The Territory (Josie Gray Mysteries #1)(56)

*

Josie woke disoriented, her head heavy with sleep. She felt Dillon’s leg draped over her own and tried to figure out what day it was without opening her eyes. She lay on her back and moved her fingers lazily over his chest and allowed the drama from the night before to filter back into her thoughts as if through a deep fog. She thought she smelled a cigarette and imagined her mother sitting out in her living room, chain-smoking, and waiting on her to get out of bed.

She heard a noise and the scrape of a boot against the wood floor just before she opened her eyes. Two armed men stood at the end of the bed. Instantly awake, her body was rigid with fear. The room was dim, but she could easily distinguish that they were two males in their twenties, one stocky with a short military cut and a bushy mustache, the other taller and wearing a camouflage bandanna around his head and a long gold earring. The stocky man held his gun at his chest, removed the cigarette from his mouth, and dropped it on the floor, grinding it into the wood with his foot.

She forced breath into her lungs and pulled the sheet up, clenched it between her fists at her chest. Take me, she wanted to say. Leave him be. She wanted to stand with her hands in the air and surrender. Walk out of the bedroom with them as Dillon slept on, undisturbed. He did nothing to deserve this. But her body was frozen, her eyes unblinking, her mind barely able to separate dream from reality.

“You made a big mistake,” the man with the bandanna said, and Dillon jerked awake beside her.

“What the hell?” he said, his voice confused.

Under the sheet, Josie squeezed his forearm but kept her eyes on the two men.

“You got two choices and thirty seconds,” the man in the bandanna went on. “You choose to let Gutiérrez and the other three go and you live. You keep them locked up and you die. You choose. Now. Ten seconds.” He spoke with a northern Mexican accent she associated with the border towns.

She spoke with no hesitation. “They go free tonight.”

“You go inside and unlock the cell and it’s done, huh? They walk free to their ride home?” the other gunman said.

Terrified, Josie watched as both men raised their guns and pointed them directly at her and Dillon. She heard him gasp beside her and throw his arm over her, as if his arm could protect her from the spray of automatic gunfire facing them. Then, in tandem, both men swung their guns up toward the wall above the bed and opened fire. Wood and plaster and glass from framed pictures sprayed over them, piercing their bodies. Josie heard screaming but couldn’t tell if it was coming from her or Dillon. He had rolled over on top of her, his body covering hers, his arm cupped around her head as the gunfire continued. She closed her eyes to the white fire coming from the end of the weapons. It felt as if the noise and the debris falling around their bodies lasted for hours. When they had finished, one of the men yelled above the ringing in her ears, “Tomorrow, midnight, you die if our men aren’t free. You count on that.”

Dillon slowly lifted off her as plaster and wood and glass fell from their bodies. Both gunmen were gone. They heard the bloodhound howling outside, and Josie leaped from the bed, running to the front door. She envisioned the dog being shot as an afterthought, but they were already in their vehicle, a black Mercedes sedan, pulling out onto the road.

Dillon came into the living room carrying her bathrobe. He wrapped her in it and tried to hold her, but she pushed him away to grab the cordless phone off the coffee table. She called in the incident to the dispatcher, then tracked down Jimmy Dixon through Border Patrol and filled him in. She called Sheriff Martínez and told him that DPS was on their way to conduct the investigation. The sheriff said he was on his way over. The mayor’s number went to voice mail; she left him the details of it all on the message.

After all the calls had been made, she sat down on the couch with Dillon. He had sat in silence with the shaking dog on the seat next to him.

“Are you hurt?” she asked.

He held out his arms and showed her flecks of blood where glass from the picture frames over the bed had penetrated his skin.

“Let me see your back,” she said. He hadn’t spoken, and she worried he might be in shock.

They both stood and he turned away from her. A single rivulet of blood ran down the center of his back from where a larger piece of glass had lodged. She pulled the piece out with her fingernails and turned him around.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

His eyes welled up and he pulled her into his chest. “I thought we were both dead. When the noise stopped, I lay there and couldn’t figure out if I had been shot or not.”

“I’m so sorry, Dillon. I am so sorry you were in the middle of this. This isn’t your battle.”

He pushed her back and clenched his hands on her shoulders as if trying to hold her in place. “You can’t keep this up, Josie. It ends today. You can’t give up your life for this job. It’s not your battle either. You turn in your badge, we pack, and we’re out of here tomorrow. Better yet, we’ll let someone else pack for us and just leave. This town, this place—none of it is worth your life or mine.”

She sighed heavily. “I can’t do that.”

“Like hell you can’t!”

“I understand you want to leave. I wouldn’t ask you to stay.”

The light in his eyes changed. She felt the water rising around her.

“Of course you wouldn’t,” he said.