Saving Grace (Serve and Protect Series) (29 page)

A big
if
. Too big.

Holding both hands out in plain view, he bent and placed the Glock carefully on the carpeted floor.

“Now kick it over here.”

Ray obliged.

“That’s better.” Landis retrieved the Glock, jammed it into his waistband, then started to swing his gun back toward Ray. This was it. He had to go for the pistol. Now or never.

A sudden thump dragged Landis’s attention back toward the bed. Ray shot a quick glance in that direction, too.

Oh, Lord! Grace had rolled right off it onto the floor. Landis’s strode back toward the bed. Ray went for the Beretta in his hightop. Without hesitation, he aimed and squeezed the trigger.

Nothing.

Oh, Jesus
. Landis was standing over Grace now, bringing the pistol’s muzzle down....

“No!” Ray cried, lunging toward Landis, impotently squeezing the trigger of the little .22.

A sudden explosion of sound shocked his eardrums in the small room, followed by another.

Incredibly, Landis reeled back, slamming into the wall between a pair of motel art pictures. Then he sank slowly to the floor, an obscenely-wide crimson streak on the white wall tracking his descent.

Ray vaulted over the bed, kicking the pistol away from Landis’s lax grip. One look at the man and he knew he needn’t have bothered. Hollow-point bullets at near point-blank range rarely left any doubt, but he pressed a hand to Landis’s carotid artery automatically to confirm it.

No pulse, and no possibility of resuscitation.

Immediate threat eliminated, he turned to check on Grace. His heart stumbled in his chest.

Even in the confusion of the moment, he’d known the killing shots had to have been fired by Grace, but somehow he wasn’t prepared for the sight of her, lying there on the carpet.

Naked, bound and gagged, she clutched his service weapon between trembling hands, her arms still stiffly extended.

“Oh, Grace, honey.” He dropped beside her, gingerly prying the gun from her tight grip. Placing the weapon on the night table, he dealt swiftly with the gag by dragging it down around her neck, then pulled her into his arms.

She shuddered, dragging in a shaky breath. “Is he dead?”

“Very.” His voice shook just as badly as Grace’s had. Damn, that was close. Too close.

Scooping the bedspread off the floor, he wrapped it around her. He tried to untie the binding at her wrists, but he couldn’t budge them. Swearing, he dug his Swiss Army knife out of his pocket and started sawing through the material. He worked carefully but quickly, anxious to restore circulation to her poor fingers.

“Did he hurt you?”

“Not much. Just a tap on the head.”

He jerked his gaze up from her discolored hands, which he’d been massaging back to life. Now that the gag had been removed, he could see she’d taken a blow to the face. The skin beneath her eye was already turning blue and the flesh was torn over her cheekbone. The eye area itself was swollen, too.

“If the sonofabitch wasn’t already dead, I’d kill him for that,” he said matter-of-factly.

“I killed him.” She looked past him to where Landis lay slumped against the wall. “I killed a man.”

Her gaze was blank, her voice devoid of emotion. That would come later, after the shock passed. She’d have nightmares about it. All that blood, the smell of death, the vacant look in the eyes after life was extinguished. It was hard to deal with even when it was part of your job.

“You saved us, Grace.” He turned her away from the grisly sight, leading her to the other bed where he gently urged her down. “He’d have killed us both.”

She blinked. “We better call the police.”

“No need. Hear that?” She nodded that she could hear the sirens. “Someone must have called 911 after shots were fired.” He quickly cut the bindings at her ankles. “In about two minutes, this parking lot’s going to be lit up like Christmas.”

He was wrong. The cavalry arrived in under a minute.

Instructing Grace to stay put, Ray stepped outside. He raised his arms high in the air as two patrol cars converged in the parking lot, their red-and-blue bar lights bouncing crazily off buildings and cars. He recognized the first officer out of his car, Corporal Jake Hartland.

“Jake, it’s me. Ray Morgan.”

Hartland tipped the weapon he’d leveled at Ray’s chest upward a fraction of an inch. “Razor?”

“Yep.”

“What’s going on?”

“You got a DOA inside, Room 116. And to your left, beside that black Mercedes SUV, you’ll find a man down. He’s a hospital case, too, unless he’s crawled off. Probable fractured skull.”

“Detective Morgan?”

Ray glanced at the second officer, a new recruit. “Crowly.”

The youngster lowered his weapon and Ray lowered his arms.

“Holy hell, Ray, what’d you do to yourself?” Jake again. “I wouldn’t have recognized you, man.”

He grinned. “Long story. You should see Grace.”

“Grace is here?”

Ray’s face sobered. “Grace is the shooter.”

If Jake had been wearing his hat as policy preferred, his eyebrows would have disappeared under it. “This
is
going to be a long story.” He shook his head. “Okay, where’s the guy with the cracked melon? We better see to him before he
does
crawl off.”

Ray led them to the black Mercedes behind which the Russian still sprawled unconscious. Jake knelt to check him out.

“You gonna tell me Grace did this, too?”

“No, that was me,” he said. “I might have hit him a little hard.”

“Nah. He’s still breathing.” Jake stood. “Don’t suppose you can tell me who it is?”

“Vladimir Rusakevitch.”

“Cripes, another one of Landis’s men?”

“Yep.”

“Jeez, we’ve been processing these guys all night. Holding cells are full of them.”

“So I heard,” Ray said.

“Yeah? From who?”

“Landis.”

“Don’t tell me‌—‌Landis is our DOA?”

“Yep.”

Jake whistled admiringly. “And Grace shot him?”

“Yes.”

“Damn, I can’t wait to hear this.”

The ambulance arrived just then, followed by another squad car.

“Our sergeant,” Jake said, as the female officer climbed out of her car. Jake waved for the EMTs who had piled out of the ambulance with a gurney.

“Over here,” he called, then turned to the other patrolman. “Dennis, you stay with our friend, Vlad.” Then he turned to Ray. “Razor, buddy, I’m gonna have to put you in my car while Sergeant Copeland and I secure the scene.”

“But Grace needs me‌—”

“Grace needs to give us an independent statement.”

Standard operating procedure to separate witnesses for questioning. Ray knew it, but it didn’t make it any easier to accept. She’d looked so blank, so stunned. He wanted to be with her, help her through this. But it was out of the question and he knew it. He was going to have to give his own statement, too. Dammit, it would likely be hours before he could wrap his arms around her again.

“Okay, Jake.” He forced his fisted hands to relax. “Okay.”

It was almost six hours later before Grace saw Ray again.

In those hours, she’d held an ice pack to her cheek while she told the bare bones of her story to Sergeant Roberta Copeland. She’d then been taken to hospital where the ER doctor had checked her over thoroughly, closed the gash on her cheek, and pronounced her fine.

Then she’d gone to the station and repeated her story in greater depth for Detective Dave Samsel, a colleague of Ray’s from Major Crime, and Jake Hartland.

She’d written out a full statement and answered what felt like a thousand questions from Samsel and Hartland. Finally,
finally
, they told her she was free to go.

Thank God. She was so tired, her head was beginning to spin, which did nothing for her stomach. She needed a dark room, a soft pillow and the blessed escape sleep would grant.

“Where’s Ray?”

“Right outside this door, I expect,” Jake said dryly. “At least, that’s where he’s been this last hour or so.”

He was right. He was at her side the moment the door opened.

“Grace, you okay?”

She looked up at his face as he took her hands. He looked dog-tired, too, but she could see the watchfulness in his eyes, the concern that softened them.

“I’m fine.” She smiled wanly. “Just tired. Can we go home?”

He grimaced. “I think a hotel would be a better bet.”

Her stomach roiled violently.

“Are you saying it’s not over? We’re
still
not safe to go home?”

“Oh, no, sweetheart. It’s not that.” He pushed a strand of her hopelessly tangled hair back behind her ear. “We’re out of danger. Landis is dead and his thugs are rounded up. There’s nothing to worry about.”

Despite his reassurance, fear gripped her exhausted mind. “How can you be sure? How do you know there won’t be reprisals? He must have had connections....”

“Listen to me, baby. Landis was the boss. His organization is broken. Yes, he had connections. All gangs do, especially these new ones. They’ll partner with the devil himself to make a buck, but their affiliations tend to be very fluid, very
ad hoc
. Those loose partners aren’t going to charge in to avenge Landis, believe me.”

“Ray’s right,” Dave Samsel said, and Grace turned toward the detective. “Makes it damned hard for us to catch them when relationships form and dissolve so quickly, but it’ll work to your advantage here. No one cares enough about Landis to do anything, except maybe to try to fill the void he leaves.”

She turned back to Ray. “Then why can’t we go home?”

“The explosion,” he reminded her. “The house is secure enough‌—‌Quigg says they boarded it up in our absence‌—‌but it’s not pretty.” He rubbed a thumb along the line of her jaw. “The door, the siding, shutters, eavestroughing...it’s still a mess.”

She looked into Ray’s eyes, looked deep into those warm brown depths, and let go of the fear.

“Okay.” She let her breath out. “A hotel it is. But I want to stay at a
nice
one. And I want to register as Grace and Ray Morgan and pay with our credit card, and I want to look the desk clerk square in the eye when we check out. All right?”

Ray grinned back at her. “All right.”

Ray lay on his back in the king-sized bed as the watery light of dawn seeped into their fifth-floor room. If he got up and stood at the window, he knew he’d be treated to a spectacular view of the sun rising over Fredericton, but he didn’t budge.

Grace was sprawled beside him, her face pressed into his shoulder, hand on his chest. He watched her sleep, counted her soft respirations.

Lord, he was so lucky. Lucky to be alive. Lucky to have Grace. Lucky to have a second chance to learn to love this woman the way she deserved.

Was it only two weeks and change since she’d walked into their kitchen and dropped that bombshell?

He’d been devastated, unable to imagine how he would go on. But the damnable thing was, he hadn’t even begun to love her then. Not really. Not for the woman she was. He’d loved an idea, the image he’d imposed on her.

But he loved her now. She was smart and brave and she loved him extravagantly. If he lived to be a hundred, he’d never forget the way she’d looked in that club, nursing a soda and waiting for Landis, the weight of Ray’s gun in her purse.

His hand tightened on her hip. If anything had happened to her, if he lost her now....

She stirred in his arms. “Ray?”

He pulled her to him, crushing her against him. “Don’t ever scare me like that again.”

She returned the pressure of his embrace with her own slim arms. “I’ll try not to.”

He stroked the silky skin of her back. “I can’t lose you now. It’d kill me, Gracie.”

She pulled back to look at him and his heart stuttered at the expression in her pale blue eyes.
Troubled
. Then she dropped her gaze to his chest. She lifted a hand to stroke the hairs there, her touch incredibly soft.

“I can’t go back, Ray.”

His heart started hammering. “You’re not coming home with me?”

“No, that’s not what I’m saying. At least, I hope not.” She pulled out of his arms and sat up, tucking the sheet across her breasts. “I’m saying I don’t want our relationship to go back the way it was. I don’t want to go back to the way
I
was.”