Stand-in Groom (21 page)

“You’re lying,” he bit out. He needed both hands to hold the gun steady, he was shaking so badly. He turned suddenly, and fired three fast, deafening shots that shattered the front window. Chelsea couldn’t hold back a scream as Moira crumpled in a dead faint.

“Show me where the freakin’ cash register is, or I’m going to freakin’
kill
you!” the man shouted.

——

Finding a big enough parking spot around the corner from Chelsea’s office, Johnny pulled the Meals on Wheels truck into it, feeling particularly triumphant. His luck had been right on all day. Even Mr. Gruber had seemed much better, upbeat and cheerful for all of Johnny’s visit.

And now he was going to drop in on his wife, see if he couldn’t talk her into going home with him for an early lunch. Lunch, and maybe a little nonfood refreshment …

He rounded the corner, a definite jaunt in his step, but then stopped short.

There were three police cars and an ambulance haphazardly parked in the middle of the street, as if they’d arrived in a big hurry and skidded to a stop. Uniformed officers were crawling all over the place, going in and out of the building.

A crowd had gathered, and someone had put out yellow crime-scene tape, keeping them back—away from the main door to the building Chelsea’s office was in.

It was the yellow tape that did it, the yellow tape that sent Johnny’s heart into his throat and twisted
his insides into a knot. He’d grown up in a part of town where he’d seen that yellow tape too often, and nine times out of ten, when that yellow tape appeared, there was a dead body or two to go with it.

Johnny broke into a run, and as he got closer the fear that was gripping his chest tightened its grasp as he saw the entire front window of Chelsea’s outer office had been broken from the inside out. Jagged shards of glass littered the sidewalk.

He pushed through the crowd and slipped under the yellow tape, only to come face-to-face with a cop the size of a professional wrestler. “Where do you think you’re going, pal?” the man demanded roughly.

“My wife works in there.” Johnny pointed to the office beyond the broken window. He could barely get the words out, his throat felt so tight. “What happened? Was anyone hurt?”

“I don’t know yet,” the cop told him, sympathy in his eyes, moving aside to let him pass. “I’m just working crowd control. All I know is gunshots were fired and someone called the ambulance.”

Gunshots fired. Ambulance.

Johnny took the stairs up to the door three at a
time, bracing himself for the worst, preparing for the scenario that he dreaded finding—the woman he loved, her life snuffed out, lying in a pool of blood.

For the first time since his mother had died, Johnny found himself praying.

Several plainclothes detectives were standing and talking with several uniformed officers. But there was no sign of Chelsea—dead or alive.

“I’m Chelsea Spencer’s husband,” he nearly shouted at one of the police officers. “Where is she? Is she all right?”

“She’s one of the women who worked here?” the policeman asked.

“Yes.”

“Then she’s with the paramedics,” the policeman told him, “in the back office. Someone was hurt, but I don’t know who. Junkie came in, needing a fix, went ballistic with a gun.”

“Oh, my God.” The door to Chelsea’s office was closed, but Johnny went toward it anyway, intending to knock it down if he had to, imagining Chelsea lying there, in her office, bleeding to death while the paramedics stood nearby, unable to save her.

But he didn’t have to knock the door down, because before he got there, it swung open.

And Chelsea was standing there. “Johnny? I thought I heard your voice.”

She was alive. She was whole. Unbloodied. Unhurt.

Johnny reached for her, holding her tightly, unable to breathe, unable to hear from the rushing of the blood in his head, unable to see from the blur of tears that filled his eyes, unable to say anything but her name.

She held him just as tightly as he lifted his head and kissed her.

It wasn’t a kiss of desire, although there was always a spark of passion each time their lips met. It was more a kiss of affirmation, a kiss of possession, a kiss of gratitude. It was a kiss that drove home to Johnny all that he would have lost had Chelsea been killed today, and it pushed him beyond his limit.

Holding tight to Chelsea, Johnny wept.

“Johnny, my God …” He could hear the surprise in her voice.

“I’m sorry,” he said, laughing at himself, but unable to stop the flow of tears. “God, when I saw
that yellow tape, I thought …” His laughter became a sob and he kissed her again, harder this time, molding her body against his own, uncaring of who saw them kissing, and who saw him crying.

He let her pull him into her office. Moira was there, lying on the sofa, an ice pack on her head and a paramedic sitting at her side, taking her blood pressure and pulse.

Chelsea pushed him down into the chair behind her desk and then sat on his lap.

Johnny took a deep breath, closing his eyes and letting his head rest against the softness of her breasts. He felt her hands in his hair, her fingers soothing. God, talk about losing it.

When he finally opened his eyes, she was looking down at him, her expression so sweet, her eyes so tender. Yeah, he’d lost it, but she didn’t seem to mind.

He wiped his face with his hands, took a deep breath, forced a smile and tried to joke. “Let me get this straight.
You’re
the one who was face-to-face with a strung-out gunman, but
I’m
the one who’s being comforted. What’s wrong with this picture?”

“Excuse me, Ms. Spencer.” One of the plain-clothes cops was standing in the door and Johnny
and Chelsea both looked up. “If it’s possible, we’d like to ask you some questions now.”

“I have a few questions of my own.” Chelsea slid off Johnny’s lap. “I thought I overheard someone say you caught the man with the gun—is that true?”

“Yes, ma’am. A suspect similar to the one you described to the 911 operator was apprehended carrying a firearm.” The police detective stepped into the room. He was an older man, slightly overweight, with thinning hair combed futilely over a bald spot. But his eyes were sharp as he gazed at them and around the room, seeming to miss no detail. “What we’d like is to get your statement, and then take you down to the station, to ID the suspect in a lineup.”

“Will that take long?” Johnny asked.

The detective focused a pair of cool gray eyes on Johnny. “Are you the husband?”

Johnny stood up, holding out his hand. “Yeah. Giovanni Anziano.”

The detective clasped his hand. “Detective Paul White. It shouldn’t take more than fifteen minutes, tops.”

But Chelsea was shaking her head. “I can’t just
leave Moira here. And what about the broken window? Anyone could just walk right in and take our computers.”

Moira’s voice drifted thinly from the couch. “My brother’s on his way over. He’s going to drive me home. I could ask him to come back and make sure the window gets boarded up.”

“I can take care of that,” Johnny volunteered. “No problem. But before you go anywhere, I want to know what the hell happened.”

“The lock on the outer door was jammed again,” Moira told him, “and this guy just walked right in. We heard the bell when the door opened, and when we came out into the outer office, he was searching through my desk, looking for money.”

Chelsea spoke up. “He had one of those giant Dirty Harry guns.”

“The perp we picked up was carrying a .44 Magnum,” Detective White murmured.

“He kept asking where we kept the cash register,” Moira said. “And when we told him we weren’t a retail store, that we didn’t have a cash register, he freaked, and fired at the windows, and started really screaming at us. That’s when I did my Perils of Pauline routine and fainted. But
Dudley Do-Right wasn’t around to catch me, so I hit my head on the way down.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t catch you,” Chelsea told her friend.

“You were a little busy trying to figure out how to keep the wacko from slaughtering us,” Moira said dryly. “Personally, I think you made the right choice by ignoring me.”

Johnny gazed at Chelsea, unable to keep from picturing her standing there, all alone, one-on-one with a man who probably wouldn’t have hesitated to kill to get the money to buy him the drugs he needed.

“I was standing there, looking down the barrel of that enormous gun,” Chelsea said, her voice very soft, “knowing that this guy was going to kill me because we didn’t have a cash register that he could rob. And then I remembered—the petty-cash drawer. I keep a purse in the bottom drawer of my desk with about two hundred dollars in cash for emergencies or COD deliveries or whatever. I told him the money was in the other office, and that there was also a back door he could use to get out of the building.”

Chelsea took a deep breath. “I knew there was a
good chance he was going to get all paranoid about being caught, and that he would shoot me even if I gave him the money, but I was hoping that if I closed the door as we went into the back office, he would forget about Moira. So I gave him the money, and then I pretended to faint—I guess I figured maybe if I was lying on the floor, he might forget that he hadn’t already shot me. I don’t know, it just seemed like the right thing to do at the time, and when I opened my eyes again he was gone. That’s when I called 911.”

The police detective was taking notes on a small pocket pad. He looked up. “You were smart,” he said. “And you were extremely lucky. This man’s MO is almost identical to a robbery homicide that took place in Dorchester a week ago. Front window of the store shot out … Of course, three people were killed that time. Still, my money’s on him being the same guy. We have prints from Dorchester—with any luck they’ll match.”

Johnny reached for Chelsea, pulling her into his arms. “God,” he murmured. “My God.”

Chelsea’s voice shook. “May we go to the station now? I want to do this quickly so I can come back here and have my husband take me home.”

Johnny didn’t want to let go of her. “Sure you don’t want me to come with you?”

She shook her head. “I need you to stay and take care of that broken window. I should probably call the landlord and—”

“Don’t worry,” he told her. “I’ll take care of it. I’ll take care of everything.”

C
HELSEA COULDN’T BELIEVE
her eyes.

Two workmen were on the sidewalk and two were inside the office, carefully lining up a pane of glass to replace the broken window.

She glanced at her watch as she got out of the police car that had driven her back. True, she’d been gone longer than she’d hoped, but it really hadn’t been much more than an hour since she’d left Johnny to deal with the mess in the office.

Identifying the man who’d robbed her hadn’t taken long. She’d picked him out of the lineup
without hesitating. It had been the paperwork afterward that had taken forever.

The lock
still
wasn’t working on the outer door as she went into the office. Johnny was on the phone, sitting behind her desk, and he quickly rang off when he saw her.

Chelsea pointed out toward the outer office and the window. “How on earth …?”

Johnny smiled at her. “Rudy—you know, my boss at Lumière’s—his brother-in-law is best friends with a guy whose son owns a glass-replacement company. We got lucky, both that they had a truck in the neighborhood, and that this is a pretty standard-sized window.” He stood up. “Let me see how long these guys think they’re going to be. If they’re going to be here for a while, I’ll take you home and then come back.”

Chelsea followed him out into the outer office. There were two police detectives dusting Moira’s desk for fingerprints, and a uniformed cop standing nearby, chatting with them. This office had never been so busy. “Don’t you have to be at the restaurant pretty soon?”

Johnny shook his head. “I told Rudy I wouldn’t be able to get in until five at the earliest. I’ll call in
later and tell the guys what to start chopping for the evening’s special.”

Chelsea looked at the window and the men working. “They’re going to be done in just a few minutes. Why don’t we just wait, that way you won’t have to come back?”

“I’m going to have to come back anyway,” Johnny told her, putting an arm around her shoulder and giving her a hug. “Someone needs to be here when the truck arrives.”

“Truck?”

“Yeah. I arranged for a moving company to come out and pick up your computers and all the stuff in your desks and on your shelves,” Johnny told her.

“What?” Chelsea was shocked. “And move them where?”

“To my condo. I figured we can bring the dining-room table into one of the spare bedrooms and set up a temporary office there and—”

“No way.” Chelsea pushed away from him. “Absolutely not. That’s
crazy
—”

“It would only be temporary,” he said. “Until you found office space in a better part of town.”

Her voice rose. “Johnny … God! We can’t afford to be in a better part of town.”

“You can’t afford
not
to be.”

“I can’t believe you would just go and call movers without even asking me.”

His voice rose too. “I can’t believe you’re even
thinking
about staying here after what happened!”

“Well, I
am
thinking about it. And the more I think, the more I’m convinced that we have to stay. We have a lease. If we leave we’ll be breaking the lease, and we’ll not only have to pay a higher rent, but we’ll be slammed with a lawsuit and forced to pay the rent on this place too. Not to mention all the time we’ll waste searching for some mythical office that’s both safe
and
affordable.”

Johnny’s eyes were bright with anger. “Money,” he said. “That’s what it always comes down to for you, Chelsea, doesn’t it? What’s it going to cost you? Well, let me tell you something, babe. There’s no dollar amount in the world that’s worth you risking your life for. If you get sued by this scumbag landlord,
I’ll
pay. And
I’ll
pay the difference between what you’re paying now and the higher rent on a place with a doorman and real locks on the door. Jesus, in a year we’re both going to have
more money than we could spend in a lifetime! As far as I’m concerned, whether or not you should move your office was not a question that required any asking. You’re outta here, as of today. I don’t give a damn what your landlord says, or even what
you
say, for that matter.”