Delores Fossen - Six-Gun Showdown

Paige didn’t waste a second. She ran toward Jax. She didn’t want Jax and her to be ambushed while her back was turned, but he was unarmed and outsized. If she didn’t help, this could turn even more dangerous than it already was.

Paige was just a few feet away when she heard a sound she didn’t want to hear. Another blast. Her stomach and muscles were already in knots, but that tightened her chest so much that she couldn’t breathe. Jax couldn’t be hurt. He just couldn’t be.

And he wasn’t.

It took her a moment to fight through the panic, especially when she saw the blood. Thankfully, it wasn’t on Jax. It was on the thug, and spreading across the front of his shirt. Now Jax had the man’s gun in his own hand.

Jax cursed, moved away from the man, but he didn’t lower the gun. He kept it aimed at him while he volleyed glances between the truck, the other man and her.

“You’re hurt,” Jax said.

Was she? Paige wasn’t sure of anything right now except the relief of seeing Jax unharmed.

“Is one of them the Moonlight Strangler?” someone called out.

Cord.

She didn’t spot him right away, but Paige followed the sound of his voice. He was in the pasture, moving toward the truck.

Jax spared Cord a glance, too. And a glare. Before he yanked the ski mask off the man he’d just shot. There was just enough light from the silvery moon for her to see his face.

A stranger.

And he wasn’t nearly old enough to be the serial killer. The Moonlight Strangler had been murdering women for three decades, and this man appeared to be in his twenties.

He was also dead.

Paige could tell from his now-lifeless eyes, which were fixed in a permanent blank stare.

“Is the other one alive?” Jax asked.

She shook her head. “I’m not sure.” Paige looked back at the guy, but he hadn’t moved since she’d bashed him with the gun. “But he’s got some kind of communicator in his ear. I think he was talking to the Moonlight Strangler.”

Jax hurried toward the man but then almost immediately stopped. Paige did, too, when she heard the sound of the footsteps. She got another slam of adrenaline. Followed by relief when she saw that it was Jericho.

Good. Well, maybe.

It was possible the Moonlight Strangler was in that truck and was ready to gun them all down. Of course, Cord was racing toward it no doubt to try to prevent that from happening.

“Call an ambulance,” Jax told his brother.

Probably in case the second thug was still alive. But she rethought that when Jericho looked at her and cursed. And when she felt the blood sliding down the side of her head and face. She wiped it away but felt a new trickle follow right behind it.

God knew how bad she looked right now or even how badly she was hurt. Her head and body were throbbing, but Paige wasn’t getting in the ambulance. She had to stop the Moonlight Strangler once and for all.

Jax cursed her, too, when he realized she was trailing after him, and he automatically adjusted his position so that he was in between the truck and her. Protecting her. Despite the bad blood between them, that didn’t surprise her. It wasn’t just the lawman in him that made him do that. Jax had always had this cowboy code about protecting others.

Even if she probably wasn’t someone he wanted to protect.

Jax approached the second man with caution. His gun aimed, his gaze still firing all around them. He reached down, pulled off the mask and put his fingers to the man’s neck.

“He’s alive,” Jax relayed. “Barely.”

Paige leaned in, hoping this would be the Moonlight Strangler. But he wasn’t. Like the other man, he was much too young. And that meant the killer could indeed be in the truck or nearby.

“Be careful,” she called out to Cord.

Whether he’d listen was anyone’s guess. Unlike Jax, Cord didn’t have that whole protection code. He had one goal. Just one.

To catch his biological father, no matter what the cost. That included sacrificing his own life.

Paige had been driven by that kind of justice after her parents had been murdered. That was the reason she’d become a CSI. But justice didn’t drive her now. She only wanted to keep Jax and her son safe. That might finally happen if the Moonlight Strangler was in the truck so they could catch him.

But if he was there, why hadn’t he driven off when he’d seen that his thugs had failed?

A possible answer popped into her head. An answer she didn’t like one bit.

This could be a trap.

Jax must have realized the same thing because his attention went straight to the truck. And to Cord.

“Watch out!” Jax shouted.

However, the words had hardly left his mouth when the blast thundered through the air. And the truck burst into a ball of fire.

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