“Officer Siemanski! Violet! Violet! Get off him, move off! He’s gone flat line.” She heard the horrible whine of the monitor, would have wanted to cease living herself at the sound if her hand hadn’t been curled around his throat, feeling his pulse pounding against her fingertips.
“No, the unit’s been hit,” a nurse called out above the din. “Get a new one in here, stat. Get a cuff on him. Officer, you have to move.” A variety of voices, calling at her from different directions, the hands of the nurse, then Suarez and Connie, prying her tight fingers off him.
Pull it together, Siemanski.
Letting go of Mac was the hardest thing she’d ever done in her life, but she managed it, rolled away, let the doctors and nurses swarm over him.
194
Natural Law
Falling back to the wall, she assessed the scene. Sergeant Rowe was checking her weapon, returning her service pistol to her shoulder holster. She stood just beyond Tamara’s body, which was collapsed in the doorway, a macabre sight with nurses and medical personnel stepping hastily back and forth over her while a doctor checked her vitals, confirming that she was dead. Uniforms hovered just behind him, waiting to lift the corpse out of the way. There’d been no time to wound. The sergeant had taken Tamara straight through the chest cavity, twice, and dropped her. Two Styrofoam cups floated in a pool of brown liquid running across the hospital floor, on a direct course to intercept the trail of blood that leaked from Tamara.
Darla’s gaze met Violet’s. “Thought you could use some coffee,” the sergeant said.
Violet nodded, a jerk of her head. The shock and terror were wearing off, leaving anger. Deep, tear-the-ass-off-the-nearest-fool-willing-to-get-close-enough-to-her anger.
“Why wasn’t she being watched?”
Consuela Ramsey, standing at Rowe’s side, stiffened at the tone. “Early this morning, a uniform informed her that her sister had been killed. She told him that she was going to their parents’ place to break the news. She wasn’t a suspect, Officer Siemanski.”
“So someone was careless enough to let her know Mac was here? Did they just pull their heads out of their asses yesterday? And how the hell did a woman who was a dead ringer for the woman who put Mac in this bed walk through a hospital of cops without a single fucking one of them noticing?”
“Officer,” Rowe said sharply. “They were in—”
“Why didn’t anyone recognize that she didn’t belong on this floor?” Violet snarled.
“What, Charles Manson could throw on blue scrubs and waltz right through the children’s ward here?”
She had started low, vicious, her teeth gritting over the words, but when she finished, she was one step below an enraged scream, bringing a momentary stunned silence to the room, the hallway, and likely to everyone on the entire floor. The doctor on call opened his mouth to snap at her, order her to get the hell out, she was sure, but before he could, someone else spoke.
“Singing… Beautiful sound.”
She whirled on her heel. Past the arm of the nurse checking his blood pressure, Mac’s eyes were half open, looking at her through a haze of pain and drugs. In them she saw a hint of that frightening distance that people teetering on the edge of life and death had. But they were open.
Violet circled the nurse, barely managing not to knock her out of the way, and put her hand against his face. “Mackenzie, you hear singing?” She groped to change gears, had a terrifying, hysterical thought. “Do you hear angels?” She looked around wildly to see if they had him hooked up to a new unit yet, so they could be sure that great heart wasn’t grinding to a halt.
195
Joey W. Hill
He made a noise, bringing her attention back to his face. There was something else in his expression, something it took a moment for her to recognize. Amusement.
Amusement with her. His voice was a broken rumble.
“Just one, sugar.”
She closed her eyes, put her forehead to his, both hands to his face. She felt his arm move weakly to the edge of the bed, brush against her leg.
“What…happened? Shots.”
“Don’t worry about it.” She stroked his cheek, bent close so all he could see was her. She felt the press of the medical personnel against her, wanting to get her out of there. But this was important, as important to his survival as anything they were doing.
“You just have to rest, and get better, because there’s a lot I want from you, Mackenzie Nighthorse. I’m not going to let you keep your ass in this bed forever.”
“You could…come put your ass in it with me.”
Violet brushed her lips lightly over his, nearly broke into tears at the slight pressure of response. The nurse’s touch on her arm had become an insistent clamp. “Soon, baby.
But let them take care of you. I’ll be right here.” He nodded, already slipping off again, but his finger caressed her leg once more. A promise that he’d be back. A promise he would keep, or she’d go yank him out of hell itself.
Violet moved back to the door as the new monitoring unit was brought in with several more nurses to get him hooked back up. Tamara’s body was being lifted onto a gurney. A clean-up crew was moving in to handle the rest, the coffee and blood, as other staff members shooed the cops who had responded to the shots back toward the elevators. She thought to look down at herself, and discovered the bullet that had passed so close to her side and through the mattress had only burned the upper layer of skin, nothing serious. Glancing back into the room at the wall, she verified that Tamara had only gotten off two shots. The one that had nearly hit them, and then the one that had gone wild, hitting the unit, when apparently Rowe had put the first shot into her back.
Violet stepped outside of the room, looked down at the bloodstained floor. “I don’t know whether to scream at you some more or thank you,” she said at last to Mac’s boss and Connie, both standing on the other side of the grisly puddle.
Darla put a restraining hand on Consuela’s arm when Mac’s co-worker curled back her lip to snap. “Easy. We’ve all had a tough day. Detective Ramsey, please go with the body to the morgue, make sure everything is handled by the book.” Consuela blew out a breath, nodded, giving Violet a curt look that Violet returned with venom. She knew Darla was right. It didn’t make her any less pissed.
“I’ll put a man on the door,” Sergeant Rowe said mildly, though Violet noticed the fingers of her gun hand were quivering slightly, held close to her leg. “I assume Mac’s in no further danger, but the hell with it. I don’t know about you, but I’d just feel better knowing the protection’s there.”
196
Natural Law
Violet looked at that shaking hand, lifted her eyes to Darla’s face. “Have you ever—
”
“Not in over twenty years on the force. This is my first.” Darla gave a shaky laugh.
“My nerves are shot to shit. But I’m glad as hell, if I had to finally do it, that it was to protect one of my own. I’m going to go for that coffee and then deal with this mess.
Want to come?”
“I’d suggest decaf,” Violet said, casting a pointed look at her fingers. “But I’ll stick here. Maybe you could bring me back a cup, though. When you’re done.” She hesitated, brought a couple of dollars out of her back jeans pocket, reached over and put them in Darla’s hand, met her gaze. “My treat.”
Darla closed her fingers over Violet’s, held there a moment. Nodded and turned toward the elevators.
“Oh.” She stopped halfway there, turned back. “You know, that was an amazing and selfless thing you did in there. You better have a good pair of running shoes.”
“How’s that?”
The sergeant cocked a brow. “Knowing Mac, when he gets out of that bed and finds out what you did to protect him, he’s going to chase you down and have your hide.”
“He won’t have far to go,” Violet said, managing a tired smile. “I’ll be right here.” 197
Joey W. Hill
Epilogue
Nine months later
Paperwork had kept her late, so the flicker of relaxing candlelight on the back screen porch should have been a welcome sight as Violet took the Stealth over the marsh bridge to their street. Instead, for just a moment, she was torn between wanting to go in and bury herself in his arms, and turning the car around and driving it as fast and far as she could, to outrun the ache that had been growing in her chest ever since he’d returned to active duty a couple weeks ago.
“Damn it, get over it,” she snapped.
She pulled up next to his bike and noted that the Aztec lilies she had planted were coming into their second blooming of the summer. Bright, vibrant, passionate red. She had a sudden urge to rip them out of the ground. Instead, she worked her fingertips into the tightness in her temples, staving off the headache, taking a deep breath before she got out of the car.
Once in the house, she tossed her keys on the kitchen table and gave Boscoe his required ear scratching before she blocked out the jumble of emotions, composed herself the same way she did right before she went to work, and headed for the back porch.
Mac rose from his hammock chair, his smile easy but his eyes showing his concern, and she knew she wasn’t masking her feelings well enough. He touched her face, curling a loose auburn strand back behind her ear, brushed his lips across hers. She fought back the urge to devour that firm mouth, to press her nose against him and just inhale all of him into her.