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He looked at his watch. “I can cover the office for two hours by myself. Go eat lunch with your girl. Get this feeling fixed up, and then get back here. I’m dying a slow death over here.”
The sheriff was the first one to come down with the flu, and the first one back.
He was likely still needing his bed, but he’d come in since we were literally down to three sheriff’s deputies and one secretary to keep this place running.
“I’ll come back after lunch,” I promised. “Do you want me to bring you anything?”
“Some chicken soup if you happen to find any,” he said. “If you don’t mind, thank you.”
I gave him a thumb up and sidled out of the office and to my cruiser.
When I got into the cruiser, I drove straight to the funeral home which took me less than five minutes.
When I arrived, it was to see Castiel staring at the front door strangely.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“The light’s blinking,” my father, who was at the edge of the building, said. “But every three seconds or so, it goes out and then starts blinking again. It shouldn’t be blinking at all. It should be a solid red light.”
“Did you check on the girls?” I asked.
“I did,” Dad confirmed. “Turner and Janie are in Jubilee’s office. Jubilee is still with the dead man that’s got the axe throat wound.”
I frowned. “Is the feed on?”
“Yes,” Jubilee’s father turned his phone to show me. “And it’s showing us, too. Not a loop.”
I frowned harder.
“I can go look.” I paused. “But I’m not good enough with these. It’d be easier if you…”
Dad started nodding his head almost immediately. “I’d feel better if that was what we did.”
I pushed past them all. “Is the pizza here?”
“It was delivered about five minutes ago,” Castiel said. “The pizza guy delivered it into my hands, and then walked to the car and left.” He grinned then. “And then the pizza guy almost ran over a dead body that was being delivered. It was epic. The body fell to the ground and everything.”
I rolled my eyes at his use of ‘epic.’ “I’ll go get her and we can eat out here on the steps.”
As I moved through the hallways, I studied each and every room we passed.
It wasn’t until I got to the part of the hallway that led to the basement that my heart started to race. Because I could hear raised voices.
And that’s about when the truth slammed into me.
I was running before I had the conscious urge to do more than take a step. And I found myself standing in front of the room Jubilee used to ‘fix’ her clientele before I drew more than two breaths.
But common sense crashed into me before I so much as barreled inside, and I had my phone out in my hand just as the door opened and someone started out.
I processed it all at once.
The door opened.
The nondescript man with the dark brown hair, hazel eyes, and honey gold skin was holding onto Jubilee’s wrist.
Jubilee, on the other hand, looked downright pissed, but there was a gun pointed at her and she was moving despite not wanting to.
She had a cut on her lip as if she was punched or slapped, and her clothes were disheveled as if she fought him.
My left hand went to the gun as my right one curled into a fist.
I had a split second of inaction as if I was trying to decide whether I was going to react or not, then I barreled forward.
Jubilee, seeing my move, wrenched her arm backward.
She didn’t get it away from the man, but she succeeded in diverting his attention for long enough that I could punch him. Straight in the goddamn jaw.
My fist hit him so hard that he was knocked off his feet.
One second he was standing, and the next he was on the ground, staring blankly at the ceiling.
It was the few seconds that I took to get Jubilee up and off the floor that he recovered enough to go for his gun.
That was when Jubilee kicked him in the face.
He rolled, and kept rolling until he was a few feet from us.
Closer to the gun.
I reacted before I could stop myself.
I was straddling him with my thighs, hand fisted in his shirt for optimal distance.
I punched the man, over and over again, in the face, relishing the way my knuckles cracked hard against his cheekbone.
The audible crunch of his nose breaking wasn’t any less satisfying now as it was when I’d broken it five minutes ago.
It was a while later when the man stopped struggling, that I finally got my shit under control enough to ask questions instead of just beat the shit out of him.
“Why?” I growled, teeth gleaming white and bright in the sunlight.
