Head to Head by Linda Ladd Page B

must’ve hit her in the kitchen, then dragged her into the living room.
    I tried to see if the woman was breathing as I moved toward her. Then Inman came at me out of the hallway so fast that I couldn’t evade him. I ducked right, but he got a hard jab on my right cheekbone, which sent me sprawling. I hit the wall hard and slid down but managed to keep my grip on the gun. A six-foot-six giant of a man, Inman jumped me again, grabbed my gun hand, and slammed me back against the wall.
    “You ain’t puttin’ me in jail again, bitch.” His breath smelled fetid from booze and cigarettes and something else I didn’t want to identify. He wrenched my wrist and squeezed until the Glock dropped from numb fingers.
    I clawed at his hands as he jerked my feet off the floor, but I thrust my knee up between his legs as hard as I could. He wheezed and grunted in agony and let go. I stomped his instep and rammed my fist into his Adam’s apple. I felt it give under my blow, and he went down hard, gurgling and holding his throat. Bud barreled in the back door and jumped him, flipping him over, and kept a knee on his back while he pulled his arms behind him and clamped on the cuffs.
    “Goddamn it, Claire, I told you not to go in without me. Are you all right?”
    He was looking at my face, and I touched my right eye and found it puffy and painful. There was blood on my fingers, but not much.
    “The bastard blindsided me,” I said, going down on one knee beside the woman. It was Inman’s wife, and her breathing was shallow, the cut on top of her head deep and oozing blood. She had a pulse, but it wasn’t much of one. I grabbed a dish towel off the counter and pressed it down on the wound.
    Bud knelt beside me. “You sure you’re okay, Claire?”
    “Yeah, but she’s not doing so hot.”
    “She still alive?” Bud stood up, jerked out his phone, and dialed for an ambulance.
    “Yeah, but she’s lost a lot of blood. Let’s get that piece of shit out of here so the EMTs can work on her.”

9
     
    Bud and I were summoned to Sheriff Charles Ramsay’s office at eight o’clock the next morning. Charlie was not in a good mood.
    “What the fuck happened to you?” he asked me in his gentle way.
    “I was injured on a domestic call last night. It’s nothing. They put a Band-Aid on it.”
    “It looks like you were hit by a dadgum freight train.” Charlie was prone to cursing. He was versed in every profanity known to mankind but drew the line at uttering the Lord’s name in vain. After all, he was a Southern Baptist. So he said weird things instead, like dadgum and goldurn . He eyed my blackening eye and butterfly bandage as if personally offended.
    “He got the jump on me for a minute, but I was able to take control of the situation.”
    “Where the hell were you, Davis? Out taking a piss somewhere?”
    “No, sir. I helped apprehend the perp when I heard him attacking Morgan.”
    “Well, that’s fucking good of you.”
    “I happened upon the perpetrator before Bud was in place,” I said.
    “You just happened on him, did you? Seems to me I warned you on several occasions about going in alone, Detective. Don’t make me call you on it again, or your ass is off the force. Is that clear?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    Charlie grimaced and jerked open his top drawer. He took out a bottle of Pepto-Bismol and chugged it like a root beer. I shifted in my chair, grossed out, until he wiped the pink stuff off his upper lip with the back of his hand. “Okay, now tell me what the hell’s going on out at Cedar Bend.”
    Charlie looked at us, expecting answers or else. He was an honest man, a man who did his job efficiently and by the letter of the law, and he insisted we do the same. He hated criminals but treated them fairly, and when some innocent victim got killed on his turf, he took it as a personal affront. Gruff and profane, he’d won every election he’d been in in the last twenty years and would continue to as long as he wanted the