Eve pulled on soft pale cream leather gloves that matched her silk dress. “Not chocolate chip, but her new favorite-peanut butter. Mrs. Lopez was chattering about it. I’m going to see your father, Molly. Does he know about this?”
“Yes, we told him last night.”
“I see. So I’m the last to know. Will you two be here when I get back?”
“Depends,” Ramsey said. “You want to bring back something to celebrate?”
“Sure,” Eve Lord said, then called out, “Gunther, I’m ready!”
IN the Chicago Sun-Times, on the bottom of page ten of Section A, there was brief mention of a man who had been found just off Highway 88 between Mooseheart and Aurora by a passing motorist. The man had been beaten severely, but was expected, in time, to make a full recovery. His cameras had been crushed and left beside him. The newspaper called him a freelance photographer, but bottom line, what he was, was a paparazzo.
“I think we should pack our meager belongings, grab Emma, and hop a plane to Reno. I was thinking Las Vegas, but Rule Shaker’s there, and I can’t quite handle getting married anywhere near to where he is. I don’t want any more magazines or tabloids with pictures of Emma. She saw the one in the National Informer. She’d made out some of the words before I managed to get it away from her. I just pray she hadn’t gotten to the part about her playing the piano as well as her murdered father, Louey Santera. Can you begin to imagine the field day the media will have if we get married either here or in Harrisburg at my folks’ place? They always find out, no matter how careful you are.”
“Oh, God!” Miles came running out of the kitchen, a dishcloth in his hands. “Thank God you’re both here. I just don’t believe this. Somebody just tried to kill your daddy again, Molly. Oh God. Where’s Gunther? Where’s Mrs. Lord?”
“Is he all right, Miles?”
“Yes, he is. That was one of the guards we hired to protect him in the hospital. The guy fired from the building across the way-a good hundred and fifty yards-right through the window. He wounded a nurse who was taking your father’s blood pressure.”
“That’s an enormous distance,” Ramsey said.
“Is the nurse all right?”
“Took off a lot of her right ear; she bled all over everything, which made everyone believe that your father had been shot, but yeah, she’s fine.”
Ramsey squeezed Molly’s hand. “I guess we’d better get to the hospital. Miles, will you make certain Emma is never out of your sight?”
“No problem, Ramsey.” He’d been wringing his hands, but now at the mention of Emma, her need to be protected, he instantly calmed down. By the time Ramsey and Molly were out the front door, Miles had pulled himself together. Emma stood beside him. He was holding her hand.
Detective O’Connor from Oak Park and two detectives from the CPD were in Mason Lord’s room when they arrived.
“Show them in,” Detective O’Connor said. Introductions were made quickly. Miles was right. There was blood everywhere.
“Ears bleed like stink,” one of the CPD detectives said. He pulled on his own ear and Molly realized the bottom part was gone. He’d never be able to wear pierced earrings. She nearly laughed. She was losing it.
She slipped her hand around Ramsey’s. He looked at her briefly, saw her too-bright eyes, and slowly, very slowly, pulled her closer. “It’s all right,” he said quietly, his mouth nearly touching the top of her head. “It will be just fine. Breathe slowly, that’s it.”
The hospital window was shattered. Two technicians were busy very carefully extracting the bullet from the wall just about ten inches off the floor. The woman was using tweezers.
Detective O’Connor looked tired and harassed, but that wasn’t anything new. She felt tension between him and the other cops. He told them in his concise way, “Nurse Thomas was standing right next to your father, taking his blood pressure. Suddenly he seemed to weaken and fall back against the pillow. Nurse Thomas immediately leaned over him, holding on to him, when the shooter fired. If your father hadn’t gotten suddenly weak, if the nurse hadn’t pressed him down even more, shielded him, all those things, then the chances are good that your father would have gone down this time, Mrs. Santera. At the very least he would have been wounded. The bullet went through Nurse Thomas’s earlobe, downward. The bullet slammed into the wall less than a foot above the floor.”