by Kava, Alex
“Sorry sir. You have any idea how many people fit that description tonight?”
He glanced around, frustrated and noticed the television in the ER waiting area. On the screen was a replay of the rescue efforts from earlier. He gestured toward the TV.
“They were part of the group trapped in the restaurant debris.”
“Okay, hold on. I do remember. We transferred the rhabdomyolysis to ICU.”
“The what?”
“ICU’s on the second floor.” And she was gone, hurrying down the hallway.
He weaved between the gurneys and wheelchairs filled with storm victims—broken, bloodied and impaled. Before he reached the elevator he realized how lucky he’d been to have only pine needles driven into his back.
“Ryder?”
In the fluorescent light, Maggie looked pale. Her hair still had chunks of drywall and pieces of glass. Her arm was in a sling. Her eyes were darting everywhere, like she was looking for someone.
“I need to find Frankie. We got separated.”
“I think she’s up on the second floor in ICU.”
Maggie punched the elevator button even though it was already lit from Creed pressing it just a second ago. He’d seen her like this before. Though exhausted, she was in high alert. Something was wrong.
“What is it?” he asked when the door finally opened and she rushed inside.
“The men who are trying to kill her,” she said in a low voice as she waited impatiently for the elevator door to close. “I know who one of them is.”
73
It was the man with the scar. Frankie recognized the caveman forehead, his hawk nose and black eyes. He wore a white coat, just like Gus.
She couldn’t move. Her hands grabbed for the bed rail. She wasn’t strong enough to pull herself up. She didn’t know what to push to call for help.
“Gus, what’s...what’s going on?”
Her voice was so quiet, so weak. And yet, she was exhausted from the effort.
But Gus had moved away from the bed. She couldn’t see him anymore. Had he left the room?
The man with the scar scowled at her as he pushed the needle of a syringe into a small bottle. He was filling it.
“No, wait! What are you doing?”
Her heart was pounding. She tried to shove herself up, but there was no getting away from him. With the syringe ready, he looked at the intravenous port on her hand then at the IV bag up above her, searching the best place to insert it.
From somewhere inside the room there was a muffled pop-pop. The big man’s head jerked. Frankie couldn’t take her eyes off the needle to look for the sound.
Then she glanced up to see why he stopped. His eyes stared straight ahead. His hand dropped the syringe. He fell forward. His body thumped against the bed before he crashed to the floor.
When Frankie looked up, she saw Gus still holding the gun. She closed her eyes and braced herself for the next shot. Maybe it was the drugs. Maybe she’d wake up and find out she had hallucinated the whole thing.
“Frankie? You okay?”
“What happened?”
She opened her eyes to find Ryder and Maggie running through the door.
Gus was gone. Or maybe he’d never been there.
“He’s dead,” she heard Ryder say. He was kneeling next to the giant on the floor.
So it was real. But she was still alive. She looked to Maggie and met her eyes.
“It was Gus,” she whispered to her.
“I know.” To Ryder, she said, “Stay with her.” Then Maggie took off out the door to go after him.
74
Braxton watched as she came racing out the nearest exit. He rubbed a hand over his jaw and pulled the ball cap lower. FBI agent, Maggie, had good instincts. Her head pivoted in all directions. Her eyes darted around. She came to a stop and turned a full circle taking in the chaos, searching for him. Her left arm was in a sling. She no longer wore her shoulder holster, and she didn’t have her weapon. Yet here she was chasing after him.
Rescue units weaved their way out of the emergency bays and left the parking lot making way for those arriving. Injured storm victims staggered from their vehicles with the help of family or friends who were also bloodied. Braxton watched Agent Maggie’s head swiveling back and forth. She was checking every face, looking around corners and hurrying up and down aisles of vehicles. At one point, she dropped to her knees to glance under a row of cars.
But she didn’t consider checking the ambulance driving right by her.
He glanced at her one last time in the rearview mirror as he drove out of the hospital parking lot. He and Rex had left the sedan two blocks away. He’d be inside it and catching the interstate by the time they discovered the ambulance missing.
Now he drove the sedan to a busy drugstore parking lot. He wrapped the stolen white jacket around the Ruger SR22 pistol with the sound suppressor intact. Later he’d drop it in a river, two or three states away. It didn’t matter. The gun would never be traced back to him. Besides, he had other things to take care of first, and he didn’t have much time. If this was going to work at all, he needed to move quickly. Otherwise, they would hunt him down and then send someone else to eliminate Francine Russo.
Braxton and Rex had been hired to do whatever was necessary to keep secret the information that Tyler Gates and his friend, Deacon Kaye had hacked into. The only reason Braxton targeted Frankie Russo was because she may have seen the compromised emails, and she could recognize Rex.
Now, she knew his face, too.
In a day or two, Agent Maggie would probably know exactly who he was. But Braxton planned to be long gone. He’d already prepared. His go-bag was stashed inside the trunk with passports and credit cards. At three different banks across the country he had safe deposit boxes under as many different aliases stuffed with more documents and enough cash to retire anywhere he chose. And that’s exactly what he planned on doing.
But first, he needed to make sure he wouldn’t be killed, or worse, have a price put on his head. He’d need to play the game better than the man he worked for.
The man Braxton had worked for and killed for had crossed the line when he gave Rex the orders to set a fire on top of the restaurant ruins. The man Braxton had given his dedication and loyalty to for almost a decade had repaid that loyalty by considering Braxton collateral damage in order to make sure Russo didn’t make it out alive.
And Rex...Braxton shook his head. He still couldn’t believe Rex had betrayed him.
So what was the best way to stay alive now? He needed to make sure those secrets that were worth killing for, were no longer secrets.
75
Maggie was on her second doughnut. It was hard to believe that only eighteen hours ago she and Frankie had met for lunch at Southern Blessings. It felt like a lifetime ago.
Around six in the morning, Jason and Ryder had left to take care of Grace and Scout. The two of them had come back with dozens of doughnuts. Ryder had pulled out two especially for her. She couldn’t remember telling him that her favorite was a cake doughnut with chocolate frosting. The two men had left, again, to distribute the rest to staff and family members in the ER and ICU waiting areas.
Earlier in the wee small hours of the morning—after things had settled down, after Frankie was resting without a dead man at the foot of her bed and after Maggie’s arm had finally been taken care of—Maggie and Ryder sat in one of the waiting rooms down the hall from the ICU unit. Neither could sleep. She told him about Gus and how she’d identified him from the street cam video. She told him everything she could remember that Alonzo had discovered. Then Ryder shared with her what information he had learned from Sheriff Krenshaw about the others who had been trapped with her and Frankie.
Six people were dead. The waitress, who had served her and Frankie and hadn’t gone down into the basement, was found with two other women: a kitchen staff worker and the hostess. Two unidentified men were found crushed when heavy kitchen appliances had fall
en into the stairwell.
“Max and Loverboy,” Maggie said. “They kept thinking that would be the only exit.
“Loverboy?” Ryder had asked.
“I never knew his name. There was a woman with him before the storm hit. Beth. She’ll be able to identify him.”
The last was one of the older women.
“Clara or Adele?” she asked, but Ryder didn’t know for sure.
Together they had watched the sunrise, though their view was over one of the hospital’s parking lots. Maggie couldn’t believe how incredibly blue the sky was. Not a cloud in sight. The television in the corner had been muted but the weather map for the coming week showed temperatures in the upper fifties and lower sixties, and no sign of another storm. She remembered Stephanie’s outrage about the weather, and Maggie had to agree: this was a bit crazy.
It was in that early morning quiet when Ryder told her he and Jason would need to leave for Florida. Since he totaled his Jeep, they were down to one vehicle.
“What happened to your Jeep?” she asked him.
“It’s a long story.” He smiled and shook his head. Instead of attempting to tell the story, he said, “Hannah’s anxious to get up here and be with Frankie. They’ve been friends for a long time.”
“I know,” Maggie said. “I’m glad she has someone like Hannah.”
Ryder explained that he and Jason would stay with Hannah’s boys. He didn’t need to say that he was worried about Brodie. She could see it on his face. He had made sure that Maggie was taken care of. That she was safe. But he had other obligations to the other people in his life. He wouldn’t be the man she knew and cared about, if he didn’t leave her to go take care of his family.
At the time, they’d been sitting side by side, and she reached over and took his hand. There would be no declarations of their emotions or feelings. There wasn’t a need for words. And it didn’t feel like a copout. It simply felt right.
“We really need to stop spending so much time in hospitals,” she told him.
Now, Maggie found a quiet corner with an outlet for a borrowed cell phone charger. A couple of hours after her unsuccessful search for Gus, her phone’s battery had finally died.
The dead guy at the foot of Frankie’s bed allowed Maggie to justify 24/7 protection for Frankie. The sheriff departments for several counties were still overwhelmed with the aftermath of the storms, so Agent Alonzo managed to get agents from one of the FBI’s field offices in Alabama. Two of the men had arrived at three in the morning. Maggie was impressed. She didn’t think Assistant Director Kunze would approve. She was anxiously waiting to hear how Alonzo had pulled it off.
She finally had the small waiting area all to herself. It felt too empty without Ryder. She watched the flat screen TV on the wall. They had left it muted with the closed captions crawling across the bottom. The local news was talking about a special report the station would be doing tonight. It would include details from one of their storm chasers who had survived his vehicle being sucked up into the storm.
When her phone rang, she grabbed it, sitting awkwardly so she could leave it plugged in.
Instead of a greeting, Alonzo said, “Are you near a television?”
“Yes,” she told him. “What’s going on?”
“Turn it to one of the cable news stations.”
She found the remote and channel surfed until she found one. A news anchor was talking about Carson Foods. Photos of the CEO, a couple of his executives and Senator John Quincy were lined up in the upper corner of the screen.
“Someone leaked a bunch of emails to the New York Times,” Alonzo told her. “In the emails, Carson Foods’ CEO admits to Senator Quincy that the levels of glyphosate are too high. But he tells him not to worry. He can control the reports and the test results, so their global initiative can go forward. Maggie, these leaked emails look exactly like the ones Tyler Gates and his buddy hacked into.”
“But how do you know that?”
“Because I’m looking at what Gates sent to Russo’s email account right now. He must have had it sent with a time delay. His email with the attached files only showed up in her email account early this morning.”
“Do you think Gates sent the emails to the Times with a time delay, too?”
“It’s possible. But from what I’m hearing, they have actual copies of the tests results and other reports that I’m not seeing in Russo’s attachment. They say they have evidence that Carson Foods changed the lab results. And they have emails saying they had to change results or risk losing billions of dollars, because the company already had products waiting to ship as part of this global initiative. I think it must be someone from the inside who had access.”
Maggie immediately thought of Gus. Alonzo hadn’t been able to find out who he was. The only link they had was the black sedan’s license plate number, and Alonzo claimed it didn’t exist.
Just then, she noticed A NEWS ALERT flashed across the bottom of the television screen. A national recall was being issued for products made by Carson Foods, and the specific cereals and breakfast bars were listed, one by one. There had to be over a dozen of them. The alert claimed that it would be the largest food product recall in history.
“Word is the CEO will be announcing his resignation by the end of today,” Alonzo said. “Through the grapevine, I’ve heard that Senator Quincy is being pressured to do the same.”
Maggie realized this was the political fallout that evidently had been worth killing for. With the secret exposed, hopefully Frankie would be safe.
“There’s something else, Maggie,” Alonzo said. “This hasn’t hit the news yet, and no one except you and me might make the connection.”
“What is it?”
“Assistant Director Kunze resigned this morning.”
76
Florida Panhandle
Creed hated leaving Maggie, but there was no question that he would go home and take care of things for Hannah, so she could be with her friend. Creed and Hannah had been each other’s family for over seven years. He’d mow down mountains before he’d let Hannah down. And now, he felt the same way about Brodie.
By the time Jason and Creed left Montgomery, Frankie’s doctor sounded more optimistic. She was starting to feel her legs. Her kidney levels were holding steady. Creed didn’t fully understand all the complications of her condition, but he knew Frankie’s recovery would benefit from having her friend by her side.
What Creed didn’t expect was to find Hannah already gone when he got home. Jason took Grace and Scout to the fenced yard behind Hannah’s house. Creed was pleased to see Grace prancing along, tail wagging. She was glad to be home and already back to telling Scout that she was the boss of him.
He was smiling to himself when he walked in the back door and found his mother in the kitchen. She had an apron on and was chopping vegetables at the center island. Lady and Hunter came to greet him then quickly returned to their spot at his mom’s feet, waiting and hoping for something to drop.
“Mom?”
“Don’t be mad,” she glanced at him then focused on her chopping. “I’m the one who talked Hannah into leaving earlier. I wanted to be sure she’d make it to Montgomery before dark.”
His mind got snagged on the fact that she thought he might get mad. At the same time, he realized why Hannah hadn’t told him about his mother staying. She wouldn’t want him to worry about Brodie.
“Whatever you’re fixing smells good,” he told her.
“It’s a stew for tomorrow. We’ve already had dinner. Did you boys eat, yet?”
“We did.”
Then she looked up, really looked at him. “Ryder, are you okay?” She put the knife down and started around the counter, stopping short of touching him but clearly concerned about the bruises and cuts on his face.
“I’m okay. Really, it looks worse than it is.” He wanted to change the subject. “Where are the boys and Brodie?”
“They’re watching a movie. Something anima
ted that Hannah’s already approved.”
She stared at him for a bit longer then went back to her chopping board, as if all this was perfectly normal for her to be preparing meals in his kitchen. Correction, Hannah’s kitchen. The two women had easily and quickly become friends, though they’d only just met last fall.
“Brodie, too?” he asked. Something felt wrong.
“Oh, I’m sorry. She was watching the movie with the boys, but she took the cat for a walk.” She glanced up, again, as if she may have missed something. “Hannah said she takes the cat everywhere. But do you walk a cat?”
“Yep, she does.” Still, something kicked in his gut. “I’m just anxious to see her. Maybe I’ll go see if I can find her.”
He left before his mother saw his alarm. He wasn’t sure why he was feeling so uneasy. Since she arrived, Brodie had been free to walk anywhere she wanted on the property, and yes, sometimes she took Kitten with her. They’d warned her about bears, and she never wandered into the woods by herself. If anything, she was extra cautious.
But the nightmares had returned. She’d been stressed about their mother’s visit. First, Creed had left her, and then Hannah. Her therapist had warned Creed that things could come crashing down with little warning. He had a bad feeling that Brodie might have left the house because she needed to get away.
He noticed a light on in the fieldhouse. It wasn’t quite dark, yet, but the high windows didn’t allow much light after the sun started to sink. As soon as he opened the door, he heard water sloshing around, and he felt the panic.
The first thing he saw was the cat sitting on the edge of the pool, watching. It took Creed a few seconds for his eyes to find Brodie in the water, clear on the other side. He saw someone beside her and immediately started kicking off his shoes. He was ready to dive in when she saw him and waved. And suddenly, he got a good look at who was swimming beside her.
