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!”
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 the corner and careened to a stop behind the ambulance, silencing her objection. Cole flashed his ID. “We’ve got a booby-trapped property. One male in the garage. Unknown number in the house. Cover me.” Without waiting for a response, Cole snuck along the side of the house using bushes as cover.
Bushes! What good would a bush do him? It wouldn’t stop a bullet. Please, Lord, don’t let another man get shot because of me.
The sheriff’s deputy hunched behind his cruiser, his gun pointed at the garage as he barked orders into the radio on his shoulder.
The garage door rumbled open, accompanied by the roar of an engine.
Cole darted closer.
“Look out,” the deputy shouted as a motorcycle blasted from the garage and screamed away.
A deafening explosion blew out the windows of the house, rocking the ambulance.
“Cole!” Sherri shoved open the side door and sprang to the ground. Shielding her face from falling debris with her arm, she scanned the area she’d last seen him, except the explosion could have thrown him anywhere. Smoke stung her eyes as she silently
