Lyle laughed. “You’re in no position to negotiate, Evie. In fact, by the time we’re done, you’re going to be thinking of really creative ways to keep me happy. You think Mr. New Boyfriend’s going to be okay with that?”
Her brain couldn’t keep up, spinning wheels at seeing the terrifying emptiness in Lyle’s eyes where a soul should be. It looked like something she should recognize, but she couldn’t find the word. “Who?” she asked, distracted. Because she didn’t have a new boyfriend. She had a cop.
He dropped to his heels beside her, and despite her tough fa?ade she flinched back. “Not a good sign if you can’t remember his name. Chad. He’s in your bar, in your apartment. In your bed. So serious, so quickly,” Lyle said, studying her face. “Are you in love with him?”
Evil. That was the word. Evil. After a lifetime of hearing about it in church, she was seeing it personified for the very first time. She controlled the impulse to look at the phone, still hidden in her father’s palm. “Maybe,” she said
“Maybe? The Eve I remember was either in love or not in love. So impetuous, all these whirlwind, passionate affairs. You were like something off a soap opera.”
Heat rushed into her cheeks. “That was ten years ago. It was high school,” she snapped.
“Do you love him?” he said again.
The nearly inaudible words somehow drew Travis’s attention from his position standing guard by the loading dock’s door. Eve looked at him, wide-eyed and pleading. Maybe he wasn’t having as much fun playing with the big boys as he thought he would. Maybe he’d help her.
Travis didn’t move.
Dying in this warehouse was looking more and more likely. She didn’t want the words to go unsaid. She knew the core of Matt Dorchester, and she loved that man. It didn’t matter if he could love her back. She loved him. “Yes,” she said quietly, “I love him, but he’s got nothing to do with any of this.”
Lyle dug his fingers into Eve’s arm and dragged her to her feet. “You think Lancaster cops don’t have something to do with this? Don’t lie to me, Evangeline.”
For the first time in her life, impulse compelled her to freeze. Still holding her, Lyle swung his gun, clenched in his fist, at her face. She screamed and ducked, heard her father’s weak shout from the floor behind her. The blow glanced off the top of her skull. Lyle hauled her upright and stepped into his swing, this time with the full weight of his body behind his arm. When he connected, white-hot pain exploded under her eye, replacing her bones with a strange sense of weightlessness. Then the back of her head hit something hard and the world went black.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Matt hadn’t driven so much as an unmarked police car in two years, had totally avoided driving anything that handled like a Crown Vic with the police package. He’d studied the way his fellow officers walked and talked, then trained himself to do the opposite. He’d crafted a smile, a stance, mannerisms and speech patterns that were as far from cop or ex-military as he could manage.
But when he heard the sound of something striking Eve Webber’s flesh, heard her shocked cry of pain, an endless moment of silence, and then the scrape and thud of a body hitting cement, training took over. Lights and sirens switched to full wail, gas pedal floored, and within seconds he was doing eighty miles an hour down Thirteenth Street, Hawthorn and McCormick right behind him in another unmarked car, with the uniforms flanking them down Hancock, heading to cut off any escape at the river.
“What the fuck is going on?”
Hawthorn’s furious question echoed in his ear, but Matt didn’t bother to answer.
“Sounds like Murphy just hit Eve,” Sorenson said into the radio. She had one foot braced against the floor, the other tucked under her as she loaded her vest with extra magazines, then ran the cord connecting her radio’s handset under her arm and clipped it to her shoulder. She fitted her earpiece. Matt’s earpiece was already in as he tracked the input from the car’s radio, the earpiece, and Eve’s voice all while maneuvering through traffic.
“Tell your partner to turn that fucking siren off when we hit the alleys.”
“I heard him,” Matt said. Fuckfuckfuck! Any more mistakes and Eve could pay with her life! He flicked the switch to cut the lights and sirens. When he swerved into the alley running perpendicular to the river and rolled to a halt at Second and Hancock, they hurled themselves out of the car.