The Right Call (32 page)

“Ethan!” Stedman’s voice echoed across the clearing. “Stay where you are. I’ll find you!”

Ethan tried to respond, but the pain took his breath away, and he couldn’t find his voice. He sat on the ground, rocking back and forth, and held his palm directly on the wound, applying pressure.

Lord, we’ll never get out of here without Your help.

Maybe they weren’t supposed to make it out alive. Maybe this was to be his final resting place. God must have a plan for all this. Even if they were never found, maybe the fact that he and Stedman had gone missing would rouse enough outrage from Brill to demand Win Davison be investigated. The pain in his calf was so intense and consuming that he didn’t have any fight left.

He closed his eyes and tried to imagine Vanessa in his arms, her perfume filling his senses, her long silky hair falling down to the middle of her back. Just when she seemed so real he could almost touch her, the ground seemed to vibrate. He didn’t move. Didn’t breathe. A deep rumbling sound reverberated in the distance. The chopper! Was it coming back? Had the search-and-rescue crew seen him? Or were they just making another pass?

Ethan tried to get up on his feet, but the stabbing pain in his calf dropped him back on the ground. Maybe he could crawl out into the clearing, but could he make it in time to be seen? Would he take another bullet?

What was the alternative—dying out here? He turned over on his belly and pulled himself toward the clearing with his arms, every movement making his calf feel as if it were being ripped off.

Lord, give me strength to keep going.

He spotted a fleck of yellow and realized it was his golf-shirt-turned-bandage moving slowly along the perimeter of the forest in his direction. Stedman must be trying to get to him.

The chopper sounded close now. Would Stedman be brave enough to step out into the sun and wave his arm?

Ethan kept pulling himself with his arms toward the clearing, but the terrain was slightly uphill, and his strength was dwindling.

Through a crack in the trees, he could see the chopper hovering overhead. And someone with binoculars peering down.

“Don’t leave,” Ethan tried to shout and realized he was barely audible. “We’re here. We’re here …”

The chopper slowly began to descend. His heart hammered with hope. He saw dried grass blowing in all directions and heard the engine go off.

A few seconds later he heard the door open and then an amplified male voice.

“Stedman Reeves, Ethan Langley, this is the Stanton County sheriff’s search-and-rescue team. If you’re there, show yourselves.”

“Here!” Stedman’s voice called out. “Over here!”

Stedman staggered out into the clearing and two search-and-rescue people ran over to him. Stedman pointed in Ethan’s direction. It was over.

Thank You, Lord
.

Ethan laid his head on the forest floor and inhaled the smell of damp earth. He heard footsteps pounding the ground, coming in his direction. He could hardly wait to see Vanessa.

Chapter 39

Ethan
faded in and out of wakefulness, aware of voices and clanging noises and the soles of shoes squeaking on tile.

“Mr. Langley, you’re in St. Luke’s Hospital. You’ve had surgery to remove a bullet from your calf. The surgery was successful, and you’re in recovery. I’m giving you morphine to help control the pain. Do you need something for nausea?”

Ethan shook his head, his eyes still closed.

“You’ll be in recovery another hour, and then we’ll take you to your room. Your family is waiting there for you. I’ll keep checking to see if there’s anything I can do to make you more comfortable. Just rest.”

It was all coming back to him. The chopper flight. The oxygen mask. The IV. Relief from the excruciating pain.

Was Vanessa here waiting? Did she know Stedman was being framed? Had Brill begun to take action against Win Davison? Or were her hands tied from lack of evidence?

Ethan felt a sharp pain in his calf and remembered trying to escape the forest, Stedman badly injured and on the verge of collapse. Was the hit man still at large? Was the threat over, or would he still be looking over his shoulder and worrying about Vanessa and Carter?

How he loved them! He had known that on some level since Christmas break. But it wasn’t until he thought he would never see them again that he realized how intertwined they already were.

A knock startled him.

“Mr. Langley’s parents are asking how much longer he’ll be in recovery,” said a man with a deep voice. “I told them another hour, and that you would call us just before you headed upstairs with him. But they wanted me to check.”

“Asking me a hundred times won’t speed up the process, but it’ll make them feel better. Remind them that the cafeteria is open. Be kind. They’ve been through a lot today.”

Ethan wondered if his parents were waiting alone or if Uncle Richard and Aunt Becca had come too. How horrible for his family to have this crisis right on top of Drew’s passing.

And what about Uncle Ralph? Was he walking the floor alone? With both of his right-hand men down, he must be beside himself. How had he reacted to Stedman’s involvement in this mess? Ethan wondered if Stedman was at St. Luke’s—and whether he’d required surgery too.

Vanessa must be frantic with worry. Had Brill told her about the threat? Would Brill have even let her come here to the hospital? Or would he have to wait until he was strong enough to go to the Jessups’ house to see her again?

Ethan felt his limbs tingle as the morphine started to work.

Lord, thank You that I’m alive. Please keep Vanessa and Carter safe—and help us stop Win Davison.

Ethan felt as if he were floating on water … drifting … disappearing …

Brill stood outside Roy Dupontes’s apartment with Sam Parker, Trent Norris, and Deputy Milstead, waiting as the sheriff’s SWAT team prepared to serve an arrest warrant on Dupontes, whom they now believed to be responsible for all five shooting deaths, for the hit and run, and for wounding Ethan and Stedman.

So much had happened that almost none of it seemed real yet. The news that Ethan was out of surgery and expected to make a full recovery trumped everything else. But there was much to ponder, not the least of which was the unexpected breakthrough in her professional relationship with Sam.

“We did a good thing today,” Sam said.

Brill glanced out at the blazing pink western sky. “The people of Sophie Trace should sleep a lot better tonight. I know Vanessa will.”

Trent folded his arms across his chest. “How could a guy as sharp as Win Davison be stupid enough not to erase his hard drive? Or destroy the DNA report?”

Sam’s grin turned his eyes to slits. “A warrant is a beautiful thing. Powerful people never think they’ll get caught.”

“Imagine how different things would be,” Brill said, “if Win had just taken a deep breath and worked through his disappointment about Tal not being his biological son. If he was so hung up about bloodline, he could’ve let the boy go into law enforcement instead of working for Davison Technologies. Admittedly, my perspective is a bit slanted in that regard. But the world did not have to end for Win Davison because he didn’t have a
male heir to the throne
. He has six daughters who might want to pick up the ball someday.”

Trent pursed his lips. “I think Win’s motivation to kill Tal went way beyond the bloodline issue, Chief. If the truth got out, it would create a scandal, and everyone would know his first wife cheated on him and conned him into giving her love child an inheritance. He didn’t want to face the humiliation. And he wasn’t about to let Tal’s biological father extort money from him either. Win’s answer to every problem is either solve it or eliminate it.”

Pat glanced over at the apartment. “It’s hard enough trying to figure out people who you expect to be unscrupulous. But what gets into an otherwise decent guy like Stedman Reeves that he would agree to kill a man to keep from losing his place at the poker table?”

Sin,
Brill thought.
Why are we so surprised?

Sam turned his head and spit. “In my thirty-five years in law enforcement, I’ve seen time and time again what happens to people when they’re obsessed with wanting more of something—or someone. Never comes to any good.”

Sam put his walkie-talkie to his ear. “Sheriff Parker here, I’ve got my ears on, over.… All right, let’s put the lid on the pot. Go!” He lowered his walkie-talkie and looked over at the others. “SWAT team’s on the move.”

Brill gently bumped Trent’s shoulder with hers. How odd it was for both of them to be on the periphery instead of calling the shots. Yet wasn’t it strangely freeing to share Sam’s turf without the wall of defensiveness and possessiveness between them?

Lord, protect the SWAT team,
she prayed.
Help us get this guy.

The four of them stood like statues for what seemed an eternity and just listened.

Finally, Sam put the walkie-talkie to his ear. “Sheriff Parker here, over.… Is that so …? When I said let’s put the lid on the pot, I didn’t expect you to take me literally.” Sam threw his head back and roared. “In the closet, you say? … Recently …? Great. Good work, Smitty. Put it all into evidence, and don’t make any mistakes. I’ll see you at the jail. Out.”

Sam put his walkie-talkie on his belt, still chuckling. “Seems ol’ Roy Dupontes didn’t hear the SWAT team enter his apartment. He was sittin’ on the john with the radio blarin’, probably listening to the news to find out how much damage he inflicted on Reeves and Langley. Of course he denies even knowin’ Win Davison. But there’s a good-sized arsenal in his closet, including a recently fired rifle. Ballistics will tell us whether it fired the bullet removed from Ethan Langley’s calf.

“And now that we’ve retrieved the memo off Wolski’s hard drive, Dupontes looks good for all the shootings. Davison’s hard drive should cough up everything else we need.” Sam smiled and winked at Brill. “All in all, I’d say we had a banner day.”

Ethan lay with his eyes closed, the cool clean sheets soothing to his skin, and listened to the bustling activity in the hospital corridor.

His parents and Uncle Richard and Aunt Becca had finally left. Could they have looked any more exhausted and still been beaming when the doctor reassured them that he was going to be fine?

He heard a knock on the door and then the sound of it swinging open, footsteps softly approaching. Fingers brushed the curls off his forehead, and warm lips touched his cheek. A familiar flowery fragrance made him open his eyes.

Vanessa stood over him, lovely as an angel, her eyes glistening with unshed tears.

“Hi,” she whispered.

“Hi, yourself.”

“I was so worried we’d never find you.”

“God knew where I was.” Ethan squeezed her hand. “I love you, Vanessa. I’ve been waiting all day to say it.”

“I love you even more than I did last night.” She brushed a tear off her cheek. “I don’t know why, but that seems so long ago.”

“Maybe because this was one of the longest days of our lives.” He brought her hand to his lips. “I had no idea how much I would miss you if you were absent from my life. But I realized today that you could never really be absent. You’re already a living, breathing part of me—so is Carter.”

“Sounds serious.”

“It’s
very
serious.”

Ethan held her hand to his cheek, looking into her crystal blue eyes.

“Are you two done so I can come in?”

Emily stood in the doorway, looking adorable in white crop pants and a pink blouse.

“Sure, come in,” Ethan said, “but I assure you your sister and I will never be done.”

Emily grinned. “You know what I mean.”

“So who’s watching Carter?” Ethan said.

“Tessa and Antonio. They’re watching him at our house so Dad could drive Vanessa and me over here. Dad’s parking the car.” Emily bent down and studied the bandage on his neck. “Why do you have
that?
I thought you got shot in the leg.”

“That’s where the first bullet grazed me. That wasn’t so bad. The one in my calf was another story. It was almost enough to make a grown guy cry.”

Emily cocked her head. “The guys in my family already cry—mostly when they’re happy. I’m sorry you got shot. It must’ve been scary having a hit man chasing you.”

He moved his gaze to Vanessa and then back to Emily. “I guarantee you, once is enough.”

“They’re all behind bars,” Vanessa said, “except for the man who died in the hit and run. I called your uncle Ralph before I came over here to see if he’d heard anything on Stedman. He said Stedman was released on a personal recognizance bond of a thousand dollars, so he won’t have to pay anything as long as he doesn’t jump bail. He’ll be here in the hospital overnight and then stay with his grandmother—at least until he finds out what the judge decides.”

“Do you know what he’s being charged with?”

Vanessa tucked her hair behind her ear. “Criminal attempt at murder—or something like that. I got the impression that, because he brought this out in the open, he’ll get probation.”

“I’m not sure Uncle Ralph will hire him back unless he goes through a program and kicks his gambling habit. If the judge doesn’t require it, I’m sure Uncle Ralph will.”

“Doesn’t Stedman have a mom and dad?” Emily asked.

“Yes, but they haven’t spoken in a long time.”

“Like your uncle Ralph and your uncle Richard?”

Vanessa nudged Emily with her elbow. “It’s none of your business. Where did you hear that? Have you been eavesdropping again?”

Emily’s face turned as pink as her blouse. “I’m trying to do better. I just can’t help myself.”

“Can’t or won’t?” Vanessa’s eyebrows came together. “That’s private business.”

“It didn’t sound private, since everyone in Ethan’s family already knew about it.” Emily batted her eyes. “And we’re practically like Ethan’s family now.”

“Nice try,” Vanessa said. “But you’re not going to charm your way out of this. You owe Ethan an apology.”

“I’m sorry.” She looked into his eyes and seemed to be searching for something. “You’re going to be a psychologist. How am I supposed to stop eavesdropping?”

“You
really
want an answer? Because you have to really want to do it.”

Emily nodded.

“Just decide
ahead of time
that whenever you’re tempted to do it, you’re going to walk away. You have to be bigger than the problem, so that it never has the chance to get bigger than you. God will help you, if you ask Him.”

“That makes sense. But it might be harder than it sounds, since I’ve been doing this my
whole
life.”

Ethan forced himself not to smile. “I never said it was easy. But it’s a lot easier than the consequences if you know things you shouldn’t and speak out of turn and hurt someone’s feelings—or their reputation.”

“Are you listening to this?” Vanessa tugged her ponytail. “You’re only eleven. There’s hope for you yet.”

Emily pressed her lips tightly together, but they finally gave way to a big grin. “Just think: Someday Ethan’s going to get paid for that kind of advice. Cool!”

“Not unless I get out of here and back on my feet,” Ethan said, “so I can earn my tuition money.”