it doesn’t take long, either.
So it was really more of a tumble than a throw. She let go of the seat, with just a little push behind it.
The seat rolled, and I shrieked and threw myself at it. The girl, meanwhile, went in the other direction. A bullet—I’m not sure whether Rafe or Grimaldi pulled the trigger—must have just skimmed past her, because it hit the bathroom window and shattered it into a million pieces. A lot of voices shrieked at the same time, and I imagine a lot of people ducked, even though the bullet got nowhere close to them. Hopefully nobody was left inside the house who could have been hit.
I just had time to think, “Not another window!” before I had the baby carrier in my hands and put it upright. Carrie was screaming bloody murder, of course—the rough handling had woken her from sound sleep—but she was unharmed, strapped in tight, and just upset. Her little face was bright red with her screaming, but there wasn’t anything else wrong with her.
I unhooked her and lifted her up, and turned to look at the scene behind me.
The girl had made it maybe two feet before David had tackled her. Now she was flat on the ground with her arms up over her face. I wasn’t entirely sure whether she was protecting herself from blows or crying, or maybe both. Rafe was plucking his infuriated son off her, much the same way he’d plucked Sergeant Tucker off Curtis Matlock a few nights ago, and Grimaldi was moving in with a pair of handcuffs.
“She took her!” David bellowed. “She took my baby sister!”
Rafe set him upright and dusted him off and slapped him on the back a couple of times. “Good job. You got her. Good job.” He met my eyes over David’s head.
“She’s OK,” I said, patting Carrie’s warm little back. The screams were down to hiccupping sobs now, and she was starting to snuffle like she was hungry. “Take care of David. I’ve got Carrie.”
Rafe nodded, and put a hand on David’s shoulder. “C’mon, son. Let’s finish this up.”
David nodded, still vibrating with fury. I made my way over to him and bussed him on the cheek. “Thank you.”
He nodded, and his eyes fastened on Carrie. “She all right?”
“She’s fine. Just shook up and hungry. She’ll never even remember this.”
“Not sure I’ll ever forget it,” David said, and followed Rafe toward the corner of the house. The bystanders gave way for the two of them like the Red Sea before Moses.
Grimaldi, meanwhile, had dragged the stalker to her feet. “You have the right to remain silent…” she began, as she marched the girl toward the street in the wake of the other two. The woman’s hands were cuffed behind her, and she had tears streaking down her face.
Charlotte crept out of the crowd inside the French doors and made her way to me. “What the hell, Savannah?”
Blame the reaction of coming off an adrenaline high, but it sounded like such an unlikely thing to come out of her mouth that I snorted, and then started to laugh. After a second, the laughter turned to sobs—blame that on the reaction, too—and Charlotte put her arms around me, and around Carrie, as well. Some of the bystanders shuffled their feet awkwardly, and some started to drift away.
“Show’s over,” I managed. “If you’re interested in making an offer on the house, my number’s on the sign out front.”
“We’ll fix the bathroom window,” Charlotte added. “We’re getting good at that.”
We were. And we would. But probably not tonight. All I wanted was to take my baby home, and batten down the hatches, and celebrate the fact that she was safe, and I still had her. The window could wait.
So we boarded it up, and shooed the remaining people out, and locked the doors, and went home. Charlotte to her kids and her parents, and I to my empty house and my dog.
Word spread about what had happened, of course, so I spent a lot of my time fielding phone calls. Mother called to make sure Carrie and David were all right. Dix and Catherine did, too. Grimaldi called to tell me that the girl, whose name was Jessica Lloyd, had been booked on kidnapping and stalking charges.
“It was a good thing she tried to take the baby,” she told me, “because without that, we might have had to let her go. There’s nothing illegal about taking pictures of people and posting