“Will he actually help you?” I asked.
“I…he said he would.”
I didn’t believe her, and I knew she didn’t believe him. “Maddox and I will help you. But you’re the only one who can save him now. Please, Chelsea. I can’t do this without you.”
She shook her head, blonde hair falling over her eyes. The door slowly closed. Latched.
“No!” I pounded the frame. Delta pulled me back. “Chelsea, please. I’m begging you. I love Maddox. I’m trying to protect him. I won’t let anything happen to you, but you have to help me.”
“Josie…” Delta tugged on my arm. “Come on. We gotta get you back to the hospital.”
“Chelsea!”
“We can try again tomorrow. The doctors are going to freak out if you aren’t in your bed.”
I broke down. I couldn’t leave. I fought away from Delta’s arms.
“He won’t survive the night.” I coughed too hard, and the words tumbled from me in a blitz of fear. “The chief will kill him tonight. No one would know it wasn’t a suicide. No one would care!”
Delta took my hand. I batted her away. “We’ll figure something out.”
“No! It has to be now! It has to be this. God only knows what will happen to him—and if Nolan…” I didn’t want to imagine it. I’d be sick thinking about it. “Nolan will come after me too. We’re not safe. We need—”
The door opened.
Chelsea shouldered a book bag and bundled a jacket in her arms. She hid the track marks, but the bruise on her cheek said more than the scars on her arm.
“He wasn’t really going to leave his wife, was he?” Her whisper broke my heart.
I shook my head. “No.”
“He spent the money Maddox gave him on a necklace for her. I saw it.”
I pulled her into a hug. “It’ll be okay. Trust me.”
“How are we going to do it without…” Chelsea’s lip trembled. “John has a temper.”
Easy. We needed to expose the secret, and I worked for a newspaper. It wouldn’t be a Pulitzer Prize winning article, but it’d reveal the corruption.
“I’ll take you to my editor,” I said. “We’ll give him the story and bring down both Chief Craig and Nolan Rhys. It’ll be on the Saint Christie Reporter blog in the morning and printed in the paper by the evening.”
I led Chelsea to Delta’s car, squeezing her hand as she hesitated before the door.
“But what if John wants to get revenge?” she asked.
“We won’t let him,” I promised. “Because we’ll have justice.”
22
Maddox
The cell’s metal bars separated me from Chief Craig.
I didn’t know if they protected me or him.
The police denied me the hospital and elected for medical treatment at the station. That was probably a lawsuit waiting to happen, but I doubted I’d get a chance to talk to an attorney. We skipped the phone call. The finger prints. All due-process.
Whatever happened tonight wouldn’t be lawful.
The chief’s stare burned through me. I wasn’t intimidated. How the hell did a man as old and weak as him have power over me? He abused my sister. He took my money. We had nothing left to exchange except a resolution to a long-standing problem.
We both wanted the other dead.
If he stepped into my cell, one of us would die. My foot already was halfway in the grave. The other slipped in the puddle of blood that pulsed from my head.
I stood, even though the injury throbbed and my body ached. I didn’t need rest. If the chief had it his way, I’d get plenty from my long nap when I hanged from the bars.
The lieutenant stapled the last of my paperwork and turned off his desk lamp. “Chief, do you need any help?”
“No,” Chief Craig said. His hands lingered too close to his belt, to the Taser inches from his fingertips. “I got it from here, Ted. Thanks for the overtime tonight.”
“Gotcha.”
The lieutenant gathered his belongings. I studied the cell. I had nothing inside the cement walls. I’d have to defend myself from a man armed with pepper spray, a Taser, and a gun with only my trembling hands, scraped and burned from the fire.
But I had plenty to fight for.
Josie. Our baby. Justice.
Nothing was going to keep me from taking what was mine.
Nothing.
The lieutenant was leaving just as a call came in. He reached for it over the desk, answering with an exhausted grunt.
“You know Nolan Rhys abducted Josie Davis.” I kept my voice low. Not that it mattered. I figured the Chief already shut off the cameras facing the cell. “Rhys would have killed me and her.”