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“Out of state,” he replied calmly. “I was attending a conference in Anaheim.”
“And you made a beeline for Fullerton because it’s such a hotbed of news?” Sonya had nothing against an undercover DEA agent—that seemed the most probable explanation for his nosiness—but Gina and her baby were more important than some drug bust.
“I had an interview in the area. My flight doesn’t leave till tomorrow, so I took a self-guided tour of local landmarks.” He halted as Duke fixed them with a glare.
“Hey, Doc,” the fellow called. “You bring a narc?” He’d obviously drawn the conclusion from the man’s business suit.
“Don’t be ridiculous! I have no idea who he is.”
The rival gang member seized on his opponent’s distraction to lunge toward Duke, knife flashing. The move happened so quickly and unexpectedly that no one reacted except the would-be victim, who dodged, grabbed his opponent’s arm and wrestled him to the table.
Sonya was trying to figure out the best way to protect Gina. The reporter, if that was what he was, simply watched as if knife fights were a common occurrence.
The pair deadlocked with the knife in the opponent’s hand. “You owe me,” he panted. “I’m sick of your lies.”
“Hey, Frankie, how am I gonna pay if I’m dead?”
The men’s gazes locked. Then the assailant tore free and stepped back, knife upraised. “You’ll pay me tonight. No more crap.”
“My girlfriend’s got some cash. She’ll lend it to me, okay?” Duke waggled his fingers and eased toward Gina. “Give it to me, baby.”
Rigid with suspicion, Frankie waited for the payoff. Sonya figured the amount had to be significant. Where would Gina get that kind of money?
She’d just drawn the conclusion that this had to be a ruse, when something came out of the girl’s purse. It wasn’t a wad of cash. It was a gun.
Duke’s. He’d sunk so low as to draw Gina into his criminal actions, Sonya surmised, although that didn’t excuse the girl for her part.
Duke hadn’t quite reached his target, and the attacker seized upon the gap to leap toward Gina. Apparently, he’d rather risk getting shot than abandon his quest.
“Gina! Get out of there!” Sonya broke off as strong hands grasped her arm and pulled her toward the steps.
“You have some kind of death wish?” the stranger demanded.
“Let go! I have to help!”
“Are you nuts? Unless you’re wearing Kevlar—”
The gun roared. Sonya stumbled and might have fallen without the man’s steadying grip. Her heart thundered so hard she wasn’t certain how much of the ringing in her ears resulted from the blast and how much from panic.
Through her confusion, she realized Frankie had seized the weapon and looped an arm around Gina’s throat. Sonya could almost feel the girl’s blood pressure soaring, but she didn’t observe any sign of injury. Judging by the speed with which Duke fled down an incline to the left, he hadn’t taken a bullet, either.
Frankie forced the girl closer to the adults. Despite the patchy light, Sonya could see sweat beading her face.
The reporter raised his hands in a pacifying gesture. Sonya’s pulse was still racing and her head felt light, but for Gina’s sake, she held her ground. “Let her go. You don’t want her to lose the baby, do you?”
“Duke’s brat? Why should I care?” Frankie included them in a wave of the gun. “That creep owes me five hundred bucks. Somebody’s gotta make it good.”
Surely a nearby resident would hear the gunshot and dial 911, Sonya thought frantically. Yet the situation might turn even nastier if the police showed up.
“I have an ATM card. I’ll get your five hundred.” The photographer spoke with a raspy edge. “Take me instead of her, for God’s sake.”
Sonya’s assessment of the man ratcheted upward. Narc or not, he had guts.
Frankie’s lip curled. “Never mind the hero act. Hand over that ATM card. And your camera.” He waved the gun toward Sonya. “Your purse, too.”
Even with their money in hand, the situation would remain volatile—and the girl appeared increasingly ill. They had to get her free, but how?
As Sonya slipped the strap from her shoulder, she caught a twitch of the reporter’s eye. A signal? Hoping she wasn’t imagining his intention to coordinate a rescue, she braced to follow his lead.
He held out his wallet and started toward Frankie. Cautious, controlled. Drawing attention from the hostage. “The card and my money are in here. There’s quite a bit of cash and some traveler’s checks.”
Sonya approached from the other side, closer to Gina. She dangled her purse just beyond Frankie’s grasp. “Here you go.”
“Hey! What’re you two—” The barrel shifted from the girl’s temple.
In that instant, the reporter flung the wallet into Frankie’s face, ducked aside, then leaped to catch his wrist. While the men battled, Sonya hauled a startled Gina toward the steps.
The girl’s compliance ended when the reporter wrenched the weapon from Frankie. “Let me go, Doc. We’re safe now.”
“Not until we get you to a hospital.” Sonya tried to make her case persuasive. “You don’t look well. Your condition…”
The girl doubled over. “It’s squeezing like crazy! What the hell is that?”
Sonya hung on to her. “It’s a contraction. You’re in labor.” She was groping in her purse for the cell phone, when she saw Frankie smash the reporter’s ribs. As the man staggered, the thug grabbed for the gun.
Another shot shattered the evening. Gina shrieked and Sonya’s head throbbed from the blast. Frankie fled down the incline, while the stranger clutched his ribs in pain. He’d kept the weapon, though.
“Are you hurt?” she asked the newcomer.
“Just…winded,” he managed to gasp.
The contraction over, Gina sagged. “I’m calling an ambulance,” Sonya told her.
“I have to go!”
“For heaven’s sake, use some sense!” Then she realized the girl was staring past her.
She spotted a uniformed officer drawing his weapon as he crested the steps. The man must have been patrolling the parking lot and heard the shot. “Police! Put the gun on the table!”
An odd expression flickered across the reporter’s face as he obeyed. Was that fear? But he’d been in much more danger earlier.
While the policeman collected the gun and requested backup on a handheld radio, Gina jerked free of Sonya’s grip. “I gotta go. Duke’ll get mad.”
“No one’s going anywhere.” The name tag read K. Monroe. To the reporter he added, “Do you have a license for the weapon?”
“Officer, that’s not my gun.” He turned to Sonya for confirmation.
To agree meant betraying Gina. Although the girl had probably been carrying the weapon on Duke’s orders, by the time they sorted this out she might have to give birth in a jail ward.
On the other hand, the interloper had put his life on the line. And he seemed a lot more worried about the gun than Sonya would have expected.
“He took it off a guy named Frankie who was holding Gina hostage,” she said truthfully.
“And where is this Frankie now?”
All three of them pointed in the same direction. That appeared to satisfy Monroe, who requested a description and called it in.
“My boyfriend’s waiting for me.” Gina was edging away as he got off the radio.
“Miss, please sit down,” the officer commanded.
Instead, she lumbered down the slope. When Monroe shouted at her to stop, she increased her pace. “Wait!” Sonya told him. “Please don’t scare her into falling.”
The officer hesitated. Gina dodged out of sight past some restrooms.
“That girl requires immediate medical treatment. I’m a doctor.” Sonya ignored the man’s quizzical glance at her clothes. “She suffers from hypertension and she’s in labor. I need to go after her.”
“We’ll put out an APB. We have other officers in the vicinity.”
“I’ve been trying to find her for days!”
He glanced toward where Gina had vanished. “Sorry, ma’am. You’re the one who said not to frighten her. Wait here, please.” He radioed in a description, including the medical condition, then requested ID from Sonya and the stranger.
The man failed to produce a badge. So much for her suspicion about the DEA.
Sonya itched to give chase. Instead, she and the man had to suffer through the police formalities, which included being questioned separately by Monroe and a backup officer. Sonya couldn’t help interspersing her step-by-step account with warnings about what might happen if Gina wasn’t found.
Frustratingly, her interview lasted even longer than the man’s. He paused, as if to speak to her, but at a word from the other officer, he headed toward the parking lot.
Finally, she received permission to leave. She knew the police were simply doing their jobs, but she wished they’d give her concerns a higher priority. Since more than half an hour had passed, clearly no one had managed to pick up Gina.
Weary and upset, Sonya trudged down the staircase. She hesitated at the sight of the tall man leaning against his car, silhouetted in the glow of a security light.
Why was he waiting? Her annoyance dissipated as she remembered his attempt to substitute for Gina as a hostage. Under other circumstances, she might even welcome his presence after the way he’d leaped to her rescue with old-fashioned masculine protectiveness. She hadn’t believed that existed anymore.
“Barry Lowell.” He extended a hand.
“Sonya Vega.”
His palm felt large and slightly rough. When they shook, he winced as if his ribs hurt. “You’re sure you didn’t break something?”
“Just bruised. Believe me, if I’d cracked a rib, I’d be writhing on the ground,” he said dryly.
Even so, he’d suffered for her sake, and Gina’s. “I didn’t know reporters were so good with their fists.”
“I can hold my own.” He neither bragged nor pretended false modesty, she noted with grudging approval. “Planning to hunt for that girl?”
“Someone has to.” She ignored the two cruisers on the far side of the lot, dome lights still flashing. In one, an officer sat talking on his radio. Sure, the police would keep an eye open, but they obviously didn’t consider this an emergency.
Barry reflected briefly before saying, “I don’t usually get involved in other people’s business, but…”
“Oh? That wasn’t the impression I had when you followed me into the park.”
A smile fleeted across his face. “You were on an errand of mercy. I had a suspicion the situation might get rough, which it did.”
Sonya recognized, and rejected, an impulse to play the poor helpless female. Okay, so tonight’s events had shaken her. But life had taught her not to lean on anyone, no matter how tempting.
And she was tempted, much as she loathed her own weakness. Tempted to rely on the big strong man the way she’d once trusted her fiancé. Maybe because she found this guy unnervingly appealing.
Better get moving, fast. “Well, I appreciate the chivalry, but I’m in a hurry.”
“To land in the middle of a shootout?” he demanded. “Frankie will go hunting for Duke to collect that debt, and Duke’s already lost too much face in front of his girlfriend, which means he’ll have to fight back.”
“Then I’d better find Gina before they start World War III,” Sonya responded sharply. “I certainly don’t get the impression the cops are having any luck.”
“So you’re taking on the job,” Barry concluded. “Okay. I’ll help.”
Capable as the guy seemed, she disliked his presumptuousness. And having a male protector along might escalate tensions with Duke. “You’ve shown you can defend yourself, but do you have any experience with gangs, Mr. Reporter?”
“Unfortunately, yes. Also knives and crude homemade weapons. You see a lot of those in prison.” His jaw worked. “I’m an ex-con. That’s why I was disturbed about getting caught with a gun.”
The admission surprised her. The clothes and refined speech, touched by a slight Southern accent, didn’t fit her idea of a crook. As for the sexy male vibes he radiated, Sonya usually wasn’t attracted to losers.
Still, lots of people rehabilitated themselves after a rough adolescence. Perhaps he’d mixed with the wrong crowd when he was younger. By now—mid thirties, she guessed—he’d evidently pulled his act together.
That didn’t make him a suitable companion for the night’s mission. She was having enough difficulty winning Gina’s trust without dragging in a stranger. “Thanks for the offer, but I’ll pass.”
He folded his arms, studying her. “You’re not used to accepting help, are you, Doc?”
“I’m not stupid enough to rely on men. They don’t stick around when you need them.” She hadn’t meant to reveal that much. Or to sound so bitter.
“If I were describing you for the paper, I’d say prickly as a cactus,” he observed. “Except that it’s a cliché.”
“Cactuses survive pretty well in the desert.”
He renewed his request. “Why not let me ride shotgun…figuratively speaking?”
“The answer’s no.” She couldn’t tell him that she found him a little too handsome. Or that she wasn’t quite as independent as she’d believed. “Much as I hate to break off this little flirtation, I’ve got a couple of lives to save. Enjoy your trip home.” She clicked open her car door.
“I didn’t realize we were flirting.” He appeared amused at the suggestion.
“That was sarcasm.”
“Ah. My favorite means of communication.”
Darn it, she liked him. And wondered again at her vulnerability. Had she really sunk to seeking support from a confessed ex-con? Talk about red flags!
Sonya slid inside. “Goodbye, Mr. Lowell.” She started the engine, and felt his eyes follow until she cleared the lot.
