CHAPTER EIGHT
The hot slug of lead whined by Grant's ear close enough to singe his hair. He still held the long-barreled Magnum steady, but shifted his aim ever so slightly as he squeezed the trigger and let the hammer fall.
A two-foot tongue of flame belched out of the barrel, but Billy Chapman hardly had time to see it. The heavy, flat-nosed bullet barely grazed his shoulder, but it hit with enough force to spin him around. The little.38 went flying.
He stumbled two steps in the same direction and began to reach out with his left hand. "Don't even think about trying to pick it up," Samantha said in a flat, hard voice. She squatted in a deep crouch with her revolver aimed at his groin. "I'll fix it so you can piss in six new places," she told him.
"Oooooh, fuck!" He staggered back and dumped down on his knees. "Get a Goddamn doctor! I'm bleeding to death!"
"Call it in," Grant told Sam. He gave her a grin and a wink, partly because she turned out to be a good back-up after all, but more because she looked sexy as hell, even with a gun in her hand.
Feeling that bullet hiss so close to his head had sparked a feeling as intense as orgasm. Shooting back made it peak higher still. But it didn't last like the jolting pleasure of fucking. Now that it was all over, he felt like, he was wallowing eyeball-deep in half-frozen shit.
He nodded toward the young redhead cowering against Jeff Hanson's convertible. "Get her out of here," he said. "Take her to your place until she calms down. Then find out where she lives and put her on a bus for home. I'll handle the Shooting Team and file all the fucking reports, then we'll pick up where we left off."
"What about your wife?"
"What about her? She's got what she wants, and so do I."
Samantha grinned and took Tanya by the arm. "We'll see you later."
Veronica said to the poised, handsome and attentive young man beside her: "My family is in the furniture business."
Brett Allison brushed a hand lightly down her mink-sheathed arm. "You must be doing very well."
"Oooooh, yes. But we only have one store now. I'd like to see it become a chain."
"I'm sure it will." Brett teased his fingers across her mink-draped thigh. "You look like the kind of woman who gets what she wants."
"Yes, but my father runs things now, and he's getting on in years. He'd like to retire if we could find someone young and dynamic to carry on."
"Oooooh?" His imagination began to race, but before he could think of a fitting reply, two shots rang out behind the restaurant. The first was a flat, brittle little pop. The second was a deep booming roar.
"God, what was that?" Veronica stiffened. He felt her soft thigh muscles tense hard as steel beneath the soft padding of fur.
"You wait right here, I'll go find out." Brett was not unusually brave, but he'd seen that vice cop Dunlap leave the restaurant only moments before. Two shots had been fired, and the second, loudest one, was almost certainly his. The sop would have things under control by now, and he would have time alone to think. He sensed a big score if he could just handle this sexy mink-clad bitch the right way.
Brett lingered on the fringe of the gathering crowd. Flashing red and blue lights on two patrol cars soon lit the scene with an eerie glow. Two paramedics trundled the injured boy into an ambulance, and it pulled away with the siren wailing.
Dunlap handed his gun butt-first to a fat cop in plainclothes. Two others were busy measuring distances with a steel tape. Brett kept thinking: "Thank God they'll all be too busy to bother with me tonight."
About that time, Grant saw him in the crowd behind a rope strung by two uniformed cops. Brett felt the chill of his icy glare. Then the cop smiled and gave him a friendly wave. He furrowed his brow and wandered what the hell that was supposed to mean.
Tanya did not calm down enough to speak until Samantha had driven her six blocks from the scene. The radio in the unmarked car chattered all that time. In addition to the shooting in the restaurant parking lot, two burglaries and an armed robbery were in progress on the far side of town. A busy night… but not at all unusual.
"Thanks for not slapping my ass in the can," Tanya finally managed to say.
Samantha kept looking ahead, somewhat ashamed of what she was thinking. The girl had such a tempting, firm young figure and such long, silky, soft red hair.
"Don't thank me. Thank my partner." Sam knew she should have gone by the book, and Tanya would be on her way to Juvenile Hall.
"He's one tough cop," Tanya said, recalling how he'd not flinched when the bullet whined so close to his ear.
"He's also very nice," Samantha said. The horror of that near miss had just settled upon her.
"Does he fuck you?" the girl asked bluntly. "Ah, yes… yes, he does." She was still distracted, otherwise she would not have answered such a personal question. At least not so honestly.
"I'll bet he's a good fuck."
"He's the best I ever had."
Tanya smiled, wondering. The sexy little bitch-cop said Grant was nice. Very nice! And she'd been waiting all of her life for a man to treat her right.
"What was it?" Veronica asked anxiously when Brett returned. He eased on to the stool beside hers and laid a familiar hand on her thigh. It seemed that he was stroking the dark, silky brown fur, but his thoughts had gone far beyond that.
"Some damn cop shot it out with a punk kid," he said. "The cop wasn't even touched, the kid not badly hurt."
"What cop?" Veronica asked. Her face had turned ashen with fear – an old habit she could not break.
"A guy named Dunlap. Grant Dunlap. You know him?"
"I used to," she answered vaguely.
The incident – so ironically close – only confirmed what she'd been thinking for some time – that she could not stand any more jerking and flinching every time she heard a loud noise.
Brett Allison was still stroking his fingers through rich folds of glistening mink, thinking about the golden opportunity that had dropped into his lap just the way his hand had dropped into hers. A furniture store! Maybe a chain of them, and a seething-hot pussy besides. He could feel her cunt pulsing beneath his fingertips.
If either of them had known who the wounded boy was and what he had done, it all might have worked out differently.
"Nice apartment," Tanya said after a quick, sweeping gaze. She never would have guessed it was the home of a cop, a woman she'd seen draw and aim a gun.
Samantha grinned modestly. "Thank you." She felt pleased that she was one of those rare women tough enough to work effectively in what was once almost entirely a man's world, but still softly feminine enough to express herself fully as a woman.
The floral-print upholstery, the frilly lace curtains, and the pastel prints of ballerinas decorating the walls all demonstrated how delicate she was. The clunk of her heavy purse when she set it down was the muted voice of her other side.
Tanya knew the purse contained a gun, probably handcuffs and a spray can of tear gas. She'd been in enough minor scrapes since running away to know the whole bitch-cop routine.
She sucked in a breath and gathered courage to speak. "I – I heard him say you were supposed to send me home. I don't want you to do that. My mother is a drunk, my step-father beats the shit out of her and then fucks me every chance he gets."
"I'm sorry." The words seemed so inadequate, but they sprang automatically from Samantha's lips. "He also said, when you calm down. I don't think that's happened yet."
"Oooooh, Samantha, you're so nice. How did you ever get to be a fucking cop?"
"Funny you should ask. I've been wondering the same thing myself." She swept Tanya into her arms and held her close. They both began to sob, half in relief, half from the warmth that passed between them.
Samantha knew that what she had in mind was a felony under the laws she was sworn to enforce. She couldn't help thinking how strange it was that she'd been assigned to the Vice Squad, because she'd long held the conviction that what people do in their private lives was their own damn business, not that of the federal, state, county or city government.