarette to her lips, lit it, inhaled and blew smoke from the corner of her mouth back into her trailer, away from Russ. Crossed an arm beneath her flat chest and propped her other elbow on it. The hand that held the cigarette to her mouth trembled.

Behind her, almost hidden in the shadows, was one of the young waitresses from the diner he frequented almost every evening before he went on duty. Janina. Young, pretty, everyday made astounding by a pair of huge heavily fringed mahogany eyes and a thick, roughly halved mane of hair the midnight side of brown. His heart and libido did the same damn telltale hop-skip-and-pucker it’d done any time he’d wound up in her vicinity lately. Damn because at maybe sixteen and still in high school Janina was jailbait. Still she was a cute little thing. He hoped her future would be more attractive than her present appeared to be.

“I don’t get involved,” Janina’s mother recalled his attention by saying, “but this time it’s bad, worse’n I ever heard. Hadda call, y’know? Lotta bangin’ around—someone gettin’ hit, like. Body hittin’ walls, furniture bustin’ ’n all. Then I hear her scream and she runs out the house all bloody. Her brother runs out after, drags her back in. Their old man’s waitin’ for ’em in the door, hits her good in the stomach ’afore he and the boy throw her inside an’ it sounds like they start goin’ on her again.”

Russ flicked a glance at the teenager who nodded slightly in frightened confirmation. Russ’s mouth thinned. Nobody’s kid should have to live in a place like this.

No woman of any age should have to live here, either.

Once again his attention stuttered. His libido loosed its hold on him, turned over to his youthful heart. One regulation-clad foot slid him protectively nearer to the screened door and the young woman inside the trailer. Her eyes flared at the movement, lit with something akin to…

Welcome, worship, recognition…

Skittishness.

And more insight than he wanted her to possess.

Russ felt his Adam’s apple bob, his sliding foot stammer and slip back where it belonged: under his control, no longer betraying him.

Or his seditious heart.

Deliberately he returned his attention to the mother. She put the cigarette between her lips and dragged hard. “Little while later I hear this sound, pop-pop, like that. Then it comes again, pop-pop, an’ I see the old man run out the door lookin’ like he don’t believe what happened. I see he’s been shot, ’cuz he’s bleedin’ down the side of his head somethin’ fierce. Don’t slow ’im down none, though. He just gets in that old car ’a theirs an’ takes off. All the while I hear this pop-pop-pop-pop goin’ off over there. Then it went all quiet. That’s when I called you.”

The demon of Russ’s temper battered his temples, demanding release from the cage in which he kept it. He short-chained it to the floor. “You waited until after to call?”

The woman nodded. “Seemed safest.” She cast a suddenly wise glance over Russ that seemed to take in his youth and his lack of backup. “Fer ever’body.”

Except the woman in that trailer, he wanted to snap at her. But didn’t. Instead he asked, “There was only the three of them in there?”

She nodded again. “Far as I can tell. Three of ’em’s all there ever is—’cept when they bring in paid company t’bang on that girl. Wasn’t none of that today though.”

“And you haven’t heard anything more from inside?”

“Nope.”

“Do you know their names?”

The woman shrugged. “Ever’body knows ’em ’roun’ here. Girl’s kinda the local hooker. Her daddy an’ her brother bring guys to her. Don’t think she likes it none, but she ain’t got much choice. Name’s Maddie Thorn, her brother’s Harold, daddy’s Charlie—”

“Damn.” At Maddie’s name, Russ yanked his handie-talkie off his shoulder and radioed for help, crossed the street and unholstered his gun before crashing through his former high-school classmate’s—his best friend’s, his prom date’s—front door.

And damn her to hell for not asking him for help.

As Russ crossed the narrow street, Janina Gálvez flew across the room to lift her absent father’s ever-loaded Winchester down from its rack on the wall. Weapon in hand, oblivious to her mother’s weak protests, she fled out the far door to carefully work her way around the edge of the trailer.

She wasn’t stupid. She kept to the shadows behind the propane tank and beneath the awnings as much as possible. She knew how to handle herself and her daddy’s gun and she really couldn’t let that boy-cop go out there alone. She just couldn’t. If anything happened to him, she wasn’t sure she could bear it. Not when she’d only just made up her mind three weeks ago that the instant she could, she intended to marry one rookie police officer named Russ Levoie, the most wonderfully gorgeous hero she’d ever laid eyes on. And if he got himself killed trying to save Maddie Thorn again, why she’d…

Janina swallowed. She didn’t know what she’d do. The only thing she was certain of was that she intended to save the taciturn hero from himself for herself.

Period.