KCPD Protector (16 page)

She’d nearly reached the exit when a concerned voice called out to her. “Elise? You need to sit down.”

Recognizing the uniformed officer, she squatted down beside him. “Officer Hale. Have you seen the deputy commissioner?”

“No, ma’am.”

His dark hair was wet, his shirt plastered to the flak vest he wore underneath. “How bad is it out there?”

“Bad. Nobody needs to be outside right now.”

Or on the upper floors of this building. “Could you try to get him on your radio? I don’t want to interfere with emergency transmissions.”

With a nod from Joe Hendricks, Denton turned his mouth to his shoulder and turned on his radio. “Commissioner Madigan, what’s your twenty? This is Officer Hale, badge number 1897.” Static was the only reply. “Commissioner Madigan, do you copy?”

“Why doesn’t he answer?”

“He could be on a different frequency. His battery’s dead. He’s taken shelter behind a wall that blocks his signal. Lots of reasons.”

She looked to Captain Hendricks for permission, as well. “May I?”

“Do it.”

Elise pulled out her portable radio. “George? This is Elise. Where are you? You said no heroics, remember?” The answering static squealed—probably from a lightning strike disrupting the electricity in the air. “Just let me know you’re safe.”

Still no answer. Fear squeezed her heart.

“Something’s not right.” She pocketed her radio and stood again. “I’m going to the ladies’ locker room and the firing range to look for him.”

But her ears popped with a sudden change in air pressure. She braced her hand on the wall for balance and felt the subtle vibrations in the steel-and-concrete structure. She was too late.

The roar of a freight train hit the building above their heads.

“Get down, Elise!” Joe Hendricks ordered.

Officer Hale grabbed Elise’s wrist and pulled her to the floor beside him as they heard explosions of glass and flying debris overhead. “Your search for loverboy will have to wait.”

Denton Hale was wearing a black leather glove.

She flashed back to the Plaza and the gloved hand that had yanked her through the crowd. Her panic was instant and terrifying. She jerked her arm from his grasp and scooted across the aisle to sit next to Joe, despite the curious frown on Hale’s face. At least with the captain as a buffer between them, she wouldn’t have to worry about Hale being able to hurt her.

“Oh, my God,” she whispered. She swept her gaze around the room. Every single uniformed police officer in this room was either wearing gloves, or had them tucked into their utility belts.

Loverboy?
Surely that snide nickname meant he was the only cop in this room she had to worry about.

She hugged her legs to her chest and kept Denton Hale in her sight for as long as possible, until the watch commander ordered them all to cover their heads.

The tornado was here.

* * *

G
EORGE
OPENED
THE
fifth-floor men’s room and ran a sweep with his flashlight.

Three floors cleared.

Four minutes time.

Five persons routed from various rooms and sent down to the sublevel storm shelter.

He listened to the chatter on his radio as officers on each floor reported in and then got themselves downstairs. He and Shane were the last ones through each floor, running a quick secondary sweep. Although the back of his mind was filled with thoughts of Elise and visions that she’d made it safely to the basement without Courtney getting on her nerves or any other incident stopping her, he made himself focus on the job at hand. He couldn’t be prouder of his department and the way the men and women who served under him were handling one weather-related crisis after another this summer.

And he couldn’t be more anxious to confess the stunning revelation he’d made about himself, his work and his relationships upstairs in his office before the sirens had gone off to Elise. If he didn’t get the chance to tell that woman how much he loved her and everything he was willing to do for them to be together, then he and Mother Nature were going to have words.

But he had a duty to this department and the entire city he needed to complete first before he could grab a little happiness for himself.

“Clear!” He moved next door to the ladies’ room, but had taken only a couple of steps inside when the air pressure around him plummeted and his ears were suddenly stopped up with pain. “Ahh.”

Not good.

He checked his watch. Five minutes had elapsed.

“Anybody in here?” He swallowed and yawned until his ears popped, and then he was suddenly aware of the eerie silence, broken only by the blare of the storm sirens.

Really not good.

Search time was over.

George pulled his radio from his belt. “Wilkins! Wherever you are, get to the basement now! If there’s anyone left up here, they’re on their own.”

Fortunately, George was on the right side of the door when the row of tiny windows at the end of the stalls exploded into the room. The force of the blast threw him to the floor of the hallway. He hit hard and skidded across the floor as shards of glass pelted the marble tiles behind him like hail stones.

“Ah, hell.” The roar of the wind was deafening, like a locomotive crashing at full speed into the side of the mountain. George pulled himself up onto his bruised knees and stood. A trash can beside the water fountain hovered off the floor, then flew past him and smashed into the wall. This wasn’t any child’s storybook with houses and dogs dropping into a colorful land.

This tornado was real.

And he was far too close to the heart of it.

“Wilkins!” That kid had better already be two steps ahead of him. George ran toward the double walls and steel doors of the stairwell, but his forward progress was more like fighting to escape the gravity of a black hole.

And then he heard the glass breaking inside the last office on his right. “Wilkins?”

The cry of pain he heard wasn’t the storm and it wasn’t his imagination.

“Shane!” George pushed open the door and immediately ducked his head as books and papers and a barrage of knickknacks got sucked out of the room. His tie whipped him in the face and the wind itself made it hard to open his eyes more than a squint. “Shane, are you in here? Are you injured?”

Grabbing the edge of a built-in bookshelf, George pulled himself along the front wall of the room. He was pelted with more books and debris before he reached a heavy office desk and dropped down beside it. The sturdy walnut shifted a little on the carpet, but blocked enough of the wind and flying missiles to allow him to search most of the room. “Wilkins?”

Following the sound of another moan, he crawled around the desk. Still no sign of the other officer. But his knee crunched down on a broken piece of glass, drawing his attention to the window above him.

George scanned the carpet around him and frowned. “One piece of glass?”

The floor in the bathroom had been littered with thousands. Holding tight to the desk, George pulled himself up and threw himself toward the shattered window. Bits of dirt stung his face like shrapnel, but he pushed his back against the wall and opened one eye to peer outside. He could see the funnel cloud coming up the street, more a giant cloud of flying dirt and debris than the spinning corkscrew he’d imagined. It picked up a car and dashed it against a streetlamp, bending the steel in half and shooting up sparks of electricity that were quickly swallowed by the storm.

Most important, he saw all the bits of glass wedged beneath the window frame and stuck into the concrete ledge outside the window.

George braced his forearm over his eyes and turned to verify the horrible suspicion burning in his gut. This wasn’t Mother Nature’s handiwork. Someone had deliberately broken this window.

He glimpsed a blur of blue from the corner of his eye, but it was too late to react. Something hard whacked him on the back of his head and neck, driving him to his knees. Another blow dropped him to the carpet, and in his spinning vision he saw the metal chair being thrown across the room. Probably what the perp had smashed the window with.

It had all been a trick, a perfectly plausible ruse to lure him into the room, to trap him here. Maybe even to kill him. And no one would suspect anything other than the tornado had been responsible.
Smart boy. I always knew you could accomplish anything you set your mind to.

“You stay away from her. Elise is mine.”

With the wind knocked from his lungs and his head spinning, George was too weak to stop Shane Wilkins from stealing his keys, radio and gun, and throwing them out the window.

The wind was roaring louder than his thoughts as Shane locked the door behind him, leaving George with no way to get down to the storm shelter now.

But George was a smart man, too. He rolled underneath the heavy desk as the tornado hit the building and thanked God that he was conscious and able to think.

Now he just had to live. Or else, Elise wouldn’t.

Chapter Eleven

The moment the sirens stopped and Joe Hendricks gave
the all clear, Elise pushed her way out of the ladies’ locker room and moved
upstream against a sea of people spilling out into the hallway and heading
toward the stairs to assess damage and to find daylight and working phones to
call loved ones.

“George?” Her worried shout was swallowed up by the mass of
bodies. But, desperate to find him, to know he was okay, she shoved her way into
the men’s locker room to look for him. In here there were people with cuts and
concussions being tended by the medics on staff and a nurse who’d been meeting
her husband for lunch in the building. Careful to stay out of everyone’s way as
she searched, she stepped up onto the long bench between two rows of lockers and
called again. “Is Deputy Commissioner Madigan in here?”

There were several nos and “I haven’t seen hims,” but no
replies that could give her the information she needed.

The crowd of survivors was thinning out when she went across
the hall to check the firing range. One woman said she’d met the deputy
commissioner on the stairs, going onto the sixth floor. He’d warned her to get
downstairs fast and had promised to join them once the tornado got close enough
to keep him from safely clearing all the floors.

But no George. She had a sick, sick feeling that something
terrible had happened. That her gun-shy caution about relationships and fears of
becoming a detriment to George’s office if she gave in to her emotions had
prevented her from telling him the truth. She should have been braver. She
should have taken the risk and told him how much she loved him.

“Where are you?” she whispered, finally joining the flow of
people to get back to her purse in the ladies’ locker room.

Captain Hendricks had turned this space into an impromptu
command center, deploying officers to various parts of the building to check for
damage, sending others on out to neighborhoods and hospitals in the area to
assist and protect emergency teams there. He was being briefed by other officers
and approving a statement for the press liaison. There were reports of extensive
property damage already coming in, threats of flash flooding near the river and
the creeks and sloughs that fed into it, hail damage and more. Everyone had a
job or was awaiting an order.

No one was looking for the man in charge of it all.

“Have you found him yet?”

Elise jumped at the hand on her elbow and jerked away from
Denton Hale’s touch. She supposed that coming right out and accusing him of
being her stalker wouldn’t be the smartest move, even surrounded by a roomful of
policemen and women. Better to stay friendly and act as if she didn’t suspect a
thing. “No. Not yet.”

Denton tapped the radio on his shoulder. “I tried to hail him a
couple more times once the captain gave us the all clear. Sorry, though, I’m
still getting nothing but static.”

She forced a smile onto her lips. “Thank you for checking.”

A distant drum of thunder reminded her that the storm hadn’t
finished yet. But the sound of rain hitting the ground and windows upstairs was
a much gentler threat, maybe even a cleansing aftermath to the tornado’s
fury.

But the threat was still here, standing much closer than any
lightning bolt or rain cloud outside. “Do you want me to go with you to help
look for him?” Officer Hale asked.

“No.” She answered a little too quickly. When his eyes narrowed
and looked at her like she was a crazy lady, Elise came up with another smile.
“No, thank you.” When Joe Hendricks called Hale over to join him, Elise backed
away. “You have work to do.”

Her intent was to find James and Courtney, and retrieve her
purse, but she smacked into a wall of blue shirt and a flak vest.

“Whoa.” Shane Wilkins reached out to grab her before she
tumbled backward. But his green eyes weren’t offering an apology when she looked
up. His forehead was creased with concern. “Are you looking for the deputy
commissioner?”

Elise’s relief was short-lived. Shane would have been smiling
if everything was okay. “Have you seen him?”

“He got hurt.” He wrapped his fingers around her upper arm and
pulled her into the hallway beside him. “I’ll take you to him.”

Elise glanced over her shoulder to see Denton Hale watching her
as Shane, taller and broader than most of the people around him, decided to
avoid the open stairs that led up to the lobby and pushed a pathway through the
crowd to get to the north emergency stairwell. Once the steel door was safely
closed behind them, Elise breathed a sigh of relief.

But she dug in her heels and questioned the change in direction
when he turned to the first floor exit instead of continuing up the stairs. “You
said we were going upstairs.”

Shane pushed open the door to the noise and more natural light
of the building’s open lobby. Shaking her head, Elise tugged her arm from his
grasp and turned toward the stairs. She tipped her head and shouted up the tall
stairwell. “George?”

Everything above her seemed rock solid. A good sign, she hoped.
But she’d only reached the second step when Shane closed his hands around her
waist and lifted her to the floor.

She swatted his hands away. “What are you doing?”

He grabbed her wrist and pulled her toward the exit. “I’ll get
you out of here.”

A spurt of frustrated anger made her strong enough to pull away
from his grip. “I thought we were looking for George.”

“Stop saying his name like that!” Shane’s shout echoed off the
concrete walls. “You mean the deputy commissioner?”

Elise retreated when he leaned closer and walked toward her.
“Yes. I’ll find him myself. You have other duties in the building, I’m
sure.”

She gasped when her back hit the wall. But he kept coming. “No.
I’m saving you.”

Elise put up her hands to brace against his chest. “I don’t
need to be saved.”

He was leaning over her now, his handsome face red with anger.
“Damn it, yes, you do. You’ve got a stalker. You’ve had a Russian mob guy try to
kill you.”

“Alexsandr didn’t threaten me—”

“Shut up!” He slapped his hand across her face and she felt the
coppery taste of blood in her mouth.

“Shane?” The übercalm that followed was more frightening than
the outburst of anger had been. He squinched up his face and turned away as if
he was grappling with impulses that threatened to tear him apart. Elise didn’t
intend to stay to see which Shane won. She slid along the wall to get away from
him. “I’m going to go find Commissioner Madigan,” she said in a soft, even
tone.

He raked his fingers through his dark blond hair, breathing
hard with the effort to control whatever sickness consumed him. She had her hand
on the door lever when he turned to her with tears in his eyes. “Do you love
him?”

Elise didn’t know whether to lie or keep him in reality with
her. She opted for reality. “Yes.”

Wrong choice.

When she turned to push open the door, he grabbed her from
behind and smacked her head against the unbending steel. There was no pain for a
split second—all the nerves had been deadened by the blow. But while the ache
blossomed and the black door and white walls spun into a sea of gray, Shane
snatched her face between his hands and ground his lips over hers in a kiss.
“You’re mine.” He lifted her onto her toes and kissed her again. “I love
you.”

Elise gripped the door behind her for balance when he dropped
her to her feet and backed away. He smiled down at her, as if a beautiful moment
had passed between them.

But Elise wiped away his kiss with the back of her hand, taking
a smear of blood that had dripped onto her cheek with it. She tenderly touched
the gash at her temple, then looked down to see the black gloves that had fallen
to the floor. Shane?

She couldn’t think of anything to say to properly express her
fear and revulsion at the terror and violence he’d put her through. “Why?”

With her vision cleared by anger, she pushed the door lever
behind her and swung it open. But before she could call for help or get away,
Shane pulled his gun and shoved it into her back. A death grip on her arm yanked
her back against his chest and he whispered against her ear, “I’ll shoot anyone
who tries to help you or keep us apart again.”

Then he urged her toward the building’s front doors.

“Elise, are you okay?”

She turned at the sound of James Westbrook’s voice. With his
arm around Courtney Reiter’s waist, he was helping her up the main stairs into
the lobby.

Even Courtney looked concerned. “That’s a bad cut.”

A steel barrel jabbed beneath her ribs before she got the
chance to say anything. Elise wasn’t surprised at how earnest and concerned
Shane sounded. “She got hit by some flying debris. I’m taking her to the first
aid station.”

“I thought they’d set that up downstairs,” said James.

Elise looked to the double glass doors. The granite steps out
front were completely blocked with the wreckage of a car and an ancient pine
tree that had been uprooted from the front lawn. There were several people
between them and the exit Shane had hoped for, some pointing and chatting about
the damage, others dealing with the rain coming in through the broken glass.

With a quick breath and glance around him that smelled like
desperation, Shane pulled her back toward the stairwell. “There’s another aid
station upstairs.”

James nodded, his eyes narrowed in doubt behind his glasses.
“Okay. Call me when you get the chance. Let me know you’re okay.”

“I need George.” Elise mouthed the words as Shane dragged her
back to the stairs. It was a plea for her life, and theirs. But she didn’t risk
saying anything out loud as the stairwell door closed behind them.

* * *

G
EORGE
SHOVED
THE
mountain of tangled blinds,
books and furniture away from the opening beneath the desk, and made a solemn
vow to buy himself a sturdy antique like this one for his office upstairs.
Assuming he still had an office. And an upstairs.

The rain blowing through the broken window splashed his face
and arms as he pushed to his feet and surveyed the damage. There was plenty. But
the floor was solid, and the walls of this 1920s steel-and-limestone fortress
seemed to still be standing.

But the building damage was the least of his concerns right
now. It didn’t take him long to decide that what had worked for Shane would work
for him. Picking up the metal conference chair the young officer had clocked him
with, George swung it against the door, smashing the wood around the lock so he
could pull it open, run to the south stairwell and get to Elise.

He’d brushed aside several status reports, and inquiries into
the nicks and scratches on his face and hands, and the bruise at his temple, to
get downstairs to the storm shelter as quickly as possible. Although there were
a few wounded refugees in the men’s locker room, most of the area had been
cleared out. He certainly wasn’t seeing anyone with soft brown waves framing her
face and killer legs organizing some kind of team and tackling a list of tasks
necessary for a recovery effort.

George propped his hands at his waist and took several deep
breaths, keeping his fear at bay. Fine. If he couldn’t locate Elise, then he’d
look for Shane.

He stopped the first uniformed officer who walked past. Denton
Hale wasn’t much of a go-getter on his own time, but he snapped to when George
called his name. “Which one is Wilkins’s locker?”

Hale led him to the end of the row. “This one, sir.”

“Can we cut that lock?”

Hale called over a maintenance man with a toolbox and cut off
the lock with a set of bolt cutters.

When George pulled open the metal door, he swore one choice,
biting word.

Hanging from a hook at the back of the locker was a dried-up
yellow rose. In the gym bag at the bottom he found a pair of lacy blue panties
and a ton of pictures. All of them of Elise—waving to the camera across a
parking lot, walking her dog, lounging on the deck in her backyard, eating a
salad in Pitsaeli’s Restaurant, standing on her front porch, hugging Spike,
looking wary and afraid.

A box on the top shelf held something even more
disturbing—stacks of love poems and letters, all saying variations of the same
thing.

I love you.

You’re mine.

We belong together.

No one will keep us apart.

When the bile in his throat receded and he could speak again,
George turned to Officer Hale. “When was the last time you saw Elise?”

“About fifteen minutes ago.” He nodded toward the locker room
exit. “She went looking for you. Wilkins was with her.”

“Shane Wilkins?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you know which way they went?”

“Your last known location was upstairs. I’m sure they went that
way. They headed to the north end of the building. She was worried sick about
you.” Hale pointed to the drops of blood on George’s damp shirt. “Sir, you’re
hurt.”

“Just a few cuts and a bump on the head. Give me your building
keys.” When George gestured for him to hurry and hand them over, Denton unhooked
the ring of keys and dropped them into his palm. “Are you carrying a spare
gun?”

“Yeah.” Hale nodded and pulled a Smith & Wesson from the
ankle holster beneath his pant leg.

George held it down and away and checked the loaded magazine
and weight of the weapon before sliding it into his own holster. “Get on the
horn and find out if my nephew, Detective Fensom, is in the building. Tell him
and any of his friends to meet me upstairs. I may need backup.”

“Sir?”

George strode into the hallway, with Hale hurrying along beside
him. “You want to guarantee your job, and get those lousy performance
evaluations off your record?”

“Yes, sir.”