Protector - Laurel Dewey [16]
The grating pitch of the Mexican woman she’d seen earlier in the elevator with the scared little girl greeted her. The woman held on to her daughter with one hand and used the other to gesture excitedly toward several of the detectives from Assault. She spoke rapidly and hysterically in Spanish, adding a sentence here and there in English. “You don’t know!” screamed the woman, during an interlude of English. “He hurt my baby! My baby girl!!!”
As determined as Jane was to get to Weyler’s office, she couldn’t help but take in the scene. Down the hall, twenty feet away, stood Martha, her hand tightly clasped around Emily’s wrist. Several detectives and police personnel poked their heads out of their offices. Even Weyler looked outside his office door to catch the action.
Jane started to move around the woman when out of the corner of her eye, she saw two officers escorting a slightly built Mexican man in his mid-twenties down the hallway. He wore a stained T-shirt, baggy tan pants and sported endless tattoos that flowed from his wrist to his neck. Even though he was cuffed from behind, he walked with an arrogant, cocksure swagger and held his head high.
Jane was about two feet from the screaming woman and in direct line with the approaching suspect when it happened. The woman caught sight of the fellow and, in one desperate stroke, withdrew a Glock from a passing patrol officer’s holster and pointed it at the Mexican suspect in cuffs. “No!” the woman screamed as she stood firm, both hands clasped around the gun and holding it outstretched toward the suspect.
Jane turned toward the woman and took a quick step back, within arm’s reach of the weapon. Every officer on the floor reached for their firearm. Martha pulled Emily down onto the carpet and shielded the child’s head with her body.
Weyler moved forward into the hallway and yelled toward the officers, “Stand down! Stand down!” Everyone took a step back except for Jane. Her eyes were locked onto the woman, who by now was shaking and choking back tears. As strong as the woman was trying to look, every fiber of her being was seized in terror. Jane carefully took her eyes off the woman and slid her glance toward the suspect who was frozen between the two officers not more than fifteen feet away. “Ma’am?” said Weyler quietly, his voice cutting through the tension. “Put down the gun.”
“No!” she screamed in her thick accent. “You don’t know what he did to my baby! No father should do those things to his little girl!”
The suspect smirked, sticking his chin defiantly in the air. “You lying bitch!”
The woman moved her finger onto the trigger. Everyone in the hallway stiffened. “I don’t lie!” the woman screamed as her daughter buried her head in her mother’s hip. “You broke her! She’s just a baby!”
“Ma’am, please,” Weyler insisted. “Put down the gun. Let’s talk about this.”
“No talk!” the woman yelled defiantly, her eyes burning holes toward the suspect. Jane drew her attention back to the woman and stepped toward her. The woman kept her eyes forward. “Don’t you try nothing!” she screamed at Jane.
“I’m not gonna do anything,” Jane said, an eerie calm to her voice. “I’m on your side.”
“Don’t you play no game with me!”
“I am not playing games. I’m serious. I want to help you.”
“How you help me?”
“Well, for starters, you’ve never shot a gun before, have you?”
“No,” the woman said, her throat choked with emotion.
“That’s okay,” Jane said offhandedly. “You’ve got the right