“Stay here out of the wind,” Connor said, gently moving Forest toward his Hummer. “Roll the windows up and turn on the heater if you need to, okay? I left the keys so you can do that, and if you fall asleep, don’t fight it. Just nap. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
“I don’t think I can sleep. Too much—I couldn’t do anything for them,” Forest whispered, but he let himself be handed up into the Hummer’s spacious seats. “Jules—”
“She’s going to be all right. Let me follow up with the guys here, and I’ll take you over to the hospital,” Connor promised. He was an old hand at soothing away nightmares. It was a pity that this one just happened while they’d been awake. “They’re going to be working on her for a bit, so you won’t be able to see her anyway. The EMT said she was good, just a puncture through the arm, but the docs will want to anchor the bone. I’ll get you over there before they even get her out of surgery, okay?”
“Okay.” The stillness in Forest’s once-lively brown eyes punched a hole into Connor’s gut, and he awkwardly patted the blond’s leg. Forest’s lashes fluttered, and he slid down into the seat’s cradle, pulling his knees up to his chest. “I’ll be fine.”
He didn’t want to leave Forest there. Not alone. Not shaking from a bone-deep chill born from having Death’s fingers brush against him. And certainly not when his tears were frozen up inside of him, unable to break past the wall of fear some asshole built up around Forest with a spray of hot bullets and cold-blooded murder.
“I’ll be right back,” Connor repeated, as much to reassure himself as Forest. “If you need anything, call over to me.”
All he got in return was a nod, but it would have to do. Closing the door, Connor patted the window and walked over to where his sister Kiki paced off the scene outside the coffee shop.
Of the two girls in the Morgan brood, his flame-haired sister, Kiki, was probably the more serious of Connor’s sisters. While Kiera might have been on her birth certificate, Connor couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t been called Kiki, a nickname bestowed on her by a two-year-old Quinn, who’d disliked their mother’s choice of names for their first sister.
It wasn’t until much later they’d discovered it wasn’t a mispronunciation of Kiki’s name but instead Quinn’s random brain pulling up a Chinese word for inner strength and energy—something he thought his ginger-topped, fussy sister possessed in spades.
The chubby toddler quickly became a lanky teenager, then a formidable woman who took up the badge along with most of her brothers and proceeded to kick her ass through the ranks. Now an Inspector, Kiki stood shoulder to shoulder with her partner, Senior Inspector Henry Duarte, her hands waving about as she spoke in quiet tones, reconstructing the event in order to pinpoint where to begin their investigation.
Duarte, an older Hispanic man with a fat mustache and rolling wit, chewed on the end of a pencil as Connor approached. He nodded to the eldest Morgan sibling, his hound-dog eyes thoughtful while he took in the scene, looking from the street back toward the decimated coffee shop.
“Con,” Duarte grunted in greeting. “How you doing, mijo?”
“Doing okay, Henry. You caught this one, then?” Connor shoved his hands into his pockets, trying to ignore the cold wind chewing its way through his bones. “You and Keeks?”
“Oh, don’t call her that. You’ll get her all spun up.” The inspector rolled his eyes when Kiki turned on her boot heel to head over to her brother. “Ah, too late. Here comes the banshee.”
“And you tell me not to spin her up,” Connor muttered.
“Hey, big brother. Come to check up on me like Kane does with Riles?” Kiki’s red mane fought desperately to escape the hair ties she used to pull it back into a double ponytail. Gentle curls softened her vulpine features, but nothing could take the edge out of her Morgan-sharp gaze.
“That would be difficult, colleen,” he teased his sister with a slow smile. “Considering I was here before it all happened. What kind of inspector doesn’t know her witnesses before she shakes them down?”
“I haven’t gotten the list yet.” She joined Duarte in a visual reckoning of the area. Pointing to a scatter of casings going from one end of the sidewalk to the other, she gestured with her cell phone, taking a panoramic of the scene. Frowning, she looked at him over her shoulder. “What are you doing down here? Kind of far from home, are we, big brother?”
“We are….” Connor searched for an explanation for being in the wide end of Chinatown in the middle of the morning. “Visiting. I know the owner of the place. Places, really.”
“Forest Ackerman?” Duarte read off from his notes. “That the guy you poured into your Hummer?”
For all of his apparent laziness, the senior inspector caught even the smallest of details—including, apparently, Connor’s rescue of Forest from the uniforms, EMTs, and forensics people crawling over the sidewalk and coffee shop.