headache and it was epic.
His vision blurred again, and he groaned.
The beep-beep-beep sound of medical equipment finally brought it all together in his beleaguered brain: he was in the county’s one and only hospital.
He felt a smaller, smoother hand curl around his, pressing something cylinder shaped into his palm.
“Push this button when the pain gets bad.” The voice was Sara’s.
He thumbed the button and, sure enough, after a few seconds, his head hurt marginally less than it had before.
“What—?” That single word was all he could manage, and it came out as a ragged croak.
“Gretchen Lansing clocked you with a snow shovel,” Sara replied, guessing the rest of the question he hadn’t managed to complete. Her voice quivered with tears she was probably too proud to shed. “She would have killed you, if it hadn’t been for Melba.”
Flashes of the attack flickered colorfully on the inside of his forehead. “Festus,” he said, trusting his sister to fill in the blanks.
She laughed softly, sniffled. “He’s fine. Melba brought him to us as soon as you’d been loaded into the ambulance.”
He was silent for a long time, trying to scrape up the energy to ask for more information. The effort exhausted him.
“Brynne is here. So are Cord and J.P. Marisol issued an edict—one visitor at a time. Right now, I’m it.”
“Melba?”
“She’s here, too.”
“Am I—?”
“No, you’re not going to die. One of Marisol’s colleagues flew in from Missoula to drill a hole in that hard skull of yours, though. Landed on the hospital roof in a helicopter. Your brain was swelling, so they had to relieve the pressure.”
“Ouch,” Eli whispered.
Sara chuckled and kissed his forehead. “My turn to sit with you is just about over. Are you up to a visit from Brynne?”
He thought, semi-coherently, of Brynne’s policy of not dating cops and the reasoning behind it. If she’d relaxed her defenses a little, early on, she must have raised them again by now.
An invisible elephant lumbered up to his bedside, raised one enormous foot, and smashed it down on his head. “How—how is she—taking this?”
“How do you think she’s taking this, Eli? She’s terrified, like all the rest of us.”
He didn’t have the wherewithal to argue, especially not with his stubborn sister. “Melba first,” he murmured, pressing the button again, this time in vain.
“The meds are on timed release,” Sara informed him. “You’ll have to wait another half hour before you can get a small shot of joy juice.” She kissed his forehead again, squeezed his hand. “Hang in there, tough guy. Marisol says the pain will let up considerably now that that big fat brain of yours is deflating like a beach ball.”
Eli chuckled at the image, then groaned. Turned out, it hurt to laugh.
He felt Sara’s smile, rather than saw it.
Several minutes later, when Eli’s vision had steadied itself a little, Melba appeared beside his bed.
She was ashen.
“You look—terrible,” Eli said.
“Look who’s talking,” Melba retorted, with shiny eyes and a flimsy smile.
Eli had to blink a lot to keep her face in focus. “Gretchen?”
“I shot her,” Melba said. “She’s alive, though. The bullet went through her upper arm. She’s had surgery, and she’ll recover.”
Eli lifted a corner of his mouth, very slightly and with a great deal of effort. “You missed?”
Melba pretended to take offense. “The hell I did,” she replied. “I’m a better shot than you are, and we both know it. I know the rule book says if you’re going to shoot, go for central body mass. I winged her, so she’d drop that damn shovel.”
That was probably true that Melba was a better shot, since she spent way more time at the range than he did, but he didn’t have to admit it. Being whacked in the head with a snow shovel ought to give him a pass on something.
“Thank you,” he said.
“Anytime,” Melba answered, as lightly as if she saved fellow officers from being beaten to a bloody pulp by a crazy woman every day of her life.
“You got there fast.” There were long gaps between the words; he could barely stay awake.
“Lucky for you, I did,” Melba agreed. “I was about a mile behind you, on the highway. When I stopped by the office earlier, Connie said you forgot your briefcase, so I was bringing it to you.”
“Sara tells me I have a hole in my head,” he told his best deputy.
“Well, homey,” Melba replied, borrowing a term from Dan, “that’s not exactly breaking news.”
He laughed. And damn, it hurt. The pain was vast, echoing.
Surprisingly,