Nicole simply sat there, completely incapable of processing any of this, shaking, mind blank. Her entire body felt heavy with the lethargy of shock.
“Honey,” one of the ghosts said, and it was as if that deep voice shattered the chains of shock holding her in place.
Sam! Sam and Mike!
Somehow they’d found her! She drew in a shuddering breath and only then realized that she had stopped breathing. A second later, she still found it hard to breathe, because Sam was holding her so hard.
“Jesus,” he muttered into her hair. “That was close.”
“Yeah.” She laughed shakily. “What took you so long?”
He made a sound deep in his chest. Not a laugh, not a snort, but a combination of the two.
Just feeling him against her, knowing he was there, made her strong. Awareness rushed back in. The men who had threatened her were dead, but her father needed medical care and she had to figure out what was in her computer because there was no guarantee that other bad men might not follow.
Nicole pulled Sam’s head down, kissed him, then pushed against his chest, hard. Surprised, he opened his arms to let her go. She turned to Mike, gave him a resounding kiss on the mouth, then ran to her father.
“Hey!” Sam shouted.
“Harry wants one of those, too,” Mike called out.
The intruder was sprawled at her father’s feet, hand still curled around his gun, finger in the trigger guard. A second later, and a bullet would have gone through her father’s head.
Nicole stared down at the man for a moment, hating him with every fiber of her being. She kicked his arm away with disdain and knelt next to her father, frantically touching him all over.
“Daddy, Daddy, are you okay?” She tugged desperately at the duct tape. She couldn’t stand seeing him tied up for one second more. But no matter how frantically she pulled, the tape held. Her father swayed in his seat as she tugged harder and sobbed. “Damn it! I can’t get this stuff off him!” she raged.
Big hands pulled her gently away. “Here honey, let me,” Sam said, pulling out one of those huge black knives she so wanted for herself.
Nicole eyed the man at her feet. “Too bad he’s dead. I’d love to cut his beating heart out with that knife.”
“Beautiful and bloodthirsty, I like it,” Sam said, slicing easily through the duct tape, one big hand on her father’s shoulder so he wouldn’t fall off the chair. “Though it’s not as easy as it looks, getting past the ribs to the heart.” He sliced the restraints around the wrists and slipped the knife back into a sheath around his thigh.
“Oh God.” Nicole looked up at Sam, tears swimming in her eyes. “He’s unconscious. We’ve got to get him to a hospital immediately!”
“Yeah.” Sam bent and lifted her father carefully in his arms. “We can drive him as fast as any ambulance. St. Jude’s is about twenty minutes away. Let’s get going.”
“I’ll drive,” Mike said. He looked down at the dead bodies, then at Sam. “I’ll have to call this in.”
“From the road,” Sam answered, turning sideways to get through the door with her father in his arms. “We don’t have time right now. Let’s move.”
Nicole scrambled to her feet, light-headed, still shocked at not being dead, and followed them out the door. Mike held a powerful flashlight to light the way.
She was halfway down the corridor when she stopped, cursing. Nearly dying had scrambled her brains. She ran back to the room that had almost been her graveyard, leaping over the man who’d nearly blown a hole in her head, and grabbed the intruder’s laptop, her hard disk and her purse.
Mike was waiting for her, a question in his eyes.
“Whatever they were looking for, they were willing to commit murder to get it,” she huffed, holding the laptop and hard disk up. “We need to find out what it is. What?” He was looking at her strangely.
They were walking quickly down the corridor, trying to catch up with Sam, who was already at the big steel gates.
“Should have thought of that myself,” Mike grumbled. “Couldn’t count on Sam to think of it, he was crazy with worry over you, but sh—damn! I should have thought of that. Here, let me carry that for you.”
He looked weighed down by about a thousand pounds of…stuff. Nicole didn’t recognize any of it except for a big black rifle, a big black pistol and a big black knife.
She could certainly carry a laptop, a purse and a small hard disk.
“No, that’s fine. I’ve got it. You just saved my life,” Nicole said as they exited out onto the dark loading apron. “You can be forgiven for forgetting things.”
