Consumed (Firefighters #1)(108)

Slow motion.

Everything went into slow motion.

Moose flipping Anne on her back. Reaching, straining to something in the grass. Soot snapping at his hand.

Something in the back of Danny’s mind put the pieces together faster than his thoughts could organize. With every ounce of power he had, he surged forward at a dead run, and on his way to the fight he picked up the first weapon he came to.

A long-handled axe.

Just as Moose found a gun in the grass, Danny skidded into place, swung the blade, and caught the would-be killer in the back of the head.

Moose stiffened in a full-body seizure, and Anne was on the split-second delay. Even though she was bleeding from the nose, she twisted and caught the nine-millimeter, snatching it out of the man’s control.

And then she shoved herself free, scrambling out from under the now-limp deadweight that lay flat on the ground.

Danny released the handle. Tripped. Fell back onto the ground and stared at the axe as it held its own against gravity, sure as if he’d buried the blade in nothing but an oak stump.

“Soot!”

Shaking himself, he glanced at Anne. She was trembling as she kept the gun pointed at Moose and pulled her dog in against her, the animal licking at her, nuzzling, whimpering.

When she finally looked at him, he put his palms up into the air like she might shoot him, too.

Silence came over the scene, his mind trying to connect with a reality he didn’t understand. Couldn’t possibly grasp. Anne seemed to be in a similar state of shock.

Why had his old roommate been trying to kill her?

“Are you okay?” he said roughly.

Her eyes, wide and glassy, locked on his face. “Danny . . . it was him. It was Moose. He lit the fires at those warehouses . . . and he was going to kill me.”

Danny slowly lowered his hands. What the hell had Moose fallen into?

“He did it for the money,” Anne mumbled. “That’s where all the money came from, for the wedding, this house, that Shelby in the garage. He was disappearing evidence in those fires, but I wasn’t able to connect him with Ripkin. I still don’t know how Ripkin is involved.”

Danny rubbed his face. “All I care about right now is that you’re okay.”

He reached out and took her hand. When she didn’t pull away, he brought her up against him and squeezed his eyes shut. Holding her tight, he looked over her shoulder at the body of his old friend.

The sadness was so deep he felt certain his heart was going to stop. He still didn’t know how a man he had lived with for all these years had turned so bad, but the one thing he was sure about was that Anne was alive.

Nothing else, even Moose, mattered more than that.

Easing back, he brushed some of the grass from her hair. “I need you to know I wasn’t with Deandra the night before the wedding. Put a bullet it in me now and send me to my twin brother, I will swear to that on my soul. She lied to Moose to make him mad, and she did it in front of the whole stationhouse, but it wasn’t true. I wouldn’t have done that to Moose.”

He let Anne looked into his eyes, for as long as she needed to, all the while praying that the truth was something she could recognize in him.

After what felt like a lifetime, she whispered, “You saved my life again, Dannyboy.”

“I will always be there for you.” As her hand raised up to touch his face, he captured it and pressed a kiss to her palm. “Always.”





chapter




53



Anne sat on the back of the ambulance and held the ice pack to her nose. The bleeding had stopped, but she was worried it was broken. Every time she poked it, it made a crunching sound and that was not good news.

“—so that was when you decided to come out here and confront him?” the detective said to her.

Two more police vehicles came up to the scene and joined the four that were already parked in a circle around the ranch. The uniforms who got out were folks she remembered from her nights at Timeout, and absurdly she wanted to wave and say hello to them, like she was the hostess of this shit party.

“Anne?”

“Sorry.” She refocused on the woman. “Yeah, I decided to come talk to him. It seemed like everything was adding up, but I needed to be sure. When I got here, I opened the back of the trailer”—edited to remove mention of her shooting the lock off—“and I saw the office equipment in there.”

“What kind of office equipment?”

“Laptops. Computers. Phones. I’m guessing that Ripkin Development was either hiding things they wanted to destroy in Ollie Popper’s extensive collection, or they have far more extensive dealings in the black market than law enforcement can even begin to contemplate.”

“Okay, so then what happened?”

Her mouth started to move again, words leaving in a stream, and she guessed she was making sense. The detective was nodding and making notes.

But Anne had stopped listening to herself.

Danny came walking around the corner of the house, two uniforms with him, the three men talking intently. When he saw that she was looking at him, he stopped, like he wasn’t sure whether he was welcome or not.

Soot, who had been by her side, let out a chuff in greeting.

“That’s all for right now. We’ll let you get treated, and you’ll have to make a formal statement.”