Loving Baby

“I was fifty-fifty on killing him or keeping him alive,” the first man said. “Either outcome I can work with.”

“No one’s in here,” the person with the Southern drawl called from the bathroom. “The house is empty.”

“So, whose truck is that, and where are they?” It was the third man who asked, and something in the back of James’s mind rattled around at his voice. It sounded familiar. If only he could see the three people beneath them.

“It could have been Sully’s boy who got free earlier,” the first said. “Came out here to warn Hank that we were coming and left on his bike. Might explain how they got away before we got here.”

James couldn’t help but tense up. He felt Suzy turn her head enough to look at him. A lot of good that did in the dark. While there might have been more than a few Hanks in Alabama, James knew of only one who would be tangled up with his brother. If Hank had been at the house, then there was no doubt Gardner had once been there, too.

“Well, what do we do now?” the drawler asked. “We got all the boys here and no one to question.”

The sigh was so loud, James heard it as though the man was in the attic with them.

“Looks like we’ll just have to hunt down Hank and make him tell us where he hid the boy before anyone else finds out Gardner Todd’s son is out there missing.”

If James tensed at the mention of Hank’s name, he turned into a statue at this new information.

Gardner had a son?

He had a nephew?

Suddenly everything fell into place. The urgency to meet in person. The secret he’d been trying to tell James.

Gardner had a son.

A son who was in trouble now.

Rage, pure as pollen in the spring, filled James so quickly that he had half a mind to open the attic door and bring down a heap of pain on the men in the bedroom. Had they been the ones who had ordered Lester to kill his brother? Why were they after the boy? What were they planning on doing with him after they found him?

Every question pushed adrenaline into James’s muscles.

In the darkness of the attic, all he saw was red.

And then that red cooled.

Suzy moved her hand onto the arm he had around her stomach. Her fingers delicately wrapped his forearm. Then, in the smallest of movements, she brushed her thumb across his skin.

The rage in him quieted, and sense returned to him.

Jumping out and taking on the unknown number of armed men would only get him killed, and her, too. And then his nephew would still be in danger.

James squeezed her side to let her know he’d gotten the message.

“Go get Zach and the boys, and tell them to go ahead and hit the road,” the first man said. He must have been the one in charge at the moment. James committed his voice to memory. “Keep your phones on,” he called as one of the men’s footsteps went back into the living room.

“What do you want me to do?” the third man asked. Not the guy with the Southern accent. Again, James felt like he could almost place the man’s voice. “I mean, do we even know where Hank is?”

“No, but Sully does.”

“I thought he was gone. In the wind.”

“Doesn’t mean we can’t get him back. The sorry SOB has a lot of problems, but his worst one is how he feels about his people. We find that boy he took a bullet for, and I bet we could smoke him out.”

“If Sully hasn’t already bought a one-way ticket to the great fire pit in the ground.”

The first man laughed. It sounded like nails against a chalkboard.

“He may be soft, but Sully isn’t about to let a bullet do him in.”

Car doors shut in the distance. An engine turned over.

“And what if he doesn’t know where Hank is? Heck, what if Hank is already on his way out of the state with the boy?”

Zach, the boys and the man with the Southern twang must have been leaving. James tried to split his attention, to see if he could hear if one or two vehicles were driving off, but he very much wanted the same answers as the unknown third man did.

“You may not have been in for long enough to know about Hank, but I used to run with him a few years back. He’s not a stationary man, and definitely not a fan of the state. He came back for a reason. He won’t leave until he’s done whatever he needed to, and my guess is it wasn’t being the father to Gardner Todd’s kid. Now, let’s start with his old woman in—”

Music—the chorus of the song “It’s Raining Men,” to be precise, courtesy of James’s sister and how hilarious she thought it was to try to embarrass him when she called—filled the attic around them. He and Suzy both reached for his coat pocket and his phone, lit up and blaring.

“What the—”

James wrapped his hand around the phone and pulled Suzy up and farther into the darkness, just as a shot sounded up through the attic door.

“We need light!” she yelled. No point in trying to pretend no one was home when The Weather Girls were belting out one of their most famous hits.

James held up the phone, giving them some light. Another bullet embedded itself in the roof above them. As soon as Suzy could see, she was playing hopscotch across the ceiling beams. The last thing they needed was to fall into the bedroom.

“Whoever you are, you’re screwed!” yelled one of the men. James didn’t have the time to figure out which one it was. He canceled Chelsea’s call and used the phone as a flashlight.

The attic ran the length of the house and was by no means spacious. They hunched and clung to roof beams as they hurried to get out from above where the men were.

Not that that would make much difference when they decided to walk into the living room and unload a few more rounds into the ceiling.

“How close is the truck to the house?” Suzy asked James. A ripping sound pulled his attention to her dress just in time to watch the tear that was already there split all the way up to her hip. Lord have mercy—if they weren’t running for their lives, James would have had to really think on the lacy number she was wearing beneath it.

“How close is the—” he repeated.

Suzy cut him off. “The vent!”

James followed her line of sight to the attic vent at the end of the house. With a jolt of excitement, he understood.

“Close enough,” he said.

Another two bullets shot up behind him, too close for comfort. Suzy must have sensed it. The moment she got to another beam, she turned toward him, brandishing her gun.

“Move!” she yelled.

James didn’t have to be told twice. He hurried around her and kept going toward the vent while she did some shooting of her own. He counted four shots by the time he made it to the beam closest to the vent.