I could have looked for the gun, maybe should have, but he’d dropped it, so I rushed over to check on him and hit him in the head again, just to be safe. He was out cold. Rounding on Digby, checking quickly, I saw that he wasn’t moving. And that’s when I felt the burn in my right arm and saw the blood. I’d been shot once when I was a policeman, and once as a fixer; both had hurt much worse than I was feeling at the moment. Lifting my T-shirt, I was relieved to see that the graze on my left side, near my ribs, wasn’t a bullet hole. I sacrificed a dish towel to the stemming of my blood, absolutely certain that Dallas wouldn’t give a damn.
“Croy!”
Dallas’s yell was loud and high, and I could hear clearly how scared he was.
“I’m out here,” I called back. “It’s all clear.”
The fact that he came through the archway before I finished telling him that it was safe to do so, told me that he had already been rushing to me. His safety was of no consideration; he just wanted to see me. It made my stupid heart stumble just a bit.
His Glock was drawn as he bolted across the room to me, while at the same moment, the front door came crashing down and the FBI stormed through it in full riot gear.
My arms went up, as I’d been trained, still holding the pan I’d smacked Digby and Ryder with. That I’d got the chance to hit Lund twice was satisfying. Dallas started yelling, and I was not surprised that Assistant Special Agent in Charge Reina Montez was the fifth one through his obliterated front door.
“I knew he was overreaching,” I told Montez, who was standing at Dallas’s counter talking to people on her phone, on a handheld police radio and, I was guessing, on Skype—or whatever the FBI used—on her tablet. “I knew you’d double-check on Ella.”
“Your faith is gratifying,” she deadpanned, squinting at me as she continued to talk to people, but watching the EMT clean and bandage my side.
Dallas had taken the time to throw on some jeans so old and faded and frayed and ripped to hell that they left nothing to the imagination, and a T-shirt in much the same condition, and was standing with his arm around Ella’s shoulders, talking to Higa and several agents from the DEA. He didn’t want to leave me, but I needed him to stand with Ella and be her support, so I’d insisted.
“Was Murray outside?”
“He was, and now he’s on his way to Virginia to be interrogated.”
“People are going to be so jealous that your office caught him.”
I saw the glint in her eye then, just that little glimpse letting me know how truly pleased she was.
“Special Agent Montez?”
“Just Reina is good.”
“Oh,” I said quickly, touched that she would make the offer. “Thank you.”
She nodded, and I realized she looked younger, suddenly, and sad too. “I want you to think better of Agent Lund, but I don’t know why.”
“I’m sure you were just as close to him as Dallas was, and it’s sad to lose friends, no matter the reason.”
“Yes, it is,” she agreed.
Digby and Ryder were both transported to the hospital under heavy guard, and a new fiberglass front door was being hung, because for some insane reason, Dallas had a spare in his garage. We were going to have to have a long talk about why that was.
“Listen to me.”
Turning my attention from Ella and Dallas, standing together looking like they should be modelling on billboards, I found Montez squinting at me.
“Bauer is an excellent agent. He goes a bit too cowboy on me occasionally, but I always trust his instincts, so you should too.”
“Is there any particular reason you’re telling me this?”
“No. I just thought you should know.”
Dallas had to go to the hospital to talk to Ryder, I had to go to get checked out by a doctor and get a tetanus shot, and Ella insisted on coming with me. What was nice was that we talked more. She brought me up to date on her family and confessed she was horrified over the fact that she had thought about sleeping with Ryder, but had decided against it only because she was tipsy.
“He is handsome,” I offered helpfully. “And he didn’t want to kill Dallas. That’s something.”
“Oh, but killing the love of Dallas’s life is okay?”
“Laying it on a bit thick, aren’t you?” I chided her.
“Am I?”
“Yes, you—don’t…you don’t know how he—what?”
She snorted out a laugh.
I made the cutting motion across my neck with my hand.
There was more snickering after that.
After the adrenaline crash, my headache came roaring back with a vengeance, so one of the nurses brought me some painkillers that wiped it right out and left my head feeling almost cool.