Chapter 47
Chapter Forty-Seven
Angie
“Jason, what the fuck?” Henry’s voice comes from the hallway.
I get to my feet. “Something’s wrong.”
Tabitha frowns. “You think so?”
I take a step toward the entryway, but then the tinkling of breaking glass.
I turn around. Tabitha’s dropped her glass. Her face is white as a sheet.
“Tabitha. What’s wrong?”
She shakily raises a hand and points out the back door toward Jason’s townhome.
And I see him.
Ralph.
He’s limping across the property, his face still nearly unrecognizable underneath the purple bruises, dried blood streaked from his nose, and swollen eyes. But he’s moving too fast for a man that broken.
He shoves open my small gate. Tillie is outside, barking like crazy at him. He kicks her to the side.
I drop my jaw. “You bastard!”
Tillie yelps and skids into the picnic table but pops right back up, hackles raised and barking like mad.
Ralph barrels through the sliding glass door into the kitchen nook, turning on me. “Your boyfriend’s been sniffing around, Angie. Getting too curious.” He advances on me.
And I stand there, frozen.
“Ralph, stop, please.” Tabitha steps in front of me.
He lunges at her.
Thank God for Tabitha. Maybe she is my bestie. I grab a heavy ceramic mug from the kitchen counter and hurl it at his head. It shatters against his temple, and he stumbles.
But he doesn’t go down.
Tabitha kicks a kitchen chair at Ralph, buying us a second. I yank open a drawer and grab the first thing I see—tongs. Not ideal.
He charges again. I stab the tongs at his face. He flinches, and Tabitha slams the refrigerator door into his side.
“It’s over, Ralph! You’re going to jail for a long, long time.”
He spits out a wad of blood onto my kitchen tiles and grins. “You don’t get it, do you? I don’t care if it’s over for me. It probably is. But I can make sure that you and your precious Dr. Lansing don’t see the light of another fucking day.” He lunges toward me again.
All three of us collide, crashing into the island. His elbow clips my jaw, and stars explode behind my eyes.
He grabs a kitchen knife from the block.
“Okay.” I raise my hands. “Okay, Ralph, just—”
“Angie!” Henry’s voice. Then, “Get down!”
I drop instinctively as Henry tackles Ralph from behind. The knife clatters across the floor. Ralph’s forehead hits the edge of the kitchen counter, opening a wide gash. Blood gushes everywhere.
He’s not moving.
I run to Henry. “Jason. Where is he?”
Henry swallows dazedly. “Front… Front door.”
I rush to my front door, and Jason is standing there holding a man I don’t recognize in a headlock. He’s wearing a brown UPS uniform, and his nose is bloody. He’s struggling to break free from Jason’s grip.
The man’s gray eyes meet mine, and he stops moving. My heart skips a beat.
I know those eyes.
The hospital.
He was there. Not in brown. In scrubs. He was the nurse who came into Ralph’s room when I was visiting him. When he tried to convince me that Jason was the one who murdered his wife.
Recognition must have flickered across my face when I saw him, because his lips twitch into a cold smile. He elbows Jason right in the gut and breaks free of the headlock, lunging toward me.
But Henry has followed me back to the front door, and he charges at the man.
Jason straightens himself out just in time to duck a swing from the man, grab his wrist, and slam his forearm against the doorframe.
He cries out in pain and raises a leg, bringing his foot down on Jason’s instep.
Jason lets go but lands an uppercut right to the man’s jaw.
His eyes roll back in his head, and he slowly slinks to the floor.
Henry pats down his uniform and pulls out a gun from his pocket.
“Holy shit, Jason, you were right. He was about to shoot us.” He holds the gun in front of himself, and it catches the light of my patio sconces. “How did you know?”
Jason points to the street. “The car. I recognized it from the night I was scoping Ralph’s apartment. This guy must be his muscle, the guy who kept him informed while he was in the hospital.”
“Yes, I saw him once disguised as a nurse,” I say. “He must be the guy that Ralph hired to beat him up.”
“And I bet he orchestrated the deaths of the Chapman brothers, too,” Jason says.
I raise an eyebrow. “What?”
He rubs the back of his neck. “I didn’t get a chance to tell you.
I think Ralph had them killed as well. Steve Chapman, his old friend from school.
This guy”—he gestures to the unconscious man on my front stoop—“must have been able to hack my search history on my computer or my phone or something, because I was looking for information about Lindsay and, after I finally got Steve’s number, I called, and he had just died an hour before I called. ”
I place a hand over my heart. “My God.”
“But you said there were two brothers,” Tabitha says, walking up from behind me and out onto the porch. “What happened to the other one?”
“He was found dead early this morning,” I say. “Gray Eyes over here figured out that he had been helping me, despite the fact that his brother had just died. So he had him killed, too.”
“Holy shit,” Tabitha says.
Jason nods. “Steve had a prior brain injury, and Tom had some preexisting heart condition. Their deaths were easily explained away.” His lip trembles. “Just like Lindsay’s was.”
Slow clapping.
“Very good, Dr. Lansing.”
I turn around, and my heart turns to ice. Ralph is up, his entire face covered in blood from the gash in his forehead, holding the knife from my kitchen.
In a flash, he pulls me to him, the cold steel of the knife against my throat.
“Ralph, don’t!” Jason cries out.
He presses the knife against my neck. “Don’t move, Lansing, or your tight little girlfriend gets her pretty little throat slit.”
“Why are you doing this?” Jason asks. “Lindsay’s gone. It’s over.”
Ralph shrugs. “It’s over when I decide it’s over. How the hell could she choose you over me? You’re a fake, Lansing. Poor doctor can’t do surgery, can’t even teach anymore.”
Jason’s muscles tense. He wants to beat the ever-living shit out of Ralph, but he doesn’t want to put my life at risk.
“Just put the knife down, Ralph,” Jason says evenly. “I’ve already called the cops. They’ll be here any minute.”
“How dumb do you think I am?” Ralph asks. “And I don’t care about the cops. All I care about is denying you the love of your life. I did it once, and I can do it again.”
He presses the knife into my throat, and I wince at the sharp pain. A trickle of blood meanders down my neck.
No.
I don’t want to die. This can’t be the end. I love Jason. I have a life, a future—
“Ralph, don’t—”
I gasp at the loud crack of a gunshot.
The knife clatters to the floor.
Ralph crumples under me, two separate pools of blood seeping out of him, one from the gash in his forehead, and one from a bullet wound just under his right eye.
I turn around.
Henry, his face pale, slowly places the still-smoking gun down.