Her round face was pale under the dirt and her eyes were shining with tears. “This might hurt,” he warned, gently peeling away the duct tape covering her mouth. He looked at the adhesive side, noting the smudge of pink lipstick.
“Thank you!” She threw herself into him and he caught her, letting her cling.
“Are you hurt?”
“My pride,” she said, tears flowing freely now. “The bruises will heal faster, I’m sure, but I’m so cold.”
“Nothing broken?” He pulled the radio from his belt and called for paramedics. “Nothing bleeding?”
“I’m fine,” she insisted. “My word. They were shooting at you.”
He decided the woman had an ironclad fortitude to be more worried about him than herself. “It wasn’t as close as it looked. Did you see who did this to you? Can you give us a description?” Then he noticed something missing. “You aren’t wearing your glasses.”
“Young man, my distance vision is still perfect.”
Which meant she might or might not be able to describe the person or persons who had done this to her.
Tree limbs popped and snapped as something crashed down nearly on top of them.
“Get down!” He didn’t hesitate at Abby’s command, pushing Mrs. Wilks back into the shallow hollow that might well have been her grave.
He heard one more deep shot from Abby’s gun, followed by a terrible sound that split the air in two. The concussion wave from the explosion threw him down and a blast of heat kept him there while pieces of trees and rock and ash fell all around them like dirty rain.
Two more loud explosions sounded too close for comfort, shaking the earth and rocks under them. It reminded him of the day he’d watched a crew take down an old building two blocks from the orphanage. He hoped that meant the other caches were blown and this trial was over.
The eerie silence that followed swallowed him up, surrounding him and Mrs. Wilks. He peered out at the shore and spotted the grisly debris of what had surely been the sniper.
“Where is Abby?” Mrs. Wilks cried. “Is she all right?”
Riley twisted around to check the place he’d last heard her, smiling when she stood tall, leaning into the slope, her gun down and just behind her leg. “I’m right here, Mrs. Wilks,” she called out. Her chest heaved as she gulped in air. “Don’t worry about me.”
Riley moved a bit so the older woman could see her friend and neighbor.
“Oh, thank heaven. Thank heaven for both of you.” She clasped her hands over her heart, then let Riley help her to her feet. He kept her turned from the mess closer to the shore as Abby stepped forward to wrap her in a warm hug. “Help will be here shortly. You don’t have to walk.”
“I will walk out of here. Lord only knows how they got me into this predicament to start.”
Abby shot a look at Riley. “They?”
“Yes. I made the coffee and started up to bed and there they were, right in my living room.”
“You saw their faces?”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. The gesture threw her off balance, but Riley steadied her. “They had black ski masks on.”
“We saw the mess in your house,” Abby said. “You put up quite a fight.”
“I clocked one of them in the knee with that hickory stick I keep in the umbrella stand.”
Riley made a mental note to watch for someone with a fresh limp. He could tell by the way Abby’s eyebrows arched that she was thinking the same thing and would pass that detail on to every shift and the extra patrols.
The radios he and Abby were wearing crackled as verification came from other teams that the other bombs were neutralized without any casualties. No sign of additional hostages. That was something anyway. Even without a bomb squad on-site they’d managed to clear the area and ensure that the explosions intended to kill and maim had harmed no one.
As the paramedics met them, Riley caught Abby’s hand. “Thanks for the cover fire.”
“Least I could do,” she said.
“What do you carry?” She showed him the .40 caliber gun. “Nice,” he said with a smile.
Abby shrugged, her attention darting all around.
“What’s wrong?”
“He blew himself up, I think,” she said quietly. She clamped her lips together, breathing deep through her nose. “I fired at his feet. A warning shot. But he...”
Riley didn’t want her thinking about that gruesome blood smear on the rocks. “Did you recognize him? Was he limping?”
“No.” She shook her head. “His face was painted with camouflage and he wore green patterned gear. I didn’t recognize anything about him. As for the limp, who could tell on this terrain?”