Vulnerable (Morgans of Nashville 4)

Standing to the side of the door, she held her gun close as she reached out and pounded on the door. “Tim Taylor!”

In all the years working in the forensic field she had never fired her weapon outside of a firing range. And though she was trained for moments like this, no amount of practice could really prepare her.

Silence echoed from the room. One. Two. Three.

“Amber! Amber, it’s Georgia!”

“Georgia!” Amber screamed. “Help me! I’ve shot Tim.”

She reached for the door handle and turned it, allowing the door to swing open as she waited for any kind of return fire. Over the sound of her own pounding heart she heard Amber’s weeping, desperate and frightened.

She drew in a breath as she adjusted her hold on the gun and turned to go into the room. Blue lights behind her flashed as Jake and Rick pulled up in their unmarked car. Both men were out of the car in seconds, guns drawn.

Jake paused and looked at her, unvarnished fear burning in his gaze as it swept over her. Signaling for her to stay, he moved past her into the motel room as several marked cars pulled into the lot.

As Amber cried in the middle of the room, she held a gun in her hand that now pointed at the ground. Her face had paled to a bloodless white and when she raised her gaze, it was filled with fear. Tim lay on the floor, facedown, his arms splayed out.

“Put the gun down,” Jake ordered. “Put the gun down!”

Amber glanced at the gun as if she forgot she were holding it and slowly released her grip and the gun fell to the floor.

Jake quickly picked it up and checked the chamber for a round. “What happened here?”

“He started talking about the woods almost immediately,” Amber said softly. “He said he killed Bethany and Mike and was going to kill me just like he killed Marlowe. I grabbed the gun. It went off.”

“Tim confessed to killing Dalton Marlowe?” Jake asked.

“Yes.” She pressed her hand to the darkening bruise on her cheek. “I freaked out and he came at me. I told him to stop. I told him I didn’t want to shoot him.”

Jake turned Tim over and they all saw the bright red bloom of blood in the center of his chest. The bullet had exited out his back.

Pressing fingers to the man’s neck, Jake shook his head. “There’s a heartbeat, but barely.”

Rick reached for his cell and punched in numbers. “This is Detective Rick Morgan. I need an ambulance.”

As he rattled off the address, Georgia holstered her gun and stood ready as Jake grabbed a towel from the bathroom and moved to Tim’s chest and pressed it firmly onto the wound.

“He’s really alive?” Amber asked.

“Barely,” Rick said.

Georgia knelt beside Jake. “What can I do?”

“Help me press this towel onto his chest.”

Tim’s face had turned a deathly white and she feared it would be only minutes at most before he bled out.

Amber hovered over Tim, her expression blank. “He’s alive?”

Jake, not answering this time, tipped Tim’s head back and opened his airway. “Very shallow breathing.” He checked his pulse again. “Faint heartbeat.”

The towel had turned a blood-soaked red as Georgia continued to apply pressure. A faint gurgling sound echoed from Tim’s mouth. At least one of the lungs had been hit. Blood would also be pooling inside the body and lungs. He was drowning.

In the distance an ambulance wailed, growing closer and closer with each minute. Amber lowered her face to her hands and began to weep. “I didn’t want to shoot him, but he wouldn’t stop. Why didn’t he stop?”

“Where did you get the gun?” Jake asked.

“It was Tim’s. He brought it.”

“How did you get the gun from him?”

“I don’t really know. He said he was going to rape me first and then track down Mrs. Reed. I didn’t fight him, and I waited until he set the gun down to undo my blouse. It distracted him long enough for me to grab the gun and shoot. I just wanted him to stop.” She looked down at the near lifeless body. “I didn’t mean to hurt him. I just wanted him to stop.”

Red lights of the ambulance flashed on the walls of the motel room, casting an eerie glow. The rescue crews rattled a gurney carrying equipment through the open door, unpacking as they went.

“I need this room cleared,” a paramedic ordered.

Rick took Amber by the arm as Jake spoke to the paramedic, who nodded and said he’d take over.

As the paramedic took Georgia’s place, she rose, her hands now red with blood. Jake grabbed a small towel from the bathroom and wiped her hands and his own clean as they moved outside.

Georgia moved past Tim as one member of the rescue crew started an IV and the other swapped the towel for a pad of clean gauze.

She stepped outside. The chill touched her sweat-soaked skin and along with the adrenaline dump sent a shiver through her body.

“Are you all right?” Jake asked.

“I’m fine. Do what you need to do.”

He hugged her and then she moved toward her car where she kept a clean blanket along with MREs, a change of clothes, and shoes in the trunk. She raised the lid and pulled out a blanket, which she wrapped around her shoulders.

Turning, she saw Rick speaking to a limp Amber. The woman looked devastated. Jake along with Georgia moved closer, needing to hear and better understand her story.

“Why did you call Georgia?” Jake asked.

Amber smoothed her hands over her head. “I don’t know. She’s the closest person I have to a friend since I came back to Nashville. And I knew Tim might be trouble. I thought she could help.”

“Why not call the cops?” Jake challenged. “They would have been better equipped to help you.”

She shook her head. “Like I said when I was mugged, I hated the way the cops grilled me five years ago. None of them believed me. They wouldn’t listen. I didn’t want to do that again.”

Jake glanced at the blood smeared on his shirt. “But you called Georgia.”

“I called a friend,” she said.

“Why’d you leave the Reeds’ house?” Jake’s questions were clipped and quick. He fired the questions like bullets so she didn’t have time to fabricate.

“Tim called me. Offered to tell me about the woods.” She touched her fingertips to her lips and turned her face from the body as if it pained her to look at it. “He said he needed to tell me the truth, but I didn’t trust the way he sounded.”

“His chest has a center mass wound, Amber. You aimed to kill.”

“I didn’t,” she said, her eyes watering. “I shot to stop him. I didn’t want him dead.”

“Why did he need your help?”

Fresh tears glistened in her eyes. “He said he’d done something horrible.”

“What did he tell you?”

She pressed trembling fingertips to her temple. “He said he killed Mr. Marlowe.”

“Someone did,” Jake said.

Amber drew in a deep breath as if to slow down Jake’s rapid-fire questioning.

“How did Tim find you?”

“He’s been following me since I came back to Nashville.”

“Why didn’t you tell us this originally?”

“I panicked. I thought you wouldn’t believe me. I thought none of you trusted me.”

Jake rubbed his chin darkened with stubble.

Georgia glanced back into the motel room where paramedics were trying to resuscitate Tim. Too much about all this bothered her, but she couldn’t articulate it.

She hurried to her trunk and grabbed a camera. As the rescue crews worked on Tim, she stood out of their way. From the threshold she began to take pictures of the room. What was wrong with this? Amber’s explanation made sense, but something didn’t fit. She couldn’t see it. Couldn’t put it into words. But her gut gnawed when a crime scene didn’t match the witness’s accounts.

Three more marked cars had appeared and now filled the parking lot near the ambulan

ce. Lights flashed as uniformed officers got out of their vehicles, hands on their guns.

The paramedics had run an IV into Tim’s arm and had packed his wound and put an oxygen bag on his face. As Jake hovered close, they loaded Tim onto a stretcher and locked it into the raised position. As one paramedic squeezed the bag over his nose and held up the IV, the other pushed the stretcher.

Tears spilled down Amber’s face as Tim was wheeled past. “Is he really alive?”

“Barely,” one paramedic said.

Tim was loaded in the ambulance and the paramedic climbed into the back beside him and closed the door. The other paramedic ran to the driver’s seat, and seconds later, the siren wailed and the ambulance left as a uniformed officer moved toward the scene with a roll of yellow crime scene tape.

As more marked cars arrived, Georgia indicated the areas she wanted marked off. Though she was tempted to process the scene, she held back. She was now a part of this investigation and her involvement could be misconstrued as a conflict of interest later in court.

* * *

Jake’s focus shifted from the ambulance to Georgia’s tired face as she moved toward him. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah. As many crime scenes as I’ve processed, I’ve never been involved with one. Now I seem to be linked to two.”

“Why do you think Amber called you?”

“I guess it’s like she said, she feels I’ve been a friend to her. I took her to the hospital after she was mugged.”

He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Do you buy her story?”

“I don’t know.” She stared into the open door of the motel room. They stood in silence for a moment. Taking it all in. “Thanks for coming to my rescue.”