Judging by the hole and the blood, Skye was pretty sure she’d hit him in the heart.
Shaking more badly than before, she stared down at the face of the man who’d approached her in the restaurant. Without any animation, without any life, his skin looked waxy, strange. If not for the holes in his earlobes and that goatee, she might’ve thought he was someone else.
She tapped his leg with her foot, hoping he’d groan or move or something. She actually prayed he would. She wanted him to be incapacitated but not dead; he had to tell her who he was and why he’d invaded her house.
But he didn’t move.
Swallowing hard, she set her gun on the hall table, crouched next to him and pressed two fingers to his neck. Those fingers were so cold that contact with his skin seemed to burn. But that warmth was deceiving. She couldn’t find a pulse. Her restaurant suitor had died almost immediately. There wasn’t much blood. His heart had probably stopped beating as soon as the bullet entered his chest.
“Oh God,” she whispered. As much as she’d wanted to eliminate the threat Oliver posed, it wasn’t easy to kill a person. She couldn’t possibly feel good about it. Especially when that person wasn’t Oliver Burke. She knew the kind of memory this would become, knew she’d collected too many harrowing memories already.
Creeping away from that lifeless body, she tried to stand, but her legs wouldn’t support her. Rocking back into a sitting position, she gasped for breath and rubbed her eyes, hoping that when she opened them again she’d see something different.
But the corpse was still there—growing colder by the second.
Skye was growing colder, too. The freezing wind coming through her open door didn’t help. Too bad she didn’t have the strength to get up and close it. She was too shaken, too overcome with the emotions she’d experienced four years ago, when she’d awakened to find Oliver looming over her bed. That sense of violation—and the lack of security and peace of mind—immediately returned to swallow her.
It had happened again….
She covered her mouth, fighting the urge to vomit. He would’ve killed her if she hadn’t killed him. The bullet holes in the wall testified to the seriousness of his intent. But she still couldn’t cope with the shock of it.
Taking a deep breath, she slid even farther from the body. She didn’t want to see it, didn’t want to acknowledge what she’d done. It was so permanent. She’d taken a life….
She needed to calm down, get a grip. She’d survived again. That was what mattered. She’d always known that future threat, future violence, was a strong possibility. She’d trained for it—and that training had done exactly what it was supposed to do. It’d saved her life. And this time, the man who’d broken into her house wasn’t capable of causing her any future harm.
“You asked for it,” she hissed. “You had no right to be here.”
Slowly, her strength returned and her thoughts became more coherent. Maybe this man couldn’t tell her who he was, but he might have some ID.
Reluctantly reversing her direction, Skye averted her gaze from his unseeing eyes as she searched the pockets of his jeans.
He didn’t have a wallet. He had two pieces of paper folded into squares, which turned out to be computer-generated maps giving detailed directions to her house and someone else’s.
Holding the second map up to the light, Skye easily recognized it, too. Directions to Sheridan’s condo.
Fresh fear blasted through her. What if this man had visited Sheridan’s house again? And what if—
Suddenly strong enough to move mountains if she had to, she launched herself to her feet and ran for the kitchen. Grabbing the phone attached to the wall, she started to dial. Then it dawned on her that there wasn’t any dial tone. The phone was out of service or, more likely, the line had been cut. Of course. She’d known he must have disabled the alarm system.
Frantic, she dug through her purse, which was sitting on the kitchen table, just where she’d left it. Obviously, her intruder hadn’t broken in to rob her. “Come on, come on, come on,” she chanted. If Sheridan was hurt—or worse…
Tears blurred her vision as her fingers closed around her cell phone, but there was too much adrenaline flowing through her system to make it easy to dial. She had to start over three times before she punched in all the right numbers.
“Hello?”
Skye sank into a chair at the kitchen table, weeping when her friend answered on the first ring. Sheridan was alive—and she sounded fine.
“Hello?” Sheridan said again.
Skye was too choked up to answer.
“Skye?”
Wiping her wet cheeks, she finally managed to speak. “It—it’s me,” she whispered.
“What’s wrong?” A spurt of anxiety filled Sheridan’s voice. “Are you hurt?”
“No. I—I think I’m okay.”
“What do you mean, ‘think’? What’s going on?”
Skye glanced over her shoulder. She could see the tennis shoes on the feet of the corpse lying in her hallway and shuddered. “That m-man who was w-watching your house? The—the one in the old J-Jag?”
“Yeah?”
Her teeth were chattering so hard she could barely talk. “He’s d-dead.”
“How do you know?” Sheridan asked.
Skye started to laugh. She had no idea why. But she couldn’t stop. “Because I just k-killed him.”
After leaving the ice cream parlor, David headed for the delta. He wanted to drive by Skye’s house, see for himself that everything seemed okay. He hated leaving her safety up to strangers, no matter how well-intentioned they seemed to be.
And he was definitely glad he’d had that impulse when he received a call from Deputy Meeks. “I’ve spotted a white Jag near the residence you asked me to watch,” the deputy said with little preamble.
David looked in his rearview mirror at Jeremy, who was finishing his strawberry shake. This wasn’t the kind of news he felt capable of handling with his son in the car. But it wasn’t as if he had time to take him back to Lynnette. “Where?” he asked.
“It’s parked next to a levee less than a mile from Skye Kellerman’s house. I’m there now. It’s locked up tight.”
“Did you run the plate?”
“Came up stolen.”
Son of a bitch. Fervently wishing he had somewhere safe to leave Jeremy, David punched the gas. He didn’t want his son anywhere near a possible crime scene, but he was already halfway there, and Skye’s life could hang in the balance. “Get over to her house. Now.”