Butterfly Cove (26 page)

“Of course. Do what you need to do. Just a friendly warning, though. If you take more than an hour, those brownies will be gone.”

Rafe touched her cheek and then frowned when his cell phone rang again. He took the call and turned away toward the door. Olivia heard him repeat a number before he closed the door behind him.

She didn’t move, struck by a cold wave of fear. But she wouldn’t cave in, not the way she had before. She was surrounded by her friends, and Rafe knew what he was doing. She wasn’t going to let her mind be derailed into dark possibilities.

Walker cleared his throat. “Those brownies are going fast. I think I’ll bring more from the kitchen.”

When he moved away, some instinct made Olivia follow. She saw him cross the kitchen and keep right on walking, out to the side porch. Rafe was there, standing next to his car. The trunk was opened; she could see a long metal case inside.

Walker glanced down as Rafe opened the case. Olivia couldn’t make out what was inside.

“What is it, a burglary?”

“Domestic disturbance. I don’t know how long I’ll be. Can you take Olivia home? I don’t want her to be alone tonight.”

“Don’t worry about Olivia. She’ll be fine here. You need some help?” Walker asked. “Noah and I can tag along if you want.”

“Better not. Official jurisdiction and all that.” Rafe closed the big case.

Walker nodded. “Got it.”

Olivia thought she felt a silent message pass between the two men. Cold wind brushed her face like icy fingers. Then Rafe was gone.

Olivia stopped Walker at the steps. “What did he say?”

Walker frowned. “He had something to do at the station.”

“No, he said there was a domestic disturbance. And I heard him say a number. Ten-forty-seven.” Olivia stared at Rafe’s retreating car, her face pale. “I’ve been studying the police codes. I wanted to know what they meant since I was seeing Rafe. Ten-forty-seven means armed with firearms. That’s bad.”

Walker didn’t say anything.

Olivia turned around, her face set. She found her purse and walked over to Jilly. “Can I borrow your car?”

“Of course you can, but where are you going?”

“I’m going to be there. In case...well, just in case.”

Walker moved a step in front of her. He shook his head. “Olivia, you can’t go there. This is a police matter. It will be dangerous.”

Olivia pushed his hand away. “I’m not a fool. I’m not going to get close or be a distraction. I just...I just want to be there in the distance.” She stared at Jilly, her eyes pleading. “Can I borrow your car?’

Jilly looked at Walker, who muttered a curse. “Hell. If you’re determined to go, I’ll drive you. But only under these conditions. You do
exactly
what I say. No noise. And you do
not
leave the car. Not under any circumstances.”

“Fine. Now can we go?”

Walker touched Jilly’s cheek, took a deep breath and slid the car keys into his pocket. “Make sure that I don’t regret this, Olivia.” His voice was very hard.

Olivia barely heard him.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

H
E WAS HERE
and yet he wasn’t here.

Rafe felt the cool wind on his face, smelled the musky perfume of pine needles. The Oregon coast was a universe away from the drifting dust and acrid heat of Afghanistan, but violence felt the same, no matter what patch of ground you stood on.

This time the threat was at home, close to those he loved. Rafe didn’t allow himself to think about that now.

Tom Wilkinson looked sick, his features pale and drawn. The dispatcher had pulled him away from therapy at the hospital, and pain lines were etched on his face. “You have your equipment?”

Rafe nodded.

“Good. Here’s the situation. It started as a domestic dispute. Husband just got back from prison. Wife seeing another man. Things went south fast. There’s a three-year-old child in there,” the sheriff said coldly. “One of our men went in twenty minutes ago. He hasn’t reported back. Shots were fired and we think the deputy may be wounded.”

Rafe nodded. Domestic disturbances were the worst, volatile and totally unpredictable. With a child involved, everything became a nightmare. He said nothing else, moving around the car and opening the trunk. He pulled out his big case, which carried the sniper rifle he had used through two tours of duty in Afghanistan.

He had hoped to put this part of his life behind him for good. He had done enough killing in the drifting desert dust.

Rafe assembled the equipment expertly and then scanned the dark hillside. He narrowed his focus to a tunnel. Only three things mattered now.

Threat. Terrain. Resolution.

As he worked, he let the noises of the night play around him. He absorbed the sounds of the wind and the distant crashing of waves at the coast. Then he looked at the sheriff. “I’m going to need secure vantage. There’s a clump of shrubs to the right of the driveway—0300.” He used the military location designations as a habit.

Wilkinson nodded. “You won’t be visible from the house. There are no streetlights in that area either. It’s a good spot. For the record I’m authorizing you to use lethal force. I’ve tried to reach the man inside for ten minutes. He never answers. We know his wife is inside and we know there’s a child involved. Our time is running out. Unless you hear differently, if you have an opportunity then take the shot.”

Rafe felt the world still. He felt the cold barrel of the rifle beneath his fingers, felt the wind in his hair. He felt the terrible weight of life and death settle on his shoulders. There was no room for error.

He stood motionless. “I want to make this clear. I’m to take the shot. Is that right?”

Tom Wilkinson nodded curtly. “Take him. The nearest SWAT team is forty-five minutes away. We don’t have that much time. It’s on you, Rafe.”

“Understood.” Rafe would not shirk the responsibility, no matter how unwelcome it was.

“Follow me.” The sheriff gripped his side as if it hurt. Then he waved Rafe forward into the woods.

* * *

“
T
HIS IS
T
OM
W
ILKINSON
. How are things going in there? I’d like to speak with you.”

There was no answer from inside the darkened house. Somewhere Rafe heard the faint cry of a child as he took up a position along the slope. Through a window at the stairwell he could see movement in the room, but he couldn’t pick out figures.

He needed to be closer.

“I’d really like to talk to you.” Tom’s calm voice went on, and Rafe knew he was trying to establish contact with the hostage taker while getting an update on the situation inside. “Do you need anything in there? Food? Water? Is anyone hurt?”

Just as before, there was no answer.

Rafe moved quietly up the deep hillside, focused on that small window and what it could tell him. He heard the sound of something heavy dropping and then the frightened cry of a woman.

Whatever was going on inside that house could explode into violence at any moment.

Rafe crawled to the window and sank flat. He eased a set of night-vision goggles into place and waited for the scene inside to grow clear.

In the green flare of the goggles, he made out two figures in the middle of the room. The smaller figure was locked into place, a shield in front of the man. This had to be the hostage. Rafe studied the room, looking for any other movement or figures.

The child cried again, sounding cranky and frightened and tired. The sound seemed to come from an upstairs bedroom.

Tom Wilkinson kept on talking, his voice calm and deep next to the front door. “Maybe if you told me what you want, I could help you. I can’t do anything to help if you don’t talk to me. Are you good with that?”

Rafe saw the big figure fling the woman around. He heard her muffled cry of pain.

Silently, Rafe eased open the window. His primary duty was to protect the hostages. Somehow he had to separate the man from his wife and child.

“Look, I’m putting a case of Coke near the front door. I brought you some pizza and some tacos, too. It’s all I could manage on short notice, but I figure you must be hungry. The pizza is nice and hot. It’s here on the porch, whenever you want it. I’m going back to my car now. Just so you know.”

Rafe’s mouth twitched. Tom Wilkinson looked and sounded like a man who didn’t have a care in the world, like a law enforcement officer who was a little short on brains. But Rafe knew that this was exactly the right thing to say. He had lowered the threat level and offered something to the hostage taker without being asked.

The man inside didn’t answer, but Rafe saw the two figures move awkwardly toward the door. The woman was still locked tightly against the man’s chest, but Rafe saw her lean against the wall, nearly falling as the man opened the front door slightly and then grabbed at the food outside.

He swung the door shut immediately, then leaned down, clearly searching through the bags that Tom had left.

The woman was too close. Rafe still did not have a clear shot. He let the wind move over him and felt the cold metal beneath his hands while he waited, deep in a zone of focus that could last for hours.

“You got the food. That’s good. If you want anything else, you just tell me. All you have to do is call out. I can hear you.”

Suddenly the woman spun around, staggering toward the back of the room. The man charged after her and Rafe saw his hands swing out in a slashing blow.

Her scream of pain was cut short as the man struck her again and then again.

She seemed to stagger. The man struggled to hold her and then half carried her along the wall. With her still locked against him, he leaned down and seemed to be digging for something on the ground.

Rafe heard the unmistakable sound of a round being loaded into a chamber.

“
Talking’s done.
I’m going to kill her.” The man inside shouted at the front door, “I’m going to kill her and then I’ll kill that kid of hers.” His voice was hoarse with exhaustion and fury. “You listening out there, Pop? That’s what I’m going to do. There’s not a damn thing you can do about it.”

From his position near the window, Rafe could hear the woman’s low, broken sobs. Somewhere in the house a child continued to wail.

Rafe didn’t move, waiting for a clear shot.

The man inside shouted at the front door. “It’s too late.”

The wind whined. Seconds became hours.

The man raised an arm. “She didn’t wait. Another man lives here. Their house now. Their kid, upstairs howling. It’s
her
fault that they’re all going to die. I told her what would happen. I told her to wait.” The words reached a crescendo of fury. “Say goodbye to all of them. To that deputy, too, back in the closet, bleeding out.” He swung the woman around, wrenching her neck sideways as if she was a doll. “I told you to
wait!
”

The words echoed through the house as the man struck again.

This time the woman twisted, kicking upward in blind anger and desperate fear, and the man’s hold broke, just for a moment. The two figures separated.

Rafe relaxed his shoulder.

Hands calm. Body floating. A heartbeat became a lifetime.

And then he took the shot.

* * *

O
LIVIA WAS IN
the front seat when she heard a man yell from inside the house, then the terrified cry of a woman. Something thumped hard. Another scream.

Why didn’t they do something? Anything?

A rifle split the silence. Two fast shots.
Boom-boom!

Olivia’s hands locked in her lap.

A woman keened. Wind gusted through the woods as a police car passed without lights or sirens. An ambulance pulled up behind Walker’s Jeep.

Tom Wilkinson and two officers broke through the front door and went in.

* * *

W
ALKER SAID NOTHING
when the emergency team brought a stretcher down the driveway with a woman and a child.

Police radios chattered. Two officers walked quickly toward the house.

Olivia sank back and closed her eyes.

She heard Rafe’s voice, absolutely calm. When he walked onto the porch she forced her locked fingers to relax. He was unharmed, a rifle in his hand, some kind of goggles under his arm.

She looked at Walker. “I don’t understand.”

Another gurney came out the front door. Walker started the engine.

“Did Rafe fire those shots?”

Walker frowned at the stretcher. “We’re going. Neither of us should be here, Olivia.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

T
HEY DIDN’T SPEAK
on the drive back to the Harbor House.

Walker glanced at Olivia every few minutes to see how she was handling the situation. Her face was very pale. But she looked thoughtful, even calm.

Walker figured that she had a whole lot to be thoughtful about.

When they pulled into the driveway, it was hard to process the return to the normal world of friends and laughter and trust. The lights were on in the big house. They could hear music and dogs barking and an occasional roll of booming laughter.

All of it seemed a million miles away from the grim scene they had just witnessed in the woods.

“I saw Rafe’s rifle before he left. And that’s the sound I heard.” Olivia didn’t look at Walker. Her eyes were very dark and seemed to shimmer. But she was holding it together. He liked her a lot for that.

“Olivia, I can’t say whether or not—”

She raised one hand impatiently. “No, don’t say anything. You don’t have to. I was there and I heard everything you heard. I’m just walking through this for myself. I’m trying to give it clear meaning. For Rafe—that’s important. I know that he was in the Marines in Afghanistan. It was some important job, but none of us back here had the details.” She looked down, staring at her fingers in her lap. “I can’t even imagine what that must have been like. How do you put those memories away and come home to start a normal life again?”

Walker sat unmoving, his hands on the wheel. She had pretty much said it all. Though she had not asked, he could tell her from personal experience that it was nearly impossible to forget the gunfire and the sweat, the screams and the fear. You did it day by day, minute by minute. You put your boots on the ground and you kept walking forward. There was no secret decoder ring to help, no easy shortcuts. Rafe had hard work ahead of him.