He squeezed her hands. The ambulance lumbered down the alley behind yet another cruiser and braked to a halt next to the Escalade. Two EMTs leapt out of the cab and sprinted into the warehouse. Sorenson pointed to each body in turn. “Heart attack. Gunshot wound to the shoulder. Dead.”
An EMT dropped to his heels by her father and snapped on gloves, then did a double take when he saw Eve. “I’ve got her,” Matt said. He slid his arm under hers and helped her to her feet, guiding her out the warehouse door into the sun.
“But Dad—” she started.
“They’ve got him. They need space to work.”
He gently helped her sit at the edge of the open ambulance door, then pulled a blanket off a shelf and wrapped it around her shoulders.
“I don’t need a blanket. It’s a hundred and five degrees,” she said. The sun beat down on the alley and on her head. Maybe that was causing the blurry vision, the shimmering sense of unreality.
“When the adrenaline wears off you’re going to be shivering,” Matt explained.
“I remember,” she said, fumbling at the blanket with shaking hands, then pulling it tight. “But I don’t feel anything. For the first time in my life, I don’t feel anything at all. Is that shock? I felt something after the first shooting. I was angry and scared. I felt something.” She looked at him, heard her voice rising. “Do you live like this? How do you live with nothing inside you?”
Matt put his hands on her shoulders, his warm fingers curving around to squeeze gently as he peered into her eyes. “You’re alive. Your father’s alive. Murphy’s dead. It’s okay now.”
With a shuddering sigh she subsided. Matt reached out and tucked her hair behind her ear. He laid gentle fingers along her jaw and exerted just enough pressure to turn her head so he could look at her face. The impact site throbbed, and in her peripheral vision Eve could see the reddened swelling skin. Matt pressed gentle thumbs to the edges of her swelling cheek, testing the bone, then found an ice pack and cracked it to activate it.
“Hold this,” he said, his voice eerily quiet and calm.
“Okay,” she said, and put the pack to her cheek.
“You’ll need X-rays,” he added as he dug through a kit and extracted a pair of tweezers. With gentle fingers he began to dislodge the bits of concrete embedded in her right knee.
“Okay,” she said again, because what else could she say when he wasn’t saying anything? “How are you?”
“That’s my line,” he said, but Eve couldn’t laugh.
“You just killed someone,” she said. His gaze flicked up, and she filled in the rest of the black, black comedy. “Not your first time at that rodeo either, is it?”
Oh, Matt. What do you do with it all, with the horror and terror and exhaustion, with the daily grind, with Iraq and Luke and undercover police work? Where does it go?
“What happened?” he asked.
“I was expecting a package. The UPS guy always drops it, knocks, then takes off. I heard the knock and opened the door. Lyle must have told the delivery driver he’d bring it up for him.”
“So you went with him?”
“He had a gun! You were in the shower! You were naked,” she said, as if this was obvious.
He gave her a look, just a look.
“This is where you tell me you have a black belt in karate and are expert in hand-to-hand combat.”
“I would have stopped him from taking you.”
“Or died trying,” she finished for him.
“Better me than you.” Because I’m already half dead.
“That’s not how I see it.” Because half dead is half alive. “Half” meant room for hope, room for a second chance.
No response. She looked around the increasingly crowded open space between the alley and the warehouse as more police cruisers, unmarked cars, and a fire truck pulled up. Sorenson trotted over and gave Eve what was left of her iPhone. She clasped the pieces with shaking hands and watched Travis get loaded into the second ambulance. “You didn’t…?”
“Kill him? No. When Lyle aimed at you, Travis stepped toward you and McCormick got him in the shoulder, not the chest. I think he was trying to stop Lyle, and it saved his life.”
Sorenson moved away to supervise Travis’s trip to the hospital. Eve considered her ruined iPhone. “He shot my phone. I run my entire life through this phone and now it’s got a bullet hole in it.”
“I thought he shot you.”
“I thought he was going to shoot me.” She stared at the phone for a moment, then felt the hair on the nape of her neck lift. “You got my call.” Obviously.
“Yes.”
“That’s how you knew where I was.”
“Yes.”
Keep going, as painful as it is … “You heard me tell Lyle I love you.”
He bent over a particularly stubborn piece of grit. “You were under duress,” he said evenly.
“Yes,” she said. “That’s happened to me quite a bit lately. But I know how I feel.”