Don't Look Away (Veronica Sloan) (29 page)

He’d been hit. Couldn’t draw breath. The lung, maybe?

He fell back, blinking, trying to focus as the man drew closer, fearing he’d missed him. There’d been too many figures in black for him to aim properly; he was seeing not everything in triplicate and couldn’t imagine how heavily dosed that drink had been.

Mark didn’t for a minute think the sounds of those gunshots would draw help. In this neighborhood, they’d send people scurrying for cover and it would probably be an hour before any cop came out here to investigate. He was finished. Done for.

“Where is it?”

He slowly shook his head, not willing to speak, even if he’d been able.

The killer dropped to his knees beside him, patting him down, from his shoulders to his waist. Slipping a gloved hand into his pocket, he pulled out the small plastic bag and nodded in satisfaction.

“Thank you very much, Detective Daniels,” he said as he brought his weapon up again. “You’ve been most helpful.”

That was when it hit him. He put the voice with the face, and understood now. He knew who it was, knew who’d attacked him, knew who’d killed Leanne and had attacked Ronnie.

Bastard. You evil, sick bastard
.

With the recognition came another kind of understanding. He considered the timing—tonight’s death all the way down in Richmond. The other clues that didn’t quite gel.

And he understood why the puzzle pieces hadn’t exactly fit.

The gun came up. Daniels rolled onto his right side, hoping he appeared unable to bear to look at it, that he didn’t want to watch death rushing toward him. He counted on the monster’s malicious streak to draw things out, to want to build Daniels’s fear.

To give him a few precious seconds.

In those seconds, he planned to take the last chance he would have to send the last message he’d ever send.

He slid his left hand up across the floor, painfully, willing his killer not to pull the trigger too soon. When his fingers were within sight, lying limply in front of him, he focused on them, trying to remember the classes, the shapes, the motions. The letters.

It had been a few years since he and Ronnie had taken that sign language class, all detectives being required to do it. He only hoped he remembered correctly.

The first three came to mind immediately. He formed the shapes as quickly as he could.

An R. An O. An N.

Got your attention now, don’t I, sweetheart?

He was growing weaker by the second, losing so much blood he could actually smell it now.

He stretched his fingers, trying to loosen them, thinking about the next letter he needed to form. He could picture it in his mind and tried to recreate it with his hand, losing sensation and feeling, not even sure he was making any sense at all.

But he kept trying. He signed a letter. Then another.

“What are you doing? Stop that!”

A click. Nothing. The gun had jammed. The figure in black cursed, trying to fix it, preparing for the kill shot, and when he heard the magazine slam back into place, he knew his time was up.

There was not a second to spare, no time to spell out a name. He had one more chance, one last opportunity to send a final message that Ronnie would hopefully see and interpret.

He knew what it had to be.

Gathering his will, he jerked both the index and middle fingers of his left hand straight out, staring at the V shape they made with every ounce of strength he had left.

Suddenly, hideous pain. Horrible, awful, brutal pain. And blood, spewing red, gushing, covering everything.

He howled, shocked and horrified, realizing that while Mark had been waiting for the bullet, the fiend had used his knife.

Daniels had done the best he could, and he hoped to God his partner would understand his message. There was nothing more he could do, no further message he could send. 

Because he no longer had a hand.

Falling asleep in Jeremy Sykes’s arms had definitely been the highlight of Ronnie’s week. Month. Year. Whatever. After the intense sex, they’d collapsed together, sharing the bed as easily as if they’d shared it all their lives. She woke up knowing her life had irrevocably changed.

Then the phone rang.

Still groggy, lying next to Sykes’s naked body in the pre-dawn light, she got up and grabbed her pants, which were still on the floor where she’d tossed them. She dug for her phone, answering it on the fifth ring.

“Detective Sloan,” she barked, recognizing the phone number from her precinct back in D.C.

“Veronica? It’s Ambrose.”

Her lieutenant. Why he’d be calling her at 5:45 a.m., she had no idea. “Yes, sir?”

“Where are you?”

“I’m at a hotel just south of Richmond, sir.” She quickly explained what had happened last night—coming down here, having to wait until morning for the latest murder victim’s remains to be released into their custody. She spoke clearly and succinctly, sensing Ambrose was tense and anxious about something. “I should be back up to the city by no later than noon.”

“Get here sooner.”

She froze, her grip tightening on the phone. “What is it?”

“I’m sorry as hell to tell you this, Sloan…”

Her stomach heaved. She threw a hand over her mouth, wanting instead to throw it over her ears so she didn’t have to hear what she suspected her boss was about to say. Because it was going to be bad. Life-changingly bad.

“It’s Daniels.”

“Oh, God,” she moaned.

Behind her, Sykes awoke. Obviously hearing the strain in her voice, he leapt out of the bed and came to her side.

“What happened?” she asked. “Is he all right?”

“He was attacked in a vacant building on the south side late last night.”

She closed her eyes, drew in a breath. Pushed it out. Drew in another. “Is he alive?”

“Yeah.”

Another slow exhalation. Then she asked the question she knew she had to ask. “For how long?”

Ambrose didn’t sugar-coat it. “It could be any time. Doctors are working frantically, but they just don’t know.”

She stared at Sykes, saw him already grabbing his clothes, yanking them on, ready to leave the very second she hung up the phone and got dressed.

“I’m on my way.

-#-

Although Ronnie had insisted she could fly back to D.C. by herself in the FBI helicopter he procured for the trip, Jeremy wasn’t about to let her go it alone. As he drove her to the nearest airport, where the chopper would meet them, he called Detective Baranski. Perhaps it was hearing that Ronnie’s partner—a fellow cop—had been shot that took the lead out of the other man’s ass and the bitchiness out of his mood. He put up no argument when Jeremy told him he’d arranged for the latest victim’s head to be transferred into the custody of an agent out of the Richmond field office. It would be driven up to Tate’s lab in Bethesda later today. Baranski also extended his sincerest condolences.

God, did he hope they wouldn’t be necessary, that Daniels would pull through.

Once they were in the air, he tried to get Ronnie to eat and drink something. She hadn’t had a thing since their stop at the fast food place last night, and he doubted she’d be making time for any meals anytime soon. So he pushed a bottle of juice and a breakfast burrito he’d purchased out of a machine into her hands and ordered her to eat.

She sucked down the juice but ignored the food. “What if he dies on the table?” she muttered.

“He won’t.”

“I wasn’t there for him. He’s my partner and I wasn’t there.”

He’d heard the refrain several times in the hour since they’d gotten the call. “Ronnie, don’t do this to yourself.”

“I could have stopped it.”

“Ambrose said he’d been at a bar in a really bad neighborhood,” he insisted. “He was in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

She finally looked at him, giving him her full attention, those big brown eyes wet and anguished. “You really think that? You seriously believe this wasn’t connected to our case, that Daniels got taken down, shot and hacked up by some random drugged-out street punk?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted.

That was the truth. He didn’t know what to believe. He only had what her lieutenant had told her to go on. Well, that and the call he’d made to the hospital to find out Daniels’s condition.

Critical. In surgery, slim chance of survival.

He’d never really gotten friendly with the other man, mainly because Daniels had been belligerent toward him from the moment they’d met—like a third-grader who didn’t want the new kid in school to play with his favorite little girl at recess. Still, Sykes had respected him. Not just for his loyalty as a partner, but for his determined professionalism and his abilities as a cop. He’d been highly impressed during yesterday’s interview of Agent Bailey, and thought that if they’d met under different circumstances—and weren’t both crazy about the same woman—he and Daniels could have gotten along very well.

Absolutely the last thing he wanted was for the other man to die. The death of any law enforcement officer was bad enough. But for Ronnie, who’d already suffered so many horrible losses in her life, it would be almost insurmountable.

“Why would he do it?” she mumbled, sweeping a frustrated hand through her short hair, a tangle of spikes and swirls this morning since she hadn’t even brushed it after leaping out of bed to answer that early phone call. “He was on the hunt, he’d stumbled onto something with those deaths. Why would he go out and tie on one last night?”

Sykes could guess, but he didn’t wait to verbalize it.

Daniels was no fool. The man had to have seen the tension that had been building between him and Ronnie from the minute Jeremy had hit town. Knowing they were going to another city last night, and could very well end up being gone overnight, he had to have been imagining the worst.

It might have been the worst thing Daniels could have imagined, but it was among the best things that had ever happened to Jeremy. He had been attracted to Ronnie from the very first—drawn by her sexiness, impressed by her strength, wowed by her intelligence, blown-away by her determination. Going to bed with her had been all he’d thought about for a long time, and it had been better than his wildest fantasies. Last night had been the culmination of every sexual desire he’d felt in his entire adult life.

This morning, she looked at him like she’d rip his hand off if he dared to touch her.

It didn’t take a shrink to figure out why. The guilt was eating at her. Guilt that she’d been in Jeremy’s arms, in his bed, having incredible sex, when her partner was being brutalized.

Hell, Daniels wasn’t even his partner and Jeremy felt guilty as hell, too.

They didn’t talk much during the ride. Her concern for Daniels kept her from thinking about her fear of helicopters, and she even managed to pick at her food. There would be no stopping once they touched down; she would be on the go, doing whatever it took to ensure her partner’s survival from that point on.

There would definitely be no post mortem of what had happened between them in that hotel room. That conversation had been indefinitely postponed. Honestly, right now, given the way she drew away from him if he got within a few inches of her, he had to wonder if they’d ever have it.

Or if last night would ever be repeated.
             

Another reason to pray to whoever was listening that Daniels survived. Because if her partner died, Jeremy knew Ronnie would forever associate the night she’d decided to take him into her bed with when she hadn’t been there for her best friend and partner.

When they got to Reagan National Airport, a patrolman was waiting to pick them up and take them to the hospital. Ronnie plied him with questions on sight, but he was able to offer no new information. Daniels was still in surgery, no news was good news, blah blah blah.

They rode in silence to Washington Hospital Center, and Ronnie was out of the car the minute they pulled up outside. Sykes thanked the young cop who’d chauffeured them and went in after her. She’d practically started running once she got within sight of the critical care wing, and he quickened his pace to follow, seeing her bound up to an older, uniformed cop and start plying him with questions.

“Lieutenant, please, don’t sugar-coat it,” she was saying as he joined them. “Not for me. Not about my partner.”

The grey-haired, kindly-looking man nodded, his sympathetic frown not disguising the firmness of his conviction as he said, “I think he’s gonna make it.”

She sagged in relief. “Really? He’s out of surgery?”

“No, the doctor said it’ll probably be hours yet. But come on, Sloan, you really think a couple of bullets are going to kill the most stubborn man either of us have ever known?”

“A couple of bullets and a hacked-off hand could do the trick,” she snapped, visibly deflating. She wasn’t in the mood to accept faith in place of medical certainty. “I can’t imagine how much blood he must have lost before somebody found him.”

The hand had surprised him, to be honest. Jeremy could see a violent gang banger shooting Daniels during a robbery. He could also see their psychotic killer bringing out a knife and cutting off a body part. But the two together just didn’t mix.

What the hell had Daniels gotten himself into last night?

“The doctors said they’ll try to reattach the hand. If that doesn’t work, I hear they’re doing great things with prosthetics.”

“If he lives long enough,” she said, her pessimism not swept away by her boss’s words.

“The first thing they gotta do,” Ambrose admitted, “is stabilize him and repair the damage from the bullets. The first one tore through his left lung. The second, apparently fired after Daniels was already on the floor, really tore up his intestines.”

Ronnie rubbed at her eyes, as if pushing any possible tears back in their ducts. When she’d pulled herself together, she reopened them and nodded for her boss to continue.

He did, explaining some more medical stuff that Jeremy didn’t totally understand. It was enough to hear that another cop’s internal organs had been turned into origami by a psychopath’s bullets and that his hand had been lopped off for good measure. Beyond that, all he needed to hear was that Daniels would pull through. 

Nobody could say that yet, though.

“It’s just lucky there was an ex-Marine in that bar Daniels had just left. Everybody else ignored the sound of gunshots, but he wouldn’t do it,” explained Ambrose. “Took him a little while to get anybody else to agree to help him search after they heard the first two shots. Once the third one happened, though, nobody could pretend it had been a car backfiring. He pretty much guilted everybody in the place into going out and finding out what the hell was going on.”

“Thank God,” she whispered. “I wonder if they scared off the assailant.”

“I bet they did,” said the older man. “He didn’t have a chance to finish the job and ran away before he could do any more damage.”

“What he did was quite enough,” Ronnie mumbled. “Has Mark’s chip been evaluated?”

“Yes. The E.M.T.’s got that data in the ambulance.”

Jeremy was glad to hear it. At least the chips were good for more than determining if somebody was old enough to buy cigarettes. All ambulances had been equipped with scanners to gather information about patients from those pesky little implants in their arms. It was one good thing that had come out of that program—lives had been saved because medical workers had known instantly about allergies and other medical conditions.

“They’re saying Daniels drank beer and bourbon.”

Hell.

“But his blood alcohol wasn’t over the legal limit.” Ambrose let out a deep, disappointed sigh. “They also found Pure V in his blood.”

“That’s utter bullshit,” Ronnie snapped. “I
know
Daniels. He has never once used drugs in the decade since we met. No way would he start tripping in the middle of a murder investigation.”

“I know, I know,” her boss said, holding his hands up, palms out to cut off her defensive tirade. “The people at the bar swear he just had a few drinks, nothing else.”

“So somebody slipped it to him?”

“Sounds that way. The bartender says he remembers somebody buying Daniels a round but can’t remember who it was.”

More likely the bartender had a record and didn’t want to get too involved, lest the police look into his own background a little too closely.

“Listen, Sloan, you should also know, somebody from Phineas Tate’s group was over here several hours ago, looking to access…well, you know.”

Sykes listened a little more closely. The images on Daniels’s O.E.P. device would be the best clue they had to catch his assailant, at least until the injured cop got out of surgery and woke up. “Did they get them?” he asked.

“Yes. They made it here just before he went into surgery and downloaded them wirelessly.”

That download would hopefully answer all their questions, and put them on the path to finding the man who’d done this. If it had been a random mugging, no way would the perp have known to cover his face. If it had been the White House killer…things might be a little tougher. But the bastard had to make a mistake sooner or later. Jeremy had no doubt Daniels would have put up a fight, and yanking that hood off might very well have been where he’d started.