Christine Rimmer - James Bravo's Shotgun Bride

The gun hit the floor. An ungodly explosion followed and a foot-wide hole bloomed in the ceiling. Addie screamed. Ears ringing, James jumped from the chair. Sheetrock, wood framing and kitchen flooring rained down.

And Levi, his face gone a scary shade of purple, keeled over on his back gasping and moaning, clutching his chest in a desperate, gnarled fist.

“PawPaw!” Addie cried and ran to him. She dropped to her knees at his side.

Levi gasped and groaned and clutched his chest even harder. “Shouldn’t’ve...untied him...”

“Oh, dear God.” She cast a quick, frantic glance in James’s direction. “Call an ambulance. Please...”

James grabbed his phone off the side table and called 911.

Chapter Two

Once he got help on the line, James gave his phone to Addie so she could talk to the dispatcher directly. He scooped up his keys and wallet and stuck them in his pocket. And then he waited, ready to help in any way he might be needed.

Addie pulled his phone away from her ear. “You can go.”

He didn’t budge. “Later. What can I do?”

She listened on the phone again as Levi lay there groaning. “Yes,” she said. “All right, yes.” She made soothing sounds at Levi. Then she looked at James again. “If you could maybe go up and get a pillow from his bed. His room’s off the front entry on the main floor. And get the aspirin from the medicine cabinet in the bathroom there?”

He was already on his way up the stairs. He found the pillow and the aspirin and ran them back down to her.

“Thank you,” she said. “And really. We’re okay. You just go ahead and go.”

Levi was clearly very far from okay. James pretended he hadn’t heard her and eased the pillow under Levi’s head.

Addie gave the old man an aspirin. “Put it under your tongue and let it dissolve there.” Levi grumbled out a few curse words, but he did what Addie told him to do. Addie shot another glance at James. “I mean it. Go on and get out of here.”

Again, he ignored her. Not that he blamed her for wanting him to go, after all that had happened. But no way was he leaving her alone right now. What if Levi didn’t make it? James would never forgive himself for running off and deserting them at a time like this, with Addie scared to death and Levi just lying there, sweating and moaning and clutching his chest as he tried to answer the questions that Addie relayed to him from the dispatcher.

At the last minute, as the ambulance siren wailed in the yard, James glanced up at the hole in the ceiling. He looked down at the rope abandoned on the rug at the base of the chair and the shotgun that had landed in front of the TV. All that was going to look pretty strange.

He couldn’t do much about the hole, but he did grab the shotgun. He ejected the remaining shells and gathered them up, including the spent casing, which he found right out in the open in front of the sofa. He put the gun and the shells in the closet under the stairs and tossed the rope in there, too. The straight chair, he moved to a spot against the wall.

“Thank you,” Addie said. He glanced over and saw she was watching him.

He shrugged. “There’s still the hole in the ceiling. But don’t worry. It’ll be fine.”

“Hope so.”

“Just a little accident, that’s all.”

She pressed those fine lips together, her eyes full of fear for her grandpa. “Would you go up and show them down here?”

“You bet.” He ran up the stairs and greeted the med techs. “Roberta,” he said. “Sal.” They were local people and he’d known them all his life.

Sal asked, “Where is he?”

“In the basement. This way...”

Roberta and Sal were pros. In no time, they had Levi on a stretcher, an oxygen mask on his face and an IV in his arm. James helped them get Levi up the stairs. As they put him in the ambulance, Addie ran back inside to grab her purse and lock up. Her sweet-natured chocolate Labrador retriever, Moose, followed after her, whining with concern. Addie told the dog to stay. With another worried whine, Moose trotted to the porch and dropped to his haunches. Addie climbed in the back of the ambulance with her grandfather and Roberta.

Sal went around and got in behind the wheel. James trailed after him.

“Who blew the hole in the kitchen floor?” Sal asked out the open driver’s window as he started the engine.

“Levi was cleaning his shotgun.”

Sal just shook his head. “You’ve got blood on your collar.”

“It’s nothing. You taking him to Justice Creek General?”

With a nod, Sal put it in gear.

A moment later, James stood there alone in the dirt yard a few feet from Levi’s pre-WWII green Ford pickup, which had no doubt been used to kidnap him. Overhead, the sun beamed down. Not a cloud in the sky. It wasn’t at all the kind of day a man expected to be kidnapped on. Gently, he probed the goose egg on the back of his head. It was going to be fine. He was going to be fine.

Levi, though?

Hard to say.

And what about Addie, all on her own at Justice Creek General, waiting to hear if her granddad would make it or not? At a time like this, a woman should have family around her. Her half sister, Carmen, would come from Wyoming. But how long would it take for Carmen to arrive?

He just didn’t like to think of Addie sitting in a hospital waiting room all alone.

As the ambulance disappeared around the first turn in the long driveway that led to the road, James took off toward the barn.

A couple of the horses Addie boarded watched him with mild interest as he jumped the fence into the horse pasture and ran until he got to the fence on the far side. He jumped that, too, and kept on running. Fifteen minutes after leaving Addie’s front yard, he reached his quad cab, which was parked in front of his nearly finished new house. He had a bad cramp in his side and he had to walk in circles catching his breath, now and then bending over, sucking in air like a drowning man.

There was blood on his tan boots—not much, just a few drops. He pictured old Levi, hitting him on the head and then dragging him to that green Ford truck of his—and not only to the truck, but then out of the truck, into the house at Red Hill and down to the basement. No wonder the old fool had a heart attack.

As soon as his breath evened out a little, James dug his keys from his pocket and got in his quad cab. He checked his shirt collar in the sunscreen mirror. The blood wasn’t that bad and the bump hardly hurt at all anymore.

He started the pickup and peeled out of there.

* * *

Addie needed to throw up. She needed to do that way too much lately. Right now, however, was not a convenient time. She sat in the molded plastic chair in the ER waiting room and pressed her hands over her mouth as she resolutely willed the contents of her stomach to stay down.

She had James’s phone in her purse. In her frantic scramble to get in the ambulance with Levi, she hadn’t thought to give the phone back. And then she’d clutched it like a lifeline all the way to the hospital. She’d only stuck it in her purse to free her hands when the reception clerk had given her all those forms to fill out.

Addie sucked in a slow breath and let it out even slower. Oh, dear Lord, please. Let PawPaw pull through this and let me not throw up now. Everything had happened way too fast. Her mind—and her poor stomach—was still struggling to catch up.

Her own cell phone was in her purse, too. She’d barely remembered to grab it off the front hall table before racing out the door. She needed to get it out and call Carmen in Laramie. But the nurse had said Levi wouldn’t be in the ER for long. They would evaluate his condition and move him over to cardiac care for the next step. Addie was kind of waiting to find out what, exactly, the next step might be so that she could share it with her sister when she broke the terrifying news.