Page 71 of Out of the Shadows
Jack jumped through the already broken window, glass crunching under the soles of his durable boots.
Aberdeen turned first to Luisa, gun aimed at her, then he heard Jack and swirled to face him. He fired at Jack, and Jack and Luisa both aimed at Aberdeen and fired back.
Jack saw Laura running down the hall, shotgun in hand, and he shouted at Luisa, who couldn’t see the hall from her angle, “Cease fire!”
Aberdeen was down on the ground. Jack immediately went over and kicked the gun away from his hand, then squatted to check his pulse. He moaned. Blood poured from his arm and his side—both Jack and Luisa had hit him. He heard sirens in the distance.
“You’re bleeding,” Laura said.
Jack looked at his arm. He thought he’d felt a sting.
“It barely grazed me.”
“Where’s Cody?”
“Hiding in the barn.”
“I need to see him. I don’t want Sydney to see this.”
Luisa said, “I’ll watch him.” She still had her gun trained on him.
“Luisa, you need to stop the bleeding,” Jack said.
“Why?” she snapped. “He broke into this house with the intent to do harm.”
Luisa was usually the cool, calm, collected sibling. This was a side of her Jack hadn’t seen before. But he hadn’t spent much time with her since she left the military. Maybe that needed to change.
“Because,” Jack said quietly, “it’s the right thing to do.”
She scowled, and Logan said, “I’ll watch him, Lu. You save his life.”
She hesitated a fraction of a second, then holstered her weapon, grabbed towels from the kitchen, and put pressure on his wounds.
Jack and Laura went to Sydney, and the three of them kept a firm hold on the dogs so they didn’t go into the living room and cut their paws on the broken glass.
“Don’t look,” Laura told Sydney, who looked at the fallen man anyway.
Jack led them and the dogs outside and into the barn. He shouted, “Cody! All is clear. You can come out.”
At first, he didn’t hear anything. Then there was a creak and the chickens started squawking. Cody emerged from one of the stalls, covered in hay and chicken feathers and chicken poop.
Laura ran to him and hugged him tightly. “Where were you?”
“The door to the chicken hutch—” He pointed. It was a tiny door and Cody could barely have gotten through it. He said to Jack, “When we clean their pen or there’s a monsoon, we let them out that way so they can hang out in the barn.”
“That was a brilliant place to hide, Cody,” Jack said.
“Are you okay, Mom? I heard guns.”
“We’re all great,” she said and hugged her children. She looked at Jack over their heads and he saw her gratitude. Spontaneously, he walked over and embraced the group.
He couldn’t wait to introduce his son to the Barrett family. He had a feeling they would be spending a lot of time together.
Chapter Twenty-Six
“I missed all the fun,” Margo said as she walked with Jack and Cody into the barn Wednesday morning.
“Shh,” Cody said. “I don’t want to scare Nimbus.”
