One #3
“That’s not true.” I smiled into the phone as I turned from the side street I was on into traffic on Harlem Avenue, heading for home. I went maybe ten feet before I—and everyone else on the street—came to a grinding halt.
“Yes, but since my sister, Candace, got her dream job, globetrotting around the world, and my folks fled to Florida and my brother, Alex, to Delaware, you and Sam are the only family I’ve got here.”
“You have a lot of other girlfriends,” I told her as I tried to see what the problem was around the SUV in front of me.
“I know, but I would check in with the others. I don’t need to check with you and Sam. He’ll kill anyone who comes near my kids, and you worry more than I do.”
“I don’t worry.”
She snorted out a laugh over the phone.
“That was very undignified,” I said as I leaned back in the driver’s seat of the sleek black minivan I utterly adored.
Everyone else I knew had SUVs that were, I was certain, helping to destroy the environment.
My minivan was not part of Satan’s master plan, and I loved my car that proclaimed me as married with children as well as safety conscious.
I was looking forward to Kola starting soccer in the spring so the picture of domestic bliss would be complete. I had a sweater all picked out.
“You bring it out of me.” Aja cackled.
“Whatever. I’ll call you when I get back from the reunion on Monday.”
She started snickering.
“What?”
“Family reunion.” She was laughing now. “Oh, the horror!”
“It’ll be fine,” I told her as I noticed a man striding by my window. It was weird that he was walking down the middle of the street and not on the sidewalk, but since we were in gridlock, he was in no danger of getting run over. “Hey, your kids like Mountain Dew and Oreos, right?”
“They’re staying with you for two days. Feed them whatever you want.”
I was laughing when I hung up, but when the SUV in front of me suddenly reversed, crashing into my front bumper, I yelled and laid on my horn. But the car didn’t stop; it kept grinding metal, and I realized that he or she was trying to get enough of an angle to go up onto the curb to the right.
I took a picture of the license plate with my phone, thanked God that my kids weren’t with me, and was about to call the police to report the accident when I saw the passenger door of the SUV open.
What was confusing was that the small woman who scrambled out had keys in her hand.
It was like she had been driving, but hadn’t wanted to get out of the driver’s door.
When she flung open the back door, a little rocket seat was visible—she had a toddler.
I got out fast and went around the back of my van—even as the guy in the car behind me honked, leaned out, and told me to get back behind the fucking wheel—and darted to her side.
She whirled on me with a can of pepper spray in hand.
“Wait! I’m here to help.”
Her eyes were huge as she looked at me, shoved the can into my chest, and told me to look out for the guy so she could get her son out of the car. She had been too frightened to even open her door.
“What guy?”
“I don’t know. Some psycho. I think he killed the man in the car in front of me,” she cried. “I think he has a gun or—oh God!”
Turning, I saw a man advancing on us.
“Move your fucking cars!”
“Get inside!” I ordered her. “Lock it!”
She climbed into the back seat around her kid, and I heard the locks behind me as the man came at me fast.
He had a lug wrench, not a gun, and since I could run if I needed to, I went from terrified to annoyed very quickly. “What the hell are you doing?” I barked at him. “You’re scaring the crap out of this lady!”
“Move your cars! This whole street is just full of fucking cars!”
He wasn’t even looking at me; I doubted he could tell me where he was or what he was doing.
Maybe the road rage had made him snap or perhaps something else.
I didn’t know, and I didn’t care. He was carrying around an automotive tool like a weapon.
That was really my only concern. The lady in the SUV was freaked because her kid was in the car and this guy was acting crazy.
If my kids were with me, I would have had the same reaction.
“Stop,” I ordered him. “Don’t come any closer.”
He kept coming, and he raised the wrench like maybe he was thinking of braining me with it. I aimed the nozzle of the pepper spray and made sure to get his face.
His scream was loud and wounded, but he didn’t drop the tool.
“What the fuck are you doing?” It was the guy who had yelled at me earlier, whose car was in gridlock behind mine. “You just attacked this guy,” he roared right before he hit me.
I went down hard, hitting the van as I bounced off it, but from my angle, I could see the guy I had sprayed coming at him.
Kicking hard, I knocked the guy who had just hit me off-balance, and he tumbled to the ground beside me.
“What the fuck are you—”
“Look out!” I yelled as the guy with the lug wrench came after us.
“Oh shit,” he screamed, scrambling back away from me, moving to run.
“Drop the weapon!”
“Get on the ground!”
Normally, policemen—even though I was married to an ex one—were not my favorite people. As a rule, they caught me doing crap I shouldn’t have been doing, but somehow missed everyone else talking on their cell phones, running red lights, and speeding.
But right at that moment, as I saw the uniforms, noted the drawn guns, and heard the orders being roared out, I was comforted.
The guy dropped the lug wrench and went to his knees.
“All the way down. Face on the pavement!”
“You saved my life,” the guy who had hit me said. “I—”
But something slammed the back of my head, and everything went dark.
My husband, my brother, family, and friends would say that, yes, Jory Harcourt was a trouble magnet, but I thought it was more coincidence than anything else when fate decided to screw with me.
Especially this time. I had been heading home from dropping off my kids—a trip I made Monday through Friday, normally without incident.
How would I have known that I would end up in the crosshairs of accidental crazy?
“A what?” the policeman who was taking my statement at the hospital, in the emergency room, asked. I was now sitting sideways on the bed, no longer lying down.
“Trouble magnet,” I told him as I sighed deeply.
What was amazing was that other than the soreness on the back of my head—which, surprisingly, wasn’t even giving me a headache—I was okay. I was certain I looked worse than I felt.
“How did you get knocked out?” he asked me.
“The lady I’d told to stay in her SUV, I guess she opened the door really fast, and I was sitting right beside her car, and … you know.”
He nodded. “I see.”
“That’s why vans are better—the doors slide,” I educated him.
His smile was patronizing.
“I—”
“Jory!”
His yell bounced off the walls, and I winced.
The officer looked startled. “Who is—”
“Scooch back,” I ordered and took a breath to get the required amount of air into my lungs. “In here!”
The curtain was flung open moments later, and there was Sam, jaw clenched, muscles cording in his neck, eyes dark and full of too many things to soothe at once.
“Detective Kage?”
Sam turned to the officer.
“Oh, no, Marshal.” He tried to smile at my glowering man, having corrected himself quickly. “I meant, Supervisory Deputy Marshal.”
Sam’s attention returned to me, and I smiled as I lifted my arms for him.
Moving fast, Sam closed the short distance between us and hauled me forward and crushed me against him.
It was not gentle; the entire movement was jarring and hard. I loved it.
“Scared me,” he stated as he clutched me tight.
I knew I had, which was the reason for the grab.
I leaned into him, nuzzled my face into the crook of his neck, and slid my arms under the suit jacket and over the crisp dress shirt.
He smelled good—a faint trace of cologne, fabric softener, and warm male.
I whimpered softly in the back of my throat.
“Those calls take years off my life, you know?”
“What calls?”
“The Jory’s in the hospital calls.”
I nodded, and there was a rumble of a grunt before he leaned back and looked down at my face. His eyes clocked me, checking, making sure I was whole and safe.
“I’m fine,” I said as he lifted his hand and fisted it in my hair, tilting my head back as he examined my right eye and my cheek. “I mean, the punch hurt the most. The bump on the back of my head is just sore.”
“Yeah, you don’t look fine,” he said, and his voice was low and menacing as he gently checked the bump. “Who did this?”
“There was a guy behind me, and he didn’t understand why I’d sprayed the man with the lug wrench, and he—”
“No. Stop,” he cut me off, dropping his hand from my hair as he turned his head to the policeman. “Speak.”
I could tell from his change of tone that he wasn’t waiting on me, but apparently, the officer could not.
“Hello?” Sam snapped icily.
“Oh-oh,” the guy stammered and then recounted to Sam the events of the morning.
“So, the lady in the SUV knocked him out when she opened the door?” He was trying to make sure he understood everything.
“Yes.”
Sam grunted.
“She’s really sorry about it. She told me that your husband there saved her life.”
That didn’t make it any better—at least for Sam, so said the dark expression on his face.
“Where is my van?”
“We’ll take care of the van and get you a rental until it’s fixed. Just don’t worry about it.”
“No, I know,” I replied to him, keeping my voice level, not wanting to fight.
Sometimes—a lot of the time—Sam treated me like a child. It had been happening more and more lately, like I needed to be taken care of, same as the kids, because I couldn’t think for myself or reason things out.
“I just wanted to know where my vehicle was towed to … Officer.”
I turned to the man in uniform, pinned him with my gaze—my question had been directed to him—and he was still looking at Sam to see if he should answer me.
“Officer?”
Sam let out a frustrated puff of air. “I can find out where the—”