Love Inspired Suspense July 2015 #1 (33 page)

The girl rolled to her feet and thrust vicious kicks at his head.

“Help,” Sherri cried, but couldn't croak out a sound louder than a squeak. She felt around her belt for her radio. Where was it?

Dan stirred, let out a low moan.

Spying his radio on his hip, she clenched her teeth against the pain and struggled to her knees to crawl to him.

“Smash his phone,” one of the punks yelled at the girl, who redirected her kicks from Ted's head to a cell phone on the floor.

“C'mon, we got to get out of here,” a kid sporting a backpack yelled.

The guy who'd been pretending to be in anaphylactic shock rammed one last hard jab into Ted's kidneys. “Cuff the woman.”

The greasy-haired teen who'd pawed her pockets earlier turned back to her with an ugly gleam in his icy-blue eyes. He twirled a pair of cuffs around his index finger and sneered.

“You want to die beside your partner? No problem.” He snapped open a cuff and lunged.

She rolled out of his reach and swung her leg, taking his legs out from under him.

His chin clipped the edge of the table as he went down. “Oh, you're going to pay for that,” he roared, calling her obscene names as he scrambled after her. Then all of a sudden he flipped onto his back.

“Run!” Dan yelled and hinged up his leg for another kick at the guy.

Sherri lurched to her feet.

But her fake patient snatched up the cuffs and grabbed her wrist before she could so much as turn on her heel. She memorized his face—pug nose, yellow-brown eyes, scraggly blond hair, the faint trace of a scar on his upper lip.

“Hurry,” the girl shouted at him, then looking around, added a note of fake hysteria to her voice. “There's a bomb. A bomb! We have to get out.”

He shoved Sherri down, kneed her head under the table and cuffed her to the same pole as Dan. “C'mon,” he said, grabbing his friend, who'd pinned Dan's free hand under his foot and was glaring at her as though he wanted blood. He spit in her face and then took off.

Dan tugged his cuffed wrist, clanging the cuffs uselessly against the metal pole. He rammed his shoulder up into the table as if he might shove it off the pole. Then pulled out his multipurpose tool and started sawing at the links. Sherri grabbed the radio from his belt and depressed the call button. “This is M2. We have two paramedics and—” she glanced at Ted's prone body “—an unconscious male trapped in the mall's food court. I repeat—”

“No, don't use the radio,” Dan shouted. “It could trigger a—”

Blast!

ELEVEN

F
ifty yards from the chest-high wall circling the food court, Cole dove for cover behind the nearest pillar. Smoke spewed through the air. He squinted in the direction the blast had sounded, but couldn't see any flames or structural damage. “Can you see where it originated?” he called to Zeke, who'd ducked for cover behind a kiosk.

“That trash can to the right of the food court, I think.”

Were they looking at a smoke bomb? Something to cause panic, but no real harm? Or a teaser to something bigger?

Heart pounding, Cole stuck his head out from behind the pillar and squinted through the smoke. “I don't see Sherri and Dan. Do you?”

“No.” Zeke sprinted to a nearby pillar, but shook his head from the new vantage point.

Cole checked in with the sheriff on his cell phone. “Did the paramedics get out?”

“Negative. Did you see where the explosion hit?”

“Next to the food court. A smoke bomb by the looks of it and no sign of the paramedics.”

“I want you out of there. The next one may not be just smoke.”

Cole's stomach bottomed out.
Sixty thousand square feet to search and Sherri could be anywhere.

“I see their gurney.” Zeke pointed to the far end of the food court.

Another boom split the air.

Zeke dove for cover once more. And...was that Sherri's cry?

“Get out of there,” the sheriff repeated more adamantly.

Spotting fresh plumes of smoke spewing from another trash can, Cole stuffed the phone in his pocket and sprinted for the chest-high block barrier between him and the dining area. “Sherri? Dan? Are you here?”

A third boom drowned out any answer, and the sprinklers kicked in.

“Sherri!” Cole shouted, squinting through the spray of water.

“Cole! Cole! Over here.”

He heard her but couldn't see her. Ducking behind the cover of the barrier, Cole drew his gun and motioned to Zeke to skirt it in the other direction.

“Cole?”

The fear in her voice gnawed at his heart. “I'm here,” he assured, staying low as he hurried toward a break in the wall. “Are you alone? Where's Dan?”

“He's here, too. They handcuffed us to a table before they ran off.”

Cole edged around the corner of the wall, wanting to get a visual of the area before he made himself a target. At the sight of Ted sprawled on the floor between the tables, pushing to his knees, Cole stepped into view. “Get back on the ground. Hands where I can see them.”

“I didn't do anything,” the man blurted, dropping his face back to the tile. “I was trying to help her.”

“It's true.” Sherri crab walked from under a table as far as her cuffed wrist would let her.

At the sight of her blood-crusted face, Cole's stomach roiled. He never should've let her out of his sight.

“A bunch of drug-seeking teens staged a peanut allergy,” she went on.

Zeke rushed in and cuffed Ted anyway. “For all we know he was in on it or on the bomb threat, along with who knows how many others.” Zeke's pointed look left no doubt he was thinking of Eddie, who they'd caught rushing out of the mall within minutes of the bomb threat. Zeke hauled Ted to his feet and updated the sheriff over the phone as Cole unlocked Dan and Sherri's cuffs.

Visibly shaking, she massaged her chafed wrist, and Cole had to summon every ounce of self-control not to drag her into his arms as firefighters descended on the area. He clasped Sherri's arm and steered her through the maze of tables.

“We've got to get them out of here,” he said to Zeke, who was demanding answers from their sputtering suspect. Sherri's partner snatched up the ransacked trauma bag and hurried after them.

“There was a girl, about fifteen, and at least three teen boys,” Sherri relayed breathlessly, one hand swiping at the sprinkler water dousing her face, the other clutching her side. “I can describe two of them. Identify them if the mall's security cameras picked them up.”

“First let's worry about getting you safely outside.” After the horrors she'd just escaped, he couldn't believe she was thinking straight, let alone capable of identifying their suspects.

“Those punks knew what they were doing,” Dan groused, stalking alongside them toward the exit. “The one kid almost killed me with an ether-saturated cloth or something. I was out before I knew what hit me.”

“Between the surveillance tapes and your testimony and any prints they left on that bag of yours, we'll nail these guys.”

“You won't get any prints,” Dan said. “They were wearing surgical gloves. That's what tipped me off. That and the fact the kid who'd supposedly had the allergic reaction was clearly getting enough air.”

The sheriff met them at the exit. “Get them in the ambulance and pull it to the edge of the cordoned-off area.”

Crowds lined the yellow tape, morbidly watching them make their way to the ambulance. Cole scanned the faces, wondering if Sherri's stalker was among them, or if Ted had been behind today's attack.

The sheriff's gaze skittered over Sherri's bloodied face. “The sooner you and your partner can ID your assailants on the security footage, the sooner we can lock them up. Do you think you can—” he motioned awkwardly at her nose “—treat that on site?”

“I can take care of her.” Dan pressed a key ring into Cole's hand. “You drive us where you need us.”

Cole helped Sherri into the back of their rig and reluctantly relinquished her to Dan's care.

Zeke secured Ted to the gurney of a second ambulance and flagged Cole. “We need to talk.”

Cole yanked open the driver's door to move the ambulance closer to the command station. “Can you get another deputy to accompany our suspect to the hospital? We need to stick around to review surveillance tapes.”

“I think I'd better accompany him. Ted says he took pics of the suspects on his phone. I radioed the deputies inside to look for it.”

“That's good.”

“Maybe.” Zeke's voice dropped. “He says he has other photos at home that we might want Sherri to look at.”

A disturbing feeling slithered through Cole's chest at the memory of the guy's too intense interest in the inside of Sherri's apartment. “What kind of photos?”

“He says he's been ‘watching out for her'—” Zeke air-quoted “—for a while and started taking photos after your kid brother assaulted her.”

Cole gritted his teeth at how much pleasure Zeke clearly took in bringing up that connection. Cole jammed the keys into the ignition, ticked with himself for not pressing Ted harder about what he'd been doing outside Sherri's apartment building. “Okay. After we're done here, we'll check in with you at the hospital.”

“Yeah, sounds like Ted could be there awhile. He suffered a few nasty blows to the head and kidneys.”

Cole parked the ambulance next to the command post. He hoped by now they had tapped into the surveillance cameras. They hadn't all been blacked out, so one of the cameras at the exits should've caught the kids running. “How are you doing?” he called back to Sherri, glancing in the rearview mirror.

She held an icepack against her nose. “Dan doesn't think it's broken.”

“That's a relief.” Cole climbed into the back with them.

“I'm more concerned about internals.” Serious concern shadowed Dan's eyes. “The girl in the group was vicious, stomped on her abdomen.”

Cole's blood pressure rocketed back through the roof. “Should we go straight to the hospital?” He searched Sherri's eyes. “I don't want to jeopardize your health.”

She smiled her appreciation. “I'm tender and bruised, but I think that's the extent of it. I'll feel better if I can take care of the IDs now.”

“Okay.” Cole didn't hesitate to wrap an arm around her waist to help her out of the back of the ambulance and into the massive truck they used as a mobile command post.

She leaned into his side and whispered, “Thank you for finding us. I knew you would.” At her unreserved confidence, his heart swelled. He wasn't sure he deserved it, but it felt amazing.

The technician sat in front of a blank security monitor “Afraid we have no video record of the attack. But...” The technician pressed the rewind button for the blacked-out screen of the food court camera and hit pause when an image appeared. “We got a pic of the perpetrator.”

The image of a kid holding up a spray can, his face obscured by a ball cap, filled the screen.

“His timing couldn't have been better,” the technician observed. “Security officers were too busy responding to the emergency to pay attention to the monitors.”

“You've got nothing on him before this? Walking toward the camera?” Cole asked.

“Nope.” The technician rewound the feed in slow motion. “The kid knew what he was doing. See that? He ducked in from underneath the camera.”

“I don't recognize the ball cap,” Sherri said. “Have you looked at the feed on the north entrance? They ran that way after everyone else had evacuated.”

The tech pulled up that camera's feed and slowly rewound it.

“There!” Sherri pointed to a group of kids on the screen. “That's got to be them. Three guys and a girl and another kid with a backpack. I forgot about him. He was yelling at them to hurry up.”

“He looks like he could be our spray painter.” The tech backed up the feed to where the group first appeared mere seconds after the last of the crowd of shoppers disappeared out the exit. “They never look at the camera. It's going to be next to impossible to get an ID on them. If they're all minors we won't be able to televise this on the evening news.”

“Is there a camera between this view and the food court?”

“No. That's all we got.”

Cole hated the deflated look that crossed Sherri's face. “Don't worry. There are lots more here than it seems. Three of the guys are wearing high tops and the girl's shoes look unique. I want you to pull every detail you can off these tapes and get deputies on the pavement checking news cameras and anyone else who might've filmed people pouring out of that entrance. Someone had to get a picture of their faces.”

Sherri began to describe one of the kids in minute detail, right down to his pug nose and icy-blue eyes.

The sheriff stepped into the command post. “We just got word that a couple of teens cleaned out shelves of painkillers and cold medicine in the pharmacy in the confusion.”

“Any narcotics taken?”

“No. Thankfully, the pharmacist caged the good drugs before evacuating.” The sheriff ran his finger down the list of cameras mall security provided. “Pull up camera twelve.”

The tech brought it up on the screen and paused the rewinding feed when the looters appeared.

“You recognize those two?” the sheriff asked Sherri.

“No. I never saw them.”

The sheriff clucked. “Okay, the two incidents might not be connected. These boys could just be opportunists. The others obviously had put a lot of planning into the attack.”

“Seems like overkill for what few narcotics they'd have pulled out of our trauma bag,” Dan spoke up. “Even the morphine vials probably don't have a street value of much more than ten bucks each.”

The sheriff nodded and focused on Sherri. “That's why we're assuming
you
were the target.”

Sherri blanched as if the idea hadn't occurred to her. She spun toward Dan, apology filling her eyes. “This is my fault.”

Cole wrapped an arm around her shoulder, curling it until she was snug against his chest. He ignored the sheriff's narrowed gaze. If he fired him for inappropriate conduct, it was a price he'd willingly pay if it meant making this day a fraction easier on Sherri.

“This isn't your fault,” he said softly.

But there was no doubt she had been the target.

* * *

“I don't know, Cole.” She crawled into the back of the ambulance and hugged her knees. “I thought being a paramedic was what God wanted me to do. Why He let me live. Why Luke made me promise not to quit.” She rocked herself back and forth, but she couldn't stop herself. “I...I forced myself to shut out the fears. To shrug off the pranks to prove I wouldn't let them stop me from helping people the way God wanted.” She swiped at her running nose, blinked back the sting of tears. “Only now other people are getting hurt and I don't know what I'm supposed to do.”

Cole hunkered down beside her on the floor of the ambulance and wrapped her in his arms. “Oh, sweetheart, it seems to me the gift Luke saw in you was being yourself, a person who cares deeply for others. A person who is more concerned about allaying the fears of a frightened child than being hit by sparks from the firefighters working to free her legs. Your empathy is your gift.” He lifted her chin and looked at her as though he really believed what he was saying. As though he really believed in her. “I never forgot how sweetly you treated my hand and listened to my woes the day I learned my parents were divorcing.”

“But I can't let myself
feel
, and do my job. It's too overwhelming.” She shook her head. “Not that it'll matter anymore. They'll probably never let me come back to work.”

“Why? Because a stalker is targeting you?”

“Because...” The tears started to fall. She swiped at her eyes, blinked to try and stop them. But she couldn't.
She couldn't.
“Because I can't pretend I'm not falling apart anymore!”

He tucked her head under his chin, and his husky voice rumbled through her. “No matter how noble your reasons for hiding your emotions, I don't think that's what God ever intended. Remember what He told the Apostle Paul? His power is made perfect in weakness.” Cole laid his cheek against the top of her head, but his comforting touch, his sweet words made her cry all the more.