On Her Father's Grave (Rogue River Novella Book 1) (12 page)

Damn it.

Zane weighed his options. Call and wait for county backup? The crack of a shot from outdoors made the four of them duck to the floor. An answering shot rang from outside the front of the house. Footsteps pounded on the front porch, and Carter announced himself before crashing open the door.

“Zane! He’s still in the barn. He just took a shot at the ambulance!” Carter’s gaze locked on the group. “They got Kenny loaded up and were leaving when the shot hit the ambulance. I fired back. Looked like he was shooting from behind the barn door.”

Zane made up his mind. He called and asked Sheila to contact Rogue County sheriff dispatch and request support. It could be twenty minutes to an hour before they got any help, depending on where the closest units were currently patrolling.

He wasn’t going to wait. Their prey was cornered.

Stevie listened as Zane outlined their plan, agreeing with his logic. Adrenaline coursed through her muscles, but she felt eerily calm and focused. Her training had kicked into gear, and her head was right where she needed it to be.

Zane opened the door and hollered, “Ted! We need you to lay your gun down and come out!”

A curse answered him from the shed.

Stevie grinned at Carter. Ted was in a building with only two exits, if you counted the window at the back. He had the choice to walk out or wait for them to come in.

“Kenny is going to be all right!” Zane yelled. “He’s not dead. So you haven’t killed anyone yet! Don’t make the situation any worse than it is.”

“Kenny didn’t look good,” Carter whispered to Stevie. “He wasn’t talking anymore when the ambulance guys got there.”

Stevie nodded at him. She couldn’t think about Kenny right now. All her focus had to be on getting Ted out of the barn safely.

“Go to hell!” was Ted’s reply.

“I’ll ask you again to put down the gun and come out. That way I can tell the judge you cooperated.”

No answer.

“Now what?” Carter asked. The young cop couldn’t hold still, making Stevie want to smack him in the head for distracting her.

“We show him he has a choice,” she whispered back. “Let him think it’s not the end of the world. That worse things could happen if he doesn’t come out. Make him feel like he’s making the decision.”

“We can’t just sit here,” Carter protested.

“We will for a while. We have to give negotiation a chance.”

Noise from an explosion made her lose her balance and topple into Carter. They scrambled apart and rushed to the glass door behind Zane.

“Holy shit,” Carter gasped.

A side of the barn had blown out and flames covered the back barn wall and part of its roof.

What did Ted do?

Stevie pointed at Russ. “Call 911 and get the fire department out here.” The boy nodded and grabbed for the old phone on the wall. She met Zane’s gaze. “Ready?” Their plan to arrest had just turned into a possible rescue.

He nodded and she and Carter followed him out the side door, focus and weapons trained on the dark smoke and bright flames billowing from the shed. Stevie felt the heat toast her face.

How close could they get?

Zane called Ted’s name again. They broke apart. Zane moved toward the rear of the barn, and she and Carter moved around the front. The door hung open, flapping in the breeze caused by the flames rapidly consuming the dry old wood. Destruction quickly ate its way up to the roof.

“No one could survive in that!” Carter shouted over the sounds of the fire.

Stevie agreed. Either Ted was roasting or he’d sneaked out—

Her hand exploded with pain as a shot sounded over the roar of the fire.

She dropped her gun and stared at her left hand, faintly aware of Carter shouting at her.

I’m bleeding . . . what is the white stuff in my hand?

Zane appeared and grabbed her left hand and yanked it above her head. She stared at his close face, sweat and soot dotting his skin. His mouth moved, but his words didn’t penetrate the fog in her brain. He pushed her backward toward the house, her feet tripping over the gravel and dirt.

She blinked as sounds started to organize into words and make sense.

“Stevie! Look at me!”

Instead she stared past him, at Ted Warner twenty feet away, near the woods with the rifle at his shoulder, his aim directed at Zane’s back. She opened her mouth to scream.

Zane yanked both of them to the right, hurtling toward the ground. The impact knocked Stevie’s breath away, and her hand screamed in agony as it hit the ground and another gunshot roared in the yard. In one swift move, Zane pulled to a knee and fired at the figure on the edge of the woods.

Ted Warner collapsed.

Zane gestured for Carter to go to Ted and spun back to Stevie. “Did you get hit?”

She lay on her back, one hand clasped around the wrist of her bleeding hand on her chest, staring up at him. “No. Only from the first shot.”

Concern and worry filled his face as he hovered over her, patting her down, checking for new wounds. “Are you sure?”

Stevie tried to take stock of the rest of her body, but the fire in her hand hogged all her focus.

“I don’t see anything else,” he said.

“He was going to shoot you,” she muttered.

“I saw your eyes focus over my shoulder on him.”

The smoky blue sky behind Zane’s head started to spin. “I think I’m going to puke now,” she croaked.

Deft hands rolled her onto her side, and she vomited into the dirt. She spit, trying to clear her mouth. She closed her eyes and sighed. “I’m okay.”

“I’m gonna go check on Ted. Don’t go anywhere.”

“I promise.”

She heard fire engine sirens.

Three days later

Zane handed over the small stack of journals to Patsy, and she invited him in for iced tea. He followed her into the house, and she pointed through the kitchen windows at Stevie in a lounge chair on the back deck, her bandaged hand propped up on a few pillows beside her. “Go see her,” Patsy told him. “I’ll bring out some tea in a few minutes.” He stepped out onto the deck. Stevie spotted him and started to swing her feet off her chaise.

“Don’t move,” he ordered.

She eyed him but relaxed back into her seat. A bit of haziness in her gaze told him she was still taking her painkillers. She’d had immediate surgery in Medford on her left hand. Luckily they’d had a skilled surgeon available to assess and treat the damage.

“At least it’s not my shooting hand,” she’d joked as she was loaded into the ambulance.

“Sheesh, two days on the job and you got worker’s comp already,” Zane had replied.

On that awful day, after the explosion, Zane hadn’t seen anyone at the back of the barn and was returning toward the front when he heard the rifle shot that hit her hand. Seeing her standing frozen with blood on her front had emotionally rocked him in a way he hadn’t dreamed existed.

He’d never been so happy to see just a hand injury.

The surgeon didn’t know if she’d recover 100 percent use of the hand, but he’d seemed upbeat about her chances for coming close. “No tendon damage. She’s very lucky to have some chipped bones and torn muscles.”

He pulled a chair close to her chaise and sat, simply happy to be in the peace of her mother’s yard and see Stevie smiling.

“Did they figure out how the explosion was triggered in Ted’s barn?” Stevie asked.

“Ted used gas from the cans for the lawnmower to start it. The fertilizer in the building caused the explosion. I guess we’ll never know why he came back to the shed after it went up in flames.”

“Because he wanted to shoot you,” Stevie said bitterly.

Ted paid for that shot with his life. Zane’s bullet had caught him in the neck.

“Grace Ellis stopped by the office yesterday. She saw Ted’s picture in the paper and she’s positive that Ted was the man she saw with Hunter before the party at the lake. A few other kids have come forward and admitted that Ted had tried to sell them “a new high” that night at O’Rourke’s Lake.”

“I’m glad we figured out who the mystery man at the lake was,” said Stevie.

“Loretta says he was selling something, and she hadn’t cared as long as he wasn’t stealing the cash out of her purse.” Zane shook his head. “She said she’d asked Ted how they could afford a brand-new truck but not new shoes for Russ, and Ted had refused to answer.”

“What’s the latest on Kenny?”

“He’s still in intensive care, battling damage to a kidney and secondary infections that kicked in from having his intestine nicked by a bullet.”

“He’ll pull through.” Stevie gave a shaky smile. “He’s a tough one.”

“I hope we all pull through. We were going to be seriously shorthanded. I’m thankful the Rogue County Sheriff’s Department loaned me three reserve officers for two months.” The reserve officers weren’t paid county employees. They were volunteers who went through a large chunk of the regular police training and bought their own equipment. But they seemed happy to help and most of them already knew their way around Solitude.

She gave a sympathetic look. “Beggars can’t be choosers.”

“They’re good guys. We’ll make it work.” He pressed his lips together and looked out across the field behind the deck.

“What is it?” she asked.

“No one can find Roy Krueger,” Zane said. “I just stopped by there. His house is locked up, his truck is gone and you know he hasn’t been answering phone calls. He’s left town.”

Stevie straightened in her chair. “That’s impossible. He would have told us. He would have said something to my mother. He was part of the family.”

“I’m at a loss here. Everyone’s pretty stunned. Do you know if he has family somewhere?”

“I don’t know.” Her forehead wrinkled. “I can’t think of him ever talking about family. Maybe my mother knows something.”

Zane glanced over his shoulder. He could see Patsy through the kitchen window, sitting at the table, flipping through Bill’s journals with a smile on her face. He hated to interrupt her. She’d clearly forgotten about the iced tea. Or thought they needed a few more quiet moments together.

“Thank you for finding the journals,” Stevie said. “They’ll make her feel close to him.”

Zane shifted in his chair. “I kept the one for the month of May. I want you to take a look at it when you’re off the painkillers. Something was going on that your dad mentions a few times, but I’m not sure what he’s talking about. I thought you might have some insight.”

Stevie’s brown eyes widened. “Did you ask James? What kind of stuff?”

James is acting odd lately.

“No, I haven’t shown it to James,” he said slowly. “There were two things in the last journal that jumped out at me. The first was that Roy was taking a lot of time off, and your dad was puzzled that he wouldn’t give a good reason.” He held Stevie’s brown gaze. “The second was that your dad was worried about James not being himself and acting strangely.”

Stevie’s skin prickled on the back of her neck, and she knew it wasn’t the Vicodin. “What does that mean, not being himself? What exactly did he say?”

“Twice he brings it up, and he mentions James and Debra’s marriage. I’ll give it to you. Maybe you and Carly can make sense out of it.” He glanced back at her mother in the house and continued. “I heard from the medical examiner this morning. About the drug in Hunter’s system.”

Stevie sat up straighter. “And?”

“It’s a new formula.”

“New? How is that possible?” She was stunned.

“It’s extremely close to another potent recreational drug, but slightly different. Someone’s created a new compound. And the exact same thing was in the system of the teen who died at the coast.”

“Holy cow. Someone’s making and selling something new to our kids.” Her mind grabbed the fact and ran. What did this mean to her community?

Zane nodded, twisting his mouth. “I think so too. Looks like Ted was our local distributor, so I’m surprised that there haven’t been more overdose cases around here.”

“What did you find at Ted’s?” she asked.

“Nothing,” Zane said grimly. “I thought for certain his barn would be a lab of some sort, but the investigation by the fire department turned up nothing illegal.”