Her Mistletoe Protector

More gunfire, this time from up above, but Morales had already thrown the duffel into his Jeep and taken off, his tires churning up clouds of dust as he barreled down the dirt road.

NINE

Nick ignored the burning pain in his left arm as he crawled across the ground to reach Rachel and Joey. She held her son in a tight hug as if she might never let him go. Every instinct in his body was clamoring for him to follow Morales, but he couldn’t bring himself to leave Rachel and her son. Or take them along, putting them in more danger.

“Are you all right?” he asked, pulling himself upright and leaning against the car. “Any injuries?”

“No injuries,” Rachel murmured as she lifted her tear-streaked face from her son’s hair. She barely glanced at Nick, her attention focused solely on her son. She brushed his hair away from his forehead. “Joey? Are you sure you’re not hurt anywhere?”

Joey shook his head but didn’t say anything, burrowing his face once again against his mother. The boy’s silence was a bit concerning, but not completely unexpected considering the trauma he’d been through.

“Nick, you’re bleeding!” Rachel reached out to touch his arm. “He hit you?”

“Winged by a bullet, nothing serious,” he said, glancing around for Jonah. His buddy shoved open the barn door and came out, limping.

“I tried to take out the Jeep, but I fell through a hole in the floor,” Jonah said with disgust. “I’m sorry I let him get away.”

“Nothing more you could have done, Jonah,” Nick assured his friend. “And the way you shot at him from up in the loft obviously scared him off, which is probably a good thing. He was armed, and the way things were going down, I doubt he intended to leave any witnesses once he got the cash.”

“Yeah, I got that same feeling,” Jonah muttered. He looked at his car and scowled, fingering the bullet hole in the back door along the driver’s side. “Now I know why you wanted me to take my car. Hope he didn’t hit anything in the engine.”

The bullet holes in the back door of the driver’s side were sobering, proof of how lucky they were to get out of this with a gouge in his arm and nothing more serious. “I’ll reimburse you, Jonah.”

“No biggie,” his friend said, waving him off. Joey lifted his head and gazed at both him and Jonah with suspicion. Nick belatedly realized they were both strangers to the child, so he dropped to his knees and smiled over at the boy. “Hi, Joey, my name is Nick Butler and I’m a detective with the Chicago Police Department. And that’s my buddy Jonah Stewart, who is a police detective, too, from Milwaukee. We’ve been helping your mom find you.”

“Thank you,” Joey said in a wobbly voice, his curiosity apparently satisfied. “Can we go home now? I’m hungry.”

Nick was trying to figure out a way to let the boy know it wasn’t safe to go home yet, when Rachel interrupted. “You’re hungry? Did they give you anything to eat or drink?”

Joey shook his head. “No. They kept me in a room in the basement. It was dark and I think there were big hairy spiders, too. The door was locked and I had a mattress and a toilet but nothing else,” he admitted, his lower lip trembling with the effort not to cry.

Rachel’s eyes filled with tears. “I’m so sorry, Joey. So sorry...” Once again, she hugged him close as if she could erase the horrible memories by will alone.

“We’d better get out of here,” Jonah said quietly. “In case they decide to come back.”

Nick couldn’t agree more. “Rachel, do you have the car keys?”

She sniffled and used the sleeve of her jacket to wipe away her tears. “Here you go,” she said as she handed them over. “Joey and I will take the backseat.”

He understood she couldn’t bear to let go of her son. “You’d better drive,” Nick told Jonah, as he loped around to the passenger side of the vehicle. “I’m going to call my boss and put an APB out on that Jeep. And I don’t suppose you have a first-aid kit in here somewhere?”

“In the glove box,” Jonah said. He slid behind the wheel and grunted as his knees hit the steering wheel. He adjusted the seat back and then started the car.

Nick called Ryan Walsh, quickly filling his captain in on the details. “I’m fairly certain the driver was Ricky Morales and the Jeep’s tag number is JVW-555.”