LITMIR.BIZ

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take his brother showing up here to tell him something about the neighborhood wasn’t right. It was a Friday night, and the streetlights hadn’t kicked on; yet, there wasn’t a kid to be seen.

      Cole quickly circled to the far end of the playground where soccer fields bordered the backs of the houses for the rest of the street. A discarded cold medicine package caught in the fence reinforced his suspicions that the guy Eddie came to see was a drug dealer. If he’d been driving his cruiser, he could’ve checked the system to see if they’d had any recent trouble in the area.

      As he sprinted to the back of the house Eddie had targeted, the wail of a distant ambulance roused concerns for Sherri. But he couldn’t trail her ambulance, let alone do a thing to protect her until he got his brother out of here.

      Peering past the detached garage between him and the house, Cole spotted Eddie picking his way up the back steps of the dimly lit bungalow. Its blinds were drawn, and Cole had no illusions the owner would welcome his arrival.

      The wood of the dilapidated veranda groaned under Eddie’s weight.

      Gripping the chain-link fence, Cole scrutinized the backyard for booby traps. Drug dealers could be sickly creative about safeguarding their privacy.

      The veranda’s wooden floor suddenly cracked, and Eddie dropped out of sight, yelping like a whipped pup.

      “Eddie?” Cole hissed.

      A low groan rose from below the porch.

      With one last visual sweep of the backyard, Cole vaulted over the fence. Monitoring the windows for signs of movement inside, he edged toward the house.

      Eddie’s head bobbed above the splintered wood.

      “What were you thinking?” Cole hissed, offering him a hand out.

      Eddie startled at Cole’s hand in his face, but a burst of light from a nearby window got him moving. As he cleared the rotted floorboard, a pill bottle tumbled from his pocket.

      Cole confiscated the drugs and stuffed them into his jeans pocket.

      “Hey, that’s mine!”

      “Only if you want to land yourself back in jail.”

      At the scrape of the door’s dead bolt, Cole yanked Eddie into the shadow of a nearby bush. A second later the door cracked open.

      From his vantage point, Cole couldn’t make out anything more than the guy was over six feet and had a pistol clamped in his fist.

      He hovered in the doorway a long moment, his pistol aimed at the hole in the porch floor, then pulled the door shut again.

      As the dead bolt clicked once more, Cole caught sight of Eddie’s bike propped against the side of the garage. No way had the man missed it. Cole dug his fingers into the fabric of Eddie’s hoodie. “We’ve got to get out of here, now.” Then, he’d worry about figuring out a way to shut this place down. One that wouldn’t land his brother in jail.

      Or worse, on the wrong end of a vindictive drug dealer’s gun.

      Eddie whirled the opposite direction. “My bike.”

      Cole tightened his grip. “Forget the bike.” He hauled him across the driveway, scarcely giving him time to keep his feet under him, and plunged into the cover of the hedge edging the property.

      Eddie slapped branches from his face. “What are you doing here?”

      “Saving your hide. Now move.” He gritted his teeth to hold back a lecture. He intended to give it, but first he needed to put a good mile between Eddie and this place. Finding a sparse section, he shoved Eddie through the bushes into the next yard. “My truck’s at the park.”

      The wailing ambulance he’d somehow stopped hearing blasted around the corner and braked at the foot of the driveway. At the sight of Sherri jumping from the passenger side, his heart lurched. He dug out his keys and slapped them into Eddie’s hand. “Wait for me in the truck.”

      By the time Cole pushed back through the hedge, Dan and Sherri were rolling a gurney toward the drug dealer’s front door. “Wait!”

      Motion-detector lights flicked on, exposing a suspicious mass in the branches of the tree in front of the house.

      “Get down!”

THREE

      Sherri dove to the dirt, scarcely escaping the giant feedbag that swung off a branch. The sack caught Dan in the back and sent him crashing against the gurney, which pitched onto her and punched the breath from her lungs.

      Cole tore the gurney off her and propped it on its edge like a shield between them and the house. “You okay?”

      A pleasant sensation fluttered through her chest at his protective presence. “Now I am.” She army-crawled toward her groaning partner.

      “I’m fine.” Dan pushed her hand away. “Just give me a second to catch my breath.”

      Cole pointed to the trip wire Dan’s foot must’ve caught. “You may not have a second! Get back to the ambulance. Both of you.”

      “The trauma bag.” Sherri reached for it.

      Cole ripped off the straps securing it to the stretcher and shoved it toward her. “Go,” he barked, drawing a gun from his ankle holster.

      Heart in her throat, she pushed to her feet alongside Dan and ran hunched over to the back of the ambulance.

      As soon as they jumped inside, Cole rounded the rear door and called for backup. “The call. What was it for?”

      Sherri snatched up her stethoscope to check Dan’s lungs. “Asthma.”

      Cole squinted at Dan. “Are you up to transporting a patient if this call turns out to be legit?”

      She fumbled the stethoscope. Legit? He thought the feedbag was meant for her.

      “Yeah, I can drive.” Dan stopped rubbing his chest and dropped his hand to his side. “Just got the wind knocked out of me. Good thing Sherri ducked when she did. It would’ve taken her head off.”

      Cole’s strangled gasp left her own chest tight. That and the gun he had trained on the house.

      Reflexively, her palms clapped over her ears, the shot that had ripped through Luke’s chest blasting through her head. Breathe. Cole’s safe. Dan’s safe.

      “You okay?” Concern edged Cole’s voice. And the heart-in-his-eyes look he swept over her, as if he desperately needed reassurance she was truly unharmed, felt...nice. Really nice.

      Slipping her hands from her ears, she forced her gaze away from the deadly steel in his hands to his attire—black jeans and T-shirt, not his deputy uniform. “What’s going on? What are you doing here?”

      The muscle in his cheek flinched and her stomach fluttered. Had he followed the ambulance to keep watch over her?

      He slanted a glance down the street, then returned his full attention to the house, not her. “I was in the neighborhood.”

      Confused by his gruff response, she squinted through the deepening twilight at the truck parked at the curb a few houses away. His truck. And it had been there before they arrived. “How did you know about the trap?”

      “Someone came out of the house,” Dan hissed, peering out the window on the ambulance’s side door.

      Sherri squinted over her partner’s shoulder as a dark figure disappeared into the detached garage. “What do we do now?”

      With an intensity that knotted her stomach, Cole peered past the ambulance’s back door he was using as cover.

      “You can’t go after him. Not without backup!”

      A sheriff’s cruiser whipped around

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