He insisted that Maggie prepare the coffee, pretending he didn’t know where she kept the filters. Fact was, he’d made coffee in her kitchen more in the last month than she probably had in the last several years. Since they’d come in out of the rain Maggie hadn’t put down her gun. She did so now, stuffing it into the back of her jeans’ waistband so she could make the coffee.
Patrick grabbed a stack of towels from a linen closet in the hall and offered one to the woman who had introduced herself as Samantha Ramirez. As she thanked him, her eyes—a gorgeous mocha brown—held his for a second too long before she probably realized he wasn’t on her side. He still wasn’t clear how this woman and Maggie had met. Maggie kept mentioning a hit piece on CNN. Ramirez didn’t offer any explanation. She seemed to recognize the situation was volatile enough and that it was best to say as little as possible.
“I don’t get it,” Maggie said as she smacked the coffeepot into its slot. “What’s so fascinating about me?”
She pushed the START button, then realized she didn’t have the machine plugged in. She yanked the cord free and shoved it into the nearby electrical outlet.
Before Ramirez could respond, Maggie continued, “I’ve gone through so much trouble to protect myself from killers—the fence, the security system, the stream at the back of the property—and you and your partner rip open my life for everyone in a matter of … what? Twenty-four, thirty-six hours?”
She pounded the coffeemaker’s START button again, and this time the machine sputtered and began to hiss.
“Why?” Maggie asked, and came to a standstill in front of Ramirez, who sat at the kitchen’s island across from her. “Why me?”
“Believe it or not, it’s not personal.”
Ramirez looked from Maggie to Patrick. It seemed as though she was imploring him to understand. Maybe she thought he would be more reasonable. Maybe she realized he couldn’t take his eyes off her. She toweled off her shoulder-length hair and sent the dark curls and waves into a wild cascade around her face. She reminded Patrick of some beautiful creature from Greek mythology.
“No, I don’t believe it’s not personal,” Maggie told her. She stared at Ramirez and crossed her arms over her chest. Then in almost a whisper she said, “Do you have any idea how close I came to shooting you?”
Ramirez’s head jerked up. Her hand with the towel froze in midair.
No, Patrick thought. She didn’t have any idea how close; neither did he.
Patrick continued to stay back like a spectator, watching the two women, close enough to intervene but far enough away that Maggie could ignore him.
Was she bluffing? Had she almost fired at the camerawoman?
In the fog and the mist it had been difficult to differentiate whether or not the camera was a gun. And Maggie had been upset, wound tight. He’d watched her once before confront a gunman. He’d seen her in action. He had watched Maggie shift into survival mode. It was like she had this on switch that when activated, she jumped into motion, single-minded and determined to do the right thing, whatever it took, no matter the consequences, no matter the risk to her own well-being.
It was one of the things he admired about his sister. She was a hero, just like their father had been. She was so much braver than Patrick. Yet at the same time, he understood how easy it was to let your emotions, your fears, your imagination get the best of you and drive you to panic. A panic that could prompt reckless assumptions and misperceptions. But despite this wave of uncharacteristic anger, he knew Maggie O’Dell would never have fired without being sure.
Samantha Ramirez, however, was not sure at all. “Look,” Ramirez began, and Patrick thought he saw her hand shake. “Jeffery’s an asshole sometimes. I honestly have no idea why he does half the things he does.”
“You just go along?”
“Basically, yes.”
“You have no journalistic integrity?”
Patrick could see Ramirez’s back go straight and her nostrils flare. “You know what I have?” she said, fear quickly firing over into anger. “I have a six-year-old son and I want him to grow up without having to clean toilets or wait on some asshole like Jeffery Cole. I have a Mexican mother who watches Jeopardy! as faithfully as she prays to the Virgin Mary so she can learn English well enough to pass her citizenship test. I have a shitload of bills and a mortgage twice the amount my tiny little two-bedroom home will ever be worth. So excuse me if I can’t afford your precious integrity just yet.”
The two women stared each other down. Rain began to pelt the windows again, only now it sounded more like sleet. The coffeemaker sputtered to an end, filling the kitchen with its fresh-brewed aroma.
Just when Patrick wondered if Maggie would throw Ramirez out into the storm, Maggie said, “Do you use cream or sugar?”
CHAPTER 34
Maggie tried not to give in to the hammering inside her head. She had thought once she was back inside, out of the rain and the cold, that the thrum-thump would subside. She was wrong.
She had not shot at Ramirez, but how close had she come?