Justice

Another curse hissed past her lips as she swung around the end of the building and lunged forward. She paused at the final corner that stood between her and the perps doing their dirty business.

A gunshot whizzed past as she stole a look around that corner.

She jerked back. Gritted her teeth and readied to swing around and return fire.

In a blur of unexpected motion Hadden charged past her.

What the hell was he doing now?

Gunfire erupted. Hadden’s as well as the enemies’.

She dived for the ground, rolled into the open and fired. One man was down, writhing and howling in pain. Hadden and another were entangled in a savage, rolling-on-the-ground hand-to-hand battle.

She fired once more. Her target stumbled when the shot tore through his thigh. But he didn’t stop. He headed straight for one of two vehicles waiting nearby.

She scrambled up and burst into a dead run. “Stop! Police! Drop your weapon!”

He glanced back, fired twice. Sent her ducking behind one of the vehicles.

So much for negotiations.

If he got away…

Her feet were moving even before the decision fully penetrated her brain. She dashed from her cover and made a dive for the passenger side door of the second vehicle at the same time her perp went for the driver’s side.

Weapons drawn, barrels leveled, they slid into the front seat simultaneously.

“You got a death wish, bitch?” he growled.

Pain glittered in his eyes. Kayla didn’t have to look to know that blood pulsed from the wound like a mini-geyser. It was possible he hadn’t noticed or that he just wasn’t ready to give up.

“Maybe,” she said, her voice dead calm. “But I’m not the one bleeding to death.”

He flinched. Didn’t look down. Damn, she mused. A real tough guy.

“I don’t want to have to shoot a cop,” he warned, his face already growing paler.

She wondered at that. Why would a bike thief, even a well-connected one making six figures, risk this level of jeopardy? It didn’t make sense.

No time to worry about that now. The black, somber barrel of his weapon remained aimed directly at her.

“Do you know how long it takes the average human to bleed out?” She cocked her head, peered around the lethal barrel and deliberately assessed him for a second or two. “Not very long when an artery is involved. After you lose that first liter it all goes downhill from there. It takes only minutes to reach a point where no amount of medical care will make a difference.”

He swallowed hard, the difficulty clear in the workings of his throat muscles.

“Do you really want to die over a bunch of over-priced bikes?” A line of sweat had already formed on his brow and upper lip. She took a risk, glanced at the leg. “Damn, it’s pumping out pretty fast. You feel dizzy yet? Cold?”

His hand shook—once, twice—before he lowered his weapon. “Call me an ambulance,” he choked out.

Kayla confiscated his weapon, called for the paramedics then made a makeshift tourniquet with his shirt when she couldn’t stop the flow of blood any other way.

Hadden had the guy he’d been tangoing with cuffed and was attending to the one he’d been forced to shoot. A shoulder wound involving mostly soft tissue, but the guy was crying like a baby. The buyer, Kayla surmised. He looked a little pudgy and had that fluorescent-lighting pallor of the skin—definitely not the type to be out pirating bikes.

“Ouch,” Hadden said as he looked over her handiwork on the guy with the femoral artery injury. “That’ll leave a mark.”

“He’ll live.” As long as the ambulance gets here in a hurry, she added silently. She’d have to keep a close watch on the jerk until then. Inflicting a lethal wound hadn’t been her intent, but she’d done what she had to in order to stop the perp from fleeing the scene and to protect herself…which might not have been necessary at all had she not been interrupted. She scrubbed her bloody palms over her jeans and eyed her uninvited backup. “What the hell are you doing here, Hadden?”

He lifted one broad shoulder in a negligent shrug. “Just driving by, thought you might need some help.”

“Bullshit,” she tossed right back. If he thought she was that naive he’d better get a grip.

Before she could pursue the point, two Pinal County cruisers arrived along with the ambulance.

“Hell, Ryan,” one of the deputies said as he surveyed the aftermath. “Why didn’t you just kill ’em all and save the taxpayers the cost of a trial?”

“Funny,” she muttered as she started walking toward the vehicles. She glanced over her shoulder at Hadden. “Don’t you go disappearing on me, we’re not finished yet.”

Two hours later, with two of the perps in the OR for surgery and the other in county lockup, Kayla had finished going over the scene with Steve Devon, the best county investigator in the Sheriff’s Department.

“I’ll need your report on my desk first thing in the morning,” Devon told her before letting her go. He flicked a sour look at Hadden. “Yours too, Detective.”

Devon didn’t have to spell out what that meant. A report was SOP, standard operating procedure. The urgency, however, was related to two wounded perps. Anytime shots were fired, the department flinched.

The investigator’s stern questions only added to Kayla’s building annoyance at Hadden. She glared at him as they walked toward their abandoned vehicles.

“This should have gone down without any shots fired.” If his arrival hadn’t set her targets on alert, a good portion of what transpired could have been prevented. She prided herself on doing her job with the least excessive force possible.

“You just keep telling yourself that if it makes you feel better, Ryan,” he snorted. “But those guys had no intention of being rounded up today, otherwise they wouldn’t have been armed. Or willing to shoot at a cop,” he added.

That part was true. She’d been surprised briefly by the unexpected exchange. But she still didn’t like him horning in on her bust.

She went around to the back of her Jeep and opened the hatch. After pawing through a dozen items that she didn’t know why she hauled around, she finally found the antibacterial wipes. For the good they would do. She had that scumbag’s blood all over her.

Hadden, playing it smart, kept his mouth shut as she cleaned herself up. By the time she’d gone through half the container of thin wipes her hands felt reasonably clean. There was nothing to be done about her clothes. The jeans and sweater were ruined.

She closed the hatch and settled her renewed fury on Hadden. “Now tell me what you were really doing here. This is my jurisdiction,” she added. “You have no business nosing around here without giving someone at the Sheriff’s Department a courtesy call.”

He grinned. A spear of warmth went through her. She looked away. She hated that he so easily turned the tide of her emotions. That was one reason she’d avoided him the past couple of months. Getting involved with another cop wouldn’t be smart. And she could see that coming a mile off. She knew Hadden’s type—nice guy, the kind who made lonely women fall in love all too easily.

“Now we’re even,” he said jokingly, but she knew that whatever his motivation, it was no joking matter.

“Don’t even go there,” she cautioned. Tucson was his jurisdiction, but her friend Rainy Carrington’s murder was her jurisdiction, no matter what the invisible boundary lines said. She would not give up on finding the whole truth. Not now…not ever. Hadden might as well get used to it. This had been a bad year for Kayla. First she’d lost her grandmother. Then, a few months later, one of her best friends had been murdered.

“I’ve been watching you the past couple of days,” he admitted, surprising her all over again.

She schooled her expression and planted her hands on her hips. “What for?” Every instinct told her she wasn’t going to like his answer. He’d been hiding things from her all along. But, so far, she’d had no reason to complain. God knew she was hiding plenty from him. That was another reason she’d steered clear of him the past couple of months.

“Why don’t we go someplace where we can talk?” The suggestion was accompanied by a long, searching look from those piercing blue eyes.