“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? There he goes,” Gray said. “Id’s safe.”
“How do you know it’s him?”
“When I drove through the develobment for my last check of the evening, I din’t see anyone.”
“No black car anywhere? What’d he do? Hide it in a garage?”
“He was driving a black car? What kind?”
I threw up my hands. “How should I know? They all look alike.”
He gave me that guy look. “They don’t, but that’s beside the point.”
“It was just black, and what is your point?”
“My point is that there couldn’t have been anyone other than him hanging around. I’m not that blind.”
I decided that his flawed logic wasn’t worth a comment. Still, I did agree with his thought that the man would either be here ready to do us further damage or be gone. Since he wasn’t here, and since I’d heard that car take off like a proverbial bat trying to escape a very hot place, I relaxed.
“We deed to report this to the police,” Gray said.
I nodded. “He pulled it from his waistband.” I whipped my hand up to illustrate.
Gray nodded as he looked out the back window toward the Ryders’.
“You can’t see much of anything but the roof unless you climb the ladder. Remember?”
“Id’s my nose that got creamed, nod my brain. I bemember.”
“Well, you don’t have to be all snippy about it.”
He looked down at me from his awkward head tilt. “I think I’mb entitled to be a liddle snippy.”
I sighed. Maybe he was. All he’d wanted to do was to lock up and go home, probably to take some beautiful woman—his wife?—to dinner. Well, it wasn’t my fault that man had a gun and that I was scared of men with guns. Everybody was scared of men with guns.
Holding on to the ladder with one hand as he held the towels to his nose with the other, Gray climbed one rung at a time.
“He’s not dere now,” he said as he searched the area, head swinging from left to right. “We’re right. He’s gond.” He started back down the ladder, froze momentarily, then leaped back just as I had. Somehow he managed to make that giant step to the ground look easy, landing neatly on his feet.
“What?” I looked from him to the window. “What’d you see?” Then I saw it, a small hole in the glass near the top on the right. “G-gray.” I pointed.
“Yeah,” he said, his voice no longer peeved or teasing but thoughtful. He looked at me. “I think he’d have missed you even if you hadn’t ducked, bud id’s probably a good thing you did.”
“And that’s supposed to make me feel better?” The man in the red shirt had shot at me! Me, Anna Volente, intermediate school art teacher and registered coward.
I stepped closer to Gray. My hands started to shake, and my stomach felt dangerously unsettled. I swallowed several times to make sure things stayed where they were supposed to. Blood on the floor was enough of a mess. I took another step closer.
Gray pulled his cell phone from his belt and held it out to me. “Call 911. I’mb afraid to take the pressure off my dose.”
I hit the digits and spoke
