“Shit! Shit! Shit!” Lola hissed.
Her cut forgotten, she knelt beside him.
“Officer Wilson?”
No response. She lifted his head to her knee and noted from the rise and fall of his chest that the cop was still breathing. Thank God, she thought, sending up a silent prayer. He didn’t appear to be bleeding, but with her hand still dripping blood she couldn’t be sure.
Grabbing the two-way radio from his belt, she pressed several of the buttons.
“Officer down,” Lola yelled into it, imitating the lingo she’d heard on TV cop shows. But unlike television there was no reassuring voice saying the cavalry was coming to the rescue, only the hiss of dead air.
Closing her eyes briefly, she shoved aside the panic threatening to consume her.
“I’m just going to my car for my phone to call for help,” Lola told the unconscious officer.
She rested the cop’s head on the ground as gently as she could, and then dived inside her car. After snatching her cell phone off the passenger seat with trembling fingers, she hurriedly called 911.
Lola clutched the phone to her ear. Silence. She glanced at the screen. The words No Service had replaced the dots indicating signal strength.
The panic she’d banished was creeping up on her now. Looking down the barren road, she saw the tractor still inching through a field in the distance. It was too far away. She ran to the police car, hoping its radio would be more effective than the one the officer carried. Her efforts were rewarded with static and then more silence.
Returning to the unconscious cop’s side, Lola exhaled a shaky breath. She had no idea if she should move him, but what choice did she have? She couldn’t leave him here to go for help.
She was going to have to take him to help.
Lola rounded her car to the passenger’s side and flung open the door. Back at the officer’s side, she sucked in a deep breath before crouching on her haunches. She lifted his head and then his shoulders as gently as possible, finally managing to weave her arms under his.
The cop, who she would have described as scrawny when he’d stepped out of the patrol car earlier, was a lot heavier than he looked.
“Come on, Officer Wilson,” she pleaded. “Help me out here.”
Slowly, Lola dragged him across the hot pavement toward the passenger’s side of her car. Rivulets of sweat rolled down her back as the sun beat on it, and for once she was grateful for years of torturous Pilates classes that had not only kept her lean, but made her strong.
Still, she was gasping for breath by the time she managed to get Officer Wilson slumped in the passenger’s seat.
Back in the driver’s seat, Lola snatched a wad of tissue from the pocket pack to stem the blood still oozing from her hand. She used her free hand to start a GPS search for the closest hospital.
“Hold on, Officer Wilson,” she said, as the route to a facility a few miles away appeared. “I’ll have you at Cooper’s Place Community Hospital in a flash.”
A scowl and the smell of chocolate greeted Dylan as he stepped through the back door of his mother’s house.
“When are you going to learn to knock before you barge into someone’s home?” Virginia Cooper placed her hands on the floral apron covering her hips.
“Knock? I grew up in this house.”
Standing at the stove, his mother jabbed a finger in his direction. “But the bills in the mailbox out front are in my name. I pay the cost to be the boss.”
“Well, I definitely don’t want to step on the boss’s toes, especially when she’s baking,” Dylan conceded with a chuckle. The heavenly aroma coming from the oven appealed to his sweet tooth, prodding him to get off her bad side. “So, what’s in the oven?”
A corner of his mother’s mouth quirked upward in a hint of a smile, indicating he was out of the doghouse, at least for now. He doubted she’d still be smiling once she found out the reason behind his visit.
“White-chocolate-chip muffins.” Virginia picked up a mechanical timer on the kitchen counter and turned the dial to set it. “They’ll be ready in sixteen minutes. You staying?”
“I am now.”
“Coffee?” she offered.
“Have a seat.” Dylan gestured toward the high-back stools surrounding the large kitchen island, which was cleared except for his mother’s closed laptop computer. When college football season started next month its smooth granite top would be loaded with a wide assortment of breakfast breads and his mother’s homemade preserves. “You’re providing homemade muffins. The least I can do is make coffee.”
Virginia sat in one of the chairs while he opened the door to the cabinet where the coffee was kept.
“What’s with the uniform? Thought you were finally taking a day off work.”
Dylan dumped a scoop of coffee into a paper filter and placed it in the coffeemaker’s brew basket. He added water and switched the machine on. While the coffee brewed, he rinsed the chocolate-muffin batter from the mixing bowl in the sink and placed it in the dishwasher.
“Technically, I am off, but I had a day-in-the-life career speech at the elementary school earlier. It’s the students’ last day of summer school.” He glanced at his watch. “Right now I’m supposed to be at city hall. Uncle Roy called a department head meeting about the next mayoral inauguration, but it’s been delayed. He’s stuck in the waiting room at Doc Hadley’s office, and the doc’s running behind schedule.”
“Inauguration? He hasn’t even been reelected yet.”
Dylan dried his hands with a paper towel. His late father’s youngest brother had been mayor of the town named for their ancestors ever since Dylan could remember. “His reelection is pretty much a foregone conclusion. He wants to take the oath of office outdoors this time, in the town square, and wants it spruced up for the event.”
“The town’s budget is stretched enough. We can’t afford the hours of overtime it would take for the public works department to work on the square.” Virginia’s snort filled the kitchen. “Besides, Roy’s getting too damn old, not to mention crotchety, to hold office. He needs to hang it up. This town needs some fresh blood in the mayor’s office.”
Folding his arms, Dylan leaned against the kitchen counter. His snort was identical to his mother’s. “There is no fresh blood. If nobody files to run in the next three weeks, he’ll be running unopposed.”
“Again,” they both said, simultaneously.
His mother’s eyes lit up. “You could run.”
“No way.” Dylan wagged a finger. “I’m not cut out to be a politician.”
A gurgling sound emitted from the coffeemaker indicated the end of the brewing cycle. Dylan crossed the room and retrieved two mugs from another cabinet.
He caught his mother’s frown out of the corner of his eye. “Anyway, if you were mayor that would leave that bumbling Wilson boy as our new police chief, and that would really leave this town with something on our hands.”
“Stop it, Mom,” Dylan admonished. “He’s young and a bit high-strung, but he tries hard and the job means everything to him.”
Dylan sat the mugs on the kitchen island, filled them with coffee and then went to the refrigerator for the creamer.
“Humph.