the other one alive?” Jax asked.
She shook her head. “I’m not sure.” Paige looked back at the guy, but he hadn’t moved since she’d bashed him with the gun. “But he’s got some kind of communicator in his ear. I think he was talking to the Moonlight Strangler.”
Jax hurried toward the man but then almost immediately stopped. Paige did, too, when she heard the sound of the footsteps. She got another slam of adrenaline. Followed by relief when she saw that it was Jericho.
Good. Well, maybe.
It was possible the Moonlight Strangler was in that truck and was ready to gun them all down. Of course, Cord was racing toward it no doubt to try to prevent that from happening.
“Call an ambulance,” Jax told his brother.
Probably in case the second thug was still alive. But she rethought that when Jericho looked at her and cursed. And when she felt the blood sliding down the side of her head and face. She wiped it away but felt a new trickle follow right behind it.
God knew how bad she looked right now or even how badly she was hurt. Her head and body were throbbing, but Paige wasn’t getting in the ambulance. She had to stop the Moonlight Strangler once and for all.
Jax cursed her, too, when he realized she was trailing after him, and he automatically adjusted his position so that he was in between the truck and her. Protecting her. Despite the bad blood between them, that didn’t surprise her. It wasn’t just the lawman in him that made him do that. Jax had always had this cowboy code about protecting others.
Even if she probably wasn’t someone he wanted to protect.
Jax approached the second man with caution. His gun aimed, his gaze still firing all around them. He reached down, pulled off the mask and put his fingers to the man’s neck.
“He’s alive,” Jax relayed. “Barely.”
Paige leaned in, hoping this would be the Moonlight Strangler. But he wasn’t. Like the other man, he was much too young. And that meant the killer could indeed be in the truck or nearby.
“Be careful,” she called out to Cord.
Whether he’d listen was anyone’s guess. Unlike Jax, Cord didn’t have that whole protection code. He had one goal. Just one.
To catch his biological father, no matter what the cost. That included sacrificing his own life.
Paige had been driven by that kind of justice after her parents had been murdered. That was the reason she’d become a CSI. But justice didn’t drive her now. She only wanted to keep Jax and her son safe. That might finally happen if the Moonlight Strangler was in the truck so they could catch him.
But if he was there, why hadn’t he driven off when he’d seen that his thugs had failed?
A possible answer popped into her head. An answer she didn’t like one bit.
This could be a trap.
Jax must have realized the same thing because his attention went straight to the truck. And to Cord.
“Watch out!” Jax shouted.
However, the words had hardly left his mouth when the blast thundered through the air. And the truck burst into a ball of fire.
Jax cursed when he read Jericho’s latest text message. More bad news. Just what he didn’t need right now since he’d already had enough of that tonight.
Both men who’d attacked Paige and him couldn’t be interrogated. One had died at the scene from the gunshot wound Jax delivered to the guy’s chest. The other one, the man Paige had injected with the syringe, was in the hospital but hadn’t regained consciousness. Until he did, he couldn’t give Jax answers about the snake who’d hired them.
The only good thing to come out of this was that Matthew was safe and only the one hired gun was dead. Of course, not everyone had come out of it unscathed. He had proof of that right in front of him. Both Cord and Paige were side by side on examining tables in the ER while nurses stitched them up.
Plus, the ER looked like a top-secret facility, what with two security guards standing in the doorway of the room. Anyone coming into the building was being searched for weapons, and everyone was on alert to make sure more hired guns didn’t try to come after Paige and him.
“What’s wrong?” Paige asked, no doubt because she’d heard his mumbled profanity over the text. No doubt, too, because she was watching him so closely. But then, he was watching her, too.
Paige was alive.
And now that the dust had partially settled from the attack, Jax would need to deal with that. He’d have to deal with a lot of things, and he started with Matthew.
His brothers Chase and Levi were at Jax’s house standing guard. The ranch hands were patrolling the grounds and had already searched the perimeter for snipers. Added to that, the road leading to the ranch was a crime scene now and was crawling with Texas Rangers, CSIs, the bomb squad, firefighters and even two of Appaloosa Pass’s own reserve deputies. With all those people on the grounds, Jax’s house was on lockdown and would stay that way until he could get home and move Matthew to a safer location.
Wherever that would be.
Belinda certainly wanted to know that, too, because she’d called twice and then left a voice mail when Jax hadn’t answered her third call. He knew the nanny was worried, as well she should be, but right now he wouldn’t be able to do much to calm any of her fears.
Jax walked closer, though he already had Paige’s attention. Cord’s as well because he ended his latest phone call and stared at Jax.
“There wasn’t a body in the truck,” Jax explained. “The bomb guys have cleared the CSI team to go in and start gathering evidence, but the explosive device inside the truck appears to have been on a timer.”
Paige released the breath she’d obviously been holding, and despite the fact that she was getting stitches near her hairline, she shook her head. “They didn’t find the Moonlight Strangler,” she said. Not a question. Probably because she knew Jax wouldn’t be scowling if they’d managed to nail the SOB.
“Somebody drove that truck to the ranch,” Cord snapped. He had two nurses working on him, and they were stitching up his head, arms and even his left leg. They’d cut his jeans to get to the wound. “That means he escaped.”
Jax nodded. Then shrugged. “But we don’t know for sure the Moonlight Strangler was even there. Do we?” And he made sure there was displeasure in his tone. Plenty of it. Because Jax was still riled to the core that he hadn’t been included in this stupid plan before it’d turned deadly.
“He wants to kill me,” Paige stated. “He would have been close enough to make sure he could do that.”
No displeasure in her voice, but there was plenty of frustration and pain, both physical and otherwise. She winced when the nurse added another stitch.
“Sorry,
