There wasn’t anything he could do for Mr. Barrett, but he might still be able to save the man’s wife and daughter. There was a good possibility that whoever had murdered Mr. Barrett was up here somewhere. Alex would bet a month’s pay the intruder had Mrs. Bennett and Jessica with them.
Ignoring the dispatcher on the radio asking for details, Alex cautiously moved down the hallway. All the instruction in the police academy, not to mention four years of room-to-room clearance training he’d gotten in the Corps, took over as he left the first victim behind and continued along the dark hallway looking for the women and praying he’d find them alive. He cleared the bathroom first, then the laundry room, before coming to the master bedroom and the body of a middle-aged woman lying half off the bed, her throat slit. Dark red blood stained the pillow and sheets, spilling onto the carpeted floor.
Shit.
Alex swallowed hard. He’d seen wounds like this enough times in Iraq and Afghanistan to know there wasn’t any hope she was still alive.
Turning on his heel, he strode for the last room at the end of the hall. The door, adorned with a poster of some boy band hunk that Alex couldn’t have identified even in good light, was closed. There was part of Alex that didn’t want to open it.
He’d seen enough death when he was in the Corps. It was one of the biggest reasons he’d gotten out and become a cop. He’d hoped that as a police officer, he could actually save lives instead of seeing carnage every day.
That wasn’t working out so far tonight.
His heart in his throat, Alex turned the knob. He’d seen more than his fair share of man’s inhumanity to man, but even he wasn’t quite ready for what he found when he opened the door.
The bedroom was bathed in the glow of an active computer monitor sitting on the desk by the far wall. Jessica was tied to a chair a few feet away, her eyes wide and filled with tears above the duct tape covering her mouth, her curly red hair tousled all over the place.
But all the tape in the world couldn’t keep the girl quiet, not with the man standing behind her holding a long kitchen knife to her throat. Smirking, he pressed the blade more tightly against her skin. In his twenties, with short blond hair, he seemed so relaxed he might as well have been standing in line at Starbucks.
Alex lined up the three glowing dots on the Glock’s sights with the man’s head at the same time as he scanned the small room. The asshole in front of him was the obvious threat, but being in Force Recon had taught him that the most dangerous threat was frequently the one you didn’t see until it was too late. But there wasn’t much else to see, not unless you counted the closed closet door and boy band posters lining the walls.
That was when he caught sight of the big dog lying on the floor at the foot of the bed, blood matting the animal’s fur and staining the carpet, his side heaving as he labored to breathe.
Shit.
Alex’s gaze snapped back to the man behind Jessica, his finger tightening on the trigger. One little pull and the .45 caliber bullet would cleanly blow off the man’s head from this distance.
“Drop the knife and step away from the girl.”
He didn’t intend to give the asshole a lot of time to decide how this was going to go. The guy had already demonstrated he was more than willing to kill. If he refused to step away from the girl, Alex would have no problem putting him down.
The jackass only smiled broader and dug the blade into Jessica’s neck even more. She screamed louder under the tape covering her mouth.
Fuck this. He didn’t have time to talk this guy down.
Alex had just started squeezing the trigger when he realized that Jessica wasn’t looking at him or even up at the sicko holding the knife to her throat. She was staring at something over Alex’s left shoulder. Suddenly, the panic in her eyes sent a completely different message than the one he’d received earlier.
Gut clenching, Alex spun around just as a big blond man with a beard burst out of the closet and started shooting.
The first bullet hit Alex in the center of the chest and knocked him backward, driving the air out of his lungs and hurting like hell. He would be dead if it weren’t for the bulletpoof vest he was wearing.
He was still getting his feet back under him when the second and third shot hit him in the side, just under his left arm. He knew he was screwed the second the bullets tore through him. Lightweight covert Kevlar vests like the one he wore under his duty uniform weren’t meant to protect every inch of your torso, just as much as was practical. The sides were one of their weak areas.
Alex fell back hard, the intense pain in his chest telling him the shots had hit something that was vitally important to his continued existence. Ignoring the long-term implications of that, he brought his right hand around until his Glock was pointing at the gunman. He squeezed off two shots and was rewarded with the image of both rounds drilling the sneaky fucker right through the center of the chest.
Suddenly, breathing seemed more painful than it was worth. Alex’s whole chest felt like it was on fire. He wanted to say the hell with it. He’d fought hard and taken out a lot of bad guys in his time—including the son of a bitch hiding in the closet—and he liked to think all that had earned him a pain-free express checkout. But he couldn’t leave yet. Jessica was still in trouble with a psychopath holding a knife to her throat. There was more to do before he was finished.
Gritting his teeth, he rolled onto his left side, dragging his right arm off the floor and straining with every muscle in his body to get his gun pointed in the general direction of the guy with the knife. Only, the asshole wasn’t standing behind the girl anymore. He was right there in Alex’s face, kicking his Glock out of his hand and sending it bouncing across the carpet.
Alex braced himself, expecting the guy to plunge the knife into him, but instead, the bastard kicked him in the ribs, head, face, stomach, and anywhere else he could reach.
Pain exploded through Alex’s body. He got his right arm up—his left wouldn’t even function now—and tried to defend himself, but it was useless. He was losing buckets of blood by the second. Sooner or later, the guy would get tired of what he was doing and skewer him with that damn knife.
Just then, a snarl broke through the wave of darkness washing over him. Alex opened his eyes to see a big, furry shape lunge at the guy. The dog, covered in his own blood and so weak he’d barely been able to breathe moments ago, had somehow found the strength to clamp his teeth down on the man’s arm.
The asshole shouted in pain and turned his attention on the dog, lifting the knife to stab the animal.
Jessica screamed behind the tape, probably begging the dog to run and save himself. But that wasn’t the way this dog was going to go out. Alex decided it wasn’t the way he was going out, either.
