Dark of Night (30 page)

“Me,” Decker said as he almost missed the right turn into the little residential neighborhood. Yeah, this was the right place. He hadn't been here that often, so he was feeling his way. “They were shooting at me. You just happened to be standing too close.”

Small but well-maintained houses, most of them brightly lit, lined a quiet street. No one was out—everyone was inside, eating dinner. Which was good, because a truck with its back window shot out was likely to draw a second glance, and maybe even inspire a phone call to the police. And while Decker wasn't paranoid enough to believe that any of the local officers were on the Agency's payroll, he was certain that whoever had just killed Tess and Jules had access to the SDPD's computer system.

“Oh, my God,” Tracy breathed, her search for her phone finally abandoned. “Decker, you're bleeding! Oh, my
God!”
He took a left as Tracy poked her head up so she could see out the windows. “Where are you going? We need to get to a hospital!”

“We can't,” he told her. “We walk into an ER, and we're as good as dead.”

“If you bleed to death,” she pointed out, “you're not just as
good
as dead, you actually
are
dead.” She moved up on the seat to get closer to him, never mind the fact that she was now sitting in a growing pool of his blood. “And I, for one, am not going to let you die.”

“Honey,” he told her, “I'm already dead. My goal right now is to keep
you
among the living.”

“You need to stop the truck,” she insisted as she reached to look beneath the sleeve of his overshirt. “Oh, my God, Deck. You really need to let me apply pressure.”

“Ow,” he said. “Don't! We're almost there.” And there it was.

“Isn't this … ?” Tracy peered out the window into the rapidly darkening night as he pulled into the drive.

“Sam and Alyssa's,” he told her.

“It doesn't look like they're home.”

“They're not.”

“Then why—”

“Tracy.” He cut her off. “I need you to help me. See the keypad next to the garage?”

She peered out the front windshield again at the standard two-bay garage, and he turned on the truck's brights. “Over to the right.”

She nodded. “Yes.”

“I have the alarm code.”

She understood what he needed. “Tell me and I'll do it.” She opened the door, but he stopped her.

“Wait. We need to get this truck into the garage and close the door behind us—as quickly as possible, but… We can't leave any blood on the driveway.”

She looked at him. Looked at herself. They were both a mess, but at least she wasn't bleeding—at least that he knew of. Without a word, and without his having to ask, she kicked off her sandals and unfastened her belt. “What's the code?”

He told her as she shimmied out of her bloodstained pants, giving him an eyeful of smooth, tanned thighs and panties that were gleamingly, vir-ginally white. She perched on the end of the bench seat, where his blood hadn't yet spread, as she reached again for the door handle, repeating the string of numbers he'd told her.

She did a quick check of the neighborhood, making sure no one was
watching, then opened the door and crossed the driveway as quickly as possible, hopping as she stepped on a stone with her bare feet.

And okay. So much for virginal, because her panties were thongs. He lowered his brights, because it was obvious that she didn't sunbathe in the nude.

And yeah, the cure for his out-of-control libido was to witness the death of Tess Bailey, the woman his best friend loved more than life.

He was sitting here, staring at Tracy Shapiro's near-perfect—if cave-fish white—ass, and it was his arm that was throbbing. His dick was numb. All he felt was sick with misery.

And dizzy. Jesus.

As the garage door went up, Tracy turned to give him a thumbs-up for victory, her hair and breasts bouncing like some starlet in a horror movie, and he focused hard and put the truck back in gear with his left hand.

He was in luck—he didn't have to back up. Both sides of the double bay were empty, and he could pull right in. Tracy followed as he did, and—good girl—she quickly found the button so that the door lowered behind them.

Decker cut the motor and killed the lights.

A cell phone ringtone, on a very quiet setting, ran up and down and up and down a scale. He searched for Tracy's missing phone—it had to be hers—cursing as he jarred his injured arm by reaching under the seat. Jesus, the pain almost made him black out, and as he retrieved the phone, he sat for a moment with his eyes closed, seeing stars and willing himself to remain conscious.

He had to get a message to Dave and Sophia—he wasn't going to be able to meet them at the airport. And Jesus, he had to contact Alyssa and tell her about Jules and Tess.

Tracy opened the driver's-side door, and her voice seemed to come from a long way away as she said, “That's my text message ring.”

Decker looked down at the phone in his hand and saw on its screen that Tracy had indeed received a text message.

“9-1-1.”
Tracy leaned closer to read the message aloud.
“Head for home STAT. Trying 2 reach U.”
She laughed, taking it from him. “It's from Tess. She sent it less than a minute ago. My phone's regular ring was
set on silent—I have twenty missed calls, from her and Jules both.” She looked up at him, joy on her beautiful face. “Deck—I was right. They're alive!”

Decker reached for Tracy's cell phone, no doubt needing to see Tess's text message with his own two eyes.

Which would've been fine with Tracy, except that his eyes very literally rolled back in his head and, if she hadn't dropped the phone and caught him, he would've face-planted on the concrete floor of the garage.

“Oh, my God,” she said. “Decker!
Deck!”

But he didn't rouse. He was completely limp and much heavier than he looked and she sank under his weight—dead weight. God, no. She tried to lower him down without hurting him, or at least not hurting him worse than he already was.

“Decker,” Tracy kept saying, “Deck!” She bumped into something hard—his gun in a shoulder holster—as she wrapped her arms around him. Gravity won and she fell backwards, smacking her butt on the cold floor, as his head lolled and one of his booted feet caught on the running board of the truck.

And oh, merciful God, as she cradled his head, she felt a huge lump already formed in the back, beneath his hair, and yes, her hand came away smeared with blood. It fact, it seemed possible that most of the blood on his clothes and in the truck cab had come from that cut on his head. “No,” she heard herself saying. “No, no …”

She was almost entirely underneath him, and as she shifted to get him onto the floor without letting go of his poor battered head, her elbow burned. She dismissed the pain as she gently lowered him to the concrete.

His face was slack, his eyes open a small but frightening slit as, kneeling beside him, she felt for his pulse. Both his neck and her fingers were slippery with blood, and it had been a long time since she'd checked another person for a pulse. It was vastly different from monitoring her own heartbeat during an aerobic workout at the gym, and she couldn't find it, and panic surged.

“Please don't be dead, don't you
dare
be dead—”

And the overhead light went out, plunging them both into darkness.

The fixture must've been set on a timer, hooked up to the opening garage door, rigged to shut back off after a limited amount of time.

But before she could react, before she could even start to wrap her brain around what to do next, she felt it.

Bump. Bump. Bump.
Decker's heart was beating—steady and even strong beneath her fingers—and her relief almost knocked her over. “Thank you, thank you!”

The pitch darkness was disorienting, and she knew that the door to the truck was hanging open, somewhere over her shoulder. The last thing she needed was to smack into it and knock herself unconscious, too.

She used Deck's prone body as a frame of reference, turning, intending to follow his leg—his foot was still hooked into the cab—to the open door of the truck, where she could turn on the headlights, and jeez, this wouldn't be a problem if, like normal people, he'd set his interior light to go on whenever the door was open and…

Okay,
that
wasn't his thigh beneath her outstretched, exploring hands. “Sorry,” she told him, even though he would never know that she'd groped him in the darkness. As embarrassing as it would've been, she desperately wished he was conscious and alert and talking to her.

Honey, it's all right. I know you didn't grab my junk on purpose. Just be careful of that open door, turn on the headlights, and then I'll tell you where Sam and Alyssa hide their extra key so we can get into the house, get cleaned up, and figure out how to contact Tess and Jules so they don't think
we're
dead.

His actual leg was solid, and she followed it all the way to his foot. She had no idea where the switch for the lights was, but she felt her way to the usual places in the dashboard. Nope, that was the windshield wipers. Nope, those were the emergency flashers. Okay, the flashing was obnoxious, but they provided just enough intermittent yellow light for her to find and turn on the headlights—thank goodness—before she switched them back off.

She had to slide Deck forward slightly to unhook his foot. She lowered it to the ground—his boots weighed about four tons; no wonder he was buff, walking around all day in them—and then scrambled to the door that obviously led into the house, and found and flipped the switch for the overhead lights and swiftly looked around.

As far as garages went, it was neat and clean. Orderly. Everything was
hanging on the walls, from work tools to bicycles—except for a pint-sized pink bike with streamers at the end of the handlebars and a license plate saying “Haley,” no doubt ready for use by Sam's daughter when she came to visit. It was parked near a lawn mower and a weed wacker and it was all so suburban-normal that it gave Tracy pause. Or it would have given her pause if the unconscious man on the garage floor hadn't been potentially bleeding to death from a gunshot wound.

In truth, she'd imagined an arsenal of weaponry hanging on the walls. A collection of swords and knives, stakes and beheading tools. Alyssa always made her think of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Sam … Former SEAL Sam Starrett made Tracy think of perfect sex—the kind that ended with her unbelievably handsome lover smiling into her eyes and saying in his adorable Texas accent,
Darlin’, I'm going to love and cherish you forever, but please, right now? Would you let me clean your refrigerator while I do your laundry? It would make me the happiest man in the world.

She hurried back to Decker, stopping to scoop up her cell phone. The battery had come out when it had hit the concrete—she had no idea if it was broken or simply dead from temporary lack of power. Either way, she knew she couldn't use it. Deck had warned her, repeatedly, back when they were on the beach, that it wasn't secure.

Still, she
would
use it—to call for help—if it looked as if Decker were going to die.

She knelt beside him, gingerly pulling back the open front of his over-shirt to take a look at his gunshot wound. But she couldn't get it over his shoulder, so she tried instead to pull up the short sleeve and …

Oh, jeez, oh, no. There was what looked like a furrow, about three inches long, in the side of his upper arm. It looked raw and painful and it was still oozing blood—but at least it wasn't pouring out of him. That was good, wasn't it?

Still, she looked around for something relatively clean to use to apply pressure.

Sam and Alyssa's washer and dryer were out here in the garage—along with one of those utility sinks—and Tracy headed for the dryer, praying for a load of towels or sheets. But it was empty, which wasn't really a surprise, knowing Alyssa, who was too perfect to leave a load of anything anywhere before she left her house.

Tracy's pants—only partially bloody—were still in the front of the
truck, and she grabbed them and returned to Decker, wrapping them as tightly as she dared around his upper arm, tying the pants legs together.

She realized that she had to check him for additional gunshot wounds—for all she knew he'd been hit more than once. His jeans were sodden with blood, mostly on his right side, which could've come from his injured arm or that cut on the back of his head. But it was impossible to tell whether or not he'd been hit in the leg, too. She tried running her hands across the denim, checking for holes—little tears like the one in her computer bag and…

Computer!

She had her computer, and her plug-in-anywhere Internet access. She could e-mail Tess and Alyssa and Jules—at least let them know she and Deck were alive.

She yanked the case from the front seat and brought it back over to Decker. She took the computer out and set it on the floor and—she hadn't turned it off after leaving the beach. It had only been hibernating, so it sprang immediately to life.

Tracy quickly accessed her address book, found Tess's, Jules's, Alyssa's, and Sam's e-mail addresses, and typed a short, quick note, fingers flying over the keyboard.
Alive. Need help. Gunshot and poss head injury. Phone not secure. We're in garage. Key?

She didn't want to be more specific than that, and it really wasn't going to be that hard for them to figure out. Tess didn't have a garage— their apartment building had a carport. And Jules didn't live in San Diego, which left Alyssa and Sam.

Before she hit send, she added
Cant help D&S—please provide backup,
because there was no way Decker was going to make it to the airport to pick up Dave and Sophia. Even if he miraculously came to right now, his truck was missing its back window. Not to mention the fact that there were an unknown number of mad bombers and gunmen scouring the city, quite probably looking for them.

Tracy also zapped a quick e-mail to Lindsey, her best friend at Trouble -shooters—petite, Asian American, and a former detective with the LAPD.
You home?! 9-1-1—need help now.