Taking the Heat - Brenda Novak Mills & Boon M&B

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you okay?” she asked.

      He didn’t answer. He tried to sit up, but she gently pushed him back. “Wait. Let me check a few things first.” Quickly she threaded her fingers through his hair and felt his skull, searching for cuts or lumps, anything that might indicate a concussion. She knew he’d been hit in the back of the head. He could have been kicked there, as well. But she didn’t find anything indicative of serious injury, other than the knot she’d expected, the obvious busted lip and the gash above his left eye.

      “I’m fine,” he insisted, batting her hands away as though impatient to escape her probing. He staggered to his feet but favored his left side so badly, Gabrielle was sure he had some damaged ribs. He held his hand at an odd angle, too.

      “I’m afraid you’ve got a few broken bones,” she said. “And your forehead probably needs stitches.” She glanced at his blood on her hands and knew touching him had been foolish. He could have AIDS. Prisons were full of HIV. In training, they’d warned her about that. She even carried a pair of gloves on her belt. But she hadn’t been at the job long enough to have established any kind of habit and in the heat of the moment her natural impulse had won out.

      “Why don’t you sit until I can bring a doctor in here?” she asked.

      “He doesn’t need a doctor. He’ll be fine. Get him back where he belongs.” It was Sergeant Hansen, her supervisor. He’d overseen the herding of the men back to their cells, but now he hovered over her, frowning at the injured convict, who stood half a foot taller than both of them. “Afterward I want to speak to you at my desk,” he told her.

      Maybe she’d been stupid to break rank with the others; maybe it was going to cost her her job. But Gabrielle had acted according to her conscience and wasn’t prepared to back off yet. “He needs a doctor,” she insisted. “I’m pretty sure he’s got a couple of—”

      “Save your breath,” the inmate interrupted. “I’m not going to get a doctor because, according to your boss and his henchmen, this little incident never happened. Too many fights in one cell block might lead to the truth—that they’re being staged. And staging fights could cost your buddy Hansen, here, his cushy job.”

      His voice held a distinctly challenging edge, but even his anger couldn’t fully eclipse the smooth, cultured tones underneath. After seeing him fight like a man born to the streets and witnessing firsthand the power of his muscular body, the fact that he sounded more like a business executive than a maximum security prisoner came as a surprise to Gabrielle—but no more so than his accusation.

      “Of course it’ll be reported,” she said. “The response team is probably on its way right now.” She looked to Hansen for confirmation, but the narrowing of the sergeant’s cool gray eyes and Eckland’s strange reluctance when she’d demanded to be let into the cell block shook her faith.

      “I was thinkin’ of doin’ you a favor, scumbag,” Hansen said. “I figured you wouldn’t be too eager for me to report another fight, seein’ as how you could lose your privileges again. But maybe you don’t know when a guy’s tryin’ to be nice. So I’ll report it if you say so. Is that what you want?”

      The inmate didn’t answer, but a muscle flexed in his jaw and his eyes turned hard and glittery.

      Hansen grinned. “That’s what I thought. Now get your ass back where it belongs before I change my mind.”

      “WHAT DO YOU THINK you were doing out there?” Sergeant Hansen shouted once Gabrielle had composed herself enough to appear at his desk.

      “I was trying to stop a convict from sustaining physical injury,” she said. “I thought I was doing my job.”

      “You were risking your fool life, that’s what you were doing. I had things under control.”

      Gabrielle had promised herself she’d be diplomatic. She needed her job. The small desert town of Florence, Arizona, revolved around seven prisons, including the juvenile detention center. There wasn’t anything else that would pay her enough to survive, at least not anything she could get. After running away from home at least a dozen times in her teen years, she’d barely graduated high school. College had been out of the question. But she was too honest to suck up to Hansen and pretend she agreed with his actions, so she folded her arms and kept her mouth shut.

      “Randall Tucker killed his own wife, Officer Hadley,” Hansen announced as though he were playing some kind of trump card. “I’ll get his jacket so you can read it if you don’t believe me.”

      Gabrielle didn’t want to read his jacket or anyone else’s. The inmates’s wrap sheets were sometimes available to the officers, but she purposely avoided anything she didn’t need to know for fear she’d lose the nerve to do her job. Working for the state provided good medical and dental benefits, an excellent retirement plan and favorable hours. Arizona needed corrections officers in Florence so badly, they’d even offered her bonus money to work in this particular prison, and they’d given her days even though most rookies had to take the night shift.

      “That’s his name, Randall Tucker?” she asked. “I think I read about him in the paper when I was living in Phoenix.”

      He nodded. “Then you know he suspected his wife of having an affair, got insanely jealous and hired a private detective to follow her around. When he found out she was cheating on him, he flipped out and beat her to a bloody pulp with that karate shit of his. No one’s ever found the body.”

      “If they’ve never found the body, how do we know what happened? Did he confess?” she asked in surprise, wishing she could remember more about the story. She was new at corrections, but she’d seen enough court TV to know the rarity of such a conviction.

      “Hell, no. Tucker’s too smart for that. He’s still trying to get out of here. But a whole roomful of people watched him drag her away from an aerobics class the night she disappeared, and he was the last person to see her. He didn’t even report her missing for three days. By then her friends were getting suspicious, but all the police could find was blood spatter in the garage consistent with a blow to the head. The kind made with a fist.”

      Shying away from the mental picture Hansen was purposely creating in an attempt to intimidate her, Gabrielle went back to the name—Randall Tucker. For a moment his deep, angry, fathomless blue eyes flashed into her mind. She recalled his face. A rugged, very interesting face. The face of a man who’d killed his wife in his own garage.

      Gabrielle stifled a shudder. “I don’t care what he’s done,” she said, remembering her ideals. “It’s not up to me to punish him.”

      “I’m not punishing him. I’m just letting him pick on someone his own size.”

      “Four to one is hardly a fair fight.”

      The muscles of Hansen’s arm flexed as he rubbed the top of his blond flattop, studying her. What he lacked in height he tried to compensate for in the weight room, which made him appear almost square. “You think his wife would want him to have a pleasant stay here?”

      “I don’t have to answer that. The government dictates what his stay is like, not me. Or you,” she added.

      He chuckled bitterly, finally seeming to accept that he wasn’t going to convince her. “Damn bleeding heart liberal, that’s what you are. It’s a shame what people like you have done to this country. Prisoners are treated like guests at the taxpayer hotel while we work like slaves to keep food on the table.”

      “What good does it do to behave like them?” she asked. “Just because we work with depraved men doesn’t mean we have to lose our humanity.”

      “You think I’ve lost my humanity, Officer Hadley?”

      Gabrielle hesitated but, in the end, her natural frankness won out. “I don’t think what you did back there was right. And I sure as hell don’t think you should have denied Randall Tucker a doctor. He’s obviously hurt. We should send him to the health center.”

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