“No wonder he looked so funny. He was wearing a stocking over his head.”
“What?” Gray stood on the step below me and tried to peer around me. “Can’t quite see yet.” He slid one foot beside mine, looking down to be sure of its placement. He began to raise himself to slide the other foot in place.
I froze as the man in the yard swiveled his head and looked directly at me. I knew I was highly visible with the westering sun streaming over me, just as he was clearly visible to me, blond hair, hook nose, mustache and all. I’m not very fanciful, but I could feel the malevolence of his stare across the distance and felt goose bumps spring up on my arms.
“What’s wrong?” Gray asked, straightening to peer over my shoulder.
“He’s—” I’d been about to say that he was looking at me, but the sentence changed when he pulled something from the waistband at the small of his back “—got a gun!”
TWO
“He’s got a gun!”
At least that’s what I meant to say. What came out sounded more like I was gargling with a particularly offensive mouthwash. I hurled myself backwards, away from the window, away from the danger.
I slammed hard against Gray who made his own gargling sound. Together we tumbled to the floor, a wild pinwheel of arms and legs. I thought I also heard a particularly heartfelt grunt from Gray when we struck the unforgiving floor. Over the crash of the falling ladder and the terrified beating of my heart, it was hard to discern one sound from another.
There was a brief moment of silence as I lay on my back, breath squished from my lungs by the bone-jarring impact. I stared at the ceiling and the little circles of red dancing across it. I gave a mighty gasp, and oxygen rushed into my depleted system. The red circles disappeared.
A gun! The man had a gun! I had never seen a handgun like that in real life before, and the hairs at the base of my neck twitched as I remembered how one looked pointed directly at me. I rolled off Gray, who had unintentionally buffered my fall, and scuttled on my knees to safety in the front hall.
“Out here should be safe, don’t you think?” I crouched, curled into a ball, and hugged the wall. “He can’t see us here.”
Of course he could decide to walk over to the house and in the unlocked front door that I was staring at. I groaned at the thought, crawled to the door, and turned the lock.
“There!” I pulled myself into a tighter ball. “My phone’s in my purse across the room. You’ll have to call 911.”
Gray didn’t answer, and he didn’t punch numbers. All I heard was a peculiar gasping sound.
“Gray?” I turned, surprised to find he wasn’t in the hall with me. I’d thought he was right behind me. “Gray?” I crawled back to the doorway into the living room and peered in. I clapped my hand to my mouth to stifle a scream. It leaked out anyway.
Gray lay on his back where he’d fallen, his mouth open, his eyes closed, his face covered with blood.
“He shot you!” I crawled toward him. Why, oh why hadn’t I decided to be a nurse rather than an art teacher? “You’re bleeding!”
Gray made that gasping sound again. At least he wasn’t dead.
“Don’t move!” I tried to remember the first aid class I’d taken as part of my health requirement in college. What did you do first? Staunch the blood! That was it. All I had to do was find where the blood was coming from. I put a tentative hand to his head, burying my fingers in his thick hair.
Gray pushed my hand away none too gently, rolled to his side, and pushed to his hands and knees.
“You shouldn’t move.” Gently I tried to push him back to the floor. “Everyone knows you don’t move when you’re shot.”
He resisted my push with a growling sound that reminded me of our neighbor’s ill-tempered schnauzer, Daisy. He gasped again, his back arching like he was doing the cat stretch exercise. Blood poured onto the hardwood floor.
Thank goodness the soft green rug wasn’t being laid until tomorrow.
Gray snaked out a hand to grab the Tuscan Vine, its unattached end sagging from the rod so that a large puddle of silk lay on the floor. His intent was obvious.
“No!” I leaped to my feet, gunman or no gunman, and snatched up the fabric. “Don’t get that material bloody!” I pulled it as far from him as I could without ripping the already attached end, flinging it over the plum chair, for once mindless of wrinkles. “It costs two hundred and twenty-five dollars a yard.”
“Bake dat three hundred and fifty,” he muttered in an odd voice. He began pulling his T-shirt from his waistband.
“Don’t use your shirt either,” I told him. “You’ll never get the blood out. There are some towels in the kitchen. I’ll get them.”
I ran to the back of the house and grabbed the designer towels laid artistically beside the sink and raced back to Gray. I found him sitting cross-legged on the floor, his head tilted back, his T-shirt bunched under his arms and wadded against his face.
I dropped to my knees beside him and handed him the towels. “Where did he shoot you?” My heart hammered. What if Gray’s handsome face was scarred for life? What if he’d taken a bullet in the eye? Of course, reason told me, if he’d taken a bullet in the eye, he wouldn’t be sitting up holding his nose.
His nose.
“Are you having a nose bleed?” I demanded as my fear and relief transmuted to irritation.
He lowered his head enough to glare at me. “Yes, I’mb having a dose bleed, doe thanks to you.”
“Me? It’s not my fault heights give you nosebleeds.”
“Heights, by foot. Id was your hard head.”
“My head?” I lifted a hand to the back of my head and hit a sore spot. I realized suddenly that I had a miserable headache, one I’d been too frightened to notice before.
“Firs’ you gib me a header, den you dock me flad on by back—and id’s a wonder I didn’t break id—and den you fall on me and dock my breaf out of me so I thought I’d neber breafe again.”
“Well, you don’t have to get so testy about it.” Tears filled my eyes. “I thought you were shot!” Thank You, God, that he wasn’t!
“Shod? Me?”
“By the man with the gun. The man in the yard over there.” I pointed toward the Ryders’ house as goosebumps once again raced up and down my arms.
Gray blinked. “He had a gund?”
“You didn’t see?”
“I din’t ged a chance. I god attacked first.”
“Attacked?” I was torn between guilt for hurting him and indignation that he’d think I did it on purpose. Then I noticed the little upward quirk of his lips where they were visible below the towels. “Beast,” I muttered.
He grinned as he pulled himself to his feet and walked cautiously to the window, towels in place, head still tilted back to stem the flow.
I caught at his arm, trying to pull him back. “Don’t, Gray. He might still be there.”
“I doubt it. He’d either be here—”
I shuddered.
“—or be gond.”
The squeal of tires taking a corner too fast and the snarl of a pedal pressed to the metal made me jump. I rushed to a front window and saw a flash of black disappear down the road bordering Freedom’s Chase.
“See?