“Go,” she said calmly. He raised his eyebrows. She smiled and said, “It’s what you do best. Go.”
He grinned, grabbed the dog, and hopped from the truck. “Come on, Bernie. Let’s go find this guy.” Tucker stopped, leaned deeply inside the truck but couldn’t quite reach Addie. However, she seemed to know what he wanted because she leaned over too, and it was just close enough that he could kiss her.
“I’ll be back in a minute.” And he turned, racing forward, coming up on the other side of the Honda, and he saw the cops surrounding the Honda. Tucker didn’t know what they would do or how badly this would go, but he wanted to make sure he was there, just in case. As he approached, the driver stepped from the vehicle, hands in the air. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said to the cops. “I don’t know anything.”
They ordered him flat on the ground. He complied, but then, as he lay down, he twisted suddenly and pulled something from underneath his jacket and started firing. Several of the cops slammed bullets right back into him. He lay there, moaning in pain, when Tucker raced up with the dog. Bernie reached the gunman and immediately started barking and straining at the leash.
The gunman looked at her. “What the hell’s up with that dog? Shut it up.” He was holding his shoulder. “You didn’t have to shoot me.”
“We figured you’re in for suicide by cop,” one of the men said calmly. “What do you expect when you fire at us?”
“I didn’t mean to,” he said. “I panicked.”
At that, one of the cops looked at the shooter’s wounds, then at his boss and said, “He’s not badly hurt, both in the same upper arm.”
“Good, we need to get him to medical care, and I want him under wraps real fast,” the detective said. “This asshole doesn’t get to run away from this. Not this time.”
At that, Tucker struggled to contain Bernie, who was definitely looking for a piece of the gunman on the ground. Since he was already injured and under wraps with the cops, Tucker walked the War Dog back to the shooter’s vehicle. “Bernie, let’s go to work.”
His voice was clipped. He kept a short leash on the dog, and the dog seemed to immediately understand. She sniffed around the vehicle, and, when they got to the trunk, she immediately barked and sat down. He asked the detective, “Can you open up the trunk?”
He walked over, pushed the button, and the trunk popped open. What Tucker saw was not what he expected. He looked at the detective, nodded at the trunk, and said, “You’ve got bigger problems now.”
Chapter 11
Addie sat in the truck nervously. It wasn’t so bad in here; she could keep Tucker in sight, but then he’d disappeared quickly. She saw chaos and could hear gunfire erupting up ahead, but she hoped that, with all the cops, it wouldn’t be gunfire at Tucker. She still didn’t quite understand what was going on, but, when he returned about an hour later, she was more than ready to get answers. She looked at him anxiously. “You’re not hurt?”
“Neither of us are,” he said, and he opened the door to let Bernie in.
“What’s going on? Who shot at us?”
“Well, the cops caught our gunman, and they didn’t search him but ordered him to the ground. He managed to roll and fire on several of them.”
“Did he hurt anybody?”
“No, but he took two bullets, one in the shoulder, one in the arm,” he said. “They’ll take him to the hospital, get him patched up, and charge him.”
“And it’s the guy who hurt you?”
“Well, I can’t be sure about that. Hopefully we’ll find that out during their investigation. I was really afraid they’d kill him, and we’d get no answers,” he said. “But then I had Bernie here sniff out his vehicle. We found a whole lot more than we expected.”
“What?” she asked, anxiously looking at him.
He turned, stared at her, his face grim. “A body in the trunk.”
She gasped, the color fading from her cheeks. “Seriously?”
“Yes,” he said. “Not exactly sure what’s going on, but that’s why he was fighting to get out of there.”
“Damn,” she said. “It’s one thing to get caught on the suspicion of an attack, kidnapping, plus the arson, but it’s a completely different thing to get caught with a body in your vehicle.”
“Well, he can sprout all kinds of denials, but it’ll be hard to get out of this one,” he said.
“Do we know who it is?”
“I took a picture of the man’s face for Rodney to identify. He said it was Raul, this guy is Rural’s partner, on the painting crew.”
“Great,” she said, “so it’s likely all related.”
“Yes, we think so.”
“But is Rural talking yet?”
“Not yet,” he said. “But I think, for the moment, this is over with.”
“Well, I hope so. How many other people can hate us so much?”
He laughed at that, started up the truck. As the traffic moved, Tucker pulled back into the line, and the traffic was free to go now that the roadblock was removed. Tucker waved and honked at the detective, as he stood there on the side of the road. Tucker pulled to the shoulder again. The detective walked over, and Tucker mentioned that Rodney had identified the dead man for them.
“Right, and the prisoner’s talking already,” he said. “He didn’t want to kill his buddy, but his buddy had put them in a terrible position because he’d accepted money to burn down the property. And, once the dog got there, the guy got afraid that the dog would know something, and then he would get charged, so he wanted to take you out.”
“Great, so the two buddies, Rural and Raul, knocked me out and carried me into the woods? Then Rural killed Raul, leaving me behind? I guess I should be thankful for that. And then today Rural worried about evidence, returned to the crime scene, and shot at us?”
“It was an argument that got out of control. Anyway, that’s the gist of the story at the moment.”
“And it makes sense,” Tucker said. “It’d be nice if we could tie up the arson and the attack at the same time. I just wonder how the hell they knew we would be there this morning.”
“Not sure that he knew you would be there at all. But he was looking to see if his buddy had left any evidence at the scene that would incriminate him. When he saw you, he didn’t know what to do but tried to go after you as well.”
“Wow, he’s just losing on all corners.”
“Well, now he’s injured, and he’ll go to jail for a long time,” he said. “You know a lot of charges are coming up for him, including firing on several police officers, but the murder charge will trump the lot.”
“I don’t care what trumps what as long as it’s over,” he said.
“You and me both. You and me both.” He smacked the driver’s side of the truck, where Addie sat now, and said, “Get ready for that wedding now.”
“Right, Rodney will be beside himself if I’m late.” Tucker waved and jumped into truck’s passenger seat.