Chapter Eight

Jacie dropped to her knees beside Brett. Something that sounded like a furious wasp buzzed past her face. The noise frightened her, but she didn’t take a second to wonder why. She leaned close to Brett. His eyes were open, but he made no attempt to move.

“We have to get away from the fire.”

The fire seemed to be a living creature. Jacie heard a sound in the inferno like the screams of a madman.

“What’s that sound?” Brett mumbled.

“I don’t know. We have to keep moving.” She wanted to get as far from the flames as possible. With her help, Brett regained his feet. He was bent almost double and stumbled frequently. She propelled them away from the fire. He straightened when he reached the clinic door. It was locked, and Brett didn’t seem to know what to do about that. Jacie dug her hand into the pocket where he’d put his car keys and, after some fumbling, found a key and unlocked the clinic. Brett sagged against the building.

The lock gave, Brett lurched for the handle. There was an explosion only inches from his head. Brett’s eyes, unfocused and confused, met Jacie’s.

Her mind started working with razor sharp clarity.

Gunfire.

The blast was a murder attempt. And the bomber was waiting around to pick off survivors.

“Someone’s shooting!” She grabbed what was left of the handle. Bits of wood gouged out of the hospital door inches in front of Brett’s head. She heard the bark of a gun. “Get down! They’re shooting at you!”

She pulled the door open. Shoving Brett ahead of her, he fell to the floor. Diving inside herself, she tripped over him. Smoke and ash billowed through the door until, crouching low, Jacie jerked it shut and twisted the lock. Then she moved to the windows.

“Do you have a gun?” she demanded, looking at all the windows in the veterinary clinic waiting room.

“Yeah, in the back, locked up.” Brett stood on wobbly legs directly in front of a window.

“Get down.” He didn’t react at all. She saw his bewildered expression. Blood trailed down his neck. He was still dazed from being struck by debris—debris that had hit him instead of her. He’d thrown his body between her and the explosion.

“Being nice is going to get you killed, you idiot,” she stormed.

She hadn’t heard any gunshots since they’d gotten inside. That helped her stifle her natural inclination to tackle Brett and knock him cold to keep him down. Instead, she crawled over to his side and urged him down to his hands and knees with gentle words and firm, steady pressure on his arm. She spoke as calmly and carefully as if he was a little child. “Brett, the gun. Where is it? Can you get it?”

He nodded uncertainly.

Jacie brushed his hair off his forehead and lifted his chin until their gazes met. He wasn’t perfectly lucid. She didn’t mean a thing by it when she kissed him on the forehead.

It was just as well because Mr. Nice Guy didn’t seem to notice.

She waggled his chin a little to get his eyes to focus. “You’re going to have to get the gun, honey,” she said soothingly. “I don’t want to leave the door. Stay low. Someone is out there shooting at us. The same person who tried to kill us by rigging your house to blow up when we went into it. That’s probably why the cat attacked you. Someone had been in there with him.”

“Siam saved our lives.” His voice sounded steadier and his eyes focused, as if Siam’s heroism had been a bucket of water on his face. “Gun. I’ll get it.”

On his hands and knees, he turned away. Whirling back, he said more coherently, “I mean, I’ll get the gun, honey.”

He pulled her hard into his arms and kissed her. He lowered her onto her back, then he lifted his lips. “You stay down, too.”

He let go and, without a backward glance, crawled out of the waiting room.

A minute later—or more—Jacie’s brain defogged enough to yell, “Stay away from the windows and lock the back door.” She made sure to mutter, ‘honey’ in a voice he couldn’t hear. There was no time now to wonder why she liked the sound of that.

She looked around and spotted a telephone. “Duh! 911.” She grabbed the receiver, relieved to hear a dial tone. She tapped 911 and, when it was promptly answered, she used her Real-Official-Cop Voice, and shouted with justified, but nonetheless exaggerated, panic, “Officer under fire! Brett Garrison’s Veterinary Hospital! Request backup! Hurry!”

She calmly set the phone aside without hanging up.

Brett returned with the gun, his eyes now completely alert. Her first thought was about the kiss, and she felt a stab of awkwardness. Then she forgot about being uncomfortable and groaned out loud. The gun looked like a souvenir his granddaddy brought back from World War I. No sight, bolt action, single shot. Jacie hated guns. She knew how to handle them, but she never did. “That relic is more dangerous to us than the nut outside.”

“Hey,” Brett protested, “This is a family heirloom. My grandfather brought this back from World War I. We beat the Kaiser with this gun.”

She snatched the piece of junk from him and eased herself to the side of one of the front windows.

“Give that back. I’m a good shot.”

With a derisive snort, Jacie pressed her back flat against the wall. Crouching down, she kept her feet under her. Brett stationed himself on the other side.

“I hope nothing’s built a nest in this,” she said, disgusted.

She slid the bolt opened. The single chamber was empty. “You brought me an unloaded gun, moron. Do you have bullets?”

Without comment, Brett reached into his pocket and pulled out a handful of low caliber slugs. He carefully reached across under the window. She grabbed them out of his hand and tossed them on the floor within reach, keeping only one. She slid the bolt and loaded her single round. She pressed back against the wall and waited for something, a noise, a smell, a flicker of a shadow, anything to give her a target.

And waited.

And waited.

The sound of Brett’s roof collapsing echoed across the lawn. Jacie looked from her crouched position to where Brett was hunkered down, bare-chested, bleeding, sweet. When he heard his home cave in, he slid from his crouched position to sit on the floor. “It was an ugly house.” He said with a glum shrug of his shoulders.

She smiled, surprised anything could make her smile at this moment. “True. About as ugly as they come.”

Brett let one leg settle onto the floor in front of him. He rested his forearm on the other bent knee. “But it was the only home I had. I kind of liked it.”

“Me, too.”

He looked so beautiful and strong and despondent about his cruddy, ramshackle house, she wanted to crawl past the dangerous window and kiss the big dummy until he cheered up.

A gruesome, vibrating howl echoed outside the hospital. It was a louder version of the sound they’d heard earlier. Fear crawled like a living thing up the back of Jacie’s neck. “Is that an animal?”

The noise continued, echoing and growing louder.

“No animal I’ve ever heard.”

Their eyes met. Terror darted deep inside of Jacie as the raving increased, shrieking until it battered at her ears. Brett rubbed his hand across his mouth like he was trying to hold words inside that he desperately didn’t want to say.

Jacie said them for him. “Whoever is making that noise is the man who blew up your house and shot at us.”

“He’s not sane.” Brett didn’t mean it as a question.

And Jacie didn’t bother to answer. There was no point. That statement summed it up completely.

A madman was trying to kill them.

 

 

The Destroyer screamed his fury into the night. He wanted to charge the building and tear both of them to pieces and fling them out to be devoured by wild beasts.

The need hammered at him. He heard the shrieking but only after a time did he realize it came from his own mouth. He fell silent. Became perfectly still. Silence, darkness, they were his allies. He watched the dancing flames. He studied the sturdy refuge into which they’d fled. He heard the distant sound of sirens. Frustration rose in him.

Before, he’d come with stealth. Now they knew. The pursuit was out in the open.

So be it.

 

 

The eerie screeching stopped. Chills still curled down Brett’s spine then climbed back up. He’d hear that awful sound until the day he died. Still, feeling dazed from the blow to his head, Brett looked across the stretch of window at Jacie. She’d taken the gun. She’d given the orders. She’d hauled his worthless hide inside while the bullets flew.

Now there she sat on the floor, her knees pulled up to her chest. She held the rifle with one finger on the trigger, one hand on the barrel. She rested it on her bent knees and aimed it away from him.

Her eyes were alert. She was listening even now. Her eyelids flickered, and her acute tension eased. He wondered why, and the next second Brett heard sirens. He glanced over at the phone and saw it was off the hook. Jacie had called in the cavalry. Brett felt the pain in the back of his head and tried to sort out what had happened since the explosion.

“He never shot at us after we got inside. I think that scream was frustration. I think he’s gone now.” Jacie sounded confident, but Brett noticed she didn’t lift her head to look out the window. Confident, but chicken just like him. It made him feel a little better. She crawled on her hands and knees the few feet to the telephone, dragging the gun with her.

She picked up the receiver. “Is someone still on this line?” She nodded and listened for a second. “Can you radio the police and warn them that someone shot at us from the woods. I hope he’s gone now, there haven’t been any shots fired for a while, but they should exercise extreme caution.”

Jacie listened on the line silently.

“Did you tell them about the fire?” Brett asked. “The forest could be in danger. They’d better send out some trucks.”

Jacie relayed the message and laid the phone aside, still off the hook. She sat cross-legged on the floor inspecting the rifle.

“When’s the last time you used this thing?”

Brett sorted through childhood memories. “We had a mild winter a few years back, a big outbreak of rabies in the spring. My dad, now there’s a man who owns some real guns, he used this to shoot a skunk. It might have been…let’s see…I was in high school. That makes it...”

“In other words, not lately,” Jacie said with enough sarcasm to peel paint.

“I’d say ‘not lately’ is fair.” Brett couldn’t do anything about when the gun was last fired.

“Don’t you vets shoot horses every time they stub a toe?”

Brett laughed. “Thanks a lot.” More seriously he said, “I occasionally have to euthanize a suffering animal, but I don’t use a gun. There are more humane ways of doing it. It’s a good thing. I don’t ever want to look in the eyes of an animal and pull the trigger.”

“How about a man?” Jacie asked grimly,

Brett fell silent. He knew exactly what she was talking about. The sirens were close now. They’d gotten the message. New sirens echoed from farther away. Fire trucks he hoped. He didn’t answer but yes, he knew he could kill a man. Knew it all too well. Knew it and hated it and had sworn to change his life. “You think it’s going to come to that?”

“The bomb was set in your house.” Jacie gave him a severe look. “That gun was aimed straight at you, Brett. It might be a disgruntled employee. A jealous husband. You tell me.”

Brett snorted. “None of them.”

“Employees or jealous husbands?” Jacie removed the bullet from the gun and double-checked the barrel to make sure it was empty.

“Neither.”

“Just how alone are you out here?” Jacie closed the bolt on the gun and settled it onto the floor beside her.

Brett shrugged, “Alice comes in twice a week.”

“How tough is Alice?”

Brett jerked his head toward the woods where the screams had been. “Not that tough.”

Jacie shuddered. “That voice...I don’t know what that’s about. You can’t count on anything rational out of someone who would scream like that. Whether you can pull the trigger or not, he can. I could smell the C4 in that bomb. That means someone who knows what he’s doing. The gun was a large caliber automatic, a Sig or a Glock. A serious, expensive weapon. His aim was good. He was going for head shots and he got very close. No, you can’t stay here. Not until we get to the bottom of this.”

“We?” Brett didn’t mean to sound so hopeful.

Jacie smiled at him.

A rather nervous voice said, “Police. Is anybody in there?”

Jacie slid the rifle across the room away from both of them. Brett was glad it was out of her hands. He didn’t want her to make a nervous man flinch.

Brett yelled, “We’re okay, Jasper. Whoever was shooting at us, is in the woods straight north of the house.”

“I’ll send someone in to scout around.”

“Be careful. He has a serious, expensive weapon, and he knows how to use it.”

Brett heard muted voices for a few seconds. Then one of those voices sounded loud and clear. “I ain’t goin’ in those woods, Uncle Jasper. You go if you’re so set on it.”

Jacie said, “I know just how he feels.”

“I’ll need to get the last few animals transferred to another clinic and change the message on my phone to tell callers Dr. Duarte is covering for me. Then I’ll...” Brett looked up at her.

“Take a vacation?” she suggested doubtfully.

“I thought maybe you’d let me stay at your place while we figure this out.”

Jacie opened her mouth just as the clinic door swung slowly open, and a worried face poked through the door.

Brett said, “C’mon in, Jasper.”

The whole Oaken police force, all three shifts and the part-timers, crowded into Brett’s clinic. That added up to Jasper Griff and his nephew Jasper Griff, who everyone called Little Jasper even though he was twenty-eight, six foot three and weighed close to three hundred pounds. The two of them had solved every crime in Oaken for the last five years. That amounted to speeding tickets, raccoons in the trash cans, and the occasional stray dog, all of which Brett had found a home for.

Jasper and Little Jasper probably had the best solve rate in the nation. Although those blasted raccoons had gotten away.

Cinder and ash billowed in the open door while Brett tried to explain what was going on. Crackling fire, accompanied by an occasional collapsing wall, provided background for Brett’s recitation.

Jacie stood just off to the side of the window. She stared at his house with a sad expression on her face. He saw the flickering light from his burning home reflected in her eyes.

The fire department pulled up. Jasper and Little Jasper went out to supervise and, in the commotion that followed, Brett uneasily stepped out into the night, into a world that had always been a place of serenity for him. Now the trees around him were a hiding place for a homicidal maniac. The rugged expanse of plains and river weren’t pristine solitude, they were dangerous isolation. Instead of a soft wind whispering through the trees, the sound of a crazy man, thwarted from his lust to kill, echoed in Brett’s ears.

His disdain for guns, even though he knew how to use them, made him defenseless, a weakling. Whoever had attacked him had taken far more from him than a house. He’d taken every ounce of his peace of mind. Every shred of Brett’s pride. He would have been furious if he wasn’t scared to death.