How to Knit a Heart Back Home (21 page)

“I just shake the gun to the side, like this, and it falls right out. See? Now I’m sure the gun’s not loaded.” He put the bullet on the counter.

Owen drew the slide back a couple more times, pointing out where the bullet had been and no longer was.

Lucy felt jittery. “Is there a way to be
sure
there’s no bullet in it?”

He smiled. “I know how they work, and I know there’s no place for a bullet to hide. But there’s one surefire way to find out.”

Snapping the slide back into place, he pointed the gun downrange.

“You’re not going to . . .” she started. But if he did pull the trigger, it would just click, right? It wasn’t going to fire, she knew there was no bullet. . . .

But he didn’t do anything. Owen just held the gun out in front of him, his eyes narrowed, arms outstretched. A muscle jumped in his jaw. He looked down and straightened his right foot.

The barrel of the gun started to waver. His hand was shaking. Lucy’s heartbeat, already erratic, raced into overdrive.

“Owen. What’s going—”

Lucy watched him take a deep breath. He pulled the trigger.

Click.

Lucy jumped at the startling snap. “What happened?”

Owen didn’t say anything. He lowered the gun slowly and then looked at it, turning it over, examining it first on one side, then on the other.

“What’s wrong?” asked Lucy. She wished she could take the earplugs out, but the gunfire from the other shooters kept a solid blanket of noise around them.

“Nothing,” said Owen, but his voice was wrong—off, somehow. “Nothing at all. Your turn.”

He handed her the gun, his fingers brushing hers as he passed it over. Her own hand shook, too. She’d blame the gun for her jitters.

He was even closer now.
Think, breathe.

“So the first lesson is never, ever point it at anyone unless you’re trying to kill him,” Owen said hoarsely.

“But it’s not loaded, right?”

“Never, ever point it anywhere you don’t want to hit. Not even when it’s unloaded. If I’d screwed up when I pulled the trigger a second ago, I would have only damaged the target. It’s harder to fix a bullet wound.” He winced as he moved to lean against the plastic dividing wall.

“Good, like that,” he said. “Now, always keep your index finger straight, just below the slide, until you’re ready to shoot. Don’t ever rest it on the trigger.”

“Don’t I have to take the safety off?”

“On most guns, yes. On this gun, the safety is that little toggle on the trigger.”

“This thing? So if I pull the trigger I pull the safety, too? How is that safe?”

“Satisfied the letter of the law, I guess.”

“So pull on the slide to cock it?” An almost unbearable giggle rose in her throat at the word, which she normally didn’t have reason to say. She choked it back. She would
not
laugh.

He ignored her. “Yeah, good. Now point it at the target and squeeze the trigger. Gently. Just one, slow, steady pull.”

His voice reverberated in her ear. Never had a thing made of plastic and metal felt so sexy in her hand, not even the toy she kept at home in her nightstand.

Click
.

Lucy jumped again, as if it had really fired. She took a deep breath. “Show me how to load it.”

Owen demonstrated snapping the rounds into the clip, pushing it up into the handle until it clicked. “Cock it. Yeah. You’re good to go.”

Lucy felt wild heat flush her face, and it wasn’t just the gun. “So I shoot?”

“Wait.” Owen pushed his weight away from the wall and moved behind her. “Right foot forward a bit. Left foot back. Now raise your right arm like this.”

While he was talking he brought his arms around her, guiding hers. “Left hand here, as support. Both eyes open, look down the sights.” His breath was warm in her ear, causing her stomach to jump. How the hell was she supposed to shoot a gun when he made her more jittery than firing a lethal weapon for the first time?

“Don’t jerk it. Just one long, steady stroke of your finger. Keep the pressure nice and even. Let it do the work—”

Boom.

“—for you.”

With trembling hands, Lucy carefully set the gun down on the counter in front of them, a tiny wisp of white smoke curling and immediately vanishing from the barrel. Owen was still behind her.

“Damn. Nice shot,” he said.

“That hole? In the middle of the chest. I made that?”

“You did.”

“That was really scary.” Lucy glanced over her shoulder. “And it was awesome.”

“You loved it.” Owen smiled, but his face looked gray. “Now do it again.”

She shook her head. “No fucking way. Are you nuts? Let’s get out of here before one of us passes out.”

Chapter Eighteen

Once I kissed the wrong man, holding the needles in my lap. They stabbed his leg like a dowsing rod gone wrong. Trust your knitting.

—
E. C.

O
wen hadn’t had the clam chowder at the pier since he’d been at the roller rink back in high school, before it closed. The pier always struck him as too touristy to consider visiting. But now Lucy sat cross-legged on top of the picnic table, a bread bowl full of chowder in one hand, a spoon in the other, looking up into the night sky. “God, this is good.”

She leaned sideways and pulled a bottle of Tabasco out of her pants pocket and dumped some in her soup. “Want some?”

Shooting on a date was an idea whose time had come. It had taken some fast-talking on his part to get her to take that second shot, though. She’d been so spooked by the bang, she’d almost bolted like a deer.

And fuck, he’d been no better, had he? As he’d picked up the gun and held it downrange, held it on the target, all he’d been able to see was the last time he’d aimed a gun. The last time he’d fired. The flower of blood that had bloomed, the river of gore that had run into the gutter, taking Rob along with it.

How was he able to pick the gun up every single day of his life, check it, cock it, put it in his holster, without seeing that reaction coming? If he’d predicted that, he wouldn’t have brought Lucy along to witness it.

But talking Lucy into sticking it out and staying at the range, that had helped him get his mind off his own stupid, unexpected terror. Not that Lucy needed much coaching. Lucy thought she was scared of things, he knew. But inside, she had guts of steel—he could see her strength as clearly as he could see her amazing curves.

At his encouraging, she’d picked the gun back up and shot again.

And when, half an hour later, the other five guys in the range had been standing behind them, hooting at her shooting the ace off a playing card? That was a moment he was going to have to work on accepting. Owen was a crack shot. Had been training for years. He was good.

She was better.

And she was hot. A damn gunslinger. She’d known just how to hold the weapon, just how to gaze down the sights, exactly how to line them up and acquire the target without getting rattled, the whole time, her ass looking so perfect in those black pants that he could barely look up to see if she’d made her shots. He’d been hard-pressed to keep his hands to himself in front of all those guys, and now, if he wasn’t careful, he was going to get all stupid out here in the beach moonlight, seagulls wheeling overhead.

That’s what it took? A little gunpowder?

Well, okay. Nothing wrong with that. He wouldn’t think about that whole firefighter thing. Not right now.

He mentally shook himself and took another plastic spoonful of the chowder. Sitting on top of the table next to her, his feet perched on the bench below, Owen said, “I can’t believe you stole the bottle of Tabasco. I should arrest you.”

She stuck out her tongue at him. “You’re not a cop.”

“Citizen’s arrest.”

“We’ll just put it back as we walk past on our way to the car. It’s what I always do.”

Owen pretended to make a note. “Chronic offender.”

She balanced the bread bowl on her knee. “You miss it?”

He didn’t pretend not to know what she meant. “Every minute of every day.”

Two boys skimmed by on skateboards, both texting while they kicked with their right legs, their phones glowing in the dimness. A woman walking a white mutt smiled in their direction. The air was cool and damp.

Lucy looked at him, and the space she left between them felt so open, so . . .

So exactly what he’d been waiting for.

What he’d been wanting. And what he hadn’t even known existed.

With all that was holy, he didn’t want to have to tell the story. Not to her. She’d look at him with those dark, liquid eyes and his heart would break all over again. But without knowing what he would say, without any planning at all, Owen put his bread bowl on top of the picnic table.

“Is it very bad?” Lucy asked.

“It’s not good.”

“For the love of wool, just tell me. You can’t bottle it up, you’ll make yourself sick.”

“You don’t happen to have any acupuncture needles concealed on your person I need to know about, do you?”

“Come on, tell me.”

Owen nodded. “When I got hurt, someone else did, too. Worse.”

Her eyebrows shot up, but she didn’t say anything.

“My best friend was a guy named Rob Marlowe. We were hired at the same time, and we did everything together. From rookies, to graveyard shift, to days. Moved up to detectives at the same time. He was local. His mom loved me. Fed me lasagna and enchiladas twice a week, whether I needed it or not.” Owen picked up his plastic spoon and bent the tip of it. “She always said that Rob hadn’t appreciated her the right way, that he’d been too stringy as a kid, and stayed too skinny. Never filled out. Me, I lifted weights and had filled out, so I ate a metric crapload of her spaghetti and pasta carbonara and garlic bread. Ate anything she put on my plate, and then I’d eat Rob’s leftovers, too. It got so that on our weekends I’d stay at his place, and we’d both go to his mom’s for dinner every night. The guys teased us about being a couple. I guess, in a way, we were.”

Lucy grinned, her eyes gentle.

“Then Rob worked vice, undercover, with a cop named Scotty Tucker. Rob starting using.”

Lucy looked shocked. “Drugs?”

“I wish it was that unusual, but it’s not. It’s tricky—you’re undercover working dope, and if you’re selling, buyers want you to use with them, to prove you’re not a cop. There’s a bunch of ways to get around it, to fake it, but you’re in dangerous situations all the time, and no one trusts anyone else, and if you just take one real taste, they’ll get off your back and believe who you say you are. A lot of guys go down that way.”

“Wow,” Lucy said softly.

“So Rob got hooked, and his partner, Scotty Tucker, knew it. He milked Rob, threatening to go to the brass if he didn’t pay him off. Rob started dealing from the evidence locker, and got more on the street on his own. He was losing weight and tweaking.” Owen paused and took a breath. “And me, I didn’t notice. He said he was on a new diet, and he’d always been so skinny. I just thought he was working too hard, too many hours. Scotty started hanging out at Rob’s house more and more. I’d never liked the guy, but I was doing overtime on dogwatch patrol, so I didn’t get over there for months. I’ll . . .” He cleared his throat. This was harder than he thought. “I’ll never forgive myself for that.”

Lucy just looked at him, her eyes full of something he didn’t recognize. His heart thumped in a way that was almost physically painful.

“Then what happened?” Lucy’s voice was gentle.

Owen twisted the spoon in his fingers. He would
not
rub the scar on his hip, which suddenly burned. “One of my narcs rolled, told me about a major deal that was going to happen at Rob’s house one night. It involved everyone—Rob’s biggest dealer, buyers, distribution, all at his house.”

God, it was harder than he thought, to tell her all this. “There’s nothing like setting up one of your own. I ran point, since I knew him the best. My lieutenant, I remember, told me that if I could enforce the law and bring down someone I loved, then I was worthy of serving that law. I believed it at the time.”

Owen stopped.

Lucy scooted over so that her knee pressed into his. She rested her hands on top of his thighs, a light, warm weight.

“Go on,” she said.

The astonishing thing was that he thought he could.

“We got to the house, a routine SWAT alignment. We were in the right shape, but we were amped to the maximum: these were our guys. All of us hated every fucking second of it. Then, at the exact moment that we had the house surrounded, when we were about to make entry, he came out. We didn’t think he’d do that, we thought we’d have to extract. No one saw that coming. Then everything went to hell.”

Lucy took the now mangled plastic spoon out of his hand and then threaded her fingers through his.

Owen cleared his throat. He had never had to say this part out loud—anyone he’d ever had to talk to about it already knew the lay of the land.

Lucy’s hand stilled in his.

“Rob came out, his arms up. When he realized we were really going through with it, really going to take him in, he pulled a gun. I shouted at him, warning him, but he wouldn’t drop it. Then he cocked it and put his finger on the trigger. He pointed it at the lieutenant.”

Owen’s voice ground to a stop, and it was almost impossible to start it up again.

“Five of us shot. Rob got Steve Moss in the stomach, and me in the hip and knee. We kept shooting until he stopped.”

“Holy shit,” Lucy whispered.

Dropping his eyes from hers, Owen watched Lucy’s pulse flicker rapidly in the hollow at her throat. For a moment there was no sound but the crash of the waves below.

Then she said, “Do you know . . .”

“They don’t release ballistics in officer deaths like that. No one knows who killed him.”

“
Good
.”

Owen nodded. “The look in his eyes . . . When we were shooting, when he was hit, it was the same wide-eyed, scared, betrayed look I’ve seen in kids’ eyes, kids who’ve had their arms broken by their parents for the first time.”