“It’s complicated,” he said.
Zane chuckled. “She’s a woman. That makes the situation complicated by definition. The real question is, what are you going to do about it?”
Brooks stared out the window at the mile markers slipping by. “I have no idea.”
Chapter 4
“You probably shouldn’t go in there, ma’am.” The young police officer standing outside the doorway of her classroom gave her an apologetic look. “It’s bad.”
Selena glanced at the officer’s name tag. “I only want to go in and grab my purse out of my desk, Officer Webber. And I really should clean up, since tomorrow is a school day.”
The blond-haired cop shook his head. “Ma’am, I don’t think you’ll be having any classes in that room for a while. Like I said, it’s a mess in there.”
Selena found that difficult to believe. She vaguely remembered there had been some broken glass from the windows and that some of the combination chair/desks had been pushed all over the classroom, but hopefully the young officer was exaggerating the extent of the damage, and she’d be able to clean up the place quickly. It had been a long day, and she was exhausted beyond belief. She definitely needed to get some sleep before facing the kids tomorrow. And today was only Monday. She’d be ready to drop by the end of the week.
She put on her best teacher face—the one she used when her kids got unruly—until the cop finally relented and moved aside. “Okay, I’ll let you in there, but only so you can grab your purse and look around. This is still technically a crime scene, even if the CSIs are already done with it. Just be careful, okay? I don’t want you to get hurt.”
Selena didn’t think that was a possibility until she noticed that the door was completely gone. There was nothing left but a broken frame and some twisted hinges. She hesitated a moment, wondering if Officer Webber was right. But then she took a deep breath and forced herself to keep moving. There was no amount of damage a little hard work couldn’t fix.
But when she stepped into the classroom, she stopped cold.Crap.It was even worse than the officer had suggested.
Broken desks were everywhere, chunks of the fake wood tops strewn about. There were bullet holes in the walls, and the entire row of windows along the outer wall of the classroom had been shattered. Glass shards spread from one side of the room to the other. The nice wood blinds that she’d paid for with her own money were smashed and hanging in pieces from their rods. The breeze blowing into the room made what was left of them sway and clatter against the frames, sounding nearly as desolate as Selena suddenly felt.
Even the little Christmas tree she’d put up in the front of the room near the corner looked saddened by what it had witnessed today.
Moving farther in, she saw what could only be pieces of the door lying halfway across the room. She couldn’t even begin to understand how they’d gotten there.
But worse than any of the broken glass and furniture was the blood. So much blood.
She expected to find it where Pablo had been shot. But the largest spatters of the reddish-brown stuff were in the middle of the floor, where she’d been tackled by that big cop. She frowned, trying to understand where the blood there had come from.
She replayed what had happened in her head, distinctly remembering Pablo pointing the gun at her, recalling how angry she’d been with him. After that, the windows had come crashing in, then the cop had tackled her to the floor. Even now, Selena could almost feel his muscled body shielding her as the sound of booming gunshots filled the air.
Had Pablo moved closer to them after he’d gotten shot? It didn’t seem possible.
She closed her eyes and forced herself to replay the scene again, even though it made her heart thump harder. She almost snarled as she realized how close Pablo—another kid ruined by the gangs in this city—had come to killing her and Ruben.
But no matter how many times the events flashed through her head, no matter how hard she dug for something she might have missed, Selena couldn’t come up with an explanation for how all that blood had gotten from where Pablo had been shot to the place she and the cop had been lying. How it had gotten on her was even more of a mystery. The only thing that could have possibly explained it was if one of the cops had been hit.
More precisely, one particular cop.
“Was the officer who saved me injured in the shooting?” she asked, turning to look at Officer Webber.
He stood a few feet away, looking around at all the destruction like he was as stunned as she was. “You mean Senior Corporal Brooks from SWAT?”
“Is he the big, good-looking black guy with all the muscles?” she asked.
Webber laughed. “I can’t really speak to the good-looking part, but yeah, that’s him. It’s kind of hard to miss those muscles. He’s a really big man. But as far as him being injured, I don’t think he got a scratch on him during the shooting.”
That didn’t make sense. There had been blood all over the both of them, and there didn’t seem to be any way it had come from Pablo. And it sure as hell hadn’t come from her. “Were you here during the shooting? Did you see him after I was taken away in the ambulance?”
The cop shook his head. “No. I got here about ten minutes after everything went down. But I saw Corporal Brooks several times after that and talked to him before he left. There were definitely blood stains on his uniform, but there’s no way it was his.”
Selena sighed. Was she ever going to figure out what had happened in this room?
“Do you happen know where his office is located?” she asked the cop.
It was nearly impossible to live in this town and not have heard about the team of elite police officers in SWAT, but while she’d seen a few video clips of their exploits, she’d never had an opportunity to meet one in person.
