Seconds to Live (Scarlet Falls) (6 page)

Chapter Seven

Stella had stayed at the Miller home longer than she’d planned. It was nearly nine-thirty before she’d left. Halfway to her home out on the Scarlet River, the rain increased to a torrent. Squinting through the windshield, she slowed the car to a crawl on the rural highway. A light in the trees just beyond the shoulder of the road caught her attention. It was the dome light of a car. Someone had run off the road and hit the trees. She didn’t see an occupant in the vehicle, but she needed to make sure no one was injured inside. She pulled over onto the shoulder, reported the vehicle’s location, and requested a backup unit.

There was no sense calling an ambulance if the driver had walked away.

Taking a flashlight from her glove compartment, she left her phone in the car to keep it dry. Hunching against the driving rain, she made her way to the other vehicle. By the time she jogged across thirty feet of muddy ground, her hair was plastered to her head and water ran into her eyes. She wiped at her face. The vehicle was an older model Jeep. Once bright yellow, the SUV was covered with scratches and dings that attested to many miles of four-wheeling.

And it looked familiar in a way that made her more uncomfortable than her soaked clothes.

The door was unlocked. She opened it. No driver, and the backseat was empty as well. The driver had probably walked away or called someone to be picked up.

Stella shined the light around the interior. Shiny drops of blood glistened on the gearshift, the driver’s seat, and the deflated air bag. More blood was smeared on the door handle. She rounded the Jeep and took note of the license number. Once back in her cruiser, she’d have the owner’s name and contact information in a few seconds.

But as Stella pointed her light at the wet ground, her discomfort grew. Something was wrong. Instinct—and raindrops—pricked the hairs on the back of her neck. She turned in a circle, slowly moving her beam across the ground. Her light fell on a boot sticking out of the tall weeds halfway between the road and the car.

She crossed the muddy ground and crouched beside him. Shock paralyzed her for a second. It was Mac Barrett. She knew that face even soaking wet and in the dark. Especially in the dark. She’d thought of him often during her middle-of-the-night bouts of insomnia.

He lay on his side in the mud. She placed her fingers on his neck. His pulse rapped against her fingertips, and relief swept through her. She straightened and turned back toward her car. Her phone was inside, and she kept an emergency blanket and first-aid kit in the trunk.

“Wait,” he croaked, his voice barely audible over the storm.

“I’m not leaving. I’m going to call for help,” she shouted.

“I’m OK,” he said.

“Let me call for an ambulance. Then you can tell me what happened.” She leaned over him and put a hand on his unshaven cheek. “Don’t move. I’ll be right back.”

He grabbed her wrist. “No. I’m fine. There was a woman lying in the road. I swerved into the trees to avoid hitting her.”

Had someone been hit by a car?
Stella turned her head and scanned the road. “I don’t see a woman.”

“She was there.” He struggled to sit up as the rain slowed to a drizzle.

Stella stopped him with a hand on his chest. “Slow it down. You were unconscious.”

“No.” He shook his head. “I just tripped.”

Bullshit
rang in Stella’s head, but she held her tongue. She and Mac had met the previous November and numerous times since. In addition to being hotter than a solar flare, he was frustratingly closed off. An intense person, he elevated self-control to an art form.

“I
need
to find her.” Tonight, his eyes were wild, and his self-control looked tenuous.

“Easy. Stay put. I’ll go double check the road.” She raced back to the bend. Sweeping her light across the wet pavement, she saw nothing that indicated a person had lain there. She checked the weedy area on both sides of the road in case a wounded person had crawled off the pavement. But there was nothing.

“She was there.”

Stella turned. Mac stood behind her, scanning the ground, one hand pressed against his side. “At the bend.”

How had he sneaked up behind her without making any noise? She shined the flashlight on him. Its beam highlighted the sharp planes of his face. With his control back in place, he’d returned to his usual countenance: lean and lethal.

“I already looked there.” Stella lowered her light to his body. A large, dark splotch stained the side of his light-colored T-shirt. “Are you bleeding?”

He glanced down, irritation crossing his face. “It’s nothing. The woman . . .”

She put a hand on the center of his chest. “There’s no one here, Mac.”

“But how . . . ?”

Maybe he had a concussion.

“No one is hurt in the road. I’m going to call an ambulance. Come sit in my car where it’s dry, and I’ll have a look at that wound.”

His head swung back and forth. “No. I’m fine.”

Stella headed for her car, one hand firmly under his elbow to steer him in the right direction. The rain tapered off until only the trees were dripping.

He pulled his arm away. “You can’t make me go in an ambulance. I have to look for her.”

She whirled, temper heating her face as she studied him. His square jaw was set in defiance.

Stella channeled some of her partner’s calm. “My backup should be here any minute. How about I have patrol sweep the area for her? Then will you agree to go to the ER?”

He gave her a curt nod. “But it’ll be faster if
you
drive me.”

She hesitated. He was right. It would likely take an ambulance twenty minutes just to drive out here. She could have him at the hospital in that amount of time. Her gaze dropped to the spreading patch on his shirt. How badly was he injured?

The red-white-and-blue strobe lights of a patrol car cut through the darkness. Stella briefed the responding officer and herded Mac to her car. He got into the passenger seat gingerly, and she bet he was hurt much worse than he would admit.

She leaned into the car. “I should put a pressure bandage on that wound.”

“It’s not that bad. Do you have a first-aid kit?” Mac lifted the hem of his shirt.

Stella got the kit from her trunk and slid behind the wheel. “Let me take a look at that.”

Mac waved her off and opened a stack of gauze pads. “Honest, I’ll be fine.”

Suddenly Stella remembered that Brody was with Hannah because her father was dying.
Mac’s father!

She touched his hand. “Were you at the nursing home tonight?”

Mac deflated as a deep sigh eased from his chest. “My father passed away a short while ago.”

“I’m so sorry.”

He answered with a sharp nod, then turned to the window and studied the darkness. Had he been so upset by his father’s death that he hadn’t been thinking straight and had crashed his car? Visibility had been poor. He could have mistaken an animal in the road for a human. She hated to think of other possible causes of hallucinations.

She reached for his shirt and lifted it. Bandages already covered the side of Mac’s torso. Blood had soaked through the white gauze. His shirt and the bandages were soaking wet, and the tape was peeling off in places. His injury wasn’t new.

“What is this?” Stella’s anger flared again. She bit it back.
Patience
. But really, couldn’t this man be up-front rather than make her drag every bit of information out of him?

“Gunshot.”

Shock and concern bloomed fresh. “When were you shot?”

“Long story.”

So much for keeping her anger in check. What was Mac into?

She studied his profile. Despite his annoying habit of not telling her anything, she liked him. She’d found him smart, determined, and if she was totally honest, too damned good-looking for his—or her—own good. But as a cop, and maybe a loose friend, she needed to play hardball. His behavior was too odd, and his family had alluded to a past that included a teenage stint in a rehab facility.

She shoved the gear stick into drive. “I want you to submit to drug and alcohol testing.”

“OK.” No hesitation or surprise in his voice. Just pure resignation, as if her request was exactly what he’d expected. He went quiet for the rest of the drive.

Was that because he was innocent? Or guilty?

Fifteen minutes later, she parked in the ER lot. He opened the car door and stepped out into the humid night.

Stella got out of the car. “Eventually you’re going to tell me how you got that gunshot wound.” Among other things . . .

He shut the car door and walked away.

“Hold on.” Stella locked her vehicle and hurried to catch up. “I’m coming with you.”

And she wasn’t leaving him until she had some answers.

Chapter Eight

The ER was Wednesday-night slow, and Mac didn’t have to wait. An hour later, the doctor had finished restitching Mac’s wound.

He eased back onto the pillow in his hospital bed, his side blissfully numb from the local anesthetic. For the first time since he’d been shot two days before, Mac wasn’t split in two with pain. The downside of less physical discomfort was that the empty space left plenty of room for grief over the deaths of his father and Cheryl.

And the image of the woman lying in the rain was seared into his optic nerve. He couldn’t get it out of his head. Had he actually seen a woman, or had his mind summoned an image of Cheryl dying in the rain forest?

He was sure of one thing: he’d seen too much death in the past few days.

Sorrow came rushing back with a vengeance. Tension in his chest clamped around his lungs.

“Hello?” Stella’s voice sounded from the other side of the curtain.

Relieved at the distraction, Mac said, “Come in.”

The curtain shifted as she stepped up to the side of the gurney.

Stella Dane.

Her black slacks and blazer were damp and wrinkled. The downpour had destroyed her uptight bun. He knew instantly why she wore it up. Wet tendrils fell past her shoulders, framing her face and highlighting her gorgeous blue eyes. The shiny wave of black made a man want to plunge his fingers into it, cup the back of her head with both hands, take control of that serious mouth and kiss her until the cop in her eyes melted.

As far as distractions went, it didn’t get much better than Stella. The first time he’d seen her, she’d been in full uniform. No cop had ever made a uniform look like she had, but body armor had concealed her shape. The new look definitely did not.

“Your new job suits you.” His comment surprised them both.

Where did that come from?
Usually he was better at keeping his mouth shut, a great life-preserving quality in the circles in which he traveled. But his raw emotions were affecting his self-control. His filter was on the fritz.

She flushed.

Silence filled the space. What was there to say? She was waiting for the drug tests to come back. He didn’t blame her for the request. He had a bad track record, and no one knew the truth. But her direct questions had told him Detective Dane wasn’t going to settle for his usual bullshit. She was kind and sympathetic, but she was no pushover.

Last November he’d discovered she was smart and loyal. Tonight she’d listened to his crazy story. Instead of telling him he was nuts, she’d reacted with common sense and empathy. To a man who couldn’t connect to a goldfish, sincere compassion impressed him.

As if he needed another reason to have her stuck in his head.

“Mr. Barrett.” The doctor came in and opened a wall-mounted laptop. He glanced at Stella, then Mac. “Is it all right to discuss your medical care and history in her presence?”

“It’s fine.” Mac was tired of secrets, and he suddenly didn’t want to keep anything from Stella. What kind of luck had brought her back into his life? He’d known he was in trouble with the pretty cop last fall, and she’d been one of the reasons he’d stayed far away since.

“I’ll send you home with some prescription pain meds.”

“I already told you I won’t take any narcotics,” Mac said without breaking eye contact with Stella.

The doctor typed on the computer. “You did, which is why I injected a long-acting local anesthetic into the site. That should alleviate your pain for up to four days. The medication I’m dispensing is a non-narcotic, anti-inflammatory pain reliever. It’s not habit forming.” He closed the laptop. “I know we talked about your reluctance to take any medications, but there’s no need for you to be in agony. We have good non-opioid options for pain relief.”

The doctor turned to Stella. “His drug and alcohol tests came back negative. Frankly, I can’t believe anyone could be walking around with that injury and not taking anything for the pain. I’d be crying like a baby.” He refocused on Mac. “How do you handle it?”

“I had a drug problem in my teens. I won’t go there again.”

“And I respect you for it.” The doctor closed the laptop.

“Seriously I find the best method for controlling pain is to accept it and find a distraction.” Mac’s gaze found Stella’s.

“OK. Well, you won’t have to live with it this time. The nurse will be in with paperwork.” The doctor disappeared through the break in the curtain.

Stella propped a hand on a curvy hip. “So you want to tell me how you were shot?”

Voices hummed in the three-bed ER triage room. This was not the place for confessions. Mac lowered his voice. “Not here.”

Stella’s eyes narrowed, and that gorgeous mouth flattened out into a suspicious line. “Are you sure I can’t call your brother or sister for you?”

“No.” Mac sat up and reached for his shirt. “They have enough to deal with right now.”

Her eyes softened. “Again, I’m sorry for your loss. Isn’t your family going to be angry that you didn’t call them?”

“Maybe.”
Definitely
. “But I’m not ready to deal with them.” Mac almost wished for the pain in his side to return.

“I can’t keep this from Brody, and you know he’ll tell Hannah.”

Mac sighed. Relationships interfered with subterfuge. “He will.”

“They care about you.”

“I know.” The tightness returned to Mac’s chest. “This isn’t about them. I’m the one with the problem. Our family history is complicated.”

“Aren’t they all?”

Mac hated the sadness that clouded her eyes, but every family had its issues. “I’ll talk to them tomorrow. I’m just not up for it tonight.”

“Fair enough.”

He reached for his stained shirt. Stella’s gaze drifted down over his torso. Female appreciation lit her eyes, and a lick of heat warmed Mac’s belly. As much as he wasn’t ready for an interrogation session with his siblings, for the first time in his memory, he didn’t want to be alone. “Give me a ride home, and I’ll tell you everything.”

A wry smile turned up the corners of her mouth. “Deal.”

What would she think when he told her the truth?