Chapter 3 Aftermath #2
No. Her bakery had been shot up, but the assailants had never gotten out of the truck. Was that because of the Marines who, apparently, had been doing basically all of the fighting back? Or had that always been the plan?
Jenna pursed her lips as the sounds of approaching sirens finally pierced the air. She watched Jon turn to glance down the road and forced herself to push out the words while she could. “Do you think they’ll come back?”
Jon’s friend tipped his head in an effort to glance her way. “Hard to say.”
Jon exhaled. “Their target today wasn’t the bakery. They were here to silence the two who’d tried to rob you, which means those two weren’t just a couple of bored punks or junkies.”
The ambulance screamed into view, cutting across the intersection and rolling up into the parking lot. It swerved wide to avoid them and came to an abrupt stop. More sirens echoed further back, so Jenna assumed more emergency services had been dispatched this time.
Jon kept talking. “The point of concern is whether or not they’ll be worried about what could have been said between the botched robbery and the shooting. We don’t know enough, which means too many assumptions are dangerous.”
Jenna swallowed hard.
Someone she didn’t recognize—which was frankly reassuring—rushed up to them. “There’s another ambulance on the way. I assume you’re the one we’re transporting first?” She directed her question at Jon’s friend with a pointed glance at his glaringly injured leg.
He managed a smile. “Only because this is my driving leg.”
The afternoon passed in a blur.
Jon had been torn about the notion of leaving Jenna behind, at her own bakery.
It felt like choosing which person to abandon in a firefight.
But at the end of the day, Lance’s eyes were glazing over no matter how hard he tried to hide it and he had no one else.
Jenna had resources, and she’d been fending for herself without him for years.
He hated having to make her do that under the possible threat of a secondary attack, so he’d made a point of hunting down the next deputy on-scene and informing the man of the concern.
It was little consolation, but it was something.
He hadn’t been to the hospital in the city since maybe a year before he’d left for boot, when they’d learned his grandfather’s cancer had relapsed.
That was far from a happy memory, and yet part of him thought he might have preferred sitting and reflecting on it rather than spending his share of time being patched up, and stuck filling out paperwork for two.
Regardless, by the time everything was done and he was changed out of his bloody clothes—mostly for the sanity of the civilians in the lobby—he barely had enough time to worry about Jenna before Lance was out of surgery.
Lance didn’t have a private room, but he was the only one in it for the time being.
Jon figured when they realized how obnoxious the man could be if they kept him bedridden and on accurately dosed pain killers, they’d either release him or move him just to let everyone else rest. In the meantime, Jon took advantage of the privacy and dropped into the single guest chair, letting their nearly identical seabags hit the floor at his feet.
It’d been a long fucking day.
He never would have expected coming home again to mean winding up in a damn shootout.
Somehow, that was still less jarring than seeing Jenna—hearing her voice, breathing her in, making the fucking stupid mistake of touching her skin.
Barely an hour in her presence and he struggled to think straight.
Putting distance between them felt a hell of a lot worse than the bullet that had torn a fresh hole through his side. Granted, he was also more used to that.
The door to Lance’s room opened with a quiet click and a woman stepped inside, closing the door immediately behind her.
Jon cut his eyes to her and a frown dipped his lips.
She wasn’t dressed like a nurse or a doctor.
This woman looked perfectly ordinary, if not a bit too pretty for a hospital.
She wore dark casual clothes and smokey makeup.
A black layered top with a solid cropped piece beneath and a full-length, long-sleeved lace number over that, paired with short-shorts and black thigh-highs that disappeared into heeled ankle boots.
In contradiction to her golden halo of hair and glowing blue eyes, she almost looked like a caricature.
Lance let out a low moan and blinked his eyes open, choosing that moment to come to.
Jon stood, his instinct telling him something was amiss.
The woman offered him a teasing smile and sashayed forward until she stood parallel with the foot of Lance’s bed.
“Jon…?” Lance cleared his throat. “You changed blondes.”
Jon cut his idiot friend a hard look.
The lithe blonde let out an airy laugh. “I think your friend is beginning to regret informing the surgeon what dosage of anesthetic to give you, Mr. Blackburn.”
Jon snapped his glare forward. The thought had crossed his mind, just for a second. “Who the hell are you?” Was she some kind of psychic? And if she was, did that mean she was working with the same group that had attacked Jenna’s bakery?
Lance pushed himself up to sit a little straighter. “The only stranger I feel like seeing in my room right now is a pretty nurse.”
The blonde made a dismissive gesture. “Your pretty nurse is on her way. Be patient. First, we need to talk.”
Jon folded his arms across his chest. “You have thirty seconds.”
She smiled. “My name is Ella, and if I’m being honest, Jon, I’m mostly here for him. I just thought it’d be best if we all met this once. For Jenna’s sake.”
“The fuck?” Lance muttered.
Jon surged forward, but after a single step, his body froze. His every muscle locked up until he couldn’t take a single breath. His mind was aware—painfully aware—but nothing responded.
Ella stepped closer and clicked her tongue, tapping a finger on his half-extended arm.
“Now, Jon, that was rude. Trying to attack me when I’m only here to help.
” She gave a little push and his arm lowered back to his side.
“I never said I was going to hurt Jenna. I’m in the business of making people deliriously happy, in fact.
But Jenna is stubborn. She and I will probably chat later, and we both know she leans on you for the ‘weird things.’ So, I let you meet me.
That’s all.” She smiled as if consoling a child.
“Now be a gentleman and go get me one of those coffees from that machine in the other hall? Lance and I need to talk privately. I promise I’ll leave him exactly how I found him. ”
The worry, fear, and general sense of aggression fled him as his body repositioned to neutral and properly unfroze. Jon blinked. Coffee was a great idea. “Sure.”
“Wait, what?” Lance said.
Jon ignored his buddy’s confusion, angled around Ella, and slipped from the room.
Lance would be fine. He didn’t have a clue who Ella was, and with every increasingly robotic step down the hall, he questioned why he wasn’t turning around.
But he continued to believe that Lance would be fine when he returned.
Lance was generally better at quick-bonding with people, anyway, so maybe it was best if he left them to it.
Or maybe he’d lost his mind.
He’d find out after he grabbed a couple of vending machine coffees.
The small, delusional voice of hope Jenna had clung to as she’d gotten ready that morning finally died when she turned onto the utility road that ran behind her shop and saw the ugly yellow tape crisscrossed over the door.
She pulled into her usual spot on autopilot, killed the engine, and blew out a hard breath.
“Then all of that … really happened.”
A part of Jenna had expected to show up at Sweet Stop in the morning and find it fully intact and quietly waiting for her.
That same part of her brain had stubbornly insisted there would be not a single sign of the devastation she’d come to wonder if her tired mind had hallucinated.
A hallucination would certainly have made more sense.
Instead, as she slowly walked around her precious bakery, Jenna was faced with the hard reality.
The front of her shop was boarded up almost completely across the forward-facing wall, and even half the parking lot was taped off.
No vehicles remained, but crunched and shattered fragments of glass still dotted the sidewalk like foreboding sprinkles, and dark stains of something she did not want to think too hard about marred the old asphalt.
Sweet Stop was closed, like it or not, until the sheriff’s office released the scene.
It would in fact have to remain closed even after, at least until she could get the damn windows replaced and the inside cleaned up.
Preferably she’d get all the visible scars removed, but if that ended up requiring repaving the parking lot … she didn’t know what she’d do.
Her throat swelled. This could kill me.
What was she supposed to do for money in the meantime?
What did she tell her employees? She wasn’t their primary source of income, thank God, but she still had an obligation to them.
Swarmed with a nauseating combination of guilt and uselessness, Jenna dug out her phone. It was obscenely early, as it always was when she arrived at the bakery, but she’d give them the most notice she could offer. If she woke someone up, she’d apologize for that, too.
Since there were only four, and she didn’t know if her heart could handle repeating the same words so many times, she threw together a group text—everyone had each other’s numbers, anyway—and sent out her message.
Probably she needed to prioritize digging through her insurance paperwork as soon as she got another cup of coffee in her system, because they would have questions she had no answers to.
More than likely, she’d have to make calls to get those answers.
But at least the text she could do easily enough.
Sweet Stop is closed for now. I intend to re-open once I get it back, and fixed up, but there’s no way we’ll be open before week’s end. I’m sorry. I’ll keep you updated and get back to you on what moving forward looks like as soon as I know.
She went ahead and snapped a picture of the storefront to send to them, by way of more explanation.
Then she had nothing else to do, so it was time to return to her little apartment, brew that second cup of coffee, and dig out her paperwork.
If she was lucky, somewhere in the small print, she’d find she was covered for whatever yesterday’s debacle qualified as.
She opted to turn her radio on for the two-mile drive, in search of something to occupy her mind. The morning host spent the duration of her drive reporting about a missing woman from the nearby city.
Jenna frowned as she listened. He was talking about a college girl in her early twenties, casting shade on the boyfriend who’d reported her disappearance and the police who hadn’t labeled him a suspect, and simultaneously making ominous comments that had the hair on her neck standing up.
It had only been a couple of weeks earlier, she was pretty sure, when she’d caught wind of a different missing person’s report.
Different city, closer to two hours away, and she couldn’t remember that woman’s age.
Younger than me. And also, female. She’d never heard anything about the woman being found, the case being solved—anything at all.
It was nerve-wracking how easily a person could just disappear. I could disappear like that.
It was an unsettling thought that made her grip the steering wheel a little tighter.
She was a business owner, sure, so she had employees who would notice her absence. But there was a difference between that and having people who would care. Her family would care, but they weren’t local. They’d moved away years earlier. It was just her, on her own, for better or worse.
Better. Definitely better.
Jenna switched off the radio as she pulled up to her drive, agitation sharpening her movements. Most of the time it was better, anyway. No solution was perfect. More importantly, she had too many time-sensitive things to be dwelling on. She didn’t need that shit in her head.