Ross POV

I was determined not to let anything happen to Alex.

I couldn't.

If things got ugly, I was just going to have to try to tackle the guy myself and hope like hell that she could escape.

Yeah, because surely Alex would run away from a dangerous situation, I thought sarcastically.

But it was my only hope at the moment.

She'd made the call using my phone since our genius captor had crushed hers.

"This is Detective Goren," she'd said. "Yes…um…I just wanted…um…yeah, to um…let you know that we're…um yeah…done interviewing Mr. Miller, and it's a um…uh uh…dead end."

I had no doubt that Goren was on the other end asking questions, which was the reason for her halting and less-than-eloquent speech.

And knowing him, he'd asked exactly the right questions, so I figured that he and the Logans were at this very moment racing toward Waukegan.

"Nice job. Now you two move over there," Miller directed, pointing towards the corner of the room.

His brother was still on the floor near the couch, moaning in pain.

"You're making a mess, Herb, and you're giving me a fuckin' headache!"

He focused on his brother for a moment. Herb was bleeding but not excessively so. He didn't appear to be in imminent danger.

This guy shoots Goren from across the field and clips an artery, but shoots his brother from five feet away and barely does any damage other than the hole.

"Velocity and positioning," Alex said quietly. "And dumb luck."

"What?"

"The bullet was traveling at a higher velocity due to the close proximity. It would've gone straight through without veering one way or the other. The way Herb was standing, the outside of his leg was toward Miller."

I stared at her for a moment, attempting to process how she'd been able to determine my exact thought process.

Finally, I had to ask, "How in the world did you…"

"Hey! Shut the hell up!" Miller shouted, swinging the gun around to point it at Alex.

"What's the plan now?" I asked quickly in an effort to get him to point the gun at me.

Predictably, he did. He was an amateur. He had trouble pointing it at someone other than who he was talking to. That offered me hope as well.

"Van," Herb wailed. "Van, I need a doctor."

"Give me your cuffs," Miller said to me.

"I don't have any."

"No cuffs? Are you fuckin' kidding me?" he asked as he approached us. Then his face darkened as he came to a stop directly in front of me. "Who are you? Did Cabbage send you?"

"To kill you?" Alex asked on a laugh. "What, you think we're hit men? Assassins without guns?"

"Don't laugh at me," he insisted. He moved to stand in front of her and then he shoved the nose of the gun against her forehead. "Don't you fuckin' laugh at me, do you understand?"

"Yeah, I got it," she replied levelheadedly.

Damn, did the woman never break a sweat? She maintained eye contact with him the whole time.

"Good," he said, slowly dropping the weapon. "Now stand there with your backs against the wall. If you open your mouths or move away from that wall, I swear to God, I'll put a fuckin' bullet in your head."

We both complied and he eased away from us slowly, and then half-turned towards his brother.

The minutes ticked away. I wanted to say something, but I was afraid that he really would shoot.

I wanted to have a brilliant plan, but my mind was blank.

Well, not entirely blank, but I couldn't come up with a plan that didn't end up with at least me dead.

And while I preferred that development to having Alex end up dead, I still hoped to avoid fatalities altogether.

Mine and hers anyway.

Miller was up for grabs.

After pacing for awhile, he went over and stood next to Herb.

I knew that we were making Miller nervous. I couldn't figure out why he hadn't made any effort to bind us somehow other than to ask us for cuffs.

Although, I guess he didn't have anything in the living room and he couldn't leave us alone.

A creative criminal would've used an electrical cord.

A curtain cord.

Hell, even our belts.

I was grateful that Miller didn't seem to be a creative criminal.

But he did still have that damn Tec-9 which was the only thing holding us at bay at the moment.

I watched as Miller hovered over his brother and continued to throw random glances at us. He pulled his brother's pants down to assess the damage to his outer thigh, and when I was sure that he was engrossed for a moment, I chanced a look at Alex.

She chose the same moment to look at me.

I was amazed by the volumes she spoke with her eyes.

First chance we get, I'm going after him. Don't try to talk me out of it, just back me up.

Had she always been like this? Or had she just gotten like this since marrying the other Goren? Did she just now realize how much she had to live for?

No, she had an incredible fortitude running through her that was ingrained.

I could perfectly see why Logan called her Wonder Woman.

And yet at the same time, I couldn't let her do it. I couldn't let her go at him.

Because I had a gun.

Tom had given me his back-up .22 when he'd given me the keys to his car. I had it strapped to my leg in an ankle holster.

I hadn't told Alex about it, since it was illegal for me to have it.

And why had I worried about that?

I had no idea because right about now, I was really wishing that I had told her. Partners didn't hold out on each other.

Goren would've told her, I told myself mockingly.

But as much as I hated to admit it, I was no Goren.

I had my assets. I had things I did well.

But I needed to quit trying to compare myself to him.

I was pulled from my self-analysis by the scream of Herb.

"Shut the fuck up, you fuckin' pansy!" Van yelled at him.

This guy was a whack job. He'd shot his own brother. How messed up was that? And now he was shouting at him for expressing his pain.

"Stop pushing on it!" Herb cried out.

And then I flashed onto the vision of Goren getting out of the hospital this morning.

He'd stood tall and stoic, not showing any hint of pain or discomfort. In fact, he'd been sympathetic to Logan's pain, rather than focusing on his own.

He was a super hero in his own right.

Miller finished tending to his brother's wound and then he helped him to his feet.

We had now been in this house for nearly an hour.

It had been half that long since Alex's call. Surely there were cops outside.

As though on cue, I heard the telltale sound of chopper blades.

The cops must have called in the damn hostage crisis team, I thought. I watched Miller closely, but with Herb's fussing, it didn't appear as though he heard the sound.

I caught Alex's eye again. She was even more determined than ever. She'd heard the same sound and I knew what she was thinking.

We didn't want to sit through a negotiation. That could take hours.

While unlikely, it was possible that Herb could bleed out.

Not only that, but Miller was a ticking time bomb. Negotiators would only piss him off.

We needed to handle this quickly.

I wracked my brain thinking of how I could get to the gun. I also needed Alex to be a little further away from me so that when I got Miller to focus on me, she could maybe get away.

We were in the corner of the room with me along the side wall and Alex along the front. The closer I could get her toward the front door, the better.

I looked at Miller as he helped Herb onto the sofa where he propped his leg up on a pillow. It was strangely oppositional to how he'd acted only moments before.

While he was distracted, I glanced back at Alex. I shifted my eyes to the left repeatedly to convey to her that I wanted her to move.

I knew that she'd have no idea what I had in mind. Would she follow my lead?

The question barely permeated my mind when I saw her subtly shift left.

She trusted me.

She managed to slide nearly three feet along the wall before Miller turned around to face us. He finally had Herb settled and calmed down.

Although she had moved, we both still had our backs to the wall. I'd shifted slightly closer toward the corner to give the appearance that we were still the same distance apart.

And as Miller looked us over, I began to shift my weight from one foot to the other.

"Stand still!" Miller yelled at me.

"I've got a cramp," I told him.

"Are you fucking kidding me? A cramp? How old are you?"

I increased my shifting because despite his taunts, he seemed to be buying it.

"I'm not kidding. My leg is killing me."

"No, I'm going to kill you if you don't stand still."

"Damn, Ross, don't you ever quit?" Alex asked harshly. "He's always bitching about his cramps," she added to Miller. "He's worse than Herb over there with all his moaning and groaning."

Miller chuckled at her ridicule of me, so she wisely kept it up.

"You may as well let him work it out," she added. "He's never going to quit. Believe me, I have to work with this guy every damn day."

He waved his gun at me in a gesture of acquiescence.

"Go ahead, Nancy boy. Work out your cramp," he told me. "Cause we're gonna be here a little while longer. I gotta wait on somebody."

I slowly bent down and began massaging my calf muscle. But Miller kept staring at me, so it wasn't going to do me any good.

And then I heard the thunk of a car door closing.

Miller looked toward the front door and I grabbed the .22 from my ankle holster.

It wouldn't hold up for long in a gun fight with a Tec-9, but it might give Alex time to get out alive.

I stood up quickly, aiming my pistol at Miller as he whirled around to face me.

"You were holding out on me, mother fucker?" he shouted as his face clouded over in anger.

I began to side-step away from Alex to keep Miller's focus and hopefully get her out of his peripheral vision.

Another step and I had him facing two-thirds of the way away from her. And she was only a few feet away from the front door.

Run, I yelled in my head.

And she did.

Except she didn't run away from Miller.

She ran towards him.

She crossed the space that had separated them in a split-second and tackled him low, catching him at the knees.

They both went down and the gun went off.

I felt a bullet whiz past my head as I charged toward the melee.

The gun went off again as Alex fought for control.

She was on top of him and the two of them were such a tangled mess that I couldn't decide how best to help.

I definitely couldn't shoot.

In the end, I tucked the .22 in my waistband and lunged for his arm. After a moment, I managed to pin it to the floor.

With one of his hands immobilized, Miller started flailing madly with his other hand.

I heard a loud smack as he caught Alex in the side of the head with his open hand, but it didn't slow her down. She hauled back and punched him in the jaw and then used both hands to finally wrestle the Tec-9 from his grasp.

And she didn't stop there.

Once she had the weapon in her hands, she then proceeded to beat the crap out of him with it.

I wasn't about to stop her.

In fact, I not only kept my grip on his right arm, but I also managed to catch hold of his left wrist as well, effectively preventing him from defending himself.

She slowed down after a minute and when she realized that he wasn't struggling any more, she quit altogether.

She was breathing heavily from the exertion that she'd put into the blows, and I watched her as she finally stood up and then gave him a kick for good measure.

"You sure you're done?" I asked her earnestly as she took a step away from him.

I still had a grip on him, but he was passed out cold.

His face was a bloody mess, the butt of the weapon having created multiple lacerations on his skin.

But considering all that Miller had done, I still would've been okay with her getting a few more licks in.

"Yeah," she replied with a nod. "You had a gun?"

"I'm sorry. I should've told you before we got here."

"No. I'm just glad you had it," she told me with a shake of her head. "Now put it back," she added pointedly.

Then she tossed the Tec-9 onto the floor on the opposite side of the room and opened up the front door. She held her hands up in the air so that there wouldn't be any confusion as to her lack of threat.

"It's clear!" she yelled.

Within ten seconds, the house was filled with cops.

"You okay, sir?" one of the cops asked me. I looked across the room at Alex as she stood against the far wall, trying to catch her breath. Two cops stood in front of her undoubtedly attempting to get her statement.

Would she admit to beating him after we had the upper-hand?

Maybe. But they'd never hear it from me.

Would she tell them that I had a gun?

Absolutely not.

Another two minutes passed before I heard a commotion at the door.

"Arrest me if you want to, but we're coming in!"

That was Logan, of course.

Goren stood quietly beside him and looked like death warmed over. I saw blood staining the front of his sling. I watched as, with wild eyes, he searched the room for Alex.

Simply by watching him, I knew the moment that he saw her.

But their passage was blocked by several officers.

"Hey, who's in charge here?"

That was Carolyn. She smoothly slipped past Logan and walked into the room as though she owned it.

"I'm representing Alex Goren," she stated loudly.

Oh Lord, she's passing herself off as an attorney.

"Her husband is in need of immediate medical attention and she needs to go with him," she continued. "She'll be available to give her statement at the 11th District in Chicago first thing in the morning."

"Miss…um…" one of the officers began.

"Mrs. Logan," she supplied. "She's not suspected of any crime, is she?"

"Well, no…"

"Then she's coming with us. As I stated, she'll be available at nine a.m.."

"Ma'am…"

"Officer, is there a problem here?"

It was Tom.

I closed my eyes and allowed myself to breathe for a minute.

Carolyn might have been able to pull off her ruse with just a little more bluster, but now she wouldn't have to.

And it didn't look like she was making up that part about Goren needing a hospital, so the sooner they could get out of here, the better.

"Captain Coulter," the officer recognized. "You're a little out of your jurisdiction, aren't you?"

"This situation resulted from an investigation that was being conducted out of my precinct. I apologize for the lack of communication. I was unaware that our email server was down, thus rendering our electronic notification ineffective."

"You can assure me that these hostages will be made available for statements at your station in the morning?"

"Absolutely."

The officer hesitated and then gave a nod to his subordinates who stood aside.

I was entranced as I watched Goren cross the room, his eyes still focused only on Alex. He used only his left arm, but he still seemed to fully envelope her, holding her close despite the pain he must have been feeling.

"You okay, Danny?"

I was surprised to see that Carolyn and Logan had come up beside me. I'd been completely spellbound by the reunion I'd just witnessed.

"I'm…I'm fine."

Logan looked across the room at Herb who was zoned out on the sofa, and then further to where Miller was surrounded by paramedics.

"What the hell happened in here?" he asked in a low voice.

"Wonder Woman saved the day," I replied.

"She usually does," Logan agreed. He put his hand on my shoulder. "Come on. Let's head back. We need to get Goren back to the hospital."

"What's going on with him?" I asked as I followed the other two toward the door.

"I think he tore his sutures. It's not extensive, but it definitely needs attention."

I looked back toward the Gorens where they were still embracing each other on the far side of the room.

"Bobby, Alex!" Carolyn called out.

They pulled apart and turned to follow us. I went out the door and down the front steps behind the Logans.

I paused at the bottom, ready to ask Logan how they'd gotten up to Waukegan, when I heard Alex shout.

"Bobby!"

I whirled around and stood frozen as I watched the scene unfold. His skin had gone ashen and his knees had given way. Alex grabbed for him, but couldn't hold on.

He hit the concrete surface of the porch and then tumbled down the front stairs.

TBC...