going to hurt you. I'm not going to let anything hurt you."
She rubbed her forehead, wondering whether she was ever going to feel normal again. "God, I wish you'd never shown-up at my back door. I wish I'd never seen your face."
He dropped his hand.
"We're almost there," he said tersely.
Butch gave up trying to stand and sank to the ground.
He sat there for a while, just breathing in and out. He couldn't seem to move.
It wasn't because his head hurt, although it did. And it wasn't because his legs felt weak, although they did.
He was ashamed.
Getting beaten by a bigger man wasn't the problem, although his ego had certainly taken one on the chin.
No, it was the knowledge that he'd screwed up and endangered a young woman's life. When he'd called about the weapons pickup, he should have had two officers waiting for him at the door to the station. He'd known that suspect was especially dangerous, but he'd been sure he could handle it himself.
Yeah, well, he'd handled jack shit. He'd had his ass kicked. And now Beth was in the company of a killer.
God only knew what would become of her.
Butch closed his eyes and put his chin down on his knee. His throat was killing him, but it was his head that he was really worried about. The damn thing wasn't working right. His thoughts were incoherent, his cognitive processes shot to hell. Maybe he'd gone without oxygen long enough to get brain-fry.
He tried to pull it together, but only managed to sink deeper into the fog.
And then, because his masochistic side had terrific timing, the past reared its thorny skull.
Out of the messy jumble of images clanging around his mind, one popped forward that brought tears to his eyes. A young girl, no more than fifteen. Getting into an unfamiliar car. Waving at him from the window as she disappeared down their street.
His older sister. Janie.
Her body had been found in the woods behind the local baseball field the following morning. She'd been raped, beaten, and strangled. Not in that order.
After she'd been abducted, Butch had stopped sleeping through the night. Two decades later, he still hadn't picked up the habit again.
He thought of Beth, looking over her shoulder as she'd run away with the suspect. The fact she'd disappeared with that killer was the only thing that got Butch to plant his feet on the ground and drag his body toward the station.
"Yo! O'Neal!" José came pounding down the alley. "What happened to you?"
"We need to get out an APB." Was that his voice? It sounded hoarse, like he'd been to a football game and screamed for two hours. "White male, six-six, two seventy. Dressed in black leather, wearing sunglasses, shoulder-length dark hair." Butch threw out a hand, steadying himself against the building. "Suspect not armed. Only because I stripped him. He'll be restocked within the hour, no doubt."
When he stepped forward, he swayed.
"Jesus." José grabbed his arm, holding him up.
Butch tried not to lean on the guy, but he needed the help. He couldn't make his legs move right.
"And a white female." His voice cracked. "Five-nine, long black hair. Wearing a blue skirt and a white button-down." He paused. "Beth."
"I know. She called." Jose's face tightened. "I didn't ask for details. From the sound of her voice, she wasn't about to give me any."
Butch's knees wobbled.
"Whoa, Detective." José hoisted him up. "We're going to take this slow."
The instant they came through the station's back door, Butch weaved. "I need to go look for her."
"Let's just chill on this bench."
"No..."
José loosened his hold, and Butch went down like a piano.
Just as half the freaking precinct came up in a rush. The fleet of concerned guys in dark blue and badges made him feel pathetic.
"I'm fine," he snapped. Then he had to put his head between his knees.
How could he have let this happen?
If Beth turned up dead in the morning...
"Detective?" José got down on his haunches, putting his face in Butch's line of sight. "We've called an ambulance."
"Don't need one. Is the APB out?"
"Yeah, Ricky's doing it right now."
Butch brought his head up. Slowly.
"Man, what happened to your neck?" José breathed.
"It was used to hold my body off the ground." He swallowed a couple of times. "Did the weapons get picked up from the address I called in?"
"Yeah. We got 'em and the cash. Who the hell is this guy?"
"I have no fucking clue."
Chapter Seventeen
Wrath walked up the front steps of Darius's house. The door