The Strong Silent Type (3 page)

Jack Hawkins was a hard nut to crack, she thought. But here he was, being nice to her. He could have waited for the elevator, could have waited for the paramedics to arrive on the roof, for that matter, instead of taking it upon himself to carry her down five flights of stairs to the ground floor. Six if they counted the
set of stairs that had led from the roof to the fifth floor. Which meant the big lug cared.

“You can huff and puff all you want, Hawk, but I’ve got your number. You’re not the big bad wolf you pretend to be.”

Reaching the final landing, he paused long enough to look her right in the eye. She had to get over this noble image of him she was trying to paint. It got in his way.

“I don’t waste my time pretending.” So saying, he pushed down on the door handle with his elbow, opening the door that led out into the lobby.

Hawk could protest all he wanted; she knew better. But she played along, her mouth curving. “What you see is what you get, huh?”

He didn’t bother looking at her. Instead, he walked by the doorman, whose mouth dropped open when he saw the wounded woman in Hawk’s arms. “Right.”

“Wrong,” she countered just as the ambulance came into view.

Seeing journey’s end, Hawk almost sighed with relief. Not long now.

The doors of the stark-white vehicle with its red letters popped open. One of the two paramedics assigned to it jumped out.

Hawk deposited her inside the rear of the ambulance.

“She’s all yours,” he announced, backing away with his arms slightly raised, like a rodeo star who had just tied up a calf. “Best of luck to you.”

A ray of panic flashed between the shafts of pain vying for possession of her. He was leaving.

“You’re not coming?”

If he didn’t know any better, he would have said she looked scared. But if he’d learned nothing else these very long nine months, he’d learned that Theresa Cavanaugh did not get scared. Or, and this was probably more likely, if she did, she never showed it.

“Someone has to fill in the reports.”

Hawk began to walk away when he saw her wince as the paramedic slid off her coat. There was blood everywhere, spearing on his guilt. If it hadn’t been for her pushing him out of the way, he would have been the one with the wound. And, more than likely, his would have been more serious. He was taller than she was. It didn’t take much of a stretch of the imagination to realize that the bullet would have probably found its way into his gut.

The encroaching panic continued spinning out its web, swirling around her. She saw the way Hawk looked at her wound and guessed at what he was thinking, if not saying. She shamelessly used it to her advantage. “We caught the bad guys, Hawk. The paperwork can wait for a couple of hours.”

The paramedic was administering to her wound, bandaging it up as quickly as possible. Hawk averted his eyes from the exposed area, giving her her privacy. “Why do you want me to come with you?”

She could lie. She could make a joke about it. But right now, she needed to have him come with her. To
chase the specters away. So she went with the truth and hoped it would work.

“I need someone to hold my hand,” she told him honestly. “I never liked hospitals. People die in hospitals.”

He wasn’t sure if she was putting him on again or not. But there was a look in her eyes that didn’t allow him to retreat the way he wanted to. He couldn’t just abandon her.

Hawk looked around the area. The so-called suspects had been placed in the back of a squad car that was about to pull out. There was protocol to follow, he reminded himself.

The paramedic was urging her onto the gurney. “Only the good die young,” Hawk informed her. “I’ll catch up with you.”

To his surprise, she said nothing. She only continued looking at him. Continued looking even as the paramedic closed the doors, severing eye contact.

“Ah, hell,” Hawk bit off, shaking his head. Spinning around on his heel, he looked around until he saw a face he recognized. Quickly, he crossed to the heavyset detective. “Hey, Mulrooney, tell Mr. and Mrs. Wong that I’ll be back to take their statements after they’ve had a chance to pull themselves together.”

Mulrooney looked surprised that Hawk wasn’t on his way back upstairs. “Where are you going?”

Hawk clenched his teeth together. He didn’t like
having to explain himself, especially when he was having trouble understanding is own motivation.

“My partner’s been shot. I’m heading out to the hospital to make sure she’s all right.”

Again Mulrooney nodded, this time looking at the ambulance that had just peeled away, its siren going full blast. He grinned broadly. Everyone liked Teri Cavanaugh. The same couldn’t be said about her partner. “Trade assignments with you, Hawkins.”

Hawk made no answer. Given his choice, he would have liked to take Mulrooney up on that. The latter had the better end of the deal.

Muttering a few choice things under his breath, Hawk hurried to his car.

Her side throbbed wildly to the beat of the
1812 Overture
by the time the ambulance pulled into the parking lot behind Aurora Memorial Hospital’s ER. Even so, Teri braced herself as the paramedic went to open the rear doors.

This was the hospital where they had brought her uncle Mike the day he’d been shot.

This was the hospital Uncle Mike had died in.

The shooting had happened less than a month after her mother’s car had crashed through the guardrail and gone over the side, to be submerged in the river. Teri had been twelve at the time and the two events combined had overwhelmed her almost completely. She’d come away with a lasting phobia of hospitals.

That same phobia was alive and well now, fifteen
years later, even though she knew that logic dictated that she come here to be treated.

Logic was one thing, but superstitious and phobias didn’t understand logic.

“You better lie down.” The paramedic who’d treated her placed a hand on her shoulder, intending to help her get comfortable.

She stiffened as if she’d been shot again. There was no way in hell they were going to strap her down to the gurney, not while she was conscious.

“I can get out on my own power.”

She didn’t want to be held down while they wheeled her in, not as long as she could walk. There was something helpless about being pushed in through the electronic doors, not being able to move a muscle.

She pressed her lips together, her body tense, her side stinging like crazy as the rear doors opened, braced for the inevitable wave of fear to hit her with the force of a tidal wave.

What she wasn’t prepared for was to see Hawk standing there when the doors opened.

H
e came.

The words vibrated in her brain, bringing with them a wave of relief and happiness. Teri waved away the paramedic who’d just tried to get her to lie on the gurney.

“I’ll sit, but I won’t lie down.” She looked at Hawk who stepped back as the gurney was brought out of the ambulance. The dread drained out of her. She didn’t have to face going in alone. “Did you forget something?”

“Yeah, my better judgment.” He’d seen the relief that had leaped into her eyes, so intense that for a second it stopped him in his tracks. What was that about? Was she actually afraid of hospitals? He
hadn’t thought she was afraid of anything. It was part of the woman’s appeal.

The paramedics were pushing her through the doors. And Hawk was not fading back into the parking lot—he was coming in with her. “What about the statements?” she asked.

“I told Mulrooney to tell the victims I would be by later to take them.”

There were nurses and attendants scattered throughout the rear of the ER. Hawk flashed his badge at the one closest to them. The tall woman in dark green livery immediately pointed the paramedics to an open bed.

“We,” Teri corrected him. “We would be by later.”

There was brave, and then there was stupid. Cavanaugh had crossed the line. “Thinking of going somewhere, Superwoman?” Before she could answer, he asked, “Don’t you think that you’ve done enough damage to yourself for one day?”

Again she waved back hands that reached out to help. “I can do this,” she told the nurse who eyed her dubiously. Bracing herself against the mattress, she slid off the gurney and onto the hospital bed. Her body hated her for it. “It’s not like I stood there, daring the guy to shoot me. Hawk. I took a bullet for you.”

Guilt corkscrewed into him a little further. “Yeah, you did.”

Sitting on the bed, she read the look in his eyes. “And you feel guilty, don’t you?”

“Guilt’s not in my file folder.” He wasn’t about to have her poking around in his head, thinking she could read him. There were things there she couldn’t see.

Teri laughed shortly. “Don’t tell me that. I’ve seen it often enough on the faces of my brothers to know guilt when I see it.” Pain dragged spiked shoes across her side. Teri waited to catch her breath. It wasn’t easy. “No need for guilt. You would have done the same for me.” And then she surprised him by taking hold of his hand in hers. “Thanks.”

The simple gratitude he both saw in her eyes and heard in her voice stirred something within him and made him uneasy. He shrugged her words away.

Emotions of any kind, other than cold, steely anger, made him uncomfortable. They always had. He’d never had any outlet for them. The parents he’d once wanted so desperately to notice him, to get themselves clean and turn him and them into a real family, had rejected him. They had ignored him for as far back as he could remember. Instead, they had more interest in the drugs that could remove them from their world and take them to somewhere he had no desire to go.

Even as a kid, he’d known that drugs were bad. He’d watched firsthand as first his father, then his mother became firmly entrenched—because of drugs—in the land of the living dead.

He’d attempted, in his own way, to make his parents come around. He’d cooked, cleaned and tried to take care of them. There were tiny glimmers, moments when he thought things were finally on the right path, but in the end, all his efforts came to nothing.

When he was just twelve, a drug dealer, enraged because his parents were into him for several hundred dollars, had killed them both. Snuffed out their lives without so much as a peep from either for them. They were that far gone into their make-believe worlds.

And he had seen it all through the crack created by the doorjamb and a closet door.

He’d tried to wake them, knowing even as he desperately shook his mother, then his father, that they were both dead. And he’d been the one who had called 911 to report their murders.

Any shred of childhood he might have still possessed died with his parents that day. He’d become a man with all the burdens, all the sorrows that entailed. A man within a boy’s body, but still a man.

Which was why he had such a hard time in the system, a hard time trying to adjust to strangers, some of whom did their best to make him feel at home. Strangers who thought their rules applied to him. They didn’t realize that it was too late for him. He didn’t fit into a family structure anymore.

That door had closed for him when he was twelve.

He’d grown up isolated, insulated, not needing anyone or anything and not allowing anyone to need him.

So what was he doing here, letting this woman hang on to his hand as if it were her tether back to life as she waited for a resident doctor to examine her? Why wasn’t he back at the apartment complex, taking down statements, doing his job? That was what he was good at—detective work, not comforting.

Hell, he wouldn’t be able to comfort someone if his life depended on it. He just didn’t know how. So there was absolutely no point in trying.

Yet Cavanaugh seemed glad to see him, glad to hang on to his hand as if it were some kind of talisman that could keep her safe. Her hand felt small within his. It made him want to protect her.

“You looked scared.” He finally answered her earlier question.

He knew it wasn’t the right thing to say, but it was why he was here. He saw no point in sugarcoating, or lying. He’d used lies to survive on the street when he’d run away from his last foster home. When he’d wound up living in an abandoned warehouse with another kid named Tierney. Used lies until the lines between reality and fantasy became completely blurred for him. He wasn’t about to go there anymore. The path back always became hard to find.

Teri’s first instinct was to say, no, she wasn’t scared. The only thing that scared her was having harm come to the members of her family. Beyond that, she was pretty much fearless—like the rest of them.

But her reaction to hospitals, to what they repre
sented to her, wasn’t logical. It wasn’t anything she wanted to explain to Hawk. “I don’t expect you to understand.”

The nurse had returned to take her pulse, then asked her a couple of quick questions, all of which went down on her chart. “How’s the pain?” the woman asked.

“Not good,” Teri muttered.

“This’ll help.”

Before she could ask what she was referring to, the nurse had given her an injection. Leaving to dispose of the needle, she returned with a starched hospital gown and deposited it on the bed.

“Here, put this on. Someone’ll be here with you shortly.” With that, the woman promptly disappeared again.

Teri pushed the gown onto the chair.

“What are you doing?” Hawk asked.

“There’s no way I’m putting one of those things on. If they want to see this wound, all I have to do is lift up my shirt and they can cut away the bandages the paramedic put on.” She saw he was about to say something and cut him off. “I won’t be reduced to something sitting on an assembly line table.”

Color rose to her cheeks. In the nine months they’d been partnered, he didn’t remember ever seeing her get angry.

Or was that fear doing it to her? “Try me.”

“Excuse me?”

“You said you didn’t think I would understand why you’re afraid of hospitals. Try me.”

Even as the words came out of his mouth, he wasn’t entirely sure just how they got there. He made his way through life not getting involved on any level with anything but the cases he was assigned, and then only in strictly a professional way. It was more than a matter of needing to be focused or possessing tunnel vision, he just didn’t care to have people’s lives touch his. It was cleaner that way. Neater.

Getting involved in someone’s life wasn’t worth the effort or the trouble. That, too, had been a lesson he’d gleaned while raising himself in his parents’ rundown, rat-infested apartment.

Yet there was something about Cavanaugh that reached out to him.

Hawk was probably going to use this against her somehow, but since he asked, she felt she owed him an explanation. After all, he was still here, not turning his back and walking away.

“My uncle died in a hospital. This hospital,” she added. “I was twelve.”

Twelve.

The same age as he’d been when everything in his life had changed for him.

It felt odd having something beyond the police force in common with her. But then, having an uncle die in the line of duty wasn’t exactly the same thing as seeing your parents gunned down in front of you
for less money than some people spent for a week’s groceries.

Restless, he shoved his hands into his pockets and wondered why he wasn’t leaving. “You and your uncle were close?”

“Not as close as I am to my other uncle. Or my father,” she added.

The time her father had been wounded in the line of duty, she thought her whole world had been shattering. She’d been so terrified, she couldn’t get herself to come to the hospital with the rest of her siblings, afraid that if she did, if she came, it would be the last time she would see her father alive.

Just as it had been with her uncle.

“My whole family’s close,” she told him. Her words echoed back to her. Because he had no family, would he take that the wrong way? Would he think she was gloating because she had such a wonderful support system and he had no one to turn to?

Hawk made it seem as if he didn’t need anyone, she reminded herself. He liked being alone.

Someone was paging a doctor to neurology. Hawk waited for the voice over the loudspeaker to fade away. “If you’re so close, why didn’t you want me to call one of them?”

“Because I don’t want them to worry.” She could almost envision the lot of them, crowding around the bed, shooting questions at her, looking like a backup for a worried Greek chorus. She could deal much better with them once she was completely patched up
and this was behind her. “You, on the other hand, won’t worry. You can just keep my mind off the fact that it hurts like a son of a gun.”

His eyes narrowed. They both knew that she was responsible for ninety-nine percent of the conversations they did have. “And just how do you figure I’d do that?”

Teri grinned from ear to ear despite the pain that insisted on shooting through her with the precision of a Swiss watch. “Snappy patter comes to mind.”

The remark was so incongruous, the image so out of character for him, Hawk laughed. The rich sound encompassed the tiny area they occupied.

She thought of her father’s fresh coffee, first thing in the morning. Rich, smooth. Fortifying. “You know that’s the first time I’ve ever heard you laugh. Nice. You should do that more often.”

His face was somber again. “You do like telling people what to do, don’t you?”

“Second nature, I guess.” The pain had been melting away, but now the room was in danger of having the same thing happen to it. She grasped on to the metal railing on one side of the bed. “Damn, what did that nurse jab into me?”

“Well, if I’m lucky, something to put you to sleep.” She began struggling to get off the bed. He caught her by the arm, holding her in place. “Hey, what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“I don’t want to go to sleep here. I want to go
home.” She was going to leave while she could still feel her legs. Sort of.

“Cavanaugh—”

She clutched his hand and raised imploring eyes up to his face. That was twice today she’d looked at him that way, and he didn’t like it. Didn’t like the position it put him in or how it made him feel—uncertain of his parameters around her. “Promise me that you’ll take me home.”

He’d seen prisoners less desperate to escape their jail cells. Hawk tried to remove her fingers and found that they were locked in almost a death grip around his wrist. Very firmly, he peeled back her fingers from his flesh. “Look, they have to stitch you up first, clean the wound—”

“Okay, okay,” she interrupted, “but I’m not staying here overnight. Do you understand?”

What he understood was that somehow, the department had paired him with a woman who was a damn good detective, but that didn’t change the fact that she was irritating and crazy to boot.

“If I say no, you’re not going to let go of my hand, are you?”

He saw Teri slowly move her head from side to side and knew that she wasn’t kidding. He could, of course, disengage himself from her. She had a good grip but she was, at bottom, absolutely no match for him. Even if he were a ninety-pound weakling, once the medication put her out, he could easily just slip away.

Again, he didn’t know why he didn’t. Maybe it was because for some reason she looked as if she needed him, and even though he told himself he didn’t want to become involved, he had a hell of a hard time turning his back on that. On her.

It was why he was in law enforcement in the first place. Because people needed to be protected. From drug dealers, like the ones who had snuffed out his parents long before they were murdered, and from burglars, like the ones they’d caught today who had gotten off on seeing the terrified faces of their victims.

People needed protecting. And his badge made him a protector.

He sighed, surrendering the battle that had never really gotten onto the battlefield. “Okay, I’ll stay.”

“And take me home when the time comes.”

“And take you home when the time comes,” he finally said after she’d pinned him with those blue-gray eyes of hers.

It was another three hours before she was finally able to get into his car again. Three hours in which she’d been tortured, injected, stitched and finally bandaged. Three hours in which she’d hovered between pain and a drug-enabled euphoria.

She was still somewhere in the region of the latter. Stretching as best she could, she sighed and leaned back against the seat.

“God, I feel like I could just leap off the top of something and fly,” she said.

Knowing that a silly grin had taken over her face, and not caring, Teri turned to flash it at her partner. She congratulated herself for finding a soft spot within his hard exterior. It made her feel giddy. She liked getting to him. Because he sure as hell had gotten to her.