Hard Rain (3 page)

“Doc?”

Amy looked at the plastic coated menu. “I’ll have a grilled cheese sandwich, please. Could you put a slice of tomato on it?”

Lurie nodded, noting it on her pad.

“On whole wheat if you have it.”

Lurie nodded again.

“And I’d prefer Swiss cheese instead of American.”

Lurie looked up at her.

“If you have it.”

“We have it.”

“And instead of fries, could I have extra coleslaw on the side? In a separate dish so the dressing doesn’t spread to the sandwich and make it soggy?”

“Not a problem. Anything else?” Lurie’s pencil tapped the pad.

“An extra pickle?”

Lurie was shaking her head as she took their orders into the kitchen.

“I can’t help it,” Amy said as she swiveled toward Jesse. “I love dill pickles.”

Jesse’s head tipped to the side as he looked at her, an amused smile on his face.

Amy sighed. “I know. High-maintenance.”

“Seems like a control issue to me.” Jesse sipped his coffee, amusement still lighting the usual dark cast of his eyes.

“Really?” Amy smiled. She picked up her own cup of tea. “Of course, you’re right.”

“Of course I am.” He teased her easily.

“A symptom of that whole physician-as-god complex.”

“Exactly what I was thinking.” He was so handsome when he smiled. His eyes softened. His mouth curved, became accessible.

Amy looked away. “That’s what brings ninety percent of us to medical school in the first place. Joke’s on us when we learn that nine times out of ten, things are out of our control.”

“That’s not just in the medical field, Doc. That’s life in general.”

Amy stirred her tea, smiled. “Still, it doesn’t seem to stop us from trying like hell.”

He surprised her by clinking his cup against hers.

“I upset Lurie, didn’t I?” Her smile faded.

“I think it was the extra pickle that broke her.”

She laughed softly, finding it easy to laugh with him. “She has a crush on you.”

“You trying to make me blush, Doc?”

“Is that possible?”

“We big, burly protectors of society have our sensitive sides.”

She liked seeing him smile. Not a polite smile, but one that relieved the flatness of his eyes and revealed warmth underneath.

“So…?” She angled a questioning gaze at him.

“So…what?”

Amy cocked her head toward Lurie at the far end of the counter. “So…” She aimed a pointed look at his hands, bare of rings. “I’m assuming you’re single if you’re going to flirt with pretty waitresses. If not, my illusion of a real-life Texas sheriff is going to be forever crushed.”

“Some might say my marital status is not exactly a pertinent issue here.”

“Is that a polite way of saying it’s none of my damn business?”

“In true Texas-sheriff fashion.”

She laughed, and he joined her. The scars stretched and faded. The pain that held his features tight eased. His laughter was like that of the boy she’d known, but then she’d heard a thousand similar laughs over the last fourteen years—across a room, on the street, in her dreams. For a moment, she was eighteen again and still believed all her desires would come true.

They were still laughing as Lurie arrived with their food. Amy saw the looks pass beneath the billed baseball caps of the men seated nearby, but she didn’t care. Right now, cows were lying flat in the fields and the rodents had burrowed for cover. Plywood strips were being fastened across windows and doors with three-inch nails. Generators were being checked, rugs rolled and pressed tight to doorjambs. Yet no one could ever be ready for what was to come. So for a few minutes at this counter, she would laugh with a man who bore the same name as a boy she had loved.

“Here you go.” Lurie set plates before them. Jesse’s “usual’’ was a king-size cheeseburger, a side of onion rings and a double chocolate shake. Lurie slipped a bottle of Tabasco sauce out of her apron pocket, put it beside his plate. Amy stopped smiling. She’d known only one other person in her lifetime who put hot sauce on his hamburger. She watched him unscrew the top, lift up the bun and splash the sauce on his burger. He re
placed the bun, brought the burger to his mouth and took a big bite. He glanced at her untouched plate. “Something wrong?” he asked, chewing.

“The hot sauce on your hamburger…” She didn’t know what she was trying to say.

“Heavenly.” He took another big bite. “Obviously one of those true Texan habits that hasn’t hit the West Coast yet.” He tipped his head. Amy looked around. At every station, a similar bottle of hot sauce stood beside the catsup bottle. “Of course, when it does, you Californians will claim you all started the trend and take the credit.”

Amy smiled wanly, feeling foolish. She looked down at her food, but her appetite was gone.

“So, you’re married?” she asked bluntly.

He seemed to have trouble swallowing. “No, I’m not. Your image of a true Texas sheriff may remain intact.” He picked up an onion ring. “And I, darlin’, am free to flirt with whomever I want.”

Jesse didn’t ask if she were married. He didn’t have to. Still, sitting beside her, he wondered if she’d ever dreamed the things he had in the years they’d been apart. Had she dreamed of them holding each other, kissing in the soft moonlight? Dreamed of their naked bodies…?

He leaned back, wiped his mouth and dropped the napkin onto his empty plate. “Excuse me.” He rose from the counter and headed to the rest room.

Amy watched him, too many questions still forming in her mind. Lurie came over and picked up Jesse’s plate. Amy turned to her, pushed her own plate toward
the edge of the counter. Lurie looked at the half-eaten sandwich as she stacked the plate atop the other. “Was everything okay?”

“Oh, yes, fine,” Amy assured her. “I’m just not terribly hungry.”

Lurie cocked a hip, balancing both plates in one hand as she gathered used napkins and Amy’s empty glass in the other. “I’ve been trying to get the sheriff to smile like that for two years.”

Amy looked at her, interested.

“Hell’s bells, half the single women in the county have been trying to get their claws into the good sheriff.”

“He doesn’t date?”

“Oh, he dates all right. Probably been through most of the single women in a twenty-mile radius and then some.”

“He’s charming…” Amy noted.

Lurie crossed her arms across her arresting bosom and gave a slow nod of agreement.

“But he doesn’t strike me as the playboy type,” Amy concluded.

Lurie leaned on the counter, settling in. “That’s exactly the problem, Doc. He’s a real gentleman and a wonderful date, but if things start heating up, getting too serious, he slows it down or calls it quits altogether. He refuses to go to the next level.”

“You and he…?”

Lurie nodded. “We dated. And he was upfront about what to expect from the first. He didn’t lead me on. He’ll let you know he enjoys your company and treats
you right, but if a woman is looking for the cozy cottage and the rest of the enchilada, she’s got the wrong man. Of course, like most woman, I thought I could change him.” She paused, studied her fingertips with their crescent moons. “I didn’t.” She met Amy’s gaze.

“A lot of men are afraid of commitment, settling down, Lurie.”

Lurie shook her head. “It’s different with Jesse. I can’t explain. It’s like he lives with a ghost. When we were dating, he’d look at me, but I sensed he was looking at someone else. Or for someone else. And no matter how hard he looked, he couldn’t find her.”

The waitress straightened. “At least, not yet.” She gave Amy a wink, swiveled and sauntered into the kitchen, her hips swaying beneath her tight black skirt.

Jesse returned. He stood beside her stool. “Lurie giving you some good gossip?” He threw several bills down on the counter.

“Just girl talk,” Amy answered as she slid off the stool.

“She’s a good gal,” Jesse said as they moved toward the door. He nodded good-bye to the other customers. “But believe about fifty percent of what she says.”

“How do you know she didn’t say the same about you?”

“She probably said believe only ten percent of what I say.”

“Actually, she said you were a straight shooter. She’s a big fan. Like most of the single women in the county.”

Their eyes met. “Is that what she said?”

“That and some.”

He slowly shook his head, laughing under his breath.

“You don’t agree?”

He reached across her to the door, so close she could feel his warmth, sense his strength.

“You’ll have me blushing yet, darlin’,” he said in a low voice that made Amy hold her breath. She stepped away, through the door, and exhaled.

The clouds were denser and darker. The winds that had come were rougher, quicker, their hard edges hitting a person dead on. Rain broke through the sky with a furor that laid the field grass flat.

“Wait here,” Jesse told Amy beneath the shelter of the diner’s metal awning. “I’ll get the Bronco and pick you up.”

He was gone before Amy could protest. She watched him weave his way among the other vehicles in the parking lot. The drop in barometric pressure could cause joints to swell, deepen aches from past injuries. If that was the case, there was no indication in Jesse’s movements.

When the Bronco pulled up in front of the diner, Amy hurried to meet it even as Jesse jumped out the driver’s side and was rounding the vehicle to open the door for her.

True Texas-sheriff fashion,
she thought as he swung open the door. She turned to thank him and found him close. She pushed back the hair the wind whipped across her face and gathered it in one hand. Her other hand clung to the side of the vehicle, steadying her while the wind and the rain and something equally el
emental and powerful seemed to push her toward this man.

Jesse stepped back. He shut the door on her as she climbed inside. Her face turned to his, its questioning stare now blurred by the rivulets of rain across the window. The breath he released was a long shudder as he rounded to the driver’s door.

Inside the vehicle, the dark sky and rain pounding hard on the roof created an intimacy, closing them off from the outside world.

“Jesse?”

He felt her hand on his forearm, a thousand longings in the feel of her fingertips alone. She’d said his name too softly and with too much question. He feared to turn and look into those blue-green eyes that he had dreamt about for fourteen years, afraid that if she asked, he would not lie. He would tell her the truth and damn the consequences.

He looked down at her small hand on his arm. The ripple of a scar on his own flesh returned him to his senses. If she asked, he could say he was not the Jesse Boone she had known fourteen years ago. Nor was she the young girl he’d taken in his arms and loved with every ounce of his soul. Too many years had passed, too much time and too many changes had come between them, conspired to keep them apart.

He raised his gaze to her. She searched his face.

A dispatcher’s voice over the radio interrupted.

“Fire reported in the old fertilizer warehouse over by the railroad station. Pickup truck traveling at high speed skidded off the highway. The truck was carry
ing kerosene and exploded on impact. County emergency vehicles en route.”

Jesse switched on the lights, the siren and punched the gas pedal.

Disaster had begun.

T
HEY SMELLED
the smoke before they saw it. One pumper truck was already on the scene. Another arrived. Six men jumped out and started unwinding the hose. The building, a two-story barn built before the newer fabricated steel structures came into favor, had been abandoned three years ago when the business closed down. Flames, fueled by the kerosene and the warehouse’s debris, raged through the lower floor.

Amy pulled out a vinyl poncho from the back of the van, grabbed her bag and moved through the rain toward the scene. Any advantage provided by the rain was cancelled out by the wind feeding the flames. Deep, terse voices sliced the air. A man in a heavy slick coat, boots and helmet took the first folds of the hose; others followed. The white snaking hose grew fat with pressure. Water streamed from the nozzle into the building, the crackling of the fire now joined by the steaming and hissing of wet wood falling.

“Give me some more line,” a man yelled. Amy saw Jesse grab gear off the hook-and-ladder, pulling boots to thighs, clipping coatrings closed as he cornered the truck. Then he disappeared among the others, identi
cal in their protective uniforms. The fire surged in its fight.

“I’m Dr. Amy Sherwood with the Courage Bay emergency team that came in this morning,” she shouted above the wind and rain to a squad member. “Where’s the driver?” She indicated the blackened pickup.

“Ambulance already took him to County,” the man shouted back.

“Any other passengers?”

“No, just the driver.”

A series of explosions inside the warehouse blew out windows. The hoses blasted the building full force.

Amy looked at the fireman. “Nitrate,” he explained. “It’s used in fertilizer. Must be some old bags still stored in there.”

She turned to where the men leaned into the hose to relieve the pressure straining their arms. A fireman, head bowed against the falling, flaming chunks of the warehouse, ran from the back of the building with a body in his arms. The body was long, a man easily six foot but lean, and the firefighter had the width of a powerful man.

Amy rushed over, recognizing Chief Kannon as he threw off his helmet and mask. Mitch laid the man down on a portable stretcher in the back of an SUV, out of the rain. The man was unconscious, late fifties, unshaven, malnourished. His skin, like well-worn leather, had a blue-gray ashy cast.

“Bring the resuscitator,” Mitch yelled.

Amy bent over the man, tilted back his head, and
breathed into his mouth, checking for chest rise. Nothing. She placed one hand over the other on the chest and pumped lightly like a heart. Sixty beats per minute.

“Don’t recognize him,” Mitch said. “He might have come in on the trains, holed up in the building. I found him not far from the back door. He must have been trying to get out when the smoke overcame him.”

Amy leaned in to the man’s tilted head, breathed. Nothing. “The airway passages are too swollen. No oxygen is getting through.”

A firefighter ran over with the mechanical resuscitator. The chief began fitting the facepiece connection into the regulator.

“We’ve got to open the airways first.” Amy reached into her bag for an emergency trach kit. With swift, precise movements, she sliced into the windpipe at the base of the throat, being careful not to touch muscle or vein. She inserted a thin tube, leaned down, breathed, watched the chest inflate.

“Give him oxygen,” she told the chief. She looked up, saw a firefighter nearby whip off his helmet, and vomit on his boots.

The mechanical resuscitator forced pure oxygen into the man’s lungs until they expanded and built up enough pressure to push the air out. The machine breathed for the man. His color stayed gray. She looked up and saw Jesse unstrap his helmet, his face colored with the heat of the fire, streaked with soot and his own sweat. He breathed deeply, taking in fresh air. Behind him, she saw the worst of the fire had been contained. Only one line was needed now to give the building a
last bath to make sure no embers waited for the wind. The warehouse stood, hollowed and charred. The blackened truck wasn’t far off, as if part of a matching set.

The resuscitator breathed. A quick, clicking sound of air in, out, in, out. “He’s still not breathing on his own,” Amy told Jesse and the chief. “He needs to get to a hospital.”

“The rescue squad is on its way to Beeville with the burn victim—the truck driver. He belongs in Houston, but the storm has grounded the Flight for Life. We could call County.”

Amy shook her head. “There’s no time.”

“Put him in the Bronco,” Jesse said. “We’ll take him to Beeville.”

He and Mitch lifted the blanketed body and carried it to the sheriff’s vehicle, Amy moving in unison, linked by the machine. All the while, the wind and rain tried to thwart them. Once Jesse flattened the back seat, they eased the man onto it. Amy propped herself by his side, and Mitch headed back to his crew. Jesse stripped off his gear, the rain washing him down.

“How far is the hospital?” Amy asked.

“About thirty-five miles north.” Jesse climbed behind the wheel and turned on the lights and siren, heading toward the interstate.

The winds had gotten stronger. Amy could feel them playing with the van, pushing against the sides while the rain battered the roof. Her patient’s pulse was weakening. “Come on, come on,” she urged in the rhythm of the breathing apparatus.

“Move.” Jesse’s order was directed at the heavy traffic slowing their progress. He took to the shoulder where necessary. After about ten miles, the lanes began to clear. The vehicle gained speed.

Jesse radioed ahead to the hospital, and emergency personnel were waiting for them with a stretcher. Amy walked beside the stretcher, reporting on the man’s condition.

“Thanks, Doc,” an intern told her.

Amy nodded, then stepped away as the patient was wheeled through the hospital’s double doors. She turned and found Jesse waiting for her. Their eyes met, and Amy knew the grimness in his gaze was mirrored in her own.

“C’mon,” he said, the strength in his low voice calling her. “I’ll buy you an herbal tea.”

She shook her head and smiled wanly. “Coffee.”

They opted for a convenience store over the hospital cafeteria. Both filled tall cardboard cups with black, steaming liquid, Amy adding cream and sugar. Jesse drank his black, she mentally noted. The Jesse Boone she’d known hadn’t drunk coffee at all, but then again, neither had she fourteen years ago.

They moved to the cashier, their gazes drawn to the portable television behind the counter, its screen filled with mesmerizing concentric circles of blue, red, yellow. The image changed to an aerial view of traffic heading in from the coast area, then to empty store shelves.

Jesse glanced at Amy, her gaze intent on the television report. Years ago, he had resigned himself to the
fact that he’d lost her forever. Now she stood beside him. He looked at the fury filling the screen. The gods were having a field day today.

“They upgraded it to a Category Four,” the cashier told them as he handed them their change. The severity of hurricanes was measured on a scientific scale. Only a Category Five was worse.

A shot of the coast filled the screen. The waves rose like twenty-foot walls, rolled onto themselves, breaking into sheets of blowing white spray. Others even larger and more powerful followed. The camera panned to a plywood sheet protecting the windows of a beach shop. A black bull’s-eye had been spray painted in the center, the message Hit me with your best shot, Damon…Fire away painted beside it. Neither Amy nor Jesse smiled.

They ran to the SUV, heads bowed against the force of the rain, hands curved protectively over the tops of their coffee cups. Inside the vehicle’s cab, they hauled off their raincoats, spraying the interior and themselves with fat drops of water. Outside, the winds caught the rain, sweeping it hard horizontally so that the water seemed to be running up the windows instead of down.
Latest predictions were the storm would hit around midnight. It was now 4:00 p.m.

They drove in silence, sipping their coffee. Lightning flashed bright as day, slicing through the rain’s curtain. The vehicle trembled with the weight of the storm. Jesse set his coffee container in the console’s cup holder and held the steering wheel steady with two hands.

“Traffic heading north seems lighter,” Amy noted.

“Most who evacuated have got to where they were going and settled in,” Jesse said.

“The storm could still bend or even weaken before it comes ashore.”

He nodded, but the way the scar stretched thin along his jaw showed anything but optimism.

“You think it’ll be as bad as they say?” Amy asked.

“Hard to predict with a storm this size. It’s already shifted twice. Like you said, it could shift again, veer south. A change in air patterns over the next few hours, and Damon could end up being no more than a tropical storm with heavy winds and rain.”

His eyes on the road, Jesse overreached for his coffee cup and mistakenly brushed Amy’s arm. Frowning, he glanced across at her. “Sorry.” He wrapped his hand around the coffee cup and raised it to his lips, his gaze returning to the road. His other hand clenched the steering wheel, the emotions rising inside him as strong as the storm outside the windows. Her flesh had been soft, warm despite the lingering dampness. He set his coffee back down and took the steering wheel with both hands, struggling for control. Fourteen years later, and she could still take him with one touch.

They had left the interstate and were on a county route close to Turning Point when they saw a garbage can in the middle of the other lane. Trash bags were strewn around it, and its lid lay several feet away. Jesse pulled over to the shoulder. “I’ll be right back,” he said, reaching for his raincoat in the back. Amy started to do the same.

“Where you going?” he asked her.

“I’ll get the lid. You get the can.” She pulled on the vinyl poncho. “We can both get the garbage.”

“I can handle it, thanks. You stay here.” He looked up and down the road, waited for two cars to pass, then jumped out of the Bronco. He paused as a truck came too fast around the corner, steered around the trash. He was about to start across when he heard a car door slam closed. “Damn stubborn woman,” he muttered, his heart growing warm. He erased his small smile before she reached his side, replacing it with a stern gaze as she fell into step beside him.

“I came here to help, Sheriff.”

“You’ll have plenty of opportunities for that, Doc. But if you enjoy standing out in the pouring rain, don’t let me stop you.”

He crossed toward the garbage can, now spinning in the wind. Amy ran to grab the lid.

“I don’t enjoy standing out in the pouring rain, Sheriff,” she shouted. “But I’d enjoy even less having to patch up your sorry butt if a car came around that corner too fast and struck you down.”

He bent to pick up the remaining bag of garbage and hide the grin he let himself enjoy. He straightened, his
features mirroring his posture until he saw her standing, arm outstretched, palm out, signaling any oncoming cars to stop. Only there weren’t any cars in sight.

“What corner would that be, Doc? That treacherous one there?” He indicated a slight bend in the road that offered no possibility of obstructed view as he took the lid from her and locked it onto the trash can.

“Exactly.” She stood straight, arms still outstretched to halt any cars should they come. “Not to mention impaired visibility from the rain,” she yelled after him as he carried the can to a house at the side of the road. Finding the garage open, Jesse secured the garbage pail inside. “Put the two together and there’s a high possibility you could be roadkill in a matter of seconds.”

He headed back to her.

“Then I’d have a hell of a time explaining to the whole town what happened to their beloved local law enforcement officer,” Amy shouted, “and would go down in the annals of Turning Point history as Dr. Amy Sherwood, sheriff-killer.”

“Doc?”

“What?” she snapped, having worked herself up into a righteous, rain-soaked bundle of indignation unhappy about being interrupted.

“There’s a car passing the one coming up in the lane behind you, so I suggest you move your butt.”

Amy glanced over her shoulder, said a word she rarely used and marched back to the sheriff’s vehicle.

Inside the cab, she whipped her poncho off. She unfastened her hair and wrung the wetness out of it before she twisted it up again.

Jesse slipped his own rain gear off and brushed his fingers through his wet hair. “That’s okay. You don’t have to thank me for saving your life. All in a day’s work, ma’am.”

She swung her head toward him with a restrained precision that he knew cost her. A murderous look deepened her turquoise eyes to navy. “What I’ll thank you for is to leave my butt—” her teeth snapped together on the word “—out of this.”

The urge to kiss those firm, full lips came so swift, so strong. He leaned toward her. Her dark eyes clouded, searched his face, looking for a man who no longer existed. He forced himself upright and put the vehicle into gear. Steering onto the road, he ignored the desire that would not go away. “It wasn’t exactly a politically correct comment, was it, Doc?”

Amy sank back into the seat as if the round were over. “I started it, Sheriff.”

“What would be the politically correct term for ‘sorry butt?’” he teased. “Please move your genetically-uninspired gluts? They say that in California?”

He watched her face light up as she smiled. The urge to take her in his arms, press his mouth to hers spiked. His gut twisted.

“Why are we talking about butts?” she asked him.

“You’re talking about butts. I’m talking about genetically—”

“Sheriff Boone,” a voice interrupted over the radio. Amy stopped smiling. They both leaned forward.

“Sheriff Boone, over.” Jesse replied.