Explosive Attraction - By Lena Diaz Page 0,39
squatted beside the body. He pressed his fingers against the carotid artery, checking for a pulse.
Rafe stepped out from behind the tree, aiming his gun at his former friend. “Drop the gun, Jake.”
Jake cursed and pitched his gun on the dirt. “I was trying to save your life, you ass.”
“The only gun I see on the ground is yours.”
“That’s because the dead guy didn’t have a gun.” Jake let out a wry, humorless laugh and held up a ring of keys. “This is what he was holding. I saw the flash of metal and thought he was going to shoot you. I can only guess he was making his way back to his car, and that’s why he had his keys out. Idiot.”
“Funny how you keep showing up wherever the bomber is, supposedly wanting to protect me.”
Jake’s mouth twisted into a sneer. Whatever he was about to say was cut off when a pale, weak-looking Captain Buresh stepped into the clearing, along with a group of uniformed officers.
Buresh took one look at Rafe and Jake, and his face turned a mottled shade of red. “Holster your weapon, Detective Morgan. Whatever’s going on between you two can wait. Right now I want someone to tell me why I have a half-drowned secretary on her way to the hospital, a psychologist yelling about someone needing backup, and a dead suspect who looks like he’s been shot in the back.” He narrowed his eyes. “Whose gun is on the ground?”
“Mine,” Jake said.
“Someone want to tell me why I don’t see a gun in the suspect’s hand?”
Rafe stepped forward, cutting off whatever Jake was about to say. “The suspect had a metallic object in his hand and turned on me in a threatening manner. Detective Young had no way to clearly see whether the object was a gun or not. He made a split-second decision to save another officer’s life. I would have done the same thing, sir.”
“Oh, you would have, would you? And I suppose that’s why you drew your gun on a fellow officer?”
Rafe gritted his teeth together. “A misunderstanding, sir.”
Jake snorted and crossed his arms.
Buresh swore a blue streak. “We’ll get to the bottom of this back in my office. But regardless of what happened here, or why, I need your gun, Jake. And your badge, pending an internal investigation into the shooting. And since you took a life, you have to see the shrink. You don’t come back until you have a piece of paper from the doctor saying you can come back. You got that?”
Jake’s jaw clenched. He unclipped his badge and slapped it into Buresh’s palm. He unloaded his gun, and handed that over, too. “I don’t need to see a head doctor.”
“SOP. No amount of complaining is going to change that. Now go. Both of you. I’ll meet you back at the station. I want every single detail about what happened here.”
Jake stalked off into the trees.
Chapter Ten
Darby tapped her nails on the desk in the squad room, waiting for Rafe to finish his interview with his boss. After giving her statement, she’d wanted to go straight to the hospital to check on Mindy. But Buresh wanted her to wait in case he thought of more questions for her after talking to Rafe and Jake. Since the poor man had been stabbed by the same person who’d been trying to kill her, she didn’t feel she could refuse his request.
“Thanks for not scratching the Charger.”
Darby glanced up in surprise to see Rafe’s brother Nick standing over her.
“When I heard about the shooting,” he continued, “I expected to find a few bullet holes or at least some scratches. But the car is sitting out front, pretty as you please, not a scratch on it. Thanks.”
“Um, you’re welcome?”
He grinned and plopped down in an unoccupied chair at another desk. He rolled over next to her, stretching his long legs out in front of him and crossing his arms behind his head. Unlike the officers milling around the room or sitting at their desks, casting surreptitious glances toward Buresh’s glass-walled office every few minutes, Nick made no attempt to pretend he wasn’t watching every second of the tongue-lashing Jake and Rafe were receiving. “How long have they been in there?”
“About fifteen minutes.”
“Has Buresh been yelling the entire time?”
“Pretty much. He hasn’t given them much of a chance to say anything. I guess it’s a pretty big deal to shoot an unarmed man, regardless of what that man did. Rafe mentioned