Asking For Trouble (11 page)

Chase shouted her name, but Beau told him to
get down, then yelled at the men to stop. Jazzie had almost made it
to the porch when she was grabbed roughly from behind and swung
around, then she was looking down the barrel of a mean looking gun.
Jazzie's heart was trying to burst out of her chest, and her
breathing came in short, sharp gasps as fear and adrenaline surged
through her. She felt lightheaded, and it seemed like the world was
moving in slow motion, as the guy pulled her arm, dragging her
across the yard toward the car.

Beau was positioned behind the front of his
truck with a gun leveled on the hood. "Stop right there! I'm a
Texas Ranger and I'll shoot your ass if you don't drop that gun
right now!" his voice was loud, forceful and full of
conviction.

Two of the men stopped, but the one with the
gun on her didn't. He kept moving toward the car, with the gun
pressed to her side. "I'll kill the girl, if you don't drop
your
gun..." he told Beau and pressed the gun harder against
her skin. She heard the engine on the black car race, then saw it
jump as the driver threw it in gear when they got closer.

A gunshot sounded and Jazzie screamed, then
fell to the ground and covered her ears. The man holding her let go
of her arm and turned his gun toward Beau, and she screamed again,
then started scrambling toward Chase's truck. She didn't know where
Chase was, but she knew she could crawl underneath and hide
there.

Another gunshot sounded behind her, and
Jazzie looked back to see if Beau or the man had been shot, and
instead she saw that two tires on the car were flat. The man who
had been holding her aimed and fired at Beau and the windshield of
his truck exploded.

Jazzie wailed, but Beau had ducked beneath
the truck, then came back up and squeezed off a shot, which hit the
man dead center in his chest. The man staggered backward a couple
of steps, then collapsed to the ground.

Suddenly, the window on the black sedan
rolled down enough for the driver to aim a shotgun out the window,
and she realized Beau was running around the front of the truck now
to check on the man he'd shot, and the driver was aiming at him. He
obviously didn't see the man with the shotgun, so she yelled, "Beau
the driver!"

The front door of the house opened and Dave
Logan came out with his pistol drawn. He ducked and took cover
behind the bushes surrounding the porch. Before she knew what was
going on, he'd fired and hit the driver square in the forehead. The
shotgun slid from the driver's hand and thudded as it landed on the
ground beside the car, then he slumped against the window. The
third man with them who was just standing in the yard now, quickly
tossed his gun aside, then laid down on the ground with his hands
spread. Both Dave and Beau ran over to him with their guns pointed
at his head.

"Don't move!" Beau shouted then kicked the
guy's gun away, before he shoved his pistol in the back of his
jeans and put his knee in the man's back, then yanked his arm up
behind him, and slapped on a handcuff. After he secured both
wrists, he jerked the man up by the arm to stand, then shoved him
over to Chase's truck and pushed him against it. Angrily, he spread
the man's legs then frisked him thoroughly, before he recited his
rights to him.

Jazzie had never seen this side of Beau, he
was forceful, violent even, and it was obvious he meant business.
This is what he did on a daily basis she realized, this was the
type of people he dealt with, and fear for his safety clutched her
heart. He lived every day not knowing if it would be his last, to
protect people like her.

If he hadn't been fast enough, or aware
enough, to dodge the bullet that guy fired at him, Beau could be
the one laying in the yard dead right now. He'd saved her life, and
had been good enough at his job to save his own too. A wail worked
itself up from her toes and tears scalded her eyes, and after he
handed the man off to Dave, he stood back breathing hard. Jazzie
pushed up from the ground and ran to him.

"Oh, god, Beau..." she shouted as she threw
herself into his arms, and hugged him like she'd never let him
go.

His arms didn't close around her, he just
stood there, his body tense and his heart beating rapidly. After a
minute, he pulled away from her without saying a word and walked to
the guy laying in the yard. Kneeling down beside him, Beau felt for
a pulse at his neck, then stood back up and shook his head. He
pulled his gun again and eased up to the car carefully, then kicked
the shotgun aside, before he open the door and swept the gun across
the interior. The driver slumped against him, and Beau shoved the
gun back in his jeans, then pulled the man out of the car and laid
him on the ground, before he felt his neck for a pulse.

Jazzie heard sirens in the distance and sank
to her knees in the yard hugging herself, as a waterfall of tears
poured down her face. Her whole body was shaking like a leaf in a
thunderstorm, even her teeth were chattering. A hand on her
shoulder made her look up and Carlos was standing there, his eyes
glittering with fear, anger and so many other emotions Jazzie
couldn't sort them out. He looked exactly like she felt, scared,
wrung out and confused.

He bent down and hugged her, then asked in a
trembling voice, "Are you okay, sis?"

"Physically, yeah...mentally, not so much,"
she sobbed then threw her arms around his neck.

"Papa's on his way home, he was upset when
mama told him what was going on...he's upset you didn't tell him
last night...I am too," Carlos said with a reprimand in his voice,
then added, "Now with all these cops in the front yard and you
almost getting abducted, he's gonna go apeshit."

"I didn't want to upset anyone until we knew
everything, and maybe had an idea where Frankie was," she told
him.

"Ya'll need to get in the house, now...it's
not safe out here," Beau told them flatly from over Carlos'
shoulder.

Carlos glanced back at him and said
sarcastically, "No shit Sherlock," then stood up and pulled her up
to stand beside him.

"Carlos, don't be like that...Beau saved my
life," she told him angrily.

"I did my job, that's all...now ya'll go
inside," Beau said without an ounce of emotion in his voice. He was
cold, and the sparkle that was usually in his eyes was missing,
they were flat and hard, just like his words had been.

Beau had just basically told her that saving
her had nothing to do with him caring about her. She meant nothing
more to him than another victim, another statistic, or any stranger
who might have been in the same situation. Once that fact settled
into her brain, the gratitude and awe over what he'd done turned to
ashes inside of her. Well, at least she knew where she stood with
him.

With one last glance at Beau, Jazzie grabbed
Carlos's arm and pulled him toward the house. The door was open and
one of Dave Logan's men was standing guard there. She had no idea
where the man had been during the gunfight...that would have a been
a prime opportunity for him to guard them. When they walked inside,
she saw Chase had Dave Logan cornered over by the stairs and he was
reading him the riot act over something. Both men's faces were very
red and their shoulders tense.

Her mom was laying down on the couch with a
wet rag on her forehead. Carlos pulled away from her and walked
over there to sit on the sofa beside her and hold her hand. She
looked over to Jasmine and her eyes widened and tears filled them,
then she tried to sit up as she wailed, "Oh, Jasmine, thank God,
you aren't hurt!"

Carlos pushed her shoulders back on the
couch and admonished, "Lay still mama--papa will be here in a few
minutes."

Jazzie had to find a quiet spot where she
could think and fall apart. The few tears she'd shed since the
incident happened hadn't done a damned thing to relieve the
intensity of the pressure inside her chest, which felt like steam
in a pipe looking for a let off valve.

Her childhood bedroom, her sanctuary for so
many years, called to her and she staggered to the stairs and then
hurtled up them two at a time as the pressure built with every
step. She had barely closed the door and leaned back against it,
before a wailing moan started at her feet and shot upward then
escaped. She hugged herself then stumbled to the double bed and
fell across it and buried her head in her arms, letting go of all
the fear, adrenaline and anger that was ripping her apart
inside.

Jazzie cried over giving her virginity to
the wrong man, caring about the wrong man, about not being able to
love one who could love her back, about the situation her brother
had gotten them all into, and finally about watching the man she
couldn't help but have feelings for almost get killed...for
her.

Buckets of tears poured from her body,
easing some of the pressure, but not all of it. Crying made her
feel worse in some ways though. By the time her tears abated some,
her throat was sore and her head clogged up, and she felt like her
soul was being wrung out by hand.

Jazzie sucked in a shuddering breath and sat
up on the bed. She needed her violin, her music was her comfort,
her release, it always had been, but her instrument was with Jess
and the band in Tahiti. All she had was her three-quarter violin
she'd had when she was a teenager, stuffed in the back of her
closet. She'd kept it for the memories, and to remind her of her
journey to where she was now in her art.

It was the violin she'd played for the
Julliard audition, the one that had gotten her the scholarship she
didn't accept. It was battered and scarred, like she was right now,
but it had been her friend for a long time, and she needed it now.
Taking a sharp breath, Jazzie pushed up off the bed and went to her
closet, then dug around in all the boxes that were stacked high on
the floor, until she found the scuffed up black case and pulled it
out.

Her old friend hadn't felt her touch in a
long time, and she felt guilty. Jazzie thought she might gift it to
one of the kids she was going to teach next week. The one she
thought had the most promise and seriousness of purpose. She'd set
up a two-month session of weekly lessons with the music teacher at
an inner city school, so her students could get the basics of
playing and see if they had an aptitude and passion for it. She'd
arranged to rent twenty violins for the students from a local music
store, that had cut her a great deal. With all the drama going on
the last few days, she'd all but forgotten about her promise to
them.

After a few tries, she managed to unwedge
the case from behind the boxes, then took it and sat on the bed,
then reverently opened the case. She took the small soft cloth
inside and pulled out the rich cherry-colored violin and shined it
up, then set it on the bed and removed the bow from the lid and
picked up a square cake of rosin and coated the bowstrings with
it.

Propping the pillows up against the
headboard behind her, she scooted up there and put the violin
beneath her chin. For some reason the haunting strains of the
second movement of Tchaikovsky's violin concerto played in her
head, and she brought it to life across the strings of her
instrument.

Slowly, her shoulders relaxed some, as the
music soothed her shattered nerves and carried her worries away
with each note she played. Jazzie sighed and closed her eyes. This
was exactly the therapy she needed right now. The music had her
enraptured, she could have been anywhere playing, it didn't matter,
as long as she had the music inside of her. Jazzie imagined herself
sitting in a wide open meadow playing to the birds and animals
hiding in the woods, then she was sitting on a dock by a lake
enjoying a gentle breeze blowing across her cheeks.

Lifting her chin she inhaled deeply and
imagined she could smell the sunshine that was painting everything
around her in a golden glow. Of its own volition, the music inside
her head transitioned into Meditation by Thais and the slow
fanciful notes lifted her heart as she played.

Jazzie smiled, as she sat down on a
butterfly's wings to play in her mind. The beautiful multi-colored
creature floated on thermals in the air over the meadow and she
looked down on all the vibrant bluebonnets dotting the green field
below, then looked at the sky, which was such an intense blue it
hurt her eyes to look at it. Deep inside, Jazzie felt every note
she played, and they twined around her wounded spirit and healed
it, lifted it. Finally, when she got to the last stanza, she
caressed the notes, emphasized them, poured feeling into it, until
the last sound had faded to nothing.

After a deep breath and a slow exhale,
Jazzie opened her eyes and saw that Beau was standing in the
doorway of her bedroom staring at her, his face a conflict of
emotions, but mainly it held something akin to awe. Slowly, he
eased the door shut, then walked over to the bed and sat down, not
breaking eye contact with her at all. "My, god that was
magnificent," he told her in a choked whisper, then ran his hand
along her jaw, "You are magnificent..."

"Just doing my job," she told him coldly
then looked away. Protecting her had been his job, that's what he'd
said to her, and playing music was hers. He hadn't done it because
he cared one way or another whether she lived or died, he just
wanted to catch the criminal...mitigate the threat...because that
was his job. Playing music was hers, and she could be just as
nonchalant about it. After all, she'd been playing for herself, not
him.