Love Inspired Suspense July 2015 #1 (24 page)

“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!”

THREE

S
herri dove to the dirt, scarcely escaping the giant feedbag that swung off a branch. The sack caught Dan in the back and sent him crashing against the gurney, which pitched onto her and punched the breath from her lungs.

Cole tore the gurney off her and propped it on its edge like a shield between them and the house. “You okay?”

A pleasant sensation fluttered through her chest at his protective presence. “Now I am.” She army-crawled toward her groaning partner.

“I'm fine.” Dan pushed her hand away. “Just give me a second to catch my breath.”

Cole pointed to the trip wire Dan's foot must've caught. “You may not have a second! Get back to the ambulance. Both of you.”

“The trauma bag.” Sherri reached for it.

Cole ripped off the straps securing it to the stretcher and shoved it toward her. “Go,” he barked, drawing a gun from his ankle holster.

Heart in her throat, she pushed to her feet alongside Dan and ran hunched over to the back of the ambulance.

As soon as they jumped inside, Cole rounded the rear door and called for backup. “The call. What was it for?”

Sherri snatched up her stethoscope to check Dan's lungs. “Asthma.”

Cole squinted at Dan. “Are you up to transporting a patient if this call turns out to be legit?”

She fumbled the stethoscope.
Legit?
He thought the feedbag was meant for her.

“Yeah, I can drive.” Dan stopped rubbing his chest and dropped his hand to his side. “Just got the wind knocked out of me. Good thing Sherri ducked when she did. It would've taken her head off.”

Cole's strangled gasp left her own chest tight. That and the gun he had trained on the house.

Reflexively, her palms clapped over her ears, the shot that had ripped through Luke's chest blasting through her head.
Breathe. Cole's safe. Dan's safe.

“You okay?” Concern edged Cole's voice. And the heart-in-his-eyes look he swept over her, as if he desperately needed reassurance she was truly unharmed, felt...nice.
Really nice.

Slipping her hands from her ears, she forced her gaze away from the deadly steel in his hands to his attire—black jeans and T-shirt, not his deputy uniform. “What's going on? What are you doing here?”

The muscle in his cheek flinched and her stomach fluttered. Had he followed the ambulance to keep watch over her?

He slanted a glance down the street, then returned his full attention to the house, not her. “I was in the neighborhood.”

Confused by his gruff response, she squinted through the deepening twilight at the truck parked at the curb a few houses away. His truck. And it had been there before they arrived. “How did you know about the trap?”

“Someone came out of the house,” Dan hissed, peering out the window on the ambulance's side door.

Sherri squinted over her partner's shoulder as a dark figure disappeared into the detached garage. “What do we do now?”

With an intensity that knotted her stomach, Cole peered past the ambulance's back door he was using as cover.

“You can't go after him. Not without backup!”

A sheriff's cruiser whipped around the corner and careened to a stop behind the ambulance, silencing her objection. Cole flashed his ID. “We've got a booby-trapped property. One male in the garage. Unknown number in the house. Cover me.” Without waiting for a response, Cole snuck along the side of the house using bushes as cover.

Bushes!
What good would a bush do him? It wouldn't stop a bullet.
Please, Lord, don't let another man get shot because of me.

The sheriff's deputy hunched behind his cruiser, his gun pointed at the garage as he barked orders into the radio on his shoulder.

The garage door rumbled open, accompanied by the roar of an engine.

Cole darted closer.

“Look out,” the deputy shouted as a motorcycle blasted from the garage and screamed away.

A deafening explosion blew out the windows of the house, rocking the ambulance.

“Cole!” Sherri shoved open the side door and sprang to the ground. Shielding her face from falling debris with her arm, she scanned the area she'd last seen him, except the explosion could have thrown him anywhere. Smoke stung her eyes as she silently pleaded with God to let her find him.

“There!” Dan jumped to the ground behind her and pointed to a dark shape on the far side of the driveway.

She sprinted toward him and scooped her arms under his armpits to pull him away from the fire.

“Through here.” Dan helped her pull him through a scraggly section of hedge into the next yard, where she instantly dropped to her knees at his side.

“Cole, talk to me. Cole!”

The deputy ordered emerging neighbors back into their houses between demands into his radio for fire trucks and someone to catch the man on the motorcycle. “Is he okay?”

Sweat slicked her trembling hands. “I don't know. He's not responding.” She forced herself to take deep breaths
. Oh, God, I can't have a panic attack. Not here. Not now.

“Try a sternal rub,” Dan ordered before dashing back to the ambulance.

Cole moaned at the pressure, but didn't open his eyes or answer her.

“Cole, tell me where you hurt.”

Dan dropped the trauma bag beside her. “Anything?”

“He responded to pain, but isn't talking.” Sherri checked his airway. “Airway clear.” She slid her fingertips to his wrist as Dan pulled out a stethoscope. “Pulse a hundred twenty and strong.”

She palpated his stomach and was rewarded with another groan. “Abdomen soft, no internals, yet. Cole, can you hear me?”

“He's got decreased breath sounds on the left side. Could be looking at a collapsed lung.”

“How bad is that?” A kid skidded to his knees beside her.

Sherri's breath stalled in her throat. “Eddie? What are you—?”

Dan surged to his feet. “You again?” He grabbed Eddie's collar and hauled him away from her. “You made the call. Didn't you?”

Sherri's heart jumped to her throat.
Eddie had set her up?

Dan shoved him up against the side of the cruiser. “What kind of sick—?”

“Hey, what are you doing?” The deputy rushed toward them.

“This punk attacked my partner yesterday trying to get drugs,” Dan growled. “He's got to be behind this crank call, too.”

“I'm not,” Eddie cried. “You've gotta believe me!”

Disturbingly, Cole didn't react to Dan's accusations, didn't even open his eyes.

The deputy snapped open his handcuff pouch. “This true, ma'am?”

Ignoring the question, she raised Cole's left eyelid. “Cole, are you with me?”

Both eyes blinked open and a slow smile curved his lips. “Hi,” he said softly, then sheer panic swept over his face.

“Cole? Dan, forget the kid. I need you here.” She struggled to tamp down the alarm edging into her voice. “Cole, what's wrong?”

Dan shoved Eddie at the deputy. “Keep him away from her.”

“I didn't do anything,” the kid bellowed. “I need to stay with my brother.”

Cole rolled to his side and tried to push himself up. “Let him go. He didn't—” His voice cut out on a frown.

“You need to lie still.” Sherri exchanged a worried glance with Dan as he caught Cole's shoulder and compelled him to stay put.

Cole's gaze shifted to her lips, his forehead wrinkling. “I can't hear.” He pressed the heel of his hand to his temple, his gaze bouncing from her to the commotion around them. “I can't hear anything.”

She leaned over him so he'd see the reassurance in her face and maybe read her lips. “You need to lie still so we can help you.” She flicked her penlight over his eyes. “Pupils round and reactive.”

His gaze darted back to his brother.

She laid her palm on his pounding chest and waited until he looked at her, her own heart galloping at how vulnerable he looked lying there. “Eddie's fine.” She stuffed down the silly disappointment that Cole hadn't been here for her as she'd first supposed.

“He's got a contusion on the side of the head,” Dan reported. “No bleeding or fluid from the ears. Check for broken bones.”

Mentally cataloging the serious injuries they could still be looking at, she continued her palpitations, her fingers trembling. “Breathe,”
she coached. He'd only been here because he'd been following his brother, not her. She wasn't to blame.

Not this time.

Below his hipbone, Sherri's fingers pressed into something hard. Probing it, she felt the distinctive shape of a prescription bottle. Glancing up, she found Eddie's gaze fixed on her hands and swallowed the bile rising in her throat. They'd been buying drugs?

Cole's hand locked on her wrist. “Please, don't,” he whispered, a soul-deep pain shadowing his eyes.

Disappointment clutched her chest. He must've followed his brother here, confiscated the drugs Eddie had just bought. He wasn't helping Eddie by covering for him. But just like the silly teenager who'd have agreed to anything if it'd meant Cole would notice her, she couldn't say no. Was ignoring what she found the same as lying? Her heart seesawed in her chest, her gaze fixed on Cole's. His brother had held a knife to her throat. Only an idiot would keep this to herself. Eddie was a danger to himself and anyone who came between him and a fix.

“You find something?” Dan's voice cut into her thoughts.

She held Cole's gaze for a long moment. She couldn't
not
keep his secret. Not after he'd just saved her hide. No matter why he'd really been here. She tugged her wrist free of Cole's grasp and quickly palpated the rest of his leg. “No broken bones.”

“Okay, our gurney's toast. I'll bring the ambulance around. We need to get it out of the way of the fire trucks anyway.”

“I can walk,” Cole said, his hearing apparently returning. He tried pushing himself to a sitting position with a frustrated groan.

She cupped his elbow to help him. “On a scale of one to ten, how bad's the pain?”

“Three,” he said through gritted teeth.

She rolled her eyes. “I'll give you some meds anyway, tough guy.”

“Thank you,” he murmured.

Warmth surged through her and with it the memory of the last time he'd thanked her for nursing his wounds. His soft kiss. Her first. And the hug that neither of them had seemed to want to end. She'd relived that moment too many times to count in the seven years since. She blinked away the memory, cleared her throat. “Just doing my job.”

He started to shake his head, winced at the movement. “I mean thank you for trusting me.”

Her heart flip-flopped. He was talking about the drugs he'd asked her to keep secret. “I hope you know what you're doing.”

* * *

Two days later, Cole walked into the sheriff's office, his head still throbbing along with his ribs, but at least his hearing was back to normal.

Or at least enough not to miss Zeke's gloating stage whisper to the deputy beside him that his nephew wouldn't have been off on sick leave less than a week into a new job. Cole pressed his fingertips to his forehead and temple, wondering how much of today's headache was due to the mild concussion the doctor said he'd suffered and how much from dreading this interview.

He'd had every intention of handing over the drugs he'd found on Eddie to the sheriff and explaining the situation. But that was before Sherri had showed up and everything had blown apart. He hadn't needed to hear what her partner had ranted to the deputy to know he figured Eddie had lured her there.

He had a bad feeling that whoever made the 9-1-1 call had deliberately set up Eddie. But who? And why? Questions he had hoped to have answers to by now. Cole sliced a glance at Zeke. The whole scenario had played nicely into his disgruntled partner's agenda, but...that didn't mean he'd set it up.

According to Eddie, the same guy who'd prodded him to raid Sherri's ambulance had given him the tip on the supposed great deal at the drug house—not Zeke. Trouble was Eddie still couldn't identify the guy.

The deputy who'd taken control of the scene outside the drug house motioned Cole to an interrogation room. “I figured you'd appreciate some privacy. Don't pay any attention to Zeke. Trust me, no one else wanted his nephew to get the job.”

Taking a seat, Cole opted not to respond, since he had no idea who might be listening in on the other side of the two-way mirror.

I hope you know what you're doing.
Sherri's words whispered through his mind for the hundredth time as the lanky deputy straddled a chair and laid a file folder on the table.

“Okay.” The deputy tapped his pen against the folder. “Why don't you start by telling me why you were in the neighborhood?”

“I already told you.” At least a half dozen times when the deputy had interrogated him in the hospital. “It's no secret that my brother's an addict. I spotted him sneaking out his bedroom window. Figured he was up to no good. Followed him to the drug house and yanked him out before he could make a buy.”

“Did he stop at the variety store on the corner?”

Cole's insides jumped at the new question. “No.”

The deputy studied him for an uncomfortably long minute. “You're sure?”

“Yes, why?”

“The 9-1-1 call that summoned the ambulance was made from a phone booth there.”

The knots in Cole's neck eased at the confirmation that his brother couldn't have secretly made the call without Cole noticing. “I already told you he didn't make the call. Since when is a deputy's word not a reliable alibi?”

“You're his brother.”

“Yeah, and I'm Sherri's friend.” He winced at the memory of their argument in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. She'd been furious that he'd asked her to keep quiet about the pill bottle in his pocket. Or more accurately “to shelter Eddie from the consequences of his actions.” Consequences that might get him the help he needed...or so she thought.