Fatal Response. Jodie Bailey

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СКАЧАТЬ roar of the engine grew closer, the lights brighter. He’d never make it. He’d never reach her in time. The car was too fast.

      The ache in his knee made him too slow.

      He was a couple of meters from her when tires screeched and rubber burned. The vehicle skidded sideways to a halt, scraping the passenger door against the brick building.

      At the same moment, Jason reached the woman and grabbed her by the waist, dragging her with him to safety behind the Mustang belonging to his buddy Seth’s wife, which sat at an odd angle on the concrete. They were safe...unless the driver got out and came after them.

      He looked over his shoulder, shielding the woman, as the rear tires spun and the dark older-model sedan skidded around the side of the building, the driver nothing more than a hulking shadow in a fleeting glimpse through the rear window.

      Then the woman he’d rescued, the one he still held to his chest with one arm, repaid him for saving her life by driving her head into the side of his jaw. “Let me go.”

      Shock relaxed his hold and she stumbled forward, barely catching herself by planting both hands on the trunk of Angie’s car. She regained her balance, then turned toward him with all of the suddenness of a summer tornado.

      A very familiar tornado.

      The air left his lungs in a rush, and he had to dig deep for enough air to say her name. “Erin?”

      For the first time, her eyes met his, her face shadowed by the floodlights behind her. But there was no doubt, none at all

      He’d rescued his ex-wife.

      For a moment, there was zero sign of recognition, but then her eyes widened and she gasped. “What are...? Where did you come from?” She backed away from him slowly, glancing over her shoulder, then back to him as her jaw set in something that might be fear. “Did you do this?”

      “Do what? Save your life?” Wait. No. This was not about them. He couldn’t let this become the discussion he’d played out in his head for years.

      He had to find Angie Daniels, and Erin had been standing in front of Angie’s Mustang while a second car bore down on her.

      Angie’s car, Erin beside it. Nothing computed. Right now, he couldn’t focus on the parts that didn’t make sense. He had to focus on finding Seth’s wife.

      Staff Sergeant Seth Daniels had called the members of their team an hour earlier and asked them to search the county for Angie because it was too soon for the police to get involved. All the man knew was he’d awakened from a dead sleep a few minutes after midnight to find his wife and her car missing.

      Jason had stopped at Seth’s and taken his buddy’s phone in order to track Angie’s whereabouts with an app her husband had installed. When the team had returned from Iraq a few months earlier, bruised and wounded, the paranoia had hit them all. Dogged by rumors of retaliation by some of the terror cells they’d infiltrated, each man had done what it took to make sure his family was safe.

      Those safety measures included knowing where their loved ones were at all times.

      The trail had stopped here, at the Mountain Springs Volunteer Fire Department. And now Jason stood by Angie’s car...with a woman he’d never imagined he’d see again. A woman who was accusing him of... Of what? “Where’s the person who was driving this car?”

      Erin didn’t answer, simply turned her back to jog to the front of Angie’s vehicle, where she knelt so he could no longer see her.

      “I asked you a question, Erin. I need an answer. How did this car get here?” He rounded the rear of the Mustang and stalked toward Erin, who bent over something on the ground. “Where’s the woman who...?” His gaze fell on a familiar pair of boots splayed on the pavement. On a growing dark pool at Erin’s feet.

      No.

      It couldn’t be.

      This was a nightmare. The helplessness of his history leaking its way into his subconscious. There was no other way any of this made sense, the only way so many incongruous pieces of his life could be packed together on the cement drive of a back-road fire station. The only way Erin could be in front of him, her head bent over Angie’s body.

      “Tell me she’s alive.” Because if she wasn’t, he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t call Seth and tell him his wife, the woman whose existence had kept Seth alive in the dark days after the incident overseas had nearly killed them all, was gone.

      Erin rose and turned to walk toward him, her boots leaving dark imprints on the shadowed ground.

      Jason didn’t want to think about what those tracks were made of. He tried to step around Erin, but she blocked his view and pressed a hand to his chest, backing him around the rear of the car. “Don’t look. If you know her at all... Don’t look.” She’d slipped into the cold professional mask he’d seen on her one too many times, the one that said she’d seen horrors he couldn’t unsee for her.

      The one that said she was protecting a victim’s family.

      The one that told him Angie Daniels was dead.

       TWO

      Erin pressed her palms to the wall and stared out the narrow window in the fire exit in the station’s kitchen. Huge portable lights shone over the parking lot and onto the edges of the grassy meadow the department used for training behind the fire station. The Mustang still sat on the asphalt, a white sheet covering the remains of the woman Jason had referred to as Angie.

      Having a name made everything so much harder. Angie. Who knew Jason. Who had been ripped from the world in a brutal, horrifying way. Whose death Erin would never be able to unsee.

      Erin had responded to accident scenes and sick calls, had been trained to render aid in the most dire circumstances, but she had never been present when life was violently torn away. It was a whole different scenario.

      Her stomach churning, Erin leaned her forehead against the shatterproof glass and looked for something else to focus on. At the far corner of the parking lot, Jason was talking to a police officer who had his back to her. From this distance, it was tough to tell who the officer was.

      Erin turned her back on the high window in the dayroom and walked to the center of the kitchen. She was tired. Exhausted in a way she hadn’t been in years. All she wanted was to cross the hall to the bunk room and collapse, but she couldn’t. She’d given her statement, which had served to solidify the horror in her mind, and if she closed her eyes there was no doubt the sickening sights and sounds of Angie Daniels’s final moments would overtake her.

      So would the memory of intense blue eyes that still somehow managed to see straight through her.

      There was a time when her heart would have known Jason Barnes was living half an hour away.

      Even better, there was a time when he’d have been sitting with her on the small couch on the other side of the room, cramming his mouth with popcorn while they binge-watched cheesy eighties television.

      Everything could have been different if he’d understood her side СКАЧАТЬ