Trouble Comes Knocking (Entangled Embrace) (13 page)

“The guy from the other night?”

“Him, the murderer, the person in the green car, Roger… I feel like there are so many people after me right now, I just don’t feel safe anymore.”

Eli shifted on the couch, pulling me closer. “I promise nothing will happen to you with me at your side, okay?”

I nodded. The storm’s intensity grew. With Eli’s warm body pressed close to mine, all my fears evaporated. I relaxed into him.

He was out within minutes, his heavy breathing reviving my mind and making me more alert. I pulled a blanket up over both of us and watched the storm outside the window. My mind couldn’t stop rolling over The Slotted Spoon. How did it all fit together?

The restaurant Simon Winters was part owner of stayed empty yet somehow didn’t go out of business. It struck me as very unlikely that money would go missing under his nose. The thoughts tumbled over and over until they became a hypnotic melody, and I drifted. Then, in the distance, the beeping stopped.

My eyes popped open. The lights hadn’t come back on, but the alarm stopped. “Eli,” I whispered urgently, hoping he wasn’t a deep sleeper.

Ears perked, I listened for any other noises while ribs threatened to break through the wall of my chest. Maybe something happened to the alarm?

A slight scraping noise sounded somewhere in the distance but definitely sounded like it came from inside the house. “Eli,” I whispered again, this time shaking him while trying not to cry out in fear.

“Shh,” he whispered back. He squeezed my hand, and we sat quiet for a moment before we heard the noise again. “I’m getting up. I want you to go into the corner, behind the TV stand, and don’t move. No matter what.”

I nodded, but my body tensed, ready to spring. He stood and pulled me to my feet, forcing me into action. From where I crouched I saw him walk slowly in the direction of the noise, moving up as close to the wall as he could. He opened the drawer in the table near the front door. I heard the muted click of his gun before he disappeared around the corner.

Hyperventilating, I waited to hear something else, anything. Then my phone lit up and vibrated on the coffee table. I listened for Eli moving toward the back of the house but couldn’t hear anything. If I could get to my phone, I could call 911 and maybe get someone else here to help.

Part of me said,
stay, don’t move, do what Eli said
. The other part said,
to hell with that! I’m not waiting around for someone to shoot my face off
. That part finally won out as I inched from my hiding space and toward the coffee table. Just as I reached the phone, I saw a shadow outside the front window.

Lightning flashed as the figure raised a gun, aiming toward me. I screamed and fell to the floor as a shot rang out. Eli came running toward the sound, but I ran, too, this time toward the back door.

“Lucy, stay still!” Eli yelled, racing into the room. I ran to the dining room and cowered under the table. Lightning flashed and I saw him sweep the room with his gun. The face from the window was gone, but then I heard a crash of glass and the sound of boots on the hardwood floor. Someone was in the house.

It took me a moment to remember the phone in my hand. Eli ran toward the noise and I dialed. Another shot rang out, but I didn’t hear anyone falling. “Hurry,” I begged the operator. “Someone is in the house!”

“What is your address?”

“I don’t know; I’m at a friend’s house. He’s a cop, Eli Reyes. Please, someone’s already shot at us. He’s still inside. They have a gun.”

“Ma’am, I need you to stay on the phone.”

I heard the sound of fighting, two bodies hitting each other. “God, please hurry,” I urged.

Something hit the wall, hard, and the sounds of fists against flesh echoed through the house.

The operator asked questions, but my brain disengaged. I’d never been so scared in my life. The sounds of the two men fighting came closer with each breath. What if something happened to Eli? What if the person came after me again?

“I can’t stay on the line,” I told the operator. “I have to get out of here.”

“Ma’am, stay on the line. We can find you better if you stay on the line.”

I kept the line open, but stuffed the phone in my pocket so I could concentrate. Gauging the distance from me to the front door, I thought I might be able to run outside and find better cover. I inched from my spot as someone hit a wall again. Loud shouts echoed as the two men tussled in the hallway.

Staying low I snuck toward the front door. I unlocked and opened it as quietly as possible, then saw them grappling, both fighting as if their lives depended on it. I threw the door open and ran into the rain. Outside red-and-blue lights flashed against distant windows and I welcomed the sound of approaching sirens.

The police cars swarmed the end of the street just as someone running out of the house slammed me to the ground. “Lucy!” Eli yelled from the door.

The man stopped and looked back at me, but I couldn’t see his face in the dark. He ran to his car. The rain made it difficult to make out the color, but once lightning flashed I couldn’t deny it was the green Cougar. The police cars approached, and he clipped one as he pulled out into the street.

Even though I couldn’t see his face, I didn’t miss the license plate on the car. The same as the one I’d seen on the drive back from Elmer. Several police cars turned to pursue him while the others continued to us.

Eli ran out of the house and found me on the ground. “Lucy, are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” I said, cold rain stabbing my face and bare arms. “That was him. That was the green car.” I grabbed Eli’s arm, and he grunted. “You’re hurt.”

He sat on the lawn next to me as officers poured out of their cars. “It’s just a scratch.”

“You were shot. Oh God, Eli!” My stomach lurched. “Help!” I screamed, drawing the officers over faster. “Help! He’s been shot!”

Through all the commotion, Eli finally convinced them he was okay and gave them the license-plate number to run down. An ambulance arrived and paramedics patched his arm.

“Shouldn’t take long to heal,” one of the men said. “It’s a graze. Still, we’ll take you in to get checked. You, too, miss,” he said, shining a light in my eyes. “You have quite the knot on your forehead.”

I hadn’t even realized I’d been hurt until he said it. “I’m fine,” I insisted. “Just get him taken care of.”

I rode with Eli to the hospital and called Ana from there.

Against my better judgment, I let them go ahead and examine me. They gave me two small stitches and a cold compress. “Can I see him?” I asked. “I need to know he’s okay.”

“Sure,” the nurse said. She pulled back the curtain between our two beds.

Eli laid back, his shirt cut up to the shoulder and bandaged arm lying across his chest. The hero cop. No, hot hero cop. If not for his swollen face and puffy, split lip, that is. “You know, you’re not exactly a fun date,” he grumbled, sounding half pathetic and half proud.

I scrunched up my face like a wrinkled old woman. “God, Eli, I’m so sorry. This is horrible. I can’t believe he came to your home.”

He coughed, then winced. “Believe it.” He repositioned his unbandaged arm to cover his ribs and groaned. “Whoever that bastard is, he’s one hell of a fighter. I couldn’t see a thing, missing every other hit. He managed to catch me most of the time. Damn.” He stared up at the lights above the bed.

“What are you thinking about?”

Shaking his head, he said, “I just can’t figure it out. How did he know you were with me? Even if he was watching you, you left the station with me. He wouldn’t have known that unless he worked at the station, too, or he was there for some reason.” Eli turned toward me. “Then again, we left through the underground parking garage.” He looked at me. “Lucy, that’s only for officers. I don’t think anyone would have seen us leave. Did you tell anyone else you were here?”

I had. I’d texted John. I didn’t want to hide anything from him. But I couldn’t believe John would be involved in this, either. “No,” I lied.

It couldn’t be him. It couldn’t. John could give someone diabetes with his sweetness. He carried guitars, not guns. He was someone I wanted to get to know better, not someone I feared. And furthermore, I would prove it wasn’t him. I was supposed to investigate, why not prove John’s innocence by eliciting his help.

Eli’s face hardened. “Lucy, whoever it was tried to kill us both tonight. How they knew you were there doesn’t matter. We just need to figure out who he is.”

I swallowed, feeling a sick sour rise in the back of my throat. “This is proof Natalie is innocent. You know that, right?”

Eli shook his head. “It’s proof that someone is still after you. The person looking through your window. That Ridley guy. Someone from Elmer.”

“God. I’m more wanted than most people on the FBI’s wall. I should just let them get me so this is all over with.”

“That probably won’t do much good. I mean, after the torture and slow death, where would they hide the body?”

Funny. Real funny. I sat up in my bed and touched the bandage on my forehead. My head swam at the movement, but I closed my eyes and let my body refocus. It wasn’t John. I was certain of it. My stomach churned, and I wanted to curl up into a ball. I might not know if or how Aunt Dolores was involved in my kidnapping, but I wanted her. I needed her with me now. I felt like a little girl, that white room closing in around me, and I needed her warmth to swaddle me and keep me safe.

“Look, we have the license-plate number. We can trace it and go from there. At least we’ll know who the car belongs to.”

Eli sighed, sounding like someone who knew talk wouldn’t change a thing. “Most likely the plates were stolen off another car, Lucy. They probably aren’t going to lead us anywhere.”

“They have to,” I insisted, blinking back the tears gathering at the corners of my eyes. “They’re all we have.”

“We have Natalie. And we have a BOLO out for Ridley.”

“What is that, anyway? BOLO? I’ve heard it on cop shows, but no one ever says what it is.”

“Be on the lookout.”

That mollified me, but only for a moment. “But she didn’t do it. You said you didn’t think she did.”

“She’s all we have,” Eli insisted again. “Unless we come up with someone willing to confess, she’s it. And honestly, if she didn’t do it, someone is putting a whole lot of effort into making her look guilty as hell.”

I worried my bottom lip, tearing a piece of dry skin with my teeth. “Can you follow up on the car, at least?” My voice came out sounding small and quivery.

“I will.”

There was a commotion outside my curtain. “I don’t care if you’re busy. She’s my niece, and I’m here to see her. Now where is Lucy Carver? I know she’s here somewhere, and by God someone is going to do their job and point the way.”

A second later a twitchy-looking nurse yanked the curtain open, and Aunt Dolores pulled me into the tightest embrace of my life. “You scared the shit out of me,” she admonished in a voice that was as much rebuke as it was loving. “Don’t you ever disappear on me again.”

“Dee, I’m so sorry!” I buried my nose in her neck and let the sobs I’d been holding back finally break. “Thank you for coming. How did you know where to find me?”

“Ana called me. We’ll discuss later how peeved I am that I heard it from that one and not you.”

Chapter Twelve

Officer Len turned his chair around and chewed the end of his pen. “I feel like we’re not getting very far, Lucy. What happened that brought you in here?”

“We’re just about there,” I promised, not willing to let the full story go untold. “All of this really does matter when it comes down to what happened. Now where were we?”

“At the hospital.”

“You should stop chewing on pens,” I warned, motioning toward his mouth. “You’ve already had at least two bust in your pocket because you do that.” He had two separate ink stains on his shirt, both faded but definitely from different incidents.

Officer Len glanced at the pen in his hand, then tossed it in the trash, retrieving a fresh one from a drawer on his side of the table. “Bad habit. Go on.”

Eli closed the curtain separating us, and the privacy let me breathe in the reassuring powdery smell of my aunt. “Can we go home?” I asked, not sure if I knew what that meant anymore but not ready to give up what I’d had.

“Soon as they release you,” she said. “Let me go make them.”

She left, and I turned to Eli’s side. “She’s gone. Can we talk?”

“I need some rest,” he said through the curtain. “Go home. You need some, too. I’ll talk to you in a few days when I’m back at work.”

I slept through most of the next day, but when I woke up and looked at my phone, I didn’t see any missed calls from John or Eli. My head spun as I got
out of bed, but it was time to move around, take a shower. In front of the mirror, I stared at Eli’s blood still on me. Some had washed away by the storm, but not all.

I traced over the streaks of brown with my fingers and thought of what he’d risked in protecting me. What he risked every day in protecting people. I could never love someone like him. My heart would break every time he walked out the door.

Watching Eli’s blood rinse down the drain, I resolved I would never allow myself to love him. The fear of losing someone I loved…losing someone else I loved…was more than I was willing to risk.

When I was eleven, my mother disappeared for a few days. “Why can’t you tell me where she is?” I begged my father, feeling as if a large piece of my being had gone missing.

He, for the most part, ignored my begging and instead worked around me. It had been the most terrifying three days of my life to that point. She finally came back, bags under her eyes, looking as if she’d aged ten years in three days.

“It’s taken care of?” my father asked, not looking her in the eyes.

She nodded but didn’t speak. I knew he couldn’t see her, but somehow he knew. When I ran to give her a hug, she caught me at arm’s length. “Lucy-mine. I love you. Will you help me into bed?”

I nodded, hurt and caught off guard by my mother not wanting to hold me. I didn’t understand; why couldn’t my mother hug me?

Late that night my father and I ate supper without her. “We love you very much, Lucy. More than you’ll ever know. Someday you’ll be old enough to understand, but for today know we both love you and would sacrifice the world for you.”

I rinsed soap out of my eyes and laid my head against the shower wall to let the water cascade down my back. A knock sounded on the bathroom door, followed by Ana’s impatient voice. “Lucy, c’mon. You’ve been in there forever.”

“I’m coming.”

I toweled off and pulled a robe around my shoulders before stepping back into my room. She sat on the edge of her bed, pulling at the blanket pills. “Did you stay with Bobby?” I asked.

“Yes.”

We sat in silence for a moment. “Don’t you ever go home?” I grinned.

She laughed. “You know as much as I do that home is here. I have that apartment but…”

“I know.” Ana’s parents had left her alone a lot as a child. Neglect sounded like a harsh word, yet I could think of no word more suited for how she’d been raised. When she started making good money modeling, she rented a gorgeous apartment over off West 7th near downtown Fort Worth. The view from her balcony overlooked the city. She kept the place more for entertaining fellow models or other visitors, but hated staying there alone. Our house was home.

“Hungry?” she asked.

“Starving.”

“Dee is downstairs cooking up beef stew and biscuits. She said we all need to talk.”

I sat on the bed next to her. “I don’t know if I can,” I said, searching for understanding in her eyes. “You saw what I saw. How am I supposed to talk?”

“She loves you, probably more than anyone else in this world. Except for me, of course.”

“Of course.”

Patting my knee, she leaned her head on my shoulder. “Hear her out. Things are never what they seem, and from what we saw of that town, I want to throw your parents a parade for taking you.”

What I couldn’t stop thinking about—couldn’t forgive—isn’t that they took me, but that they took
only
me.

I dressed, and we went downstairs.

The house smelled amazing. A mixture of holiday candles and home-cooked food. Aunt Dolores stood at her usual sentinel post, the kitchen island, and Ana and I occupied ours, barstools directly across from her.

“Dinner’s fixin’ to be ready,” she said, without her usual enthusiasm.

A nervous smile cracked my face. My arms braced in front of me like foreign appendages; my legs hung like slabs of pork. “Okay.”

“You feelin’ better?”

“A little. I have a headache.”

“Did you take somethin’?”

“Not yet. Maybe later, after I get something in my stomach.”

“Don’t let it get too bad. It’s harder to fix then.”

We stayed in uncomfortable silence for a few moments. For the first time in a lifetime together, neither of us knew how to start.

Ana looked between us. “Dolores, did you know Lucy’s parents kidnapped her?” she asked, her voice rising in mock or practiced disbelief at the end.

Both of us looked at her wide-eyed. Not the way you start talking about a deep, dark family secret. She might as well have said, “Dolores, did you know Lucy’s sister killed a bunch of people and now an entire town wants to kill her?”

“What?” Ana asked, shrugging. “Dinner is essentially ready, and if one of you doesn’t start talking about what happened, it’s not going to taste as good. So go.”

“I most certainly did not,” Aunt Dolores said, not looking at me.

Then she did look. “Well, no. I…had suspicions somethin’ was off, but I didn’t know what. I wasn’t close to your parents. We hadn’t talked in over a decade, and then suddenly you were here. What was I supposed to do, not take care of a niece I hadn’t known existed? Family is family.”

“What was it?” I asked, moving up on the stool. “What made you suspect something?”

She shifted her feet a little, back and forth as if she were dancing to a tune only she could hear. “I didn’t expect you was kidnapped or nothing, but you were different. The way you acted, things stood out.”

Was she being vague on purpose? Who wants to be different like that? My shoulders fell a little, and I crossed my hands over my knees, suddenly not wanting to hear anything more.

Dee quickly caught the change. “Oh, no, honey! I mean, nothing bad. You were an amazing kid. That was it, you were so much more than your age, more like a tiny adult. I couldn’t have imagined what happened to you growing up to make you act like that. It was disconcerting at first, like I had to teach you how to be a teenager.”

She had, too. She’d cursed around me, left the remote unlocked so I could watch whatever I wanted, never told me when to come home. I ate junk food and meat for the first time in my life, heard about sex, drugs, rock and roll—things I’d never learned from my parents. “So they raised me differently?”

“Oh,
way
more than that,” Ana said, twirling a strand of hair around her finger and examining it for split ends.

“You noticed, too?”

“God, yeah. I thought you were an alien or something the first time I met you.”

“Thing is,” Aunt Dolores said, giving Ana a dirty look at the last part, “I knew you were mine. And it didn’t matter if you acted right or not, you were my brother’s so you were mine.”

“But I wasn’t his.” Officer Henderson never said who our father was, only that our mother died. “Did Ana tell you there were three of us?”

Dee’s countenance fell. “I’m sorry about your sisters,” she said quietly, a thoughtful expression on her face. “I don’t know what happened. I don’t know why your parents took you and not them, but I want you to know that you are a gift to me. I wish I had answers, something I could tell you. No matter what, though, blood or not, secrets or not, you are mine. Don’t you never forget that.” She reached her hand across the island and placed it on top of mine. Our eyes locked.

“I won’t.”

The stove timer dinged as if on cue. “Thank God that’s over with,” Ana said in a voice so overly dramatic she could go up for an Oscar. “I’m starving. Dolores, since you’re being all sappy and sentimental right now, do you need me to get everything to the table?”

Dee rolled her eyes and smacked at her with a towel. “I can manage just fine, little girl. Get your ass in there. Both of you get your asses in there.”

I stood and grabbed her into a hug before I went. “I love you so much,” I whispered into her ear.

“Back at’cha,” she whispered, her own version of ditto.

I called John three times the next day, and when he still wasn’t answering the day after, Eli’s suspicions about him grew like a poison in the back of my brain.

Although, to John’s defense, Eli didn’t answer, either.

Even though I should have been a walking ball of anxiety, for the first time in weeks I could breathe; no men around to suck the life from me. Wednesday I returned to work, where I was immediately called into Seth’s office and written up for having missed so many days.

“I’m sorry, Ms. Carver, but you can’t keep calling in sick and expect it to be okay. When you’re out the entire department suffers, do you understand?”

“You know I was shot at and in the hospital, right?” I asked, not quite believing he was reaming me out. Then again, he did care a lot about professionalism. I mentally gave a one-fingered salute.

“Regardless,” he said, tenting his fingers and tapping his fingertips. “Might I remind you, you are still on probation in this department. Other people would kill to work for HGR, and you need to have that in mind next time you decide to take a few days off.”

I nodded, keeping what I wanted to say deep in my mind and far away from the tip of my tongue where it wanted to be. What he said made me think, though, and after he excused me I went back to my desk to make some notes. I looked over my cubical wall to where Natalie usually sat. Even though her mom bailed her out, she hadn’t been back since her arrest—on leave pending further investigation—and they hadn’t replaced her with a temp yet.

Who would have wanted to kill to get Mr. Winters’s job?
No clues showed up in Central Processing, and I hadn’t had any further success in investigating anything at HGR, so I thought about that question. Lana Sousa was in line to take over the department, according to rumors, but she didn’t strike me as someone willing to kill for the chance. No one else in his department, or anyone I’d talked to about him, had a bad thing to say so it didn’t seem likely his death had anything to do with HGR. Which meant HGR was a front for something else, and if someone didn’t want his job, what else could it have been?

My brain slipped again to The Slotted Spoon.

I really, truly needed to talk to John.

He finally answered the next morning. “I’m sorry. I’ve been sick and my phone was missing. I found it in my car this morning,” he said, in possibly the lamest excuse ever. “How are you?”

“I’m okay.” I hadn’t planned to ask, but I knew I couldn’t go forward until I did. “You were the only person who knew I went to Eli’s. He thinks you are involved somehow with the person trying to kill me.” Okay, so I didn’t exactly ask, I more tossed it out there. Still, the ball now sat firmly in his court.

“Lucy, I hope you don’t think I’m involved.”

I waited in silence, not sure how to respond. No! The fight. John would be covered in bruises.

“Lucy, I swear I don’t know who is doin’ this to you. If I did, I would kill them myself. I would never hurt you.”

“I know,” I said simply. And I knew for sure now. I smiled; I couldn’t wait to tell Eli how wrong he was.

John was silent for a few moments. “When you texted me to say you were spending the night at Eli’s, Lucy, it hurt my feelings. I know I’m not as macho, but I can protect you, too. I mean, I know I’m not a cop or anything, and I certainly wouldn’t have known what to do if someone was shooting at you, but I would do everything I could to protect you. Don’t you get that?”

I hadn’t thought about it. I only wanted to be honest with him, not hurt him. “I’m sorry.”

He was quiet again. I let the silence settle between us. “I guess I’m saying give me a chance next time, okay? I mean, not that I want there to be a next time.”

I nodded but knew he couldn’t see me. “Okay.”

He came to my house to pick me up for breakfast before work, but I took his hand and led him up to my room instead. Dee went grocery shopping early, but I didn’t want to risk being interrupted. “You mean so much to me,” I said, sitting next to John on my bed, holding his hand. “I don’t think I’m the best at showing my emotions, but you need to know I think about you all the time.”

He squeezed my hand, which was enough to propel me forward.

“I lost my parents when I was sixteen. I just recently found out I had sisters I didn’t get to know.” I looked him in the eye. “We’ve only been on a few dates, but I don’t want to lose you. Do you understand that?”