Thankfully, Leslie understood, and she let her legs give way. The gunman tried to catch her, to pull her back in place as his human shield.
But he must have realized it was too late.
The thug readjusted his aim instead. Ready to shoot Ethan. Before Ethan could fire, though, two shots blasted through the corridor. For a heart-stopping moment, Ethan thought he’d gotten it all wrong, that the thug had indeed managed to shoot Leslie. But she was unharmed and was scrambling away from the man who’d taken her captive.
The man wasn’t fine.
Far from it.
Ethan whirled to his right and saw Livvy. She was now in the center of the hall. She was in a classic shooting stance, her Sig Sauer trained right on the thug. And she clearly hadn’t missed.
The two shots she’d fired had hit the gunman in the head. And with his eyes already blank and lifeless, he dropped to the floor.
Chapter Seven
Livvy sat next to Ethan in the waiting room of the hospital, waiting for Sunny to be medically cleared so they could talk to her. Whenever that would be. Livvy just hoped she could stay on mental autopilot for a while longer until she could get somewhere quiet and process what’d happened.
For now, though, she had to focus on the job. On the aftermath of what had been a fatal attack. Focus on the fact that Ethan and she hadn’t been hurt and their baby was okay. She knew that for a fact since Grace had insisted she have a checkup and an ultrasound. Livvy hadn’t minded since she had wanted the exam for her own peace of mind. Added to that, it meant she wouldn’t have to keep her ultrasound appointment for tomorrow.
Despite having to fire those shots, they had all come out unscathed. Not the still-unidentified gunman though. And not Teddy either. The security guard was dead, shot and killed in the line of duty, trying to protect the medical staff and patients.
And for the most part Teddy had managed to do just that.
There’d been only one other injury to a nurse who’d been shot in the arm. She was expected to make a full recovery. Ditto for the patients who’d been forced, in some cases, to pull out their own IVs so they could take cover and hide. But all in all, the patients had gotten lucky.
Ethan’s phone dinged with a text, and she risked looking at him. Risked because at this point something as simple as eye contact might cause her composure to drop a couple ofnotches. He no doubt knew that, and he hadn’t doled out anything emotional. Just the opposite. He’d been all cop since the shooting, and that gave her some much-needed steadying.
“Hank Stover,” he read aloud from the text. “That’s the ID that they just got on the dead gunman.”
She mentally repeated it a couple of times, testing it to see if it rang any bells. It didn’t.
“Aged thirty-nine. A long rap sheet for drugs, assault, robbery. He was from San Antonio,” Ethan continued. “Eden is searching for any connection between him, Sunny, Zadie and New Hope.”
There would likely be one, but it might not be easy to find, especially if this Hank Stover had been hired to kill Zadie and come after Sunny. If that was the case, who had hired him? Chloe, Franklin or someone else?
And why?
Too bad they wouldn’t be able to get the answers from Hank himself, but Livvy knew she’d had no choice but to kill him. If she’d hesitated just a second, he would have ended up shooting Ethan.
“Did you look at the ultrasound?” Ethan asked, the question surprising her.
Livvy turned to him, and yeah, staring at him straight in the eyes packed a wallop. The look alone might have pulled her right in, bringing on the flood of emotion, but then his question sank in.
“No,” she answered. “Not really. I just listened to what the doctor was saying.” Especially the part about the baby being all right. “Did you?”
He wasn’t so quick to answer, and he finally nodded. “The images were a lot clearer than I’d expected.”
“Oh. So, you saw…the sex of the baby.” And Livvy wasn’t sure how she felt about that.
Nor did she get a chance to think about it because Grace came into the closet-sized waiting room. She handed Ethan a Pepsi and Livvy a small box of milk.
“You got word about the ID of the gunman?” Grace asked, downing some of her own Pepsi.
“Yes,” they answered in unison.
“So, you know he was a lowlife son of a bitch before storming in and committing murder.” Grace stopped and seemed to be making an attempt to rein in her anger. “Sorry—I just had to do the notification to Teddy’s family. Let’s just say I have a whole lot of ill will for Hank Stover.”
“Same,” Livvy agreed, drinking some of the milk. Her stomach was in knots, so she hoped she could keep it down.
