Seemingly in slow motion, one of the Bedouins ran toward her, having dropped his blunt prop scimitar in favor of a sharp, gleaming knife. The other confused extras parted in front of him like the Red Sea.
Bobby was screaming that he hadn’t approved this change in the script.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw movement, wondered if it was Patricio, wondered if he’d get there in time.
Still the man ran toward her, and no one moved to intercept him.
Sadie bent her knees and crouched low, hoping she could leap out of the way of the knife as soon as the man got close enough. When he was within a couple of feet, she rolled to the left, leading with her shoulder, coming to her feet as soon as she’d tumbled around. Sand rained off her clothes as she stood, turned. A sharp pain sliced along her thigh, and she gasped.
The man was standing right in front of her, a crazed look in his eyes. And the knife was too close. There was no way she could get away in time. He raised his hand, brought the knife down. She held up her hands in a futile effort to stop him.
Suddenly one of the Bedouins burst out of the crowd in a swirl of blue robes, connecting the edge of his curved sword with the back of the man’s knife hand. The man shouted in pain, clutching his wrist, but he only had a moment in which to protest. Yanking off his headdress, Patricio swung his blunt prop sword in a sideways arc, hitting the man square in the gut with the flat of the blade. The man doubled over, and Patricio kneed him in the face. As the man stumbled back, his hands moving to hold his nose, Patricio swept a kick at the back of his ankles, causing him to fly backward and hit the sandy ground with a muffled thud. Patricio brought the point of the scimitar to rest in the hollow of the man’s throat, the blade no less deadly when used that way, though it was blunt.
“No!” the man shouted. “No, please don’t hurt me!” He shrank back into the sand and held his hands with the palms facing upward.
Unable to believe that the man who’d terrorized her for months was this cowardly creature, Sadie moved beside Patricio.
“You’re bleeding,” he said gruffly, still holding his sword to her attacker’s neck.
The pain in her thigh had all but disappeared from the adrenaline high caused by the previous events, but now that it was all over, she could feel it starting to sting again. She looked down to see a shallow but long cut across the side of her leg, bleeding profusely.
“First aid!” Bobby yelled, though his voice sounded far away. “I need first aid over here. Locke! Don’t move!”
She stumbled, more from clumsiness than injury, though her leg hurt. Patricio caught her around the shoulders with one arm, supporting her until she regained her balance. “I’m sorry,” he said, his jaw working angrily. “He should never have gotten that close to you.”
When he took his hand away, Sadie noticed he’d left a bloody handprint on her arm. She grabbed his wrist, turning his palm up. He immediately snatched it away, but not before she saw that the man had sliced an ugly gash in Patricio’s palm. You’d never know it, though, by the way the guy was ignoring the fact that he was bleeding all over the place. All of his attention was focused on the man lying before them, still cowering beneath his sword.
It must’ve hurt a lot when Patricio had grabbed her to keep her from falling.
“Hayes, get someone to call the police,” Patricio called to the director, and then he looked at Sadie as if daring her to protest. “The time for covert protection is over, Sadie.”
She just nodded, knowing there was no way she could avoid the press now, anyway.
With as much feeling as if he were discussing the weather, Patricio turned back to the man. “Now you, my friend, are going to tell us who you are.”
Wincing, the man was arching his neck back, trying to keep away from the business end of Patricio’s sword. Patricio pulled the sword away and replaced it with his combat boot. Sadie had no doubt Patricio could easily snap the man’s neck if he wanted.
“I swear, I’ve never done anything like this before. He told me to. He told me…”
“Who told you?” Patricio demanded.
“I don’t know. He was dressed like all of us. He said he’d give me money.” The man put both hands on Patricio’s boot and tried to push it off. It didn’t budge. “He was supposed to create a diversion so I could get out of here. He was supposed to—”
Patricio applied more pressure, and the man winced. Sadie looked around at the rolling sand hills surrounding the outdoor set. She wasn’t sure how the man had planned to get away, seeing as the hills weren’t that close. Then again, her dying would have created one heck of a diversion. Sadie shivered, though her brain still wasn’t ready to fully process the fact that someone had just tried to kill her.
“Who was supposed to create a diversion?” Patricio demanded.
“I—I don’t know,” the man said. “He was dressed like all of us. I figured he was another extra. His face was covered, but he had a lot of money on him. He showed me.”
Sadie looked around at the sea of half-covered faces surrounding them. There were so many of them here—it could be anyone. If this guy was telling the truth.
Deep in her gut, Sadie knew he was. “This isn’t Lovesick,” she said quietly to Patricio. “He’s shorter, and the eyes are wrong.” Patricio scowled at her words.
The man waved both hands at Sadie, as if she could save him from Patricio. “He gave me a prop knife. It wasn’t supposed to cut you. It’s not my fault. It was supposed to be a prop knife.”
Bobby Hayes came over to them, flanked by two burly guys. “Yeah, right, you little twerp. You nearly took her leg off.” Which was a gross exaggeration—it really was just a hairline cut. But Bobby’s face was flushed, indicating that he was really angry, and she didn’t want to get into an argument over the seriousness of her injury with him. For once, he wasn’t chowing down on a wad of gum. Sadie wondered if he’d swallowed it during all the chaos.
He eyed her leg, tugging on the brim of the Angels ball cap he’d obviously found to protect his scalp. “Jeez, Locke, get to the first-aid people, would ya?” he said, though his voice had lost some of its usual power. He turned to Patricio. “I called the state police. They’re on their way. Bo and Harry here will hold this guy if you don’t want to keep stepping on him.”
Tossing the sword aside, Patricio reached down and yanked the man up to his feet. He handed the man over to the two security guards, telling them to take him to a nearby trailer, where Patricio would soon join them. Bobby and the guards left, leaving Sadie alone with Patricio—or as alone as she could be with two hundred extras milling about. Fortunately the extras were always instructed to give the main actors a wide berth during shooting, and that seemed to be extending into the aftermath of the attack as well.
She wondered which one of them was Lovesick. And then she shook her head. It didn’t matter. She still had little idea what he looked like without a disguise, and Patricio wasn’t going to let her look for him anyway—hopefully the police would be able to ferret him out when they arrived.
Sadie tried to look at Patricio’s bleeding palm, but he moved it behind him, out of her immediate line of vision.
“You’re hurt,” she said, remembering full well the deep gash she’d seen there.
“So are you.” He gestured toward the cut on her leg, which still stung but had stopped bleeding.
She glanced down at her leg. “It’s—”
“—just a scratch,” they finished together, then looked up at each other. A corner of Patricio’s mouth quirked.
One of the first aid people ran up to them with a kit in her hands. Patricio took it from her and glared when the woman tried to protest. With a frightened blink, she hurried off, leaving her kit behind.
Sadie snatched it out of his hand. “We need to wrap that up fast,” she said, waving the small, metal box at his hand. “You might need stitches.”
He smirked at her. “Nah. I’ve had worse than this.”
Walking over to a nearby table, Sadie set the kit down and snapped it open. Extracting a couple of cotton balls and some iodine, she held out her hand. “Let me see,” she said to Patricio, who had followed her, as she’d known he would.
To her surprise, he acquiesced, turning his palm upward and holding it out to her. She took it, gently dabbing the cut with iodine-soaked cotton.
“Ouch,” she said for him, wincing as she cleaned the cut. He didn’t move a muscle.
“It’s okay,” he murmured. “Just get it over with.”
Maybe he was right—the cut had bled a lot, but once it was cleaned off, it looked like perhaps he wouldn’t need stitches. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to have one of the first-aid people take a look at it, if he didn’t scare them off again. She taped the cut closed with the butterfly bandages, then wound some gauze around his hand, which she taped in place.
“The bandages would have been fine,” he muttered, poking at the gauze with a look of mild disgust on his face.
“Sure. Let’s let some nice sand blow on that and cause an infection,” she retorted. “Just don’t come running to me when your hand turns gangrenous and falls off.”
A corner of his mouth tipped upward in that almost-smile of his. One of these days, she was going to get him to smile at her for real. Maybe even show some teeth.
“Your turn.” He took the gauze out of her hands, placing it on the table. She removed her prop gun belt, as he knelt on the ground, his hands touching the outside of her thigh to examine the cut, which was just under the hem of her safari shorts.
Every nerve ending she owned seemed to migrate down to the side of her leg, and it wasn’t the cut she felt, but Patricio’s gentle touch. He used peroxide on her wound, which didn’t hurt at all, then taped it shut with a couple of butterfly bandages. He covered the entire thing with a patch of gauze, which he taped into place, his fingers brushing her bare skin several times.
By the time he was done, Sadie couldn’t breathe.
When he was finished, she expected him to rise off the ground right away, but he didn’t; instead he stayed where he was as if deep in thought, still on his knees, his hands still on her skin. “I’m sorry, Sadie,” he said, his voice so low and soft, she could barely hear him.
“For what?” she murmured.
“I should have seen him coming. This—” he touched the side of her bandage “—shouldn’t have happened.”
“Patricio.” She turned to face him, and he rose to tower over her once more. His face was impassive, but his eyes were so filled with guilt and remorse, she wondered if there was more to his apology than met the eye. “You did see him coming, and you probably saved my life. It’s not your fault Bobby made you stand so far from me. I don’t think a superhero could have moved faster than you did.”
He closed his eyes briefly, the opened them once more. “I’m not a superhero,” he said. “I wish I were.” And he turned and headed into the trailer where the security guards had taken her attacker, leaving her to follow behind, wondering what that had all been about.
Angrier than he’d been in a long, long time, Patricio grilled Sadie’s attacker for what seemed like hours. But either the man was telling the truth, and a mysterious second person had really offered him money to attack the actress, or Lovesick was putting on a really good act. Either way, the guy would be headed for jail as soon as the police arrived.
The only thing he could get out of the guy was the same story—some mysterious man with a covered face had given him a “prop” knife and had asked him to pretend to attack Sadie. He hadn’t given a reason—just displayed a lot of money. Obviously the “attack” was meant to scare her.
After their lengthy conversation, Patricio was pretty sure Sadie’s attacker had at least a mild mental illness—it was the only thing that explained his ranting, his changeable moods and his motivation for following some mysterious man’s vague orders. Patricio did believe that there was a mystery man— Sadie’s account of hearing a second person taunting her was no coincidence. Lovesick had been here. Perhaps he was still here, but there was no way Patricio was going to leave Sadie alone for a second to look for him.
Apparently, whoever Lovesick was, the guy was good at picking the weak elements out of a crowd and using them to his advantage. Out of the corner of his eye, Patricio saw Sadie sit down, and when he turned to look at her, he knew that despite her earlier bravado, the man’s actions had frightened her to the core.
At that moment, Patricio heard police sirens in the distance, coming closer to the trailer they were in. A few seconds later, there was a knock at the door, and a detective pushed his way inside, holding up his badge. He heard Sadie gasp in surprise when she saw who it was.
“Detective Daniel Rodriguez, LAPD, Homicide Special,” he said, and then his eyes met Patricio’s. “Yo, Rico.”
“There are two of you? Jeez!” the man who’d attacked Sadie said as he looked back and forth between the two brothers.
“Danny Boy,” Patricio replied.
His twin walked across the trailer to stand next to him. “You okay?” Daniel asked, undoubtedly because the last time they’d spoken, several armed guards had been dragging Patricio out of the prison.
He nodded, looking away.
Daniel clapped his arm on Patricio’s shoulder, leaning in toward him. “If you hadn’t said it, I would have,” he whispered, communicating in the peculiar verbal shorthand they’d always used, letting Patricio know he was off the hook for his outburst in the prison.
“What are you doing here? Isn’t this out of your jurisdiction?” Patricio asked.
“Believe it or not, I was in the area. There’s a private forensics lab out here I had processing some evidence for another case. The state police let me tag along when they got the call. Mulvaney has us looking into the break-in at Sadie Locke’s house, so I wanted to know if this was related.” Captain Aaron Mulvaney was the head of the LAPD’s Homicide Special unit, an elite group of detectives to which Daniel belonged. Homicide Special investigated the city’s highest-profile cases. And with this second threatening action involving Sadie Locke, they were in prime Homicide Special territory. “Nice outfit, by the way.” He indicated Patricio’s Bedouin costume.
“Thanks. And yeah, this is related.” Patricio motioned for Sadie to come over. “Meet my newest client,” he said.
“Sadie Locke,” Danny greeted her in his deep baritone. “My wife and sister-in-law never miss your show.”
“Thank you,” she said politely, shaking his hand. If she’d been surprised earlier by seeing his twin, she hid it well. “Let me know if they ever want to visit the set. I’d be happy to give them a tour.”
“Seriously? Thanks. They’d probably explode from joy. Those two are serious fans.” Daniel took out a pen and a notebook, segueing to business matters. “So, why don’t you start from the beginning and tell me what happened?”
Patricio and Sadie gave him a run-down of what had happened, and then Daniel took accounts from everyone in the trailer. After a couple of exhausting hours, where they all felt like they’d answered the same five questions ten different ways each, Daniel and his partner, Detective Lola Ibarra, hustled Sadie’s attacker into their unmarked squad car. Then, Danny approached Patricio and Sadie once more.
“None of the extras in Ms. Locke’s immediate area saw anything,” Danny said to them. “We’ll question all of them in the next few days, but I’m not sure it’ll yield anything, since their costumes were so similar and the guy’s face was hidden.”
Sadie just nodded, her arms wrapped around her torso. Patricio wished he’d gotten a good look at the guy, but he hadn’t. He’d been moving through the crowd, keeping tabs on the guy who had been getting too close to Sadie, when the man with the knife had attacked. Choosing to deal with the immediate threat, Patricio had lost the man, too.
“He’s about five-eleven, maybe 180 pounds, brown eyes. That’s all I could see,” Patricio told his brother.
Sadie touched his arm. “You saw him?”
Patricio nodded briskly, his mind only filled with his own failure—failure to collar Sadie’s stalker when he’d been right next to him, and failure to stop the other man from cutting her. Sure, it had been a scratch, but that had been pure luck. He fell down on the job like that again, she might not survive it.
“That’s why you weren’t right there when that guy came at me with the knife,” Sadie murmured. “No one else even knew something was wrong.”
“He’s the best there is, Ms. Locke,” Danny said agreeably. “There was one time—”
“Callate, Daniel,” Patricio muttered. He really didn’t need Danny launching into his greatest hits right now.
Danny laughed. “All right, Rico. I’ll let you tell her about your exploits yourself.” He turned to Sadie, holding up a plastic bag containing Lovesick’s letter. “Patricio gave me this. I’ll send it to the lab for fingerprint and DNA analysis. If this guy’s been in trouble before, we’ll ID him.”
She nodded.
“It was great meeting you. I promise, we’ll do everything we can to get this guy. In the meantime, you’re in good hands.” Danny smacked Patricio’s shoulder a couple of times, and then his expression turned serious.
“I need to talk to you later,” Daniel said.
Patricio looked at him questioningly.
“It’s about Sabrina. Joe’s got a lead.” His brother glanced briefly at Sadie, then back at Patricio. “I know you’re tied up here, but call me when you can. Anytime.”
And then with a wave, he got into his car and drove off, leaving Patricio wondering whether his brothers really had found their missing sister at last.