Griffin was half on top of her. He already had his cell phone in his hand. “Someone is shooting at us through a window,” he said, his tone urgent but the message clear.
Thank God he was doing it—she would have babbled.
“We’re on the third floor, facing Texas Street.” He gave Raleigh’s address.
Copper whined, and Raleigh realized she was on top of him. She raised her shoulders and allowed the dog to wiggle out, then did some wiggling of her own so she could grab the dog. She didn’t want Copper getting glass in his feet.
Griffin kept a protective arm around her, trying to hold her down as he continued to speak with the 911 operator. Raleigh was pretty sure the shooting was over: whoever was behind it would be making their escape, rather than waiting for the cops to come along and catch them in the act.
But Raleigh was too numb to try to move. Instead, she lay there, feeling safe against Griffin’s warm, hard body. Copper licked her ear and whined again.
“Shh. It’s okay, baby.” Griffin’s chest rumbled as he spoke. His breath ruffled her hair. She didn’t want to move.
Eventually she had to. Sirens sounded in the distance. The shooter would be long gone.
Griffin eased himself off her. “Crawl over toward the fireplace,” he said. “We can wait there. It’s out of the line of fire.”
Raleigh did as she was told. She’d never been shot at before, so she bowed to Griffin’s apparent knowledge. He claimed he’d been shot before, so he knew more than she did.
Her only other life-or-death experience, she’d gone into a fugue state.
The brick hearth of her fireplace did seem the safest place. While much of the rest of her living room was a mess of broken glass and china, splintered wood and bits of stuffing from her sofa, this corner appeared unscathed.
With one exception. Her favorite photo of Jason had been hit. He’d taken a bullet square in the face, the glass broken in a spiderweb pattern.
She reached for the photo and touched the cracked glass while she attempted to soothe Copper, who had jumped into her lap. Poor Jason.
“Yeah, paramedics too,” Griffin was saying.
Paramedics? In an adrenaline daze, Raleigh looked down at herself and with a start realized she had blood on her jacket. Just the sight of the blood made her woozy.
Was she hurt? She didn’t feel any pain. She put her hands to her head, then her face, then her arms…
Griffin. She was almost afraid to look over, and when she did, her head started to spin. Blood. A lot of it—on the rug, some on her sofa—and on him.
He sat on the edge of one of her chairs holding a throw pillow against his arm. His hand and the pillow were smeared with blood, his shirt was bloody. His face, though, was pale and tense with pain.
“Griffin!” Still clutching Copper in one arm, she went to him. “Are you okay? What am I saying, of course you’re not okay. You’re bleeding all over….”
“Sorry about your rug. And the pillow. I’ll have them cleaned.”
His concern was so ludicrous she would have laughed if she hadn’t started to cry. The situation was too familiar. Until this moment, she had never remembered anything about the accident that killed Jason. Now, hideous images flashed through her mind. She sank to the floor next to Griffin, sobbing hysterically.
“Hey, what’s all this?”
She grabbed on to his jean-clad leg and rested her cheek against his knee. “Please don’t die on me, Griffin.”
“I’m nowhere near dying. Everything’s okay. The bullet hit my arm. Lots of blood, but no vital organs.”
“I should do something. I should get you some bandages or…or apply pressure or something—” She tried to get up, but he held her next to him with a surprisingly strong grip on her shoulder, considering the injury to his arm. “
I’m
applying pressure. Paramedics are coming. Hear the sirens?”
She did, but they weren’t here yet. She clamped her eyes closed, but the awful visions wouldn’t leave her alone. Jason with the car compressed around him, his head against the broken windshield. His face covered in blood.
She tried to stop the blood, but it was like a waterfall and he wasn’t talking or moving. She needed help. But she couldn’t lay her hands on a cell phone, so she jumped out of the car and ran—
No one. The road had been deserted. She called for help until her throat was raw, then started
running in her heels and her thin wool coat, slipping every few steps on the icy road surface, finally abandoning the shoes altogether and running in her stocking feet. She fell to her hands and knees, scraping the flesh from both.
Then, car lights, and someone wrapping a blanket around her. The warm backseat of a car, a cocoon of blessed forgetfulness…
“Raleigh, you okay?”
Was she okay? She snapped back to the present. Jason was dead, but here was a man alive and vital who needed her help.
“I’m sorry, Griffin.” She pulled away from him, despite his weakening grip on her. “Maybe you should lie down.”
“I don’t want to get any more of your things bloody.”
“For God’s sake, I don’t care about the furniture!”
He didn’t argue further and she helped him to the sofa, where he could at least lean back against the cushions.
“I’ll get some clean towels.” She forced herself to walk on wobbly legs to the bathroom and grab three bath towels from the linen cupboard.
When she returned, Griffin’s eyes were closed and his hold on the pillow had slackened. Copper sat on his lap, looking worried.
“Griffin?” She yanked the blood-soaked pillow away and wrapped one of the towels around his arm, which bore a ragged gash that continued to bleed.
“I’m still here,” he said.
Someone knocked at the door and she rushed to open it. Before she could say a word, police swarmed into her apartment, guns drawn. One of them shoved her against a wall and placed his body between her and any possible threat.
“Hey, hey, it’s over. The shooter is gone. Griffin—” She pointed to the sofa. “He’s been shot. Someone across the street—I’m not sure what happened.”
Cops yelled at each other and yammered into radios. Then, stretchers and IV bags, men and women in blue uniforms, maybe firefighters? Copper barked at them all and no doubt would have nipped at a few of them if Raleigh hadn’t grabbed the dog and tucked him under her arm.
It was all such a blur. Raleigh was forced to leave her apartment and stand in the hallway with Copper while they made certain there was no further threat from the shooter. One uniformed officer asked her a bunch of questions, but all she could think to answer was, “I don’t know.”
The situation was so confusing Raleigh didn’t know what to do or how to behave. She’d been on the fringes of terrible crimes most of her adult life, but she’d never been in the middle of one like this.
“Is Griffin okay?” she asked every person who came out. Most of them didn’t seem to know, but finally one of the firefighters came out to tell her Griffin would survive.
“He’s lost some blood, but it doesn’t look like the bullet broke any bones or hit a major artery,” the female paramedic told her. “But he won’t consent to go to the hospital. Can you change his mind?”
“What? That idiot.” Here she was all bent out of shape because she thought he might die, and he was refusing help. She wanted to march right back into her apartment and give him a piece of her mind, but the cops wouldn’t allow her back in. Her lovely apartment, her oasis, was now officially a crime scene.
She was shocked a few minutes later when Griffin exited her apartment under his own steam, though he wasn’t moving very fast. He was shirtless, and a very large and thick white bandage decorated his left bicep.
The moment he saw her, he went to her and crushed her against him in a surprisingly strong bear hug.
“Are you okay?” he demanded.
“I’m fine.” His warm, bare skin felt good against her. “It’s you who got shot, in case you hadn’t noticed. I hear you won’t go to the hospital.”
“I told them I can’t leave until I’m sure you’re someplace safe. I promised you, when we left your office, that you would be safe and look what happened.”
She was touched by his attitude. He wasn’t being a macho, bullheaded male. He was trying to keep his word to her. “You saved my life. You took a bullet for me.”
“It’s not like I deliberately threw myself in its path.” He didn’t let her go, and she didn’t want him to. She would stay in his arms all night if he would let her. He was alive, he was okay.
Eventually two detectives showed up, along with a crowd of crime-scene investigators with their cameras and bags of equipment. One detective took Raleigh and Griffin downstairs to the building manager’s office, then put them in different rooms. Raleigh knew this was standard procedure, but she still felt like a suspect rather than a victim.
Several minutes passed before a detective joined her for her interview. And when the office door opened, her heart sank when she saw Lieutenant Abe Comstock standing in the doorway. Why, oh why had she antagonized the man mere hours ago?
“Looks like you got yourself in a might of trouble,” Comstock said as he pulled out a rolling office chair for himself, then rolled it way too close to where Raleigh sat on a small sofa with Copper in her lap.
Copper, who usually loved everyone, growled at the detective.
“You might want to back off a hair,” Raleigh said. “He’s upset and he might bite. Anyway, your intimidation tactics won’t work with me. I use them myself.”
Comstock nodded, awarding her the point, and backed away a couple of feet. “Sorry. I guess I forgot for a minute you’re a crime victim here, not a hostile defense attorney. Looks like you might have ruffled a few feathers.”
“You see?” She grabbed on to the thread of reasoning he’d given her. “Whoever the real murderer is doesn’t want me to prove Anthony’s innocence.”
“I confess, this turn of events has me wondering,” Comstock agreed. “But I have to consider all possibilities. Do you have any enemies, Ms. Shinn?”
Part of her wanted to hold back. Once this story broke, other reporters would be all over it, and she felt a strange desire to protect Griffin’s story. He’d worked damn hard for it, after all.
But she was an attorney, an officer of the court held to a higher standard than the average citizen. Plus, she wanted the police to find the person who had tried to kill her—fast.
“Someone’s been trying to ruin my reputation,” she said with a sigh. And she explained about the deposit, the altered phone bill, the threatening phone call. “The phone call seems to indicate the threats are related to the work I’m doing for Anthony Simonetti. But Griffin suggested it could be a smoke screen, to hide the perpetrator’s real identity and motives.”
Comstock nodded as he made notes. “Now I see why Benedict is hanging around you. This could shape up to be a real potboiler.”
“Whatever his motives, I’m glad he was there,” she added hastily. “He might have saved my life.” Part of her wanted to believe that Griffin was with her because he wanted to be there. He’d said he liked her. But how much of that was real, and how much was due to the article he hoped to write? The deeper he got into her psyche, the more compelling he could make the story.
She’d read his work. His stories read like bestselling fiction precisely because he did such a good job with the people involved. They weren’t just quotes or sources to him, they were real people with real lives.
The thought made her uncomfortable. She’d known he was using her predicament to help him get the job of his dreams, but was he using
her?
“When can I return to my apartment?” she asked Comstock.
“Not for a couple of days. We need to get a ballistics guy in there, and given the number of bullets… Is there somewhere safe you can go?”
“I’ll figure something out. Could I get my purse and briefcase, at least? I left them both near the front door.”
“I’ll see what we can do.”
Raleigh followed Abe Comstock out of the office and into the marble-tiled lobby and found Griffin waiting for her. Someone had loaned him a shirt, a bit snug across his broad shoulders, but at least it wasn’t stained with blood. She wanted more than anything to return to the solace of his warm embrace. But what might have been appropriate in the midst of an emergency didn’t seem so now.
“How about we go to the hospital?” Raleigh asked.
Griffin frowned. “Not necessary.”
She shook her head. The big strong man didn’t want to show weakness. “Maybe you need a transfusion. Antibiotics.”
He shook his head. “I’m good. Stop worrying.”
His color was better, at least. And he was no longer wobbling like a colt trying to find its legs.
“What now?”
That question was answered when Jillian Baxter, Daniel’s ever-efficient personal assistant, waltzed into the lobby as if she owned the place. She had a knack for getting past guards and doormen. All she had to do was show them Daniel’s business card.
Jillian looked stylish and polished as always, her chin-length blond bob sleek and her skinny black jeans and gauzy striped shirt screaming classy-casual.