I started to get closer to the sheriff as Leo blundered out the front door onto the porch, clutching Ricky to his chest with a stranglehold across Ricky’s throat. As a shield, Ricky was a joke, looking more like a human codpiece since he was so much shorter and thinner than Leo. Ricky also seemed to be dead weight at this point, his feet dragging over the threshold.
“Let me go and I’ll release him!” Leo shouted at the sheriff and deputies while he waved his gun around.
“Not gonna happen,” Sheriff Campbell muttered, and shot at Leo’s hand. Leo dropped his gun and fell on top of Ricky.
I was stunned. Nobody looked like they’d been hit, but it had been an effective move.
The deputies swarmed over Leo, one handcuffing him, the other getting Ricky out from under Leo’s body. Ricky was crying while Leo was shouting about how someone—namely him—could have been killed.
My legs were so shaky, I slid down and sat in the snow. Almost immediately, Sheriff Campbell had holstered his gun and put a hand under my arm.
“Okay, let’s get you inside and warmed up,” he whispered.
“Where’s John?” I asked as I stood and shuffled forward.
As the sheriff helped me up the porch steps, the deputy moving Ricky inside turned to us.
“There’s a guy on the floor in here. He looks like he was hit on the head, but he seems to be okay. He’s coming to,” she reported.
John was injured? Shit. I tried to hurry, but my feet weren’t acting right. So I staggered to keep up with Sheriff Campbell’s slow and steady speed as I got my breath back. I was shivering, but my head seemed to be clearing.
By the time we got into the living room, John was already on the couch, a plastic bag with ice, wrapped partially in a dishcloth, clutched to his head.
“Hey,” he greeted me. “You okay?”
“Yeah. Just cold. You?”
He lifted the bloody cloth, grimaced, and nodded. “I’ve been better.”
A cursing Leo was being led down the walk toward the police station as a couple more deputies arrived. Then Ricky found his voice, and chaos ensued. Every time he yelped or shouted or got really shrill, a buzz-saw pain ripped through my head.
It was going to be a long night.
Chapter 14
Processing Leo took a little under forever. The sheriff asked me to stay and sign a statement about Leo threatening us with a gun. In the meantime, both John and Ricky had been taken to the clinic and examined by the doctor, then released. John’s wound amounted to a cut that needed to be bandaged, and he’d been cautioned to have someone stay with him to check for signs of concussion. To no one’s surprise, he volunteered me.
We were exhausted and bundled up against the cold as I picked him and Ricky up at the clinic to drive them back to Blue Cottage. As we drove up, we saw the house had been sitting empty with the front door unlocked and a little ajar the whole time we’d been gone. I felt like a fool when I realized I hadn’t even checked the doors after I’d gone across the street with the sheriff to give my statement.
It took a while for the two floors to return to anything I’d consider room temperature, and by that time, I was the only one still awake and roaming around. I turned off the lights upstairs, locked the kitchen door, then came downstairs and did the same. I left a message on the Cuttings phone telling Beth that neither Ricky nor I would be in.
Before I joined John in bed, I pulled down the shades on the bottom-floor windows. Morning was coming soon, and I for one didn’t want to be totally awake for at least eight hours, if not longer, even if I did have to check John every few hours to see if he was okay. I could do that fine when I was semiconscious.
* * * *
The knocker started a roll-call loud tattoo around eight, much too early for any of us. When I peeked out a crack in the shades, I saw a phalanx of news trucks along the street and some even stopped on the snow-covered lawn of the city park next door.
I caught the eye of a guy who shouted he was a reporter and would like to talk to John or Ricky.
I double-locked the front door and put the chain on the back doors, upstairs and down, then crawled back in bed where John wrapped himself around me, muttering, “You’re cold. Here, warm up.”
Then we proceeded to ignore the rap of the knocker and the shouts of the crowd and the honking horns of the traffic. Sheriff Campbell had been elected to take care of crowds like this. I was happy to let him do his job.
Turned out that the tiny foothills village of Stone Acres had captured one of the Bay Area’s most wanted. Leo and his prostitution ring, with its branch office in San Diego, had been fleeing capture for over a decade.
The loss of John, which triggered Ricky’s disintegration, had helped pull the plug in the Bay Area. Leo had feared John might go to the police and steer them to his door, so he’d been moving around relentlessly, jeopardizing the continuity of service. Clients began leaving in droves, and competitors moved into San Francisco, which drained Leo.
It all sounded like a mystery novel to me as I heard about it on the news. Adam had gotten John and Ricky a lawyer, who’d given out a press statement, but reporters still wanted to talk to both of them, much to John’s dismay.
The deadline for me to decide what I was going to do with my life sped toward me as the sordid story unfolded.
In the end, my decision wasn’t rocket science, and I didn’t even need my doctorate degree to figure out
