Elly Finnegan looked up in awe at the twinkling blue Christmas lights lining the parade route through downtown Milwaukee. This was her favorite time of year, and more so since she had planned a family reunion between her siblings and their Callahan cousins on Christmas Day. She’d found her grandmother’s diary in the attic and couldn’t wait to share what she’d learned with the rest of the family. The Callahans and Finnegans shared the same set of great-grandparents, but their respective grandmother siblings had lost touch with each other.
And now she knew why.
Since she was looking upward, she didn’t notice the guy coming toward her until she’d bumped into him. Flustered, she smiled, and said, “Oh, excuse me.”
His gaze sliced toward her. Her smile faded at the hard coldness reflected in his eyes. Elly genuinely loved people, and animals too, having made a habit of bringing strays home when she was younger, but there was something about this man that made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up in alarm. He wore a long dark coat that went to his knees, his hands tucked out of sight. Their gazes locked for a long, uncomfortable moment before he turned away and merged into the crowd without saying a word.
Evil. The word flashed in her mind, a weird sense of impending doom washing over her. But then she told herself not to be ridiculous. Tugging on her boxy navy-blue EMT uniform, she quickly made her way toward the ambulance. She and her EMT partner Derek were on duty for the Christmas parade. The assignment was a relief as the parade usually went off every year without a hitch. It wasn’t likely she and Derek would have to deal with any actual injuries.
Okay, maybe she was getting better at dealing with her irrational aversion to blood, but there was still that moment of light-headedness she couldn’t quite shake. Between that and the nausea that rolled through her abdomen, she’d barely managed to hold herself together the handful of times she’d been forced to deal with a bleeding injury.
Normally, she spent her days transferring patients from one location to the next. The ambulance company she worked for had contracts with most of the hospitals and nursing homes in the area. It wasn’t exciting work by any stretch of the imagination, but she’d been deeply grateful for the uneventful transfers.
She really needed to find a way to push through this. The Finnegan family was all about being first responders, and she was determined to do her part. She’d already disappointed her oldest brother, Rhy, after failing first to become a cop, then again when she’d dropped out of the nursing program.
This career she’d chosen would work. It had to. There wasn’t another option.
Crowds of people packed both sides of the street along the parade route. She pushed through the throng, smiling at the memory of how her parents had brought her to the Christmas parade when she was young. Her parents had passed away eleven years ago now, and she still missed them. Although she was also grateful for her two oldest brothers, Rhy and Tarin, who’d stepped in to raise her after their tragic loss. As the youngest of nine siblings, she knew full well she was the main reason Rhy and Tarin had given up having a personal life to move back to the Finnegan homestead. Granted, the twins, Aiden and Alanna, had only been seventeen to her fourteen, but still. She had been the driving force behind their decision.
Thankfully, all her older siblings had found love in the past year. She was thrilled with the expansion of the Finnegan clan, including baby Colleen, the newest member of the family, born five weeks ago to Rhy and Devon. Joy’s baby was due next April, and Kyleigh was pregnant now too. She had a feeling it wouldn’t take long for the rest of the family to add to the Finnegan clan. Aiden and Shelby were getting married mid-January, so they had that momentous occasion to look forward to as well.
Glancing at her watch, she realized the parade was about to start. It would take about fifteen minutes or so for the parade to pass by her current location.
“There you are,” Derek said. He was three years younger than her twenty-four, although her birthday was only a few weeks away. He’d asked her out, but she’d declined, not having any interest in him. Nice enough guy, but she’d been fighting a crush on Joe Kingsley—a cop who worked for her brother Rhy on the tactical team—for months now.
Not that Joe knew she existed. Well, other than being Rhy’s baby sister. He all but patted her head as if she were ten every time they met. She shook off the depressing thought.
“This is going to be awesome,” she said. Their position near the intersection was such that she’d have a great view of the parade.
“If we don’t freeze to death,” Derek muttered, stamping his feet and tucking his hands under his armpits. While she had to fight her aversion to blood while working, Derek had grown up in Arizona and hated, absolutely hated the cold weather.
Why he didn’t just go back to Arizona was a mystery.
She caught a glimpse of a tall cop, and her heart gave a silly thump when she realized Joe was here too. In uniform and obviously working, the way she was. She stepped forward, but then forced herself to stop. She couldn’t just rush over to say hi. Not while they were both on duty.
Especially since Joe had never hinted at having any sort of feelings toward her. She was nothing more than a pesky younger sister to him. Tolerated only because Rhy often put Joe in charge of the tactical unit. The sooner she accepted that fact, the better.
Christmas music rang out, indicating the parade had begun. She couldn’t help grinning like a little kid as the marching band gave a rousing rendition of “Frosty the Snowman.” She sang along, letting out a quick laugh.
The music grew louder as the marching band and the rest of the parade made their way down the street toward them. Elves tossed Christmas candy into the crowd, and a large float on a flatbed trailer had a pair of ice skaters dressed in cheerful red costumes doing twirls on the small patch of ice.
“Oh, that’s so cool!” She was impressed the couple was able to spin and skate on a very small ice pond. When the male skater lifted the female over his head, she gasped and applauded along with the rest of the spectators.
Crack! Crack! It took a moment for her to realize the skaters were lying on the ice, bleeding.
Gunfire? Had that really been gunfire?
Screams reverberated around her. The marching band scattered. More bullets were fired, and people around her fell to the ground, not moving. Dear Lord Jesus, no!
There was an active shooter at the parade!
“Get down!” Derek tugged on her arm, trying to get her closer to the shelter of the ambulance. But when she saw Joe and several other cops rushing into danger, she surprised herself by breaking free of Derek’s grip.
She grabbed the first aid kit and ran out to where she saw a young kid, barely eight years old, lying on the ground. Bile rushed into her throat and her head spun as she saw he’d been shot in the leg.
Don’t faint! Don’t faint! She knelt beside the child, but then as more gunfire rang out, she realized she couldn’t stay there with him. Instead, she scooped him into her arms and ran, stumbling back to the ambulance.
“Here, take care of him!” She thrust the crying boy into Derek’s arms. “Go inside the rig!”
Derek nodded and opened the back doors to carry the boy inside. She spun and ran back out into the street where the parade had abruptly stopped.
Her gaze landed on a cop sprawled on the ground on the other side of the street. Joe? No, please, Lord, no! Elly grabbed her abandoned first aid kit and darted through the screaming mass of people, nearly tripping over an abandoned tuba lying in the street in her haste to reach the fallen officer.
Not Joe, but a familiar face. She searched her memory for his name as she avoided looking down at the massive pool of blood forming beneath him. Kyle. That’s right, his name was Kyle.
“Elly?” He stared up at her, confusion in his eyes, as if he didn’t understand what was going on. Frankly, she didn’t either.
“I’m here. You’re going to be okay.” The edges of her vision blurred, and she had to tell herself again not to faint. Not now! Please, Lord, not now!
“El . . .” He tried to say something more, but then his eyes closed, and his body went limp.
Why was this happening? Her fingers fumbled on the first aid kit as she searched for gauze. As if the small amount she carried could stem the flow of blood running like a river across the frozen street. She swallowed hard, praying she wouldn’t be sick. She pressed gauze to his groin wound, but instantly, it was soaked in blood. No use. It was no use!
“Elly!” It took a moment for her name to register. Dazed, she glanced up to see Joe making a beeline toward her, a look of panic etched on his features. Over his shoulder, she saw a man wearing a long dark coat standing above the others. He lifted a long automatic rifle.
“Down!” She screamed the word as loud as she could. Joe reacted instantly, as if she were Rhy shouting an order, and hit the ground as another crack of gunfire rang out. She watched in horror as Joe rolled over, lifted his own weapon, and returned fire.
The guy in the long coat ducked, then disappeared. She rose to her feet, stumbling toward Joe. “He’s getting away!”
“Go back to the ambulance.” Joe looked as if he wanted to stay with her, but he turned and ran toward the location the shooter had last been, talking into his radio as he went, no doubt putting the other officers in the area on alert to help him search. People were still screaming, some running away, others cradling injured loved ones close.
The entire scene was surreal and straight out of a horror flick. The amount of blood was paralyzing, but Elly forced herself to do her job.
The way Joe was.
Slightly calmer now that she knew the gunman had left the scene, she turned back to Kyle. When she couldn’t feel a pulse, she forced herself to move on to the next victim. In times of a crisis, there was no time to waste on those who had no chance of survival. Not when there were so many other victims to assess and treat.
The next closest victim was a young woman being held by a man who was likely her husband. The woman was bleeding from an upper chest wound, but she still had a pulse. Despite being pale and in shock, the woman glanced at her. “Hurts.”
“I know.” Elly crouched beside them, using more gauze and pressing it against the exit wound. “Hold this,” she instructed. The dazed man did as she instructed. “You’re going to be okay. Let’s get you up and over to the ambulance.”
The man looked grateful for something constructive to do. She stood and helped him lift the injured woman. “Hang on to me, Lisa,” he instructed.
“I don’t understand,” Lisa murmured. As if there was a way to make sense out of this horrible act of violence. “Why, Dan? Why?”
“I don’t know.” He pressed a kiss to her temple and half carried her across the street to the ambulance. There were other victims there now, too, having instinctively gone to the closest source of aid. Derek had the young boy inside, but he was now kneeling beside another victim. He glanced up as she approached.
He looked as if he wanted to say something, but then shook his head and went back to work. She completely understood. There was nothing else they could do but continue providing care until more help arrived.
The wail of police sirens was a welcome relief. Yet after she quickly assessed those with more minor injuries, she forced herself to head back out to the street.
There were several people up on the flatbed of the truck, tending to the two ice skaters. She had to swallow hard against another wave of nausea when she saw blood dripping off the edge and onto the street. Somehow, she managed to climb up.
“We need to get him to the hospital,” a man was saying. “They need to get the Lifeline chopper out here ASAP.”
“Are you a doctor or nurse?” Elly asked. The way they’d mentioned the Lifeline rescue helicopter made her think so.
“I’m a doctor,” the young woman said. “He’s a nurse. The female skater is dead, but the male is still alive.”
“Okay, you stay with him. I’ll keep searching for other victims.” Elly told herself the injured skater was in good hands. Much better hands than hers, that was for sure.
She wanted to cry when she found another dead body, an elderly man who’d taken a bullet to his chest. But after that, she was grateful to find two more live victims.
After stabilizing their injuries as much as she was able to with her limited supplies, she helped them get over toward the ambulance. It seemed like the best place to keep the victims together.
As she worked, Elly couldn’t stop thinking about Joe. Or the man in the long dark coat who had done this terrible thing.
The man she’d instinctively known was evil. Maybe even the devil himself.
Joe Kingsley had only gotten a glimpse of the shooter but tried to keep the brief image locked in his mind as he scoured the area searching for him. Using his radio, he’d alerted the other officers on duty, giving the brief description of short brown hair and a long dark coat. Steele Delaney was the closest to him, and they’d fanned out, scanning the area for their shooter. Yet he couldn’t deny the perp could have easily dumped the coat and even the weapon by now. And there were still far too many people milling about, running chaotically around the scene of the crime making it difficult to quarter the area for a grid search.
It wasn’t easy to leave Elly behind. His boss and her oldest brother, Rhy Finnegan, would expect him to find and apprehend the shooter while also keeping Elly safe.
Ironic that she was the one to save him by shouting at him to get down a split second before the shooter fired another three rounds. Narrowly missing him, and Elly.
They’d lost Kyle. After seeing the massive blood loss pooling beneath his fellow cop, he’d known the shooter must have hit an artery below the bullet-resistant vest they were all required to wear. The loss of a fellow tactical team member brought a fresh wave of anger. He’d been shocked and stunned when he’d heard the gunfire, then watched as the ice skaters went down on their small patch of ice.
These active shooter incidents were out of control. He’d never felt so helpless in his entire life.
They needed to find this guy! Most shooters killed themselves or kept firing until a cop took them out. But not this one. The fact that this shooter had sneaked away was outside the norm.
And he didn’t like it. For all they knew, he’d escaped and was already planning his next shooting rampage. Maybe after he basked in the glow of his brutal success in taking out so many innocent victims. There was always an attention-seeking component to these events.
This one would be no different.
After a solid twenty minutes of searching, Joe, Steele, and Raelyn Lewis, the only three members of their team who had been assigned to the parade, had given up. He sent Steele and Raelyn out to scour for evidence, explaining his desire to check on Elly. Knowing Rhy would want that, too, the two cops had scattered to do what they could. He stood for a moment, considering what little he knew about their guy. The perp had seemed tall, but he had no way of knowing if the shooter had been standing on a chair or some other object while firing into the crowd.
On his way back to Elly, he stopped and provided aid to several victims who were thankfully not hurt too badly. Then he noticed dozens of cops swarming the area and knew additional help had arrived.
Now that the immediate threat was over, at least as far as he could tell, Joe was impatient to get back to Elly. He desperately needed to know she was safe.
There was a growing crowd around the ambulance carrying the logo that matched Elly’s uniform. He pushed forward, raking his gaze over the group of people until he found Elly’s auburn hair.
A wave of relief hit hard, yet he didn’t stop until he’d reached her side. “Elly? Are you okay?”
“Joe.” She turned and grasped his arm, leaning against him for a moment before letting him go. “Did you find him?”
“Not yet.” He winced at the disappointment in her gaze. “You’re sure you’re not hurt?”
She gave a slight nod, but her gaze skittered from his. She looked so pale that he feared she had been hit and didn’t realize it. He raked his eyes over her, finding plenty of blood smears but nothing that appeared to be a recent injury.
“I saw him.”
Her words were so soft with the chaos spewing around them that he wasn’t sure he heard her correctly. He put his arm around her slim shoulders and pulled her close so he could speak into her ear. “What did you say?”
“I saw him.” Her anguished gaze finally met his. “I literally bumped into him a few minutes before the parade started.” She shook her head. “His cold, dead gaze made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.”
An icy chill that had nothing to do with the winter weather washed over him. “You saw him up close?”
She nodded. “I didn’t know he had a gun or that he intended to hurt anyone. If I had, I would have told you or another cop. The minute I saw him, though, I felt he was evil. And now—this—” She broke off, biting her lip.
“He is evil.” Joe was still struggling with the idea that she had seen the shooter. “Elly, we’re going to need you to work with a sketch artist so we can get an ID on this guy. Can you do that for us?”
“Yes, of course.” Her voice lacked conviction, but she nodded slowly. “I’ll do whatever is necessary for you to find this guy before he hurts anyone else.”
“I know you will.” He cared for Elly, far more than he should considering she was his boss’s youngest sister. She was off-limits in a big way. Not that it was easy to ignore her when they were together. He was about to pull away when his gaze landed on her name tag pinned to her uniform.
Finnegan.
He could almost hear Rhy screaming in his ear. This was not good. He pulled Elly closer. “We need to call your brother.”
“What?” She stared at him as if he’d suggested they take a walk on the moon. “Don’t be ridiculous. We need to search the area for more victims.”
“Elly, this guy might figure out who you are.” He couldn’t quell a flash of panic. “You’re wearing a name tag. People in Milwaukee have heard a lot about the Finnegan family over the past twelve months. You couldn’t have gotten any more press coverage than if you were Hollywood superstars.”
She gaped, speechless, then shook her head. “You’re exaggerating. The shooter probably isn’t from this area. I’m sure he chose the parade because it was a good target . . .” Her voice hitched, then trailed off at the grim realization of how that twisted mind had purposefully come to the Christmas parade because it would be the best place to kill a bunch of innocent people.
He didn’t have a chance to say anything more because more officers and medically trained first responders converged on the scene. He tried to call Rhy, but the call went through to voice mail. He left a quick message saying Elly was fine but that they were at the scene of the Christmas parade where a gunman had opened fire.
Elly continued to provide care to those who came to the ambulance, while other medical providers stepped up to help triage. The scene was still chaotic, yet he didn’t dare let Elly out of his sight. For one thing, he hadn’t been kidding about needing her to work with a sketch artist to create a composite of this perp.
But even more so, he wasn’t putting anything past this guy. The destruction surrounding them proved what he was capable of. She had bumped into the shooter, thought of him as evil because of the coldness in his eyes.
While wearing a name tag that announced she was a Finnegan.
The thing that bothered him the most was that the shooter didn’t fit the profile of the average active shooter. They were mostly young white men, angry at the world, bigots who purposefully took out people of color. Taking their anger out on those who couldn’t fight back.
The gunman he’d glimpsed from afar was older, maybe in his midthirties. And he hadn’t stuck around to become famous, like so many other active shooters had.
He’d slipped away.
His phone buzzed a few minutes later. He edged away from the crowd, still keeping his gaze on Elly as he answered Rhy’s call.
“You’re sure she’s not hurt?” Rhy demanded.
“I promise she’s not injured.” But Joe knew Elly was hurt, deep inside. She was always smiling, full of fun and laughter, but today would likely have changed that for her.
And not for the better.
It made his heart ache, knowing she had lost her happy innocence.
“What happened?” Rhy was on vacation for the next two weeks over the holiday, or he would have been at the Christmas parade too. He shivered at the idea of Devon being here with their new baby.
He quickly filled Rhy in on the scant details he knew. Finally, he said, “The worst part is that Elly saw this guy up close. Apparently, she bumped into him. And, Rhy, she was wearing her uniform, complete with her name tag.”
There was a long, tense silence on the other end of the line. Being on Rhy’s team for the past five years, he knew very well that Finnegans didn’t curse, but he could easily imagine Rhy wanting to. Maybe even saying the words in his head.
“Get her out of there, Kingsley. Bring her home.”
“I will, but I’d like her to work with a sketch artist first.” When Rhy didn’t say anything, he added, “I’m sorry, but the shooter is still out there. We need to find him.”
“Yes, we do. But do me a favor, stick to Elly like glue.”
“I will.” He was glad Rhy was on board with the plan he’d already intended to carry out anyway. “I’m taking her to the police station now.”
“Thanks, Joe.” Rhy’s tone was softer now. “I know I can trust you to take care of my baby sister.”
“You can.” He lifted his gaze up to the heavens above, vowing to make good on that promise.
No matter what.