It felt worse, somehow, knowing that they were both leaving within the hour. That neither of them really knew where they were headed next. The notion made the separation all the more permanent.
She paused a few paces back from his door, her thoughts quieting. His door was open. It shouldn’t have been. For an irrational moment, she feared she’d missed him. That he’d already left and somehow the printouts in her hand were duplicates, or some cruel joke. Then she spotted movementinside, a male figure moving backward into the door’s space.A visitor?Or someone come to help him?
She eased closer and quickly realized it really wasn’t either thing. The figure wore rumpled dark brown on brown, a loaded gun belt at his rotund waist, and an emblazoned hat on his head. It was the sheriff of Leeland County again. If the man was doing anything, he was delaying Lance’s preparation to go. And considering the experience she’d recently had in the man’s department—with his son, specifically—she wasn’t in the mood to spare him her temper. So, she squared her shoulders and strode into the room through the wide-enough space at his back. For good measure, she looked down at the papers she still held, hoping to emphasize the point as she spoke. “Sheriff, we’re trying to discharge—”
She was only a couple of feet past the man, maybe parallel with the interior corner of the foot of Lance’s bed, when she spotted movement in her peripheral vision. The sheriff addressed her simultaneously, his voice haggard and harsh and sending warning bells blaring in her mind. Lynnette turned just in time to see what she thought might have been a gun—the sheriff’s gun—aimed in the direction of her face.
Then the lighting in the room blinked, or snapped, or flickered both visually and audibly, she wasn’t really sure. It was like watching a lightning storm and suddenly being too close when it struck. And just as suddenly, Sheriff Morty Parker was against the far wall and sliding down to the floor, unconscious. Smoke sizzled up from his chest. His gun skittered across the floor, sliding under the hospital bed.
Lynnette jumped back, her brain registering the sights and crackling bursts of sounds almost belatedly. “Holy shit!” she exclaimed on reflex, her hand somehow flinging the papers completely loose in her startled movement. “What the hell?”
Lance started moving, swinging his legs over the side of the bed and reaching for his socks—because his things had been pulled free of the cupboard storage for him—and her mind fell into a manic sort of autopilot.
What the hell had just happened? Why was the sheriff even there? Why did it look like he’d been about to shoot her?
She dropped to the floor as the questions flooded from her, scrambling to re-gather the papers. She spotted the gun she vaguely remembered hearing Lance ask about, nearly kissing the heel of his foot, so she warned him to be careful with his foot placement as he maneuvered.
He promptly swept it up with the pillowcase he no longer needed and spouted off an obnoxious answer that helped, annoyingly, to pull her more thoroughly into her head. Something about already knowing the answers to her questions.
What the hell does he mean by that?
“—promise he’s not dead,” Lance was saying when she tuned back in.
Lynnette frowned at him, but in truth, her frown was born of frustration at the larger series of events. Whatever he’d done, which she didn’t have the ability to think about at the moment, he’d done to protect her. She couldn’t have dodged that bullet.
Her gaze shifted to the unconscious sheriff, and the nurse in her reared to the forefront. The words were out before she could remember that she was, technically, not employed. “I should check on him.” She reasoned he’d hit his head; he hadn’t stirred since his body had slumped to the ground, and given his age and likely increased risk of cardiovascular event, it was irresponsible of her not to ascertain that worse damage hadn’t been incurred. Despite that he had just tried to commit homicide in a hospital. While wearing a badge.
Lance reiterated the sheriff’s state, shrugging off the head bump, but followed all of that with a statement that snared her focus once more. “I know how to modulate my voltage.”
Lynnette blinked at him. “Your voltage.” She said the words numbly, unable to even form them into a question.
He actually grinned. “What’s the hospital’s policy on attempted murder?”
He did not.But now it was him not looking at her—in his case, because he was multi-tasking—so he couldn’t see the glare that overtook her expression. “Please don’t tell me you held back only to avoid us cuffing you to a bed and calling the police.”
Having managed to settle his pants over his hips without flashing her his junk—which she was in no way disappointed about—he began working on his belt while he explained that his comment had been in reference to the sheriff. He expected the sheriff would need to be restrained. Before she could ask why, he was elaborating … and ripping off the hospital gown, to reveal his ridiculously sculpted chest that she still could not allow herself to stare at. So, she tried to focus on his words and not his muscles, or the tattoo over his heart.
“Counting aiming at you, he made two attempts to end a life in this room in less than five minutes,” Lance explained. And that was a pretty damn jarring statement. He further explained that Parker had gone so far as to confess his intentions, as he was confident in his success, but of course … that hadn’t panned out. By the time Lance was done patting himself on the back and pointing out how his medical chart would corroborate his sobrietyifthey took it to court, he’d tugged his shirt over his head and covered up the artistry of his chest.
The artistryonhis chest.
Which she hadn’t been admiring.
Lynnette pursed her lips and held silent for a moment as she attempted to pull herself together and make some sense of thescene.Insanity. The entire day’s been insanity.Rather, it had been a bullshit nightmare, but that was an acceptable alternate descriptor. She moved forward, slapped Lance’s papers against the chest she’d never otherwise get to touch, and instructed him not to lose them before scooping up the pillowcase-enclosed gun. “I’ll take this and fetch security.” It was outside Gayle’s parameters, but she wasn’t technically popping in on another patient, either. This was an unexpected development that still involved finishing up Lance’s case.
And fuck Gayle.Not the healthy response, but it bolstered her, anyway.
She rushed from the room, moving with urgency, keeping her undesired package close to her body lest it swing too wide and bump anyone or anything. She needed to either get all the way back to the nurse desk to call for security, or find—There!Her first stroke of good luck all damn day.
Doctor Garland, pushing sixty but still sharp as a tack, had just stepped from Kara’s room.
“Doctor!” Lynnette called, projecting her voice as much as she dared. Even if he’d heard she had been fired, she was doing the right thing by reporting the incident she’d walked in on.
He turned to her, his movement abrupt enough to assure he hadn’t seen her, and a small smile lifted his lips. “What’s the urgency, Lynnette?”
She moved up to the edge of his personal space so she could speak quietly and held out the bundle in her arms. The last thing she wanted was to be seen by the wrong person carrying a gun around, even if it would never hold her fingerprints. “We have an emergency. The sheriff from Leeland County just barged into Blackburn’s room while he was preparing to be released and assaulted him, and when I walked in—obliviously—Sheriff Parker pointed his weapon at me instead.”
Garland’s eyes bulged and he tucked his tablet under his arm to accept the pillow case and peek inside. “Is this—” He cut himself off, paling, then quickly wrapped it into a secure knot. His voice was lower and firmer when he spoke again. “Tell me exactly what happened. Who’s hurt, how bad, and is the threat still active?”
