Blackberry Summer (6 page)

“I’ll help you get them.”

He didn’t want to endanger anyone else, but the kid was strong, muscled, like a bulldogger. Probably a rancher’s kid, who bulked up by hefting hay bales and wrestling steers. “That would be great. If you can carry the girl to shore, I can check on her mom.”

Riley hadn’t been able to feel his feet for some time now and the snow was falling more heavily, joined now by a vicious wind that churned the water and blasted through his wet clothes. He didn’t care. Not when Claire needed help.

“What’s your name, kid?” he asked as they made their way back to the SUV.

“Joe Redmond.”

There was a coincidence. Redmond was a common name around here, but he was quite sure the kid was somehow related to Lisa, his old girlfriend.

When they reached the SUV, Riley aimed the flashlight into the backseat and the kid made a sound of astonishment. “Mace? Is that you?”

“Yeah. Hey, Joey.”

“My mom’s gonna
freak
that you guys were the ones hurt.”

“How’s your mom?” Riley asked Macy.

“I think she might be waking up. I was trying to get her to talk to me and she moaned a few times.”

“You did great, honey. Let’s get you warmed up,
okay, and I’ll take care of Claire from here. Joe, are you sure you can carry her?”

“You bet. Come on, squirt.”

He made sure Macy looked secure in the kid’s arms before he focused all his attention on Claire while they headed for shore. “Claire? Honey, can you hear me?”

She moaned again, an encouraging sound.

“I need to break another window. I’m going to cover your face, okay?” He had to hope she could understand and wouldn’t come back to full consciousness in a panic that she was being suffocated.

He grabbed her scarf and managed to protect her face as best he could before he hefted the crowbar and half waded, half dragged himself around to the passenger side across from her. This window was already cracked and it took only a hard smack to shatter it completely. He was guessing by the way the vehicle was tilted toward the driver’s side that the vehicle had landed on that side. Her body would have absorbed most of the impact and it made sense that her injuries would potentially be more severe than the children’s in the backseat, who probably hadn’t braced against the crash like Claire would have done.

The water inside the car was up to her waist and she was shaking violently despite her unconscious state. Guilt crashed over him, colder and more vicious than the waves. He should never have started the pursuit under these conditions. He should have just waited and set up a roadblock at the mouth of the canyon to take care of it.

When he pulled the scarf away, she blinked at him and her huge, dilated pupils and pale features ripped at his heart.

“Cold,” she moaned.

“I know, honey. I know. I’ll get you out of here as soon as I can figure out if it’s safe to move you. Where do you hurt?”

She squinted at him, then closed her eyes and he saw blood oozing from her temple.

“What…happened?”

“Accident. You went off the road to avoid a head-on. You probably saved your kids’ lives.” He batted away the deflated air bag and worked on her seat belt.

A second later, she opened her eyes and started moving frantically. “My kids?”

“Hold still while I get this. They’re okay. A little banged up, but they’re over on dry land getting warm right now. They’re going to be okay.”

Her agitation subsided and she sagged against the seat. His radio squawked static and he fumbled with fingers that felt icy and useless to turn it down so he could talk to her.

“Where do you hurt, Claire?” he asked again, more firmly this time.

“Legs. Wrist. Um, head. Everywhere.” The last word came out a whimper.

“I don’t want to move you until we can get a stretcher out here, unless I absolutely have to. The ambulance should be here soon. We just have to wait it out here a few more moments.”

“My kids. I need to take care of my kids.”

“They’re okay. Someone else is with them.”

“Promise. Promise you’ll make sure.”

“I’ll stay right here with you until you’re out of the water and then make sure all of you are okay.” He brushed a hand over her hair and saw blood oozing from a cut on her forehead. “Just hang on, sweetheart.”

“This isn’t fun.”

Her ragged words somehow managed to shock a laugh out of him in spite of everything. He had never been so frigging cold in his life and he could barely breathe around the icy guilt pressing in on his chest. “No, I can’t say that it is. I don’t think it’s supposed to be.”

“First my store, now this.”

“I know. You’ve had a pretty rough day. Got to rank right up there with the worst day ever.”

“Stupid horoscope,” she muttered, for reasons he didn’t understand. He would have asked her, but nothing else mattered except making her safe.

W
HERE THE HELL WERE
the paramedics?

Riley glared at the shore and the noticeable absence of flashing lights besides his own. He could see the flurry of activity as those on shore helped the children, but the ambulance was nowhere in sight. If this was the way the Hope’s Crossing paramedics responded to emergencies, he was going to have to have a serious discussion with the fire chief about the response time of his crews.

“C-cold,” Claire whimpered.

“I know, sweetheart. Hang on.” He adjusted the blanket around her more snugly. Time was definitely not on his side. The longer she stayed out here in these frigid conditions, the greater the chance of hypothermia.

He’d forgotten how bitterly cold spring storms could turn in the high Rockies. It was the third week of April, for crying out loud, but the temperature had to be in the twenties, with a windchill making it feel much colder.

Claire was already shocky. She seemed to be fading in and out of consciousness and the wound just above her left temple where she must have hit the window was bleeding copious amounts. She needed to get the hell out of the water fast. All his protective instincts were
urging him to pluck her out of the car and haul her to safety and it was killing him to just stand here helplessly. But given the extent of her injuries, he couldn’t take the risk of injuring her worse. The best thing, the only thing, was to offer whatever comfort he could until the ambulance crew arrived with a gurney to transport her safely.

Her eyes closed again, and he grabbed her scarf for a makeshift compress to the cut on her forehead. “Claire, honey, you’ve got to stay with me. A few more minutes, that’s all.”

She moaned a little and he brushed her hair away again. “I know, sweetheart. I’m going to get you out of here. Just hang on.”

He thought of how bright and lovely she had looked in her store earlier, even amid her distress at finding her store burglarized. Seeing her like this—scared and injured, like a frightened child—was heartrending.

She seemed to drift off again and he knew it was important that he keep her conscious and alert.

“Claire. Claire!”

Her eyes fluttered open with obvious reluctance.

“Tell me about String Fever.”

“My store.”

“I know. I saw it today, remember? I never expected you to be running a bead store. I thought you were going to be a teacher, like my mother. Isn’t that what you went to college to do?”

She nodded a little. “I taught for a few years. Third grade. When…Macy…was little.”

“So how did you go from that to running a bead store?” He didn’t really care—okay, he found every
thing about her unexpectedly fascinating—but he mostly just needed to keep her talking.

The tactic seemed to be working. He saw a little more clarity in her eyes and maybe even a hint of pride. “Worked for Katherine Thorne before…the divorce. Not for the money, just for fun. After…Jeff left…she asked if…wanted to buy it.”

He pictured Katherine Thorne, sixty-six years old and a five-foot, ninety-eight-pound dynamo. Although tiny in stature and deceptively fragile in appearance, she packed a powerful force of will. Had Katherine really wanted to sell the store or had she only offered it to Claire to give a newly divorced, struggling mom something solid to hang on to? Knowing Katherine’s generosity, he wouldn’t be surprised.

He also hadn’t missed Claire’s phrasing.
After Jeff left,
she had said. He had assumed her divorce had been a mutual decision. He didn’t know why he’d jumped to that conclusion, but Claire’s subconscious at least didn’t view the end of her marriage that way.

Although he was completely focused on Claire’s precarious situation, some tiny corner of his brain couldn’t believe any man could be such a moron that he would walk away from someone like Claire for a twentysomething bimbo.

Right now, it was a toss-up whether he was more furious with Jeff Bradford or the stupid little prick who caused the accident.

Her eyes flickered closed again and he cursed to himself. Where the hell were the paramedics?

“How do you like being a businesswoman?”

“Wh…what?”

“Your store. Do you like running it?”

“My store was robbed.”

He didn’t like how disoriented she sounded. “I know. The good news is, I think it’s safe to say we found the bad guys.”

He would have preferred a thousand unsolved crimes in his first month on the job to this outcome and he was kicking himself all over again for his handling of the pursuit when the flash of red lights finally heralded the arrival of paramedics on the scene.

Through the hazy filter of snow, Riley watched impatiently while the paramedics conferred on the bank of the reservoir before they finally returned to the ambulance for the gurney.

He spoke nonsense words to Claire while he waited for them. He couldn’t have told anyone what he said. Something about how his mom and his sister were both going to kill him for making Claire stay out here in the cold water this long and about the house he was renting down the street from hers and about the trip he wanted to take somewhere hot—maybe down to the bowels of the earth at the bottom of the Grand Canyon—when this was all over.

Finally, just when he could feel her slipping back into unconsciousness and he was pretty sure he could no longer feel his legs, a couple of paramedics in wet-suits waded through the frigid water toward them.

“It’s about damn time,” he growled. “You stopped for coffee first?”

“Sorry, Chief.” The first paramedic to reach him was some kid who looked barely old enough to drink, with blond streaked surfer hair and the raccoonlike
goggle tan of a die-hard skier or snowboarder didn’t look thrilled to be reamed by the new police chief.

“Took us a while to make it around the other accident scene,” the older one, dark with a bushy dark mustache, explained. “What have we got here?”

Riley put away his irritation to focus on Claire. “Female, age thirty-six, possible head, arm and leg injuries. Definitely in shock. I’m concerned about hypothermia, obviously, and also the head injury. She’s been in and out of consciousness for the last ten minutes. Because I couldn’t get a proper assessment of her injuries, I didn’t want to move her without a stretcher, but if you guys had taken much longer, I would have figured something out on my own.”

“We’re here now.” The older paramedic looked inside and Riley saw his eyes widen.

“Hey, there, Claire.”

She opened her eyes slightly and then Riley realized why the guy looked familiar. It was a cousin of hers, Doug Van Duran, a couple years behind him in school.

“Hey, Dougie.”

“You’re in a real mess, Claire.”

“I know.” Her eyes were wide with confusion and panic as the paramedics’ powerful flashlights shone into the vehicle. “My kids?”

“They’re okay,” Riley told her again. “Remember, I told you we got them to shore. Just relax and let the guys here take care of you.”

He had to admit, despite their late arrival at the party, the paramedics seemed competent. He stood by and watched while they assessed her condition,
stabilized her neck and back and then prepared to carefully remove her from the vehicle and transfer her to the gurney.

“We’ve got this under control, Chief, if you need to head down the mountain to the other scene,” Van Duran said after a moment.

“I’ll stay until Claire and the kids are in the bus before I check out the situation down there.”

In the gleam of the other kid’s flashlight, he didn’t miss the careful look Doug aimed at him. “You sure about that? I mean, Claire’s got some pretty bad injuries but they seem to be fairly straightforward and her kids are just banged up, from what I understand.”

“Yeah. So?”

“I’m just saying, that’s an ugly scene down there. One DOA and two serious injuries. While we were there, the sheriff was calling in Medivac.”

Fatality. Damn it. He closed his eyes. How many kids had been inside that pickup truck? Yeah, they were robbery suspects and had stupidly chosen to run instead of facing the consequences, but nobody deserved to die because of a chain of idiotic choices.

“We can certainly use another man getting her out of the water, but we can make do without you if you need to head down to the other scene.”

He should be on the scene of a fatal accident in his jurisdiction, especially one he’d been involved with, however inadvertent, but he couldn’t leave Claire. Not yet.

“No, let’s get her into the ambulance. I promised her and her kids I’d stay with her.”

Over the next few moments, he was forced to retract
every negative thought he’d had about the paramedics as he watched their quick, efficient efforts to extract her safely from the vehicle. But it still seemed like a lifetime before she was finally loaded onto the gurney and they began to wade back through the icy water.

The trickiest part—besides making his painstaking way through the water with legs that no longer felt attached to his hips—was safely maneuvering the rack up the slick, snow-covered slope from the water’s edge to the roadway. When they finally crested the top, one of the passenger doors opened and a moment later, Macy Bradford rushed to them, her face white and scared in the snow-filtered light of the headlights and her eyes trained only on Claire.

“Mom!” she exclaimed.

Claire’s eyelashes fluttered in the icy snowflakes as she tried to remain alert. “Macy. My brave girl.”

“Are you okay?”

“I will be. You and Owen and Jordie?”

“I’m fine. We’re okay. Some people wanted to take us to the hospital, but I…we wanted to wait for you.”

Claire had been through hell and back and she was bloody and broken. But when she still managed to muster a smile for her daughter and reach for the girl’s hand, Riley felt like something sharp and hard had just lodged against his heart.

“We’ve got to get her inside so we can roll,” Claire’s cousin Doug said, not unkindly, and they pushed the gurney up into the back of the ambulance.

Without warning, the moment the doors were closed behind her mother, Macy suddenly burst into noisy sobs. Even though Riley was exhausted and soaking
wet, frozen to the bone, he placed a comforting hand on her shoulder. “She’s going to be okay, you hear me? She’ll be okay.”

The girl drew in a deep, shuddering breath. “I was so scared.”

“I know, honey. You’ve been a champ about this. Now we need to get you and the boys to the hospital. I’m going to see if I can round up another ambulance for you.”

“We’ve got the boys safe and warm here. Do you want us to take them down the canyon to the hospital?”

He looked up at the voice and found the woman he had seen on shore standing beside her big Suburban, along with the boy who had waded out to help him. “I’m Barbara Redmond. I work at the hospital E.R.”

Riley considered his options. If the other accident was as serious as the paramedics had indicated, it might be a while before another ambulance crew could make it for the children. Transported in a private vehicle, the kids could already be in a treatment room at the E.R. at the small Hope’s Crossing Medical Center before the other crew could make it back up.

“Thank you. That will help.”

The people of Hope’s Crossing banded together in crisis situations, with everyone pitching in to help. He’d forgotten that in the years since he’d been gone. In some of the neighborhoods he worked in Oakland, accident victims faced a crapshoot, whether would-be rescuers would call for help or loot their pockets.

Riley made sure the children were safely buckled and settled and watched the SUV slowly pull back onto
the road. Just as they made the first turn, he saw the brown and white of a Peak County sheriff’s vehicle pull to a stop.

He estimated a half hour had passed since the accident, maybe an hour since he’d left the elementary school. For the first time in his life, he understood what people meant when they talked about living a lifetime in a few moments. He felt as if he’d aged at least twenty years since he sat and listened to the Spring Fling pageant with his older sister beside him.

The cold sliced through his wet clothing and Riley fought shivers as he watched a figure climb from the sheriff’s department SUV. The sheriff himself, he realized. Evan Grover.

He tensed and instantly felt kickback from his already-aching muscles.

Evan Grover hated him and had since Riley was a punk-ass kid always in trouble and Grover was a wet-behind-the-ears deputy looking to make his mark. From what he understood, the sheriff had thrown his support behind J. D. Nyman and wanted him to be wearing the chief’s badge.

The man headed toward him, his brown parka open over his beer belly. All he needed was a cigar clamped between his teeth to complete the Boss Hogg imagery.

He shook his head. “Hell of a mess.”

Riley ground his teeth together to keep his teeth from chattering. No way would he show that particular sign of weakness to the sheriff, even if he had frostbite in every appendage. “You could say that.”

“The other scene.” The sheriff whistled through his teeth. “Nasty.”

He was a professional, Riley reminded himself. He’d been a cop a long time and had dealt with much worse than a two-bit sheriff who used to have it in for him. “I’ll have to take your word. Haven’t seen it yet. I’m heading down that way myself to assess the scene.”

“No rush. Go ahead and change into dry clothes. My guys and the Colorado State Patrol have things in hand.”

“Thanks,” Riley gritted out. “I appreciate it.” Neither department had jurisdiction because this road and the canyon were all part of the Hope’s Crossing city limits, but this wasn’t the time to be pissy over boundaries, not with a fatality.

The sheriff was acting entirely too conciliatory, which should have tipped Riley off that something was disastrously wrong. But he was still caught completely unaware by Grover’s next words.

“I’m real sorry about your niece and all.”

Everything inside Riley seemed to freeze. He didn’t think it was possible for a person to be even more cold without turning completely to ice, but somehow he managed it. “Sorry, what?”