Chapter 12
Rebel dropped beside her friend.
The woman moaned, her sob deep, guttural.
“Easy, Tammy. Take it easy. Help is coming.”
The woman made a small head movement and groaned again.
Rebel could hear the men coming toward her.
“Over here,” she said. “Bring a flashlight.”
Instantly light shone in her direction and then fell on the woman, first on her face, then at her feet.
“Oh, my God,” Rebel said.
“What?” Saul said, dropping to his knees beside her. “What does that mean?”
“It’s not Tammy.” Her heart stricken, Rebel stared down at the female supervisor Tammy had never got along with. “This is Samantha, Daniel’s and Tammy’s boss.”
“Well, I guess that answers a few more questions.” Saul reached out and touched the woman’s pulse. “She’s been badly beaten, and her pulse is thready.”
Blood was everywhere. Her leg was obviously broken. Her breath came out in short gasps. Saul said, “Broken ribs, possibly a punctured lung too.”
Stone came up behind them. “The ambulance is on its way. We’re taking a quick look around, inside and out, to make sure Daniel and Tammy aren’t here as well.”
Rebel heard them, but she was so shocked she couldn’t have spoken if she’d tried. She reached down to the woman’s hand, hearing her groan in pain. She backed off and whispered, “Oh, my God! What have they done to her?”
“Probably broke almost every bone in her body,” Saul said, fatigue and wariness in his face. “We see stuff like this with drug deals that have gone bad. Although nowadays they usually just put a bullet in you. A beating like this is very personal and usually as a warning to others.”
“And Tammy? Does that mean they’ve done worse to her?”
He lifted his gaze and studied Rebel. “Keep hoping, remember? We don’t know where or how Tammy is.” He motioned at Samantha and asked, “Any idea how long she’s been missing?”
Rebel shook her head. “No, I’ve been out of the loop most of this last week.”
Worry about finding Tammy was all Rebel could do besides whispering encouragement to the poor woman. Samantha was in such a bloody mess. Rebel wanted to pat her arm or squeeze her hand or give her a hug, but she didn’t dare touch Samantha for fear of hurting her further. It was such a relief to hear the ambulance’s wailing siren in the distance. Surely the cops were coming too. Like where was the detective? Mentally she willed them to get here faster. Anything to help this woman.
At the same time, she was desperate to search more of this building to hopefully find Tammy. “Why would they have brought Samantha and not the others?”
Saul didn’t say anything for a long moment.
She took a wild guess. “Because they could. Because they held all the cards. Because Samantha was still alive, and the others are dead.”
“They could still have brought the others even if they were dead.”
“It’s also possible,” Merk added, “that they wanted to make sure they have exactly what they need on the key, or they may need more information from Tammy and Daniel before they kill them.”
“And yet we found out nothing further. We don’t know where Tammy and Daniel are, and the vehicle we tracked here only led us to the pair of dead men. The asshole who took our friends is gone in the wind yet again.”
The truth was so damn painful she didn’t know how to handle it. She wanted to scream in rage, and yet she wanted to curl up in a corner, defeated. As she stared down at the poor broken woman in front of her, she realized Tammy didn’t have a hope in hell.
Rebel reached out a trembling hand, brushing back a couple strands of the woman’s hair and heard a heavy gurgling sound followed by silence. As in all-the-way silent. Rebel gasped, her hand covering her mouth as she frantically waited for the woman’s chest to rise yet again.
But it didn’t.
“Oh, no, no, no, no. Please breathe. Please breathe.”
Saul grabbed her hand. “Stay steady.”
She raised dripping eyes to him and whispered, “She’s dead.”
“Yes. But I don’t think any of us could have done anything for her in the meantime. She was very badly injured.”
Just then uniformed men, police burst through the door. EMTs came running to the body. Saul stood, stepped around the body and pulled Rebel out of the way. The EMTs went to work.
As she watched, she kept up hope. “She just stopped breathing,” she cried out. “Please try to save her.”
The men didn’t seem to hear. They were so focused on the woman in front of them. They worked on her heart, trying to keep it pumping, but ten minutes later they shook their heads.
Rebel burst into tears—her heart hurting and the fear in her mind growing by the second. She was tucked up against a warm chest.
Saul wrapped his arms around her and held her close. He just held her; he didn’t rub her back or arms. He didn’t share any platitudes this time.
She was ready to implode, like a hurricane was inside her, drawing everything inward. She cried, hating the sense of weakness that was desperate for a release from the constant tension inside.
When the worst elements of the storm blew over, she stood quietly in the circle of Saul’s arms, wondering if there was something more she could’ve done to save the woman.
Saul gently stroked her hair from her face. “What can I do to help you right now?”
She rubbed her eyes with her sleeve, like a two-year-old. She stepped back but didn’t look at him. “Sorry about that,” she muttered. “I haven’t broken down like that in a long time.”
“It’s to be expected. Don’t be too hard on yourself. You’ve had a series of shocks, culminating in what we thought was relief, only to find defeat instead.”
She lifted her gaze to stare at him dully. “I don’t even know what to do now.”
“You need to sleep. We all do.”
She looked around. “Did the others find anybody else?”
He shook his head. “No.”
She bowed her head. “Tammy’s dead, isn’t she?”
Saul didn’t answer.
*
Saul didn’t want to answer. Because, if Tammy wasn’t already dead, chances were she’d soon wish she was. In his mind he couldn’t come up with one reason for keeping Tammy and Daniel alive. Samantha was so badly beaten. This asshole was responsible for two kidnappings and four deaths now.
Stone walked toward them, motioning at the police all around them and asked, “Ready to go?”
He nodded. “Where to?”
“To the police station. Of the two men we caught, one was shot. The EMTS will take him into custody and take him to the hospital, but the other one is heading to the station. Neither had IDs on them.”
Saul nodded. He remembered the mention of catching the men, but he sure as hell didn’t remember most of the details after handing over the key. It all had moved so damn fast afterward. That they had two live men to question, well, that made him feel like cheering. “I sure hope we get a chance to question them after the police do,” he said. “After what they did to that woman …”
Stone nodded, his gaze hard. “Don’t worry. Even if he makes it to jail, he won’t live long.”
“Still too damn long,” Rebel said passionately. “They broke her to pieces.”
Saul wrapped an arm around her shoulders and tucked her close again. “That doesn’t mean the same thing was done to Tammy.”
Rebel took a deep shaky breath and then let it out slowly. “I keep hanging on to that.”
“We have work to do, but we also need some rest. Police station it is, then back to Richard’s to crash. A fresh start in the morning.”
“Sounds good to me.” Saul led Rebel away from the bloody stains on the floor, outside toward her car.
She moved automatically, her face blank with exhaustion. She got in the vehicle when he told her to, sat and buckled up. And she hadn’t said anything. She just stared, her arms wrapped around her chest. He closed her door, walked around to the driver’s side and, in a low voice, he said to Stone, “She’s in bad shape.”
Merk joined them. “I just told Foster that she’ll come home with us. If nothing else, it gives her a place to stay for the night.”
Saul nodded. “I’ll follow you guys.” He got into her vehicle, started the engine, waited for the jeep to pull out and then slipped behind it into the empty street. He heard her small voice.
“Where are we going?”
“First to the police station, then some place safe to get some sleep.”
“And me?”
“You’ll stay with us for the moment.”
Her relief was palpable.
He reached over and gently curled her fingers into his hand and squeezed. “We won’t leave you.”
“You guys are here on a job. For me this is my life. If I don’t find Tammy, I don’t know how I can even begin to start over.”
He squeezed her fingers again and dropped her hand as he put both hands back on steering wheel, shifting gears as he turned the corner and headed up Main Street. “We have to remember that was not Tammy. Maybe that’s a good sign. Maybe it’s not. What we do know is, Tammy could still be alive.”
She settled back and closed her eyes. “Why the police station?”
“Merk and Dakota have brought along the two men they captured. One was shot by his boss. The bullet didn’t go between his eyes like the others. It grazed one side of the skull. I suspect he’ll be okay, but we know he’s gone under guard to the hospital.”
She opened her eyes. “We got someone?” She half sat up. “Two someones?”
He nodded and explained.
When she collapsed in relief, her fervent whisper was, “Thank God, that’s huge.”
“I know, right? It’s not a total loss.”
“We should have questioned them before the cops came. Otherwise we can’t make them tell us what we want to know.”
He chuckled. “I trust Stone.”
“Is he the one who found them?”
Saul nodded.
She grinned. “Then let’s hope Stone is every bit as mean as he looks.”
“They are all teddy bears. Stone is just the biggest of the lot.”
“So many of those big guys are,” she whispered.
“Let’s just get through the police station visit, and then we can get some rest. A few hours’ sleep will make a hell of a difference.”