Listen, Pitch (There's No Crying in Baseball 3)

Sorry, sucker. You betrayed me first.

“It’s rightly my money,” Pablo snarled, cocking the gun.

He didn’t look away from my eyes as he pulled the trigger.

Lynn’s bullet hit Pablo in the forehead moments after the reverberation filled the room from the first gunshot, and I dropped to my knees, unable to catch my breath, as I watched Pablo fall backward.

The moment his body hit the floor, I felt such a sense of relief that it was hard to catch my breath.

“It’s good, yes, that I moved them when I did?” Joker asked, sounding proud of himself.

I got up, walked over to the cradle, and looked in.

The only thing in there was a small plastic doll wrapped up in a hospital blanket—a doll that now had a bullet hole through its plastic skull.

If Pablo had cared to look, he’d have seen that the baby wasn’t real.

If he had half a brain, he would know that babies that were as small as mine wouldn’t be in anything but an incubator to help them breathe and thrive—to help regulate their temperature.

I switched over the app on my phone, taking a long hard look at the nurses and doctor that flitted around my children’s bedsides. They were both in huge plexiglass incubators, and they were both covered from head to toe with wires and tubes.

It hurt my heart to see.

“You missed one.”

I whipped around in time to see Henley roughly force a man’s hand behind his back, twisting his thumb up high between the man’s back while also holding a gun to his head.

Irrational anger surged through me.

“What are you doing here?” I snarled.

But in the next second, Lynn had the man by the hair and was forcing him to his knees at the same time Henley hit me like a wrecking ball.

I threw my arms around her and squeezed her so hard that it was likely I was causing her pain.

I didn’t stop, though, and she didn’t ask me to.

“I came because Marsala said the safe word,” she whispered. “Her location said she was here.” She looked over at the baby doll that we’d used as a stand-in, and she shuddered. “I have a feeling Marsala was bad?”

I laughed. “You have no idea. She gave her location away—which I knew she would do—and we transferred the babies via Medivac to a new safe house about eight hours ago. You weren’t supposed to leave.”

Henley narrowed her eyes. “You could’ve solved all of this by telling me what the fuck was going on.”

I didn’t miss the anger in her voice. Nor did I miss the way she was staring at me with a ton of accusations in her eyes.

“I had to finish this,” I told her honestly. “And do you even know how to use a gun?”

The anger. The helplessness. The worry. It was all still there.

Pablo was dead. Michael was dead. Marsala was dead. There was nothing else that could hurt us…except it felt too good to be true.

“You should really back away and keep some distance between you and the gun, just in case he tries to reverse y’all’s positions. Then you’re not in jeopardy of losing your firearm,” Lynn supplied helpfully.

With practiced ease, he brought him up to his face and stared into his eyes for a few long seconds. “What is your name?”

The man blinked. “My name is Artu—”

Arturo didn’t get the chance to finish his name before his words were cut off with a swift twist of his neck. The slimy, sickening pop of his spinal cord severing followed those words.

Henley bent over and threw up at Joker’s feet.

“Holy shit,” she breathed, trying not to lose it a second time.

That was futile when Joker let the man fall at his feet, directly in the puddle of puke that’d just been emitted from Henley’s body.

“I’m so going to hell,” she wheezed.

I walked over to her, as sedately as I possibly could, and drew her back into my arms.

“I can’t breathe,” Henley wheezed.

I couldn’t seem to let her go.

“I’m sorry. I can’t…I can’t…”

She threaded her arms around my neck. “I can’t either. It’s okay.”

But it wasn’t…then buried her face into my shoulder.

And everything didn’t seem as bad as it seemed only a few seconds ago.

***

“So, you’re telling me, over this past month, you’ve hunted down every single man in your uncle’s organization, with Joker’s help, and nobody is going to do a damn thing about it because Joker, this broker guy you were discussing as a neutral party, was the one to pull the trigger? And nobody will question him?” Henley said. “And, only eight hours before, our children had been in that room where Pablo had entered all because Marsala decided to turn bad?”

“Marsala and the other surrogate were always bad. Pablo knew exactly what we were going to do—find someone to do this the expedient way—and he made sure to have a doctor on his payroll at each surrogate center in the area,” I explained.