Safe Harbor (18 page)

Mike’s mind began to race.

Could Crenshaw have learned that he was alive and here at the inn? If he had, then he had to be desperate and desperate men did terrible, desperate things.

Taking hold of Ricky’s shoulders, he looked down at him sternly and gave the boy instructions. “I need you to be brave, kid. Go to your mother, tell her what you told me.” Cris was levelheaded, he thought. She’d do the right thing.

This time, Ricky bobbed his head up and down. “Okay. Are you gonna save them?” he said before he took off.

Mike squared his shoulders. “If I can, kid. If I can.”

With that, he quickly strode around the side of the inn, hurrying to Richard’s office. Had so much not been at stake, had it only been the other man and him, he might have attempted to get the drop on Crenshaw. To look in through the outside window and take the man down with one well-aimed shot.

Only problem was, his gun was somewhere in the middle of the ocean and he had no weapon.

Even if he did, if he could have gotten his hands on a gun, he’d be risking the two people in there with the police officer. If he managed to shoot Crenshaw first, the police officer could still fire as he went down, which meant that he could accidentally get one or the other.

He couldn’t take that chance.

Couldn’t risk either of them being hit.

There was only one course of action open to him that gave Richard and Stevi a chance of getting away. He had to make Crenshaw think he was surrendering.

If he could get close enough to him, he could either disarm him or block the shot with his body, allowing Richard and his daughter to escape.

Mike wasn’t stupid, he knew that if he merely surrendered, no matter what Crenshaw threatened or promised, the police officer couldn’t allow two witnesses to live. Mike knew what Crenshaw was thinking. He’d kill him first, then get rid of Richard and Stevi.

It couldn’t go down that way.

Mike couldn’t remember the last time he’d been scared, not even when he’d avoided the kill shot on the boat, but that was because he hadn’t felt he had anything to lose. Life wasn’t all that precious to him to begin with.

But he was scared now.

And the life that was precious to him now wasn’t his own.

He reached the closed door of Richard’s office.

“Crenshaw?” he called in a loud voice, through the door. “I hear you’re looking for me.”

“Ryan?” he heard the man reply. “Is that you?”

Psyching himself up, Mike leaned his forehead against the door, doing his best to visualize the right thing going down. “Yeah, it’s me.”

“Mike, run, he’s got a gun!” Stevi screamed.

The next moment, Mike heard her cry out in pain. Crenshaw must have hit her. The thought enraged him.

“Leave her alone, Crenshaw!” he shouted. “It’s me you want. I’m unarmed and I’m coming in.”

“Slowly, Ryan,” Crenshaw instructed, “or their blood’s on your hands.”

Mike strained to hear more discussion coming from the office.

“You’re not going to be able to get away with this,” Richard said.

“Let me worry about that,” Crenshaw growled. And then his voice rose again. “You coming in, Ryan?”

Mike turned the doorknob slowly and eased the door open. He had one hand raised.

“Both hands!” Crenshaw ordered, aiming the muzzle of his gun not at him, but at Stevi. “Raise both hands in the air!”

“Watch where you aim that thing,” Mike said quickly, doing as the other man instructed.

“I know exactly where I’m aiming ‘that thing,’” Crenshaw retorted. There was a smile on his lips. “Welcome to the party, Ryan. Now get in here and shut the door behind you!”

CHAPTER TWENTY

H
ANDS
STILL
HELD
up high over his head, Mike moved away from the door. Crenshaw was standing to the side of Richard’s desk, maximizing his vantage point so that he could see both of the hostages he’d taken, and now, Mike, as well.

When Mike looked at Stevi, he didn’t see fear so much as anger.

He had to get them out of here before the entire situation got out of hand.

“Okay, I’m here,” he said to Crenshaw. “Now let them go.”

The other man’s smile indicated his satisfaction. “It doesn’t work that way,” Crenshaw said.

That wasn’t an answer Mike was willing to accept. “Look, these people never did you any harm. It’s me you want. Take me hostage, let them leave.”

Crenshaw’s smile vanished, as did his patience. “This is your fault,” he snapped. “If you’d just died the way you were supposed to, none of this would have had to happen.” And then he corrected himself as he waved the muzzle of his gun to include his initial two hostages. “None of this had to happen. But you forced my hand and now they’ve turned out to be witnesses.”

“They won’t say anything,” Mike stressed. He looked at Richard. “Richard, tell him you won’t say anything,” he pleaded.

But rather than agree, the way Mike had expected him to, Richard shook his head. “I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

Was he
trying
to sign his own death warrant? His and Stevi’s?

He turned to Stevi. “Stevi, talk some sense into your father.”

“He is talking sense,” Stevi replied, glaring at Crenshaw.

Mike’s heart sank. He had to save their lives, but they weren’t helping him any.

“See?” Crenshaw said to him, as if the responses proved some point of argument he’d made. “Not that I would have actually believed either of them if they’d sworn to take a vow of silence.”

Mike tried another route, all the while watching for a sliver of an opening that would allow him to get the drop on the other man and take him down before he could do either Richard or Stevi any harm.

“You can’t kill us here,” he insisted. “Someone will hear the gunshots. Besides, how are you going to get rid of the bodies? You haven’t thought this through,” he said, trying to ruffle Crenshaw’s thin veneer of composure.

“No, I haven’t thought this through,” Crenshaw agreed. The renewed expression of complacency was in direct contradiction to what Mike expected to see. “Not past you—and now them—being dead.” The police officer’s eyes narrowed into slits. “I had a nice little lucrative business going before you came and messed everything up. My partners have all pulled out, taken their trade someplace else,” he accused. “So this—” Crenshaw waved his weapon from Stevi to her father and then back again “—is all on your head.

“The only thing left for me to decide is who goes first. You—” he aimed the muzzle at Mike, then swung over toward Richard “—or you. I always did hate your chipper Mr. Rogers attitude, Richard.” Crenshaw’s expression was dark and ugly. “It’s easy being chipper when there’s nobody telling you what to do, ordering you around as if you were a lackey.” For a moment, he appeared caught up in some melodrama playing out in his head. Then he was pointing his weapon at Stevi. “Or you,” he concluded.

Fear shot through Mike. “Leave her alone!”

Crenshaw swung his gun back to point at him. “Shut up! You’re in no position to give orders.”

Still aiming the weapon at Mike, Crenshaw dug into his back pocket and took out a muzzle extension to muffle the sound of the weapon being discharged. As he spoke, he attached the extension on to the end of the muzzle.

“By the time they find your bodies, ‘Larry Crenshaw’ will have disappeared.” He laughed , the sound chilling Mike’s blood. “Sounds like a happy ending to me.”

“You won’t get away with this,” Stevi insisted. “Somebody’ll hunt you down and make you pay.”

“Maybe,” Crenshaw allowed, although it was obvious that he thought the possibility was remote. “But it won’t do any of you any good, now, will it?” he asked.

Mike had no doubt that the man swaggering before them was cold-blooded enough to carry out his threat. He also knew that there was no bargaining with him. If he were to take a guess, he would have said the police officer was relishing what he was about to do: to kill not just him, but Stevi and her father.

It would be making his worst nightmare come true.

Desperate, he came up with a fragment of a plan. Mike made eye contact with Stevi, then deliberately looked first to her father, then toward the door before shifting his eyes back to her.

“This is going to be a piece of cake,” Crenshaw declared as he raised his weapon to fire.

Mike yelled, “Run!” as he launched himself directly at Crenshaw, cutting the short distance between them into nothing.

Startled, cursing, Crenshaw fired just as Mike tackled him. At the same time, a split second before both men crashed to the floor, another shot rang out.

As Stevi watched, Crenshaw screamed and sank to the ground with Mike on top of him.

Rather than run for the door, Stevi ran to him. “Mike, Mike, are you all right?” she cried, falling to her knees beside him. “Talk to me, please,” she begged. “Say something.” Still kneeling, she attempted to turn Mike over onto his back so she could see if he’d been the one hit by the bullet.

His eyes were closed.

There was blood, so much blood, all over the front of his shirt. The sight of it and its implications terrified her.

“Mike,
say something!
” she begged again.

“Ow,” he murmured just as Richard came around to his other side.

Her father took hold of him and slowly tried to raise him to his feet. “Steady now,” Richard coaxed. “Let’s get you off this so-called police officer.”

Scrambling to her feet, Stevi swung around and grabbed the weapon that Crenshaw had dropped when he was tackled. Holding it with both hands, hands that weren’t quite steady, Stevi aimed the gun at Crenshaw’s chest.

“Don’t move!” she ordered angrily.

With Richard’s help, Mike had made it to his knees. But that had taken all the strength he had, so he remained there, kneeling on the floor. He covered his fresh wound with his hands. Doing his best to rise above the pain, Mike looked at the other man.

“I don’t think he can, Stevi,” he told her. “I think he’s dead.”

But she kept the gun aimed just where it was. “He could just be pretending,” she said despite the growing evidence to the contrary beneath him.

“Let’s get you into a chair,” Richard said, taking hold of Mike’s elbow and making a second attempt to get him up onto his feet.

It was at that point that all three of them, from slightly different vantage points, saw the partially opened window behind Richard’s chair.

And saw the man standing outside, on the other side of the window.

“Silvio,” Stevi breathed in a stunned whisper of disbelief.

The gardener lowered the gun in his hands.

The door to the office burst open. The first one through it would have been Ricky had Cris not been holding on to him with both hands.

“Grandpa, Grandpa, are you okay?” he cried frantically, taking everything in at once.

Richard exhaled a huge sigh of relief. It appeared that his family had been spared. “I’m fine, Ricky.” He put his arm around Stevi’s shoulders and hugged her to him. “We’re all fine.” And then he realized he had to amend that statement. “Except for Mike here,” he said in his next breath.

“It’s just a flesh wound,” Mike said, dismissing the gravity of the situation. When he looked out the window again, Silvio was gone.

“How did he—” Turning back to Richard and Stevi, Mike wasn’t even sure how to phrase his question about the man who had come to his rescue.

But he didn’t have to. Cris provided them with the explanation.

“When Ricky came running in and told me what was going on, I didn’t think calling 911 would get anyone here fast enough, so I found Silvio.” When her father looked at her quizzically, she added, “I’ve been paying attention, Dad. I knew he didn’t exactly have a traditional background, so I took a chance that maybe what had brought him here all those years ago was something that could be used to help us now.”

Mike heard sirens approaching.

“I sent him to you,” Cris continued. “Then I called 911.”

Only half listening—she could always get details later—Stevi put the gun on her father’s desk and turned her attention to her hero.

“Let me see that,” Stevi said. She took Mike’s hands away from his wound to get a better look at it. It didn’t improve from this vantage point.

The sirens grew louder, the sound becoming another entity in the room.

Richard’s eyes shifted to Mike. “Do we need to hide you?” he asked, surprising everyone in the room, including Mike.

There was just the barest hint of a resigned, complacent smile on Mike’s lips as he replied, “No. I’m not hiding anymore.”

“Cris,” Stevi addressed her sister without looking away from the wound, as if afraid that if she did, it would grow that much worse, “get me some clean towels, some peroxide—and Silvio,” she concluded as the man, sans his weapon, walked into the by now very crowded office.

The gardener’s dark eyes swept over the people in the room, doing a casualty count. They came to rest on the police officer on the floor.

“He’s dead,” Mike told him.

Silvio nodded, as if someone had told him a plant in the garden had failed to thrive.

“I know,” he said in the same calm voice he always used.

Stevi looked at the man with ever growing respect. She knew by his statement—and by the way he carried himself—that he had to have been a man who always got what he aimed at. Had he been a sniper as well as a doctor? Whoever he had been in the life he’d led before he’d come to their doorstep, she was really glad that fate had brought him into their lives.

“He needs attention,” she told Silvio, referring to Mike. Silvio nodded and turned toward her wounded hero, then paused as Stevi put her hand on his arm, drawing away his attention for just a moment. When Silvio looked at her quizzically, she said, “Thank you,” with as much heartfelt sincerity as she could infuse in the two words.

Silvio grunted something unintelligible and nodded his head just as Cris returned with the supplies that Stevi had requested. Only then, as Silvio got down to work, did Stevi withdraw her other hand from Mike’s wound.

She took a step back as the police officers, whom Cris had summoned by reiterating what her breathless son had told her, walked into the small office.

* * *

“D
ON
’
T
YOU
WANT
to rest?” Stevi asked, not for the first time, concerned as Mike began to shrug into his shirt. Unlike the last wound he had sustained, this one, though it turned out to be less serious, necessitated his having to make use of a sling, thereby making even the smallest of chores—such as getting dressed—into a major undertaking.

Taking the other end of the shirt, Stevi helped him slip it on the one arm that could be put through the sleeve.

“I’m not an invalid, Stevi,” he protested, wanting to do it himself.

“No,” she agreed, “you’re not. But it makes me feel better fussing over you just a little, all right?” she said. “Let me feel as if I’m a little useful in your life, at least for a couple of weeks.”

You’re more than a little useful in my life,
he thought.
And that’s just my problem.

Giving in, Mike sighed and stopped struggling with the shirtsleeve and her.

“Knock yourself out,” he told her. “And as for your first question, I’m really getting pretty sick of resting.”

“Well, by my estimate,” she informed him, “you haven’t exactly been doing very much of it. After Silvio bandaged you up, you insisted on going down to the precinct to give the police a statement—”

“It was the right thing to do,” he said, cutting in.

“No one’s arguing with that,” she pointed out, “but they were willing to give you a pass for a couple of days, especially after you gave them your superior’s name and number and they verified your information. After all, it wasn’t exactly as if Crenshaw was going anywhere but the morgue.”

He didn’t operate that way. His comfort was the least of his concerns.

“Better to get it all cleared up sooner than later,” he said. “I wanted to make sure the police captain knew that none of what happened was in any way anyone at the inn’s fault. What happened was between Crenshaw and me.”

And, he added silently, he had also wanted to go to the precinct to make sure Crenshaw was the only one on that side of the badge who had been involved in the sale of the illegal drugs.

He’d come away satisfied that Crenshaw had been the only bad apple in the police station’s barrel. He’d also noted that the precinct personnel had been appalled that one of their own had led such a double life.

Captain Reins told him that he was initiating an investigation right after the Fourth. That meant tomorrow.

“I noticed that in that statement you gave to the Captain, you covered for Silvio,” Stevi said.

He began to shrug and realized that he couldn’t, not without incurring shooting pains all up and down one side.

He made no apologies for not implicating the gardener. “Least I could do.”

He knew that if Silvio’s part in all this came to light, quite possibly the man’s background might fall under investigation as well and he had a feeling that Silvio’s past was best left untouched.

His shirt on, Mike fumbled with the buttons. Stevi pushed his hands out of the way and quickly closed all of them. With a smile, she smoothed down the front of his shirt.

Nodding his head, he said, “Thanks. Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to see the fireworks that everyone’s been talking about, seeing as how I was the one to get everything ready for this big celebration of yours,” he said.

“As I recall,” she reminded Mike, “you did have a little help.”

He paused and with his one good hand, he cupped her cheek as he looked down into her eyes. “As I recall,” he countered, “I had a lot of help.”