Keeper of the Peace (Graveyard Guardians #2) (24 page)

Without thinking, she began moving toward
the doors, needing to get to him. “Hannah, don’t.”

She felt Dan’s hand on her arm and jerked
away. “Stop it, Dan. We need to get him out of there.”

“No,” he countered. “We need to watch first,
to see what we’re up against in there. We don’t even know how many
there are.”

“Besides, this could be a trap,” Greg
added.

Consciously, she knew they were right, but
there was a part of her that wanted to charge in there and free
him. So, she continued forward, but quickly paused when two men
appeared in the living room, stalking in from the direction of the
kitchen.

She gasped and stepped back a couple paces,
feeling Dan and Greg flanking her. One of the men was huge,
Hispanic, and looked mean as hell. The other was a rather average
looking blond man.

“It looks like just the two,” Jack
whispered. “And they definitely aren’t Reapers.”

The Hispanic man leaned over in front of
David and appeared to ask him a question. When David didn’t move,
the man reared back and then slammed his fist into David’s
cheekbone.

“No!” Hannah charged forward again,
determined to stop this violence, when she felt arms wrap around
her waist, pulling her back. “Let me go!” she hissed at whoever it
was that stopped her.

She didn’t bother turning around, because
the guy hit David again, this time on the other side. “He’s going
to be so fucking sorry.” She bent down and pulled one of her
daggers from its sheath. When the guy hit David again, she shook
her head, trying to erase what she was seeing.

And then what happened next made her want to
erase it that much more. The Hispanic man reached behind him and
withdrew a pistol from the waistband of his jeans. He pointed it at
David’s forehead and appeared to be speaking to him.

“That’s it, I’m going.” Hannah charged, but
stopped when she heard Aiden’s voice.

“I’ve got this.” Aiden stepped up beside her
and tossed a pebble at the glass. It wasn’t much, just a tiny ping
of stone on glass to cause a distraction. A reason to look
away.

The man lowered the gun and stared at the
glass door for half a second before leaving his place in front of
David and stalking toward the door. At the halfway point, Aiden
threw another pebble.

Both men neared the door, intending to see
what was out there causing the disturbance. Aiden lifted his hand
gun and waited a beat. The Hispanic man took two more paces and
Aiden pulled the trigger.

Glass exploded and glittering shards rained
down onto the porch and inside the house. The bullet found its
target and buried deep within the forehead of the large Hispanic
man. He stumbled backward a few steps and fell to the floor like a
sack of potatoes.

The blond one, realizing what was happening,
turned and ran. All it took was a shift and Aiden pulled the
trigger again. The back of the man’s blond head burst open as the
bullet lodged inside his skull. He fell mid-stride, landing on the
hideous green shag carpet with a horribly loud thud.

Without another thought, Hannah lunged for
the house. She leapt the two steps up to the landing of the porch
and then crunched over the broken glass, determined to get to David
as fast as she could.

Avoiding the bodies, she finally reached the
chair and fell to her knees in front of him. Taking a moment to
breath in, and then exhaling long and slow, she reached up and
touched her fingertips to his cheek. “We’re here, baby. We’re
here.”

His only movement was a slight eye twitch,
but it was enough to let her know that he was alive. “David, wake
up.”

She heard footsteps behind her, but really
didn’t give a crap who it was. “David, please …”

And then, finally, he pried open one of his
swollen eyes, peering at Hannah as if she were a figment of his
imagination. “Am I dead now?”

Hannah smiled, and was going to answer till
he frowned and shook his head slightly. “No, Heaven doesn’t have
green shag carpets.”

She laughed. “That’s right, not heaven, but
it looks like you weren’t far off from that.”

He didn’t respond, he just moved his gaze
over the situation of the room. The dead bodies, Hannah’s whole
family, the broken glass door.

“How did you guys know where to find me?” he
asked.

Hannah shook her head. “We can talk about
that later, right now we need to get you out of here. Where is your
handcuff key?”

His head lolled a little bit and then he
snapped back, “Uh, check that big guys pocket for my car keys.”

Jack marched over to the body and lifted his
wallet out of his back pocket, then turned him over and searched
his front pockets. “Found ‘em.” Jack tossed them up in the air a
little then caught them again. He rounded the body and then
crouched down behind David. In a flash, he had the cuffs off and
David was free.

“Aw, fuck, that hurts,” he groaned, testing
the movement of his arms.

Hannah held out her hand and helped David to
his feet. After he was standing, she pulled his arm around her
shoulder so she could help him walk. “Come on. We’re going to get
you out of here.”

“Not yet.” Lucy stood in the center of the
room, staring at the bodies with a shocked and very worried
expression, “Right now we have a whole new issue to work out. What
the
hell
do we do about these guys?”

CHAPTER

24

DAVID

The gunshot never came. He had closed his
eyes and must have passed out again because when he did open his
eyes, he thought he’d died.

She was there, in front of him. Her
beautiful red hair peeked out from beneath a black hood. He should
have known her face would be the last thing he thought of before
death took him, but he never thought that the Grim Reaper would
come and get him in the form of his true love.

“David, wake up.”

Oh, her voice, how he had longed to hear it
over the years. Thank God he’d had the last couple days with her.
That made everything worth it.

“David, please …”

Something wasn’t right though. He painfully
pried his eyes open. “Am I dead now?” he croaked. He had to be,
Marcus shot him. But … he shifted his eyes away from Hannah. The
surroundings sure as hell weren’t what he expected he would find
when he died. Then, realizing that he hadn’t actually died, he
shook his head. “No, Heaven doesn’t have green shag carpets.”

She laughed. “That’s right, not heaven, but
it looks like you weren’t far off from that.”

Suddenly, it all came back, hitting him like
a ton of bricks. Marcus, Aaron … where were they? He tore his eyes
away from Hannah so he could take a look around.

Holy shit, the place was filled with people.
Marcus and Aaron were both dead, their bodies lying on the ugly ass
carpet. Hannah’s entire family milled around, whispering and
staring at the bodies. There was a blond man he’d never seen before
hanging out near Jack and Lucy. He really hoped that guy was legit
because whatever just happened in this house was real fucking
bad.

“How did you guys know where to find me?” He
turned his attention back to Hannah.

“We can talk about that later, right now we
need to get you out of here. Where is your handcuff key?”

Damn, his head hurt so fucking bad, but he
pushed the pain away and thought about where his key ring would be.
“Uh, check that big guys pocket for my car keys.”

Jack was the one who took initiative and
rolled Marcus’s dead body over so that he could check the front
pockets of his jeans. “Found ‘em.” Jack pulled a key ring out.

Thank God. He wanted to be able to move.
Jack hurried over and knelt down behind David, he heard the first
click and then felt the cool metal being removed from his wrist.
The next one followed and he was free.

He brought his arms around, intending to
wrap them around Hannah, but pain flashed through his stiff
muscles. “Ah, fuck, that hurts.”

She held out her hand for him and he took
it, letting her help him to his feet. This was embarrassing as
hell, he’d never needed a girl to help him before. But, bottom
line, he was fucked up.

“Come on. We’re going to get you out of
here.” She lifted his arm so that it was around his shoulder.

But then Lucy brought reality back to them,
“Not yet. Right now we have a whole new issue to work out. What the
hell
do we do about these guys?”

Both David and Hannah, as well as everyone
else, set their gazes to her. “But, David needs to go to the
hospital,” Hannah insisted.

Lucy shook her head. “Seriously, Hannah. Do
you realize what just happened here? There are two more dead guys
lying on your boyfriend’s floor and you’re on bond for murder
already! I think we need to clean this up before you go
anywhere.”

David blinked. “That’s right … she’s right.
We have to take care of this.”

Hannah shook her head. “Oh shit. I didn’t
realize the repercussions of this. Oh fuck.”

With a quick squeeze of her hand, David
lifted his arm off of her shoulder. “Don’t worry. This was all me.
Those guys were going to kill me, and we have a history, I can get
out of this on my own. There isn’t any reason anyone should even
know that you all were here.”

The strange blond guy raised his hand a bit
and stepped forward. “No you can’t. I shot them with my own
gun.”

“Shit,” David cursed. “I forgot about that
part.”

Hannah nodded. “The bullets will trace back
to his gun, which is not the same as yours.” She plopped down onto
the chair he had just vacated. “Dammit! I can’t believe this shit
is happening again.”

“It’s all right. We will figure it out.”
Greg crossed the room and rested his hand on Hannah’s shoulder.
“Why did these guys want you dead, anyway?” he asked, the question
obviously directed at David.

Time to let it all out … to share with
Hannah’s family what a fuck up he was. He gave them the short and
sweet version, but it got the point across. “So, they were supposed
to find me, in hopes that I knew where Coop was so they could get
their money and probably off Coop as well. Those two hated me
because I fooled them, I pretended to be one of them and they
believed I was. It pissed them off.”

The Estmonds, Ethan, and the blond guy, who
he still didn’t have a name for, stood in a semi-circle around him,
listing to his story and gaping at him. “Holy shit, Dave!” Dan
reached into his trench coat, withdrew a flask, twisted the cap off
and took a long pull. “You were a fucking gangster, man.”

David shook his head in denial, “No, I was
never one of them. I didn’t have it in me.”

Hannah closed her eyes for a second and then
peered up at him. “Yes you did,” she told him softly, “or they
wouldn’t have believed you were one of them. Guys like this, and
that Julian, they aren’t dumb. Their business did well because they
were smarter than most.”

It was true, but he didn’t ever want to be
called a gangster or a mobster or anything of the sort. He was
completely the opposite, a cop … one of the good guys. The most
disturbing part of all of it, though, was that he was good at being
the bad guy.

James glanced around the house again. “Well,
as nice as it is to know why all this happened, we still have two
bodies to deal with.”

Aiden stepped forward. “I’ll take the blame,
they were my guns. I can tell them what happened and just leave out
the fact that you all were here, which would protect Hannah.”

“No,” Jack shot the idea down. “You can’t if
you are going to be Hannah’s witness for the other murder.”

“I don’t mind doing it. Just tell me what
you need me to do,” Aiden assured them.

“I don’t mean to sound ungrateful,” David
began, “but who the hell are you anyway?”

Aiden and Jack eyed each other, a question
clearly being asked there.

“That’s Aiden.” Hannah finally rose from her
spot on the chair. “And he’s Jack’s friend, our friend.”

Aiden moved his gaze and met hers, then
nodded acknowledgement of something. Apparently, the two of them
had just reached some kind of terms with her statement.

Knowing who the guy was had to be enough for
him though, at least he had a name for the blond guy now. “Nice to
meet you Aiden. Wish the circumstances were better.”

Aiden smiled. “The circumstances could
always be better, man.”

James paced back and forth with Steph right
on his heels. “What is it James?” she asked.

He stopped pacing and stared at the bodies.
“I know this isn’t going to be the suggestion everyone wants to
hear because you all keep talking about who is going to take the
blame for this. Well … fuck.” He paused and ran his hands through
his dark red hair. “Has anyone considered the option of us
not
telling anyone this happened? I mean, shit, these guys
are drug dealers … sent here to assassinate you. Do we really think
anyone is going to come looking for them?”

Dead. Fucking. Silence.

James turned away, waving off the group. “It
was just an idea. Sorry man, I know you’re a cop and all that.”

David held his hand up. “No. No, it’s not
that. I would do anything to protect Hannah, and all of you, not to
mention myself at the moment. That option is actually the best one
we have right now.”

“No, David, if anyone ever found out about
this …”

“They won’t.” David cut Hannah off before
she could say anymore.

“But, your job?”

“Don’t worry about me. I’m happy just to be
alive right now.” He shot Aiden a grateful glance and received a
nod in response.

Greg switched his eyes back and forth
between the bodies and the group. “Okay. I never thought I would be
saying this, but I’m going to have to agree with James.”