Collateral Damage: A Savannah Martin Novel (Savannah Martin Mysteries Book 19) Read online

  “You can fight over it,” I told them. “Let’s just get Rafe inside for now. At least no one’s shooting at us anymore.”

  Like earlier, outside the house on Fulton, it would have been a golden opportunity for anyone who wanted a chance to take out important personnel. The Columbia chief of police, the Maury County sheriff, Rafe, the two paramedics…

  “Whoever it was is long gone,” Bob said, with a glance over his shoulder into the fields. “I guess we’re starting the day with another search tomorrow.”

  “And likely to find no more than we did today,” Grimaldi nodded, as she followed Bob and the male paramedic around the front of the car, as they supported Rafe toward the stairs. I tagged along behind, while the female paramedic wheeled her unused gurney toward the back of the ambulance.

  Rafe must be starting to feel more himself, or maybe it was just getting up that was difficult. He navigated the steps just fine for a man who’d just been shot. Inside the doors, Bob and the paramedic steered him toward the parlor and Aunt Ida’s loveseat, and deposited him, carefully, on it.

  “If there’s nothing more I can do for you,” the EMT said, taking a step back, “I’m gonna push off. We have to be ready for the next call.”

  Rafe nodded. “We got this.”

  I rolled my eyes, but refrained from saying anything. “Thanks for coming,” I told the paramedic instead. “When I called 911, I didn’t know it was ‘just a scratch.’”

  I put quotes around the words with my fingers. Grimaldi smirked. Rafe chuckled, and promptly thought better of it. He put a hand to his ribs with a wince.

  “Serves you right,” I told him.

  A corner of his mouth turned up, and he held out the other hand. “C’mere, darlin’,”

  I gave him a look, but I went. And perched on the peach velvet next to him. “Are you really all right?”

  “Right as rain, darlin’. We’ll have to take it easy for a couple days, is all.” He winked, so there’d be no question about what we’d have to take it easy about.

  The paramedic closed the front door behind him, so it was just the family and law enforcement left, and the atmosphere changed. “Somebody wanna fill me in on what the hell happened tonight?” Bob wanted to know. “I heard there was some kind of to-do up in Columbia. And now this? Is it related?”

  “Someone vandalized the house Charlotte and I have been working on, on Sunday night,” I told him. “This evening I got a text message saying that something was going on there. I picked up Darcy on the way—it’s her house, and Rafe was at work, and I didn’t want to go alone—and when we got there, there was a cardboard box on the porch. Before I could get out of the car and over to it, it blew up.”

  Mother gasped. I hadn’t heard her come down the stairs from the second floor—she was probably stepping softly so she wouldn’t wake Carrie—but she was standing in the doorway listening. “Savannah!”

  Pearl raised her head from the pillow by the wall, and slapped her stubby tail. Mother walked that way and—would wonders never cease?—sat down on the floor next to Pearl so the dog wouldn’t try to get up to greet her. I tried to recall whether I’d ever seen my mother on the floor before, unless she was in a dead faint. She must have played with us when we were kids, I assumed. Most parents do. But I couldn’t remember it.

  “We’re all fine,” I told her. “You’ve seen Carrie and me. And Darcy wasn’t hurt. We were both a little shook up, though. Patrick Nolan took her home.”

  Grimaldi nodded. “I was still there when dispatch called me to come down here. The fire department pulled out, finally. I had a couple of uniforms string incident tape all around the property. Hopefully that’ll keep people out.”

  Hopefully. “Half the front wall is gone,” I told Mother and Bob. “The porch roof. Some of the roof in the living room. Some of the wall between the living room and the bedroom next door. The coat closet is just splinters.”

  They’d both been to the house during the couple of months Charlotte and I had been working on it, so they could picture what I was talking about.

  “Dear Lord.” Mother shook her head, one hand pulling Pearl’s ear through her fingers. “What will you do, Savannah?”

  “Never mind that,” Bob said. “Somebody left a bomb on the doorstep?”

  “Not a bomb,” Rafe said. “Ammonal.”

  Bob’s brows arched. “Plenty of that around here.”

  “What?” Mother said, wrinkling her brows and then immediately smoothing them out again.

  “Not a bomb,” Bob explained. “An explosive. One that needs a spark to light it.”

  “So someone set it on fire?”

  “Someone shot at it,” Rafe said.

  Mother’s eyes opened wide, and her jaw dropped.

  “Lotta shooting going on the past couple days,” Bob said laconically.

  A lot of shooting. Culminating in tonight.

  “Any idea who it might have been?” Grimaldi wanted to know.

  “I’ll tell you who it wasn’t.”

  They all turned to me, and I added, “It wasn’t the guy Rodney and Kyle and Clayton was with at Beulah’s. He took a right out of the parking lot and went north, and he wouldn’t have had time to get down here before us.”

  Rafe nodded.

  “What guy?” Grimaldi and Bob asked together. “What happened?” Grimaldi added.

  Rafe explained which guy and what had happened. “I have the plate number. Just haven’t had a chance to look it up.”

  “Geez,” I said, “whyever not?”

  He gave me a look. “I’ll do it tomorrow.”

  Grimaldi reached out a hand. “Give it to me. You’re on medical leave for the next week.”

  “I’m what?”

  “Medical leave,” Grimaldi repeated, enunciating clearly. “One week. And light duty after that.” She wiggled her fingers.

  Rafe stared at her. “It’s in my head.”

  “Then tell me what it is, and I’ll write it down.”

  She looked around for something to write on and with.

  “I didn’t go on leave when I got shot before,” Rafe said.

  “You weren’t working for me when you got shot before.” Grimaldi accepted a pen and the back of a receipt I dug out of my purse. “If you had been, you would have been on medical leave. It’s SOP. I looked it up.”

  “I got shot,” Rafe said, “and you took the time to look up standard operating procedure before you drove out here?”

  “I looked it up in January, when you agreed to work for me. I figured I’d need it sooner or later.”

  I probably shouldn’t have giggled, but it was funny. Rafe gave me a dark look, before turning back to Grimaldi. “I can’t go on medical leave. I’m in the middle of an op. I’ve got a guy undercover I gotta keep up with.”

  “Someone else will keep up with him,” Grimaldi said. “It wasn’t like you were going to do it yourself, anyway. You made arrangements.”

  Of course he had. I didn’t know what they were—it was less than twelve hours since I’d first discovered that Clayton was in Columbia; I hadn’t had time to ask—but Clayton clearly couldn’t be seen with Rafe. There had to be a middleman of some kind he’d report to.

  “What the hell do you expect me to do for a week?”

  “Take it easy,” Grimaldi said. “Give those ribs a chance to heal.”

  “A week ain’t enough for that!”

  She didn’t say anything, just looked at him. Rafe turned his fulminating glare on Bob, who shrugged. “Sorry, son. But SOP is SOP.”

  Rafe growled.

  “We could go to Nashville,” I suggested. “You could hang out with Wendell and Jamal. And supervise.”

  Jamal, not Wendell. Wendell supervised Rafe. But he could probably be trusted to keep Rafe in line and make sure he didn’t over-exert himself.

  “That’s not a bad idea,” Grimaldi said, eyeing me with approval. “Make it look like you’re in worse shape than you are. Maybe even dead.”
r />   “Here we go again.”

  “At least you know he’s alive this time,” Grimaldi pointed out, and since she’d taken the brunt of my grief and anger the last time I’d thought Rafe had gone down in the line of duty, I kept myself from sniping back. Until she added, “You wouldn’t be able to go, though.”

  I opened my mouth to protest, and she said, before I could, “That’d defeat the purpose. For anyone to believe he was dead or in bad shape, you’d have to stay here and be visible.”

  “Can’t we put out word that he was life-flighted to Vanderbilt? They have a good trauma unit.” And if Rafe was supposed to be there, then I could go with him.

  There was silence around the room.

  “That’s not a bad idea,” Grimaldi said, somewhat reluctantly.

  Bob nodded.

  “You said the car had Nashville plates,” I told Rafe. “You could go up there and track it down. And do some surveillance on the guy.” It would keep him out of trouble and mostly sitting still for the next day or two, at least.

  “I guess maybe that’d be OK.” He didn’t sound thrilled, but he sounded like it might be a solution he could accept, at least for the interim.

  “I can’t do anything about the house on Fulton anyway,” I told him. “We’ll have to have a structural engineer come out and look at it. We may have to tear it down. But Charlotte and Darcy can handle it for a couple of days while I go to Nashville with you. You said Mrs. Jenkins’s house is livable again, right?”

  He shrugged.

  “Or if you prefer, you can go by yourself and bunk with Wendell. I’ll stay here, and we can put out word that you’re dead.” Although how we’d get anyone to believe it, I didn’t know. We’d already played that trick on the people of Sweetwater. This time, I wasn’t sure they’d believe it unless we paraded the body through town on a bier.

  “No,” Rafe said, “Not doing that again. Let’s go with the ‘life-flight to Vanderbilt.’ At least that way I’m just almost dead.”

  “Any chance they were out there, watching, and know you’re not almost dead?”

  All the law enforcement in the room shook their heads. “They were gone as soon as they saw me fall,” Rafe said. “Or at least as soon as they heard the sirens. Wouldn’t wanna risk getting caught out there.”

  Everybody nodded.

  “So nobody actually knows that you’re alive and well. Other than the people in this room.”

  “And the EMTs,” Bob said. “But I’ll put them wise.”

  “And I’ll move back in for a couple of days and take care of Pearl,” Mother said, from down on the floor. “Or we can move her to Bob’s house.”

  Bob didn’t looked thrilled about the idea, but he nodded.

  “You can take my car,” Mother added, “since I assume you can’t drive either of yours.”

  No, that probably wouldn’t be a good idea. The Volvo was going to need some bodywork, not to mention the blood cleaned off the side. We couldn’t take Carrie on the bike. And plenty of people had seen Rafe drive the Chevy, so it was better to leave that behind, too.

  “Let’s talk about how we’re going to handle this,” Grimaldi said.

  Thirteen

  We were on the road an hour later, and in Nashville an hour and a half after that. I was driving, and Rafe was sitting as straight as the passenger seat allowed, barely breathing, and wincing every time one of the tires hit a pothole. Carrie had complained for a few seconds about being woken up again, but as soon as we hit the road, she fell back asleep.

  “You OK?” I kept asking Rafe every five or ten minutes, and every five or ten minutes he’d tell me, “Just drive,” through gritted teeth.

  “Are you sure there isn’t anything that can be done to make you feel better?”

  He nodded. “I’m sure.”

  We pulled into the circular driveway outside Mrs. Jenkins’s house just before one, and of course it was as spooky as something out of an old horror movie. None of the lights were on, and the mostly bare tree-branches—of which there are many in the front yard—rubbed together, making creaky noises. The house itself—three stories, red brick, with a tower on one corner—rose up like Count Dracula’s castle.

  I suppressed a shiver, but not well enough to hide it. Rafe’s mouth quirked. “Nervous?”

  “I spent a long time living here,” I told him, “so no, not really. But it looks haunted. And unlived-in.”

  “That’s ’cause it is unlived in. Once we’re back inside, it’ll help.”

  I cut the engine and turned to him. “Just stay there. I’ll come around and help you out.”

  He arched a brow and opened his door. And was still sitting there, breathing hard, with his feet on the ground, when I got to the other side of the car.

  “Don’t try to be a hero, Rafe. All right?” I reached for him. “You have nothing to prove as far as that goes. And it’s OK to accept help when your ribs were broken a couple hours ago. Brace yourself on me and see if you can stand.”

  It turned out he could stand, but it wasn’t easy, and he kept up a low-voiced and vicious string of curses as he grabbed for the top of the car.

  “Good!” I said encouragingly. “Now let me help you up the stairs.”

  “Take the baby first.”

  I honestly didn’t think anyone was going to run up to the car and take off with the baby while I helped Rafe up the handful of steps to the front porch, but maybe he just needed a chance to catch his breath.

  “Sure.” I hauled the car seat out of the back and carried it up onto the porch, where I put it next to the door. “Ready? Or do you want me to grab the bags, as well?”

  I hadn’t packed much. We hadn’t packed much when we left here in a hurry, either, and all of our warm-weather clothes were still here. It was getting warmer, so I’d felt safe in leaving most of the colder-weather clothes in Sweetwater. We just had a small bag with some necessities—underwear, socks, makeup, toothbrushes—while Carrie had the bulk of the luggage. Babies need a lot, and while she had a crib and changing table and all that here, her entire wardrobe and a lot of her stuff had had to come with us.

  “Ready.”

  He was already—or still—gritting his teeth, but when I stepped up next to him, he put an arm across my shoulders and let me take some of his weight. The trick was staying as straight as possible, not bending, and also not jarring those ribs unnecessarily. It took us several minutes to navigate the steps he’d usually take in a bound or two, but we got there. I propped him against the wall and fished the key out of my purse. The door was different—an ugly metal security door, as far as it could get from the lovely, carved Victorian door that used to be here—but the key worked. I pushed the door open and flipped on the light.

  And quailed. “Oh, my God.”

  “It ain’t pretty,” Rafe agreed.

  It wasn’t. The lovely foyer that used to be there, all dark, carved wood and gleaming, polished floors, was gone. I was looking at new wood, unstained, and in place of the old plaster walls, new unpainted drywall. It smelled different, too. There was still a whiff of smoke in the air, even two months after the fire, but otherwise it was all sawdust and drywall mud and something that might have been someone’s lunch burrito. A half-empty bottle of Gatorade stood inside the door, and I resisted the temptation to kick it, since if it fell and spilled, that would only make things worse.

  My eyes filled with tears, though, and Rafe reached for me. “C’mere, darlin’. It’s OK.”

  “It’s not OK,” I sniffed, moving carefully into his arms. “It’s ugly. And it doesn’t look or smell like home.”

  “It will. Once they get finished and it’s all shined up.”

  I wasn’t too sure about that, but there was honestly no point in crying about it, since part of the crying wasn’t about the house at all, but about everything else that had happened tonight. So I sniffed one last time and withdrew. “Let me help you in.”

  “I got it.” He grabbed the jamb with one hand and
propelled himself up and through the door, and into the foyer. “Get the baby.”

  I got the baby. “I’ll just grab the rest of the stuff from the car.”

  We were driving Mother’s Cadillac, since we couldn’t take either the Volvo, the Chevy, or the Harley.

  “Be sure you lock it up tight,” Rafe called after me. “This neighborhood, a Caddy be gone by morning.”

  “I’ll lock it. And please lose the jive. You don’t talk like that the rest of the time.”

  “I be multi-lingual,” he told me, with a grin. I rolled my eyes, but made sure I locked the car up nice and tight after I’d hauled all the luggage out of the trunk and up the stairs into the house. Rafe watched, looking frustrated, like he wanted to help but knew he couldn’t.

  “By the time we’re ready to go back, I’m sure you’ll be feeling better,” I told him. “In the meantime, you’re just going to have to let me deal with it. The last thing you want, is to do something that keeps those ribs from healing. It’s much better just to take the time you need, and heal as fast as you can, than fight it and have it take longer.”

  Which he knew, anyway. It wasn’t his first injury.

  “I know, darlin’. It’s just hard, watching my wife haul everything while I stand here, looking useless.”

  “You’re not useless,” I said, moving some of Carrie’s paraphernalia past him. “You’re decorative. And anyway, if someone came at us with a knife, you could totally take him out before he cleared the trees.”

  “Nothing wrong with my aim. I just can’t bend over.”

  “That’s all right. Just pull the door shut—everything’s inside—and lock it. And let me help you up the stairs.”

  “I think I can manage.” He grabbed the banister—half of which was still unstained wood, spliced into the 1880s wood on the top half of the staircase—and began hauling himself from step to step. I watched for a few seconds—he was doing all right—before I gathered up Carrie and her diaper bag and prepared to follow.

  “Wait till I’m up,” he told me, without turning his head. “If I fall, I don’t wanna take you with me.”