by Cap Daniels
Skipper stepped between me and the charging animal. I couldn’t fathom why she’d sacrifice herself to stop the dog. I reached up to grab her, hoping I could throw her out of the way before the dog’s teeth arrived, but I missed by an inch.
She knelt between the advancing dog and Anya’s body. “Harvey! Down!”
The dog put on his brakes and slid across the floor, coming to a stop in front of Skipper’s knees. She took the dog’s head in her hands. “It’s okay, Harvey. It’s okay.”
The dog licked her hands and peeked around her, making sure I wasn’t still a threat.
I dropped the empty magazine from my pistol and slammed a full one in its place. I placed two fingers on Anya’s neck, but my heart was racing too fast to feel a pulse—if she still had one.
I couldn’t let myself crash. I’d made a promise to Coach Woodley that I’d bring his daughter home. I’d been trained and honed into a weapon of war, and I couldn’t turn my back on my word or my training. I hefted Anya’s limp body onto my shoulder in a modified fireman’s carry and yelled at Skipper. “Go! Out the front. My car’s at the corner of the drive. It’s a silver BMW. I’m right behind you!”
She jumped to her feet and ran for the door. Harvey bounded after her.
Hearing his feet hitting the floor behind her, she stopped. “No, Harvey. You have to stay, but I love you.” She kissed the dog on the head and he sat, watching us race past him and out the front door.
I was thankful to see the soles of the fat guy’s shoes still protruding from beneath the shrubs. I didn’t want to have to deal with another gunman. I yelled to Skipper, “Open the back door!”
She yanked the door open and crawled inside. I laid Anya’s body on the back seat, and Skipper pulled her inside the car. I slammed the door and ran to the driver’s side.
Taking one last look toward the house, I saw two more men coming hard through the front door. I emptied my pistol in their direction and jumped into the car. Thankfully, Anya had left the keys where they belonged, and the car roared to life. Broken conch shells and sand flew into the air as we accelerated onto Fourteenth toward Meridian.
As I turned onto the MacArthur Causeway, I saw Skipper in the rearview mirror applying pressure to the exit wound on Anya’s chest.
“She’s got a pulse!” she yelled from the back seat.
I yanked my cell phone from my pocket and thumbed in the only number I could think of. Dominic Fontana answered on the second ring. He started into his long, drawn-out speech that he gave every time he answered the phone, but I cut him off.
“Dominic! It’s Chase. Shut up and listen. I need your help. Anya’s been shot, and we’re coming across the MacArthur Causeway. She needs a doctor now!”
Dominic shifted from yacht broker to covert operative in an instant. “Stay on the Causeway ’til you cross Interstate Ninety-Five and take Twelfth Avenue Northeast. The VA hospital will be two blocks on the left. Don’t take her to University. You’ll see it as soon as you turn on Twelfth, but keep going to the VA. I’ll let them know you’re coming. What are you driving?”
“My silver BMW,” I yelled into the phone.
Firmly, he said, “Listen to me, Chase. Do not stay with her. Someone will take her from your car and get her inside. As soon as she’s out of your car, you have to disappear. She’ll get the best care possible, and I’ll call you as soon as I can get there to pave the way for you to come back. You don’t want to try to answer their questions. Drop her and go. It doesn’t matter where. Just go.”
We left the Causeway onto mainland Miami and traffic picked up. There were cars everywhere, but I wasn’t slowing down. I blew through the red lights at the interstate and started scanning for Twelfth Avenue. I spotted the exit and was thankful no one was in front of me. I glanced back to check on Anya. She didn’t look good. There was blood dripping from her mouth and her blonde hair was now matted and crimson. Skipper had blood all over her hands and arms, but she was still holding pressure on the exit wound.
We made the turn onto Twelfth and traffic was standing still. I accelerated into the oncoming lane and roared through the first traffic light and past University Hospital. Accelerating through eighty miles per hour, I spotted the sign for the VA hospital and slammed on the brakes, sliding the car into the drive and under the canopy. Two orderlies with a gurney yanked open the back door and peered inside. They pulled Anya from the back seat and roughly laid her on the gurney. Seeing Skipper covered in Anya’s blood, one of the orderlies asked, “Are you hurt?”
Skipper yelled, “No, I’m fine! Just take care of her.”
I pressed the accelerator hard, slamming Skipper’s door with the momentum as we roared back onto Twelfth and north toward the Julia Tuttle Causeway.
Skipper found a beach towel on the floor and started cleaning her hands and arms. I was driving more reasonably and things were starting to calm down, but I hated leaving Anya at the hospital. I needed to be with her, but I had to take Dominic’s direction. He’d never led me astray.
When Skipper finished cleaning herself up, she said, “Chase, what’s this all about? How did you find me?”
Noticing she was still wearing the bathrobe, I pointed to a bag on the floor. “There’s some clothes in there that’ll fit you. Put something on, and I’ll try to explain.”
Anya’s clothes fit her pretty well. She climbed into the front seat, and I saw she still had a little blood on her hands and forearms. I tried not to look. She leaned across the console, placed her head on my shoulder, and sobbed.
I wrapped my arm around her. “It’s okay,” I said, trying to sound reassuring. “You’re safe now, and I’m going to get you home. Your folks are worried sick about you.”
She sat back up. “I can’t go home, Chase. I can never go back there. My parents hate me, and I’ve made such a mess of everything. I can’t go back.”
I took her hand. “None of that matters right now. We’ll figure it out. What’s important is that you’re safe, and I’m going to keep you safe.”
Her face tightened, and she started punching me and screaming. “Where did you go, Chase? Why the hell did you run away?”
I let her punch me several times before grabbing her fist. “Stop it,” I said. “There’s a lot to explain, and it’s going to be tough to understand, but you have to listen to me.”
She yanked her fist from my grasp. “Okay, fine. Let’s hear it.”
I could hardly believe what my life had become since the last time I’d seen her. There was no way to make her understand or believe everything she was about to hear, but I had to try.
“When I got hurt, it was tough for me. I didn’t want to see anybody who had anything to do with baseball. It was—”
“It was tough for me too, you asshole. You were like a big brother to me and you shut me out. You shut everybody out. It wasn’t fair.”
“I know,” I said. “It wasn’t fair, and I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I shouldn’t have done that to you. Of all people, not to you.”
“You’re right, you shouldn’t have, but you did. Where have you been? Where did you go? And how the hell did you find me?”
“It’s a really long story,” I said, “and I’m going to tell you everything, I promise, but we have one more thing to do first.”
I punched Clark’s number into my phone. “Put a bullet in his head and I’ll meet you out front in three minutes. We’ve got Skipper.”
Clark said, “Roger,” and hung up.
“Who was that?” she asked. “And put a bullet in whose head?”
“That was Clark, my partner, and the bullet’s going in Giovani Minelli’s head.”
She scowled. “Put two bullets in his head . . . one for me.”
Three minutes later, we pulled up in front of Paradise Productions and Clark walked out the front door as if he were a businessman on his way to lunch. Seeing Skipper in the front seat, he opened the back door and started to slide inside.
“Wait a minute,” I s
aid. “There’s quite a bit of blood back there. Grab that bathrobe to sit on.”
He pulled the robe over the blood and slid onto the seat. “Who’s blood?”
My stomach churned. “Anya took a bullet in the back on our way out of the house. She’s at the VA hospital on Twelfth. Dominic Fontana is smoothing that over. Do you know him?”
“Is she going to be all right?” he asked, showing sincere concern.
Skipper bowed her head and put her face in her hands.
Clark said, “That doesn’t look good. What happened?”
Fighting off the nausea in the pit of my stomach, I said, “I’ve got a lot of tough questions to answer, and it’s going to take me a while to get through all of them. First, Clark, this is Elizabeth Woodley. I call her Skipper. She’s who we’ve been searching for.”
“It’s nice to see you safe and sound, Elizabeth. We’ve been worried about you.”
* * *
We pulled into Pine Tree Park and found a remote parking spot.
“Skipper, I promise to get back to your questions in a second, but I have to fill Clark in on what happened.”
“Okay.” She wrung her hands and gazed out the window.
“We found the house, Clark. Anya told me not to go in alone, but I didn’t listen. It didn’t take me long to realize she was right . . . she’s always right. They were gunned up pretty heavy in there. I found Skipper and got myself cornered and outnumbered. Thank God Anya showed up. We had to shoot our way out, and she took one in the shoulder blade and fell about ten feet onto a marble floor. We made it to the car and called Dominic. He sent us to the VA and told us to get lost until he could smooth things over. He’s going to call as soon as the coast is clear. God, I hope he calls soon.”
“I knew I should’ve gone with you,” Clark said.
“No, it was my fault. I should’ve listened to Anya. I never should’ve gone in there alone. It was stupid, and I may have gotten her killed.”
The three of us sat silently for several minutes.
“Skipper and I are going for a walk,” I said. “We won’t be gone long, but I have a lot of things to explain. If Dominic calls, we’ll be headed back to the hospital, so stay close, okay?”
He pointed to a grove of pines. “I’ll be right over there in the shade.”
Skipper and I walked until we found a bench and sat together. I was trying to keep it together for Skipper’s sake, but I was falling apart. The woman I loved was lying in a hospital a few blocks away fighting for her life, and I couldn’t be beside her. Worse than that, my arrogance is what put her there.
Stilling myself, I put my arm around Skipper. “Are you okay?”
She shook her head. “No, I’m not okay, but I’m safe for the first time in a long time. Thanks to you.”
I stared through the trees, gathering my nerve. “Like I told you before, it screwed me up pretty bad when I got hurt and couldn’t play ball anymore.”
She started to interrupt me again, but I took her hands in mine. “Just listen.”
She sighed and squeezed my hands.
“I didn’t deal well with seeing my dreams get flushed down the toilet after I got hurt, so I stayed away from everyone and everything related to baseball. I got recruited to work for the government, and I took them up on their offer. I ended up training for a couple years, and now I travel around and do things for them that no one knows about.”
“So, you’re some kind of secret agent, and they sent you to find me? That’s stupid, Chase. You’re making this up.”
“No, they didn’t send me to find you. I took Anya to see a ball game in Athens and had dinner with your mom and dad. Something was noticeably wrong, and we finally convinced them to tell us what it was. They have no idea what really happened to you. They still think you’re running with the wrong people and probably messing with drugs.”
She started crying. “That’s how it all started. I hooked up with some people I thought were my friends and made a lot of terrible decisions. I got caught up in the whole thing and we ended up in the Keys. The people I thought were my friends bailed on me, and I was stuck down there with no money and no place to stay. That’s when—”
I stopped her. “It’s okay. None of that matters now. We started our search in Key West where we met a guy named Micky.”
“If I ever see him again, I’ll gouge his eyes out and cut off his—”
“Relax,” I said. “You’ll never see him again. I promise you that. No one will ever see him again.”
She blew out a satisfied breath. “So, how did you find me here in Miami?”
“We simply followed the breadcrumbs,” I said. “People like that aren’t very good at covering their tracks. We hooked up with Clark along the way, and he helped us out. He’s a former Green Beret and an all-around badass.”
“No way,” she said. “He’s like my age.”
I laughed for the first time in a while. “Yeah, he’s actually thirty-four. I heard they called him Baby Face in the army.”
She looked back toward the parking lot. “So, what’s the deal with this Anya chick?”
“She’s even harder to explain. We work together, but there’s more to it than that. She’s incredibly important to me. In fact, I’m in love with her. I’ll tell you the rest later, but for now, we just have to keep praying she’s going to be okay.”
“This is a lot to take in,” she said.
My phone chirped, and I grabbed it. “Yeah?”
“Chase, it’s Dominic. Why don’t you come on back to the VA hospital? I’ll meet you in the front lobby.”
“Is Anya okay?” I asked him.
He had already hung up.
“That was Dominic. We have to get back to the hospital. I’ll tell you everything I can later.”
We jogged back up the walking path and Clark met us beside the car.
“You sit up front, Clark,” Skipper said. “I’ll fit better in the back.”
“I cleaned up a little while you were gone,” he said. Clark had thoroughly scrubbed the back seat, and there was no evidence there’d been blood in the car.
I told him about the phone call and asked him again if he knew Dominic.
“Yeah,” he said. “I know Dominic.”
16
Broken
We parked and ran into the lobby of the VA hospital. Dominic was sitting in a chair away from everyone else. He rose when he saw us come through the door and seemed surprised when he saw Clark.
“It’s good to see you again, Chase,” said Dominic. “I didn’t know you knew my son.”
“Your son?” I glared at Clark. “He’s your son?”
“He sure is,” Dominic said proudly.
Clark said, “You asked if I knew him. You never asked if we were related.”
“But your last name is Johnson.”
“My mother’s last name is Johnson and Dad wasn’t around much when I was a kid.”
Choosing not to take that any further, I asked Dominic, “Where’s Anya. Can I see her?”
He put his hand on my shoulder. “Let’s go for a walk, Chase.”
I jerked away from him. “No! I want to see her. Where is she?”
“Chase, the wounds were too severe. I’m sorry, but she didn’t survive. There was nothing anyone could do. She’d lost too much blood by the time you got her here.”
I crumpled to the floor and held my face in my hands, gasping and desperate to catch my breath.
Skipper knelt beside me, but I shoved her away. “This is your fault! If we didn’t have to come looking for you, she’d still be alive!”
Dominic put his hand on my shoulder. “Chase, you’ve got to—”
I slapped his hand away and leapt to my feet. “You don’t get to tell me what I’ve got to do! None of you get to tell me shit!”
I grabbed a handle on one of the double doors leading beyond the lobby and into the depths of the hospital. The door was controlled by some mechanical lock and wouldn’t budge w
hen I pulled, so I thrust my forearm into the pane of security glass on the door and it rattled violently. I took a step backward and sent my right foot into the handle, shattering the lock and leaving both doors bouncing against the jamb. I yanked the doors open and ran through them, frantically scanning the hallway beyond.
The hospital was enormous. Believing I could find Anya was irrational, but that didn’t slow me down. I jerked open doors and yelled at the top of my lungs for the woman I loved. I had to see her. I had to know she was still alive. I had to hear her tell me what she and the SVR knew about my family.
I’d made it to the second floor when a pair of rent-a-cop security guards showed up thinking they were going to stop my search for Anya.
“Sir, calm down,” one of the overweight uniformed guards yelled. Calming down was not in my future, and taking me down was not in theirs. The larger of the two men grabbed my left wrist and tried to twist my arm behind my back. I let him turn my body, but I didn’t let him stay on his feet. I continued the rotation and landed an elbow strike just beneath his third chin, sending him solidly to the white tiled floor.
His buddy, undeterred, decided to take his chances at apprehending me, and charged toward me with a Taser in his outstretched hand. I side-stepped the device and struck him in the wrist with a hammer fist, sending the Taser crashing to the floor. I used the guard’s momentum to let him continue stumbling past me, and I clamped my arms around his neck and head.
“There’s a twenty-five-year-old woman in this hospital with a gunshot wound through her right shoulder blade. You’re going to tell me where she is or I’m going to snap your neck!”
The guard gagged and squirmed in my grip, but I wasn’t going to let him go. I squeezed tighter until he grunted, “I . . . don’t . . . know.”
I shoved his head into the wall, leaving a stain of blood following his body to the floor. I didn’t kill him, but he was out cold.
I ran back for the stairs, thinking if she was dead, she’d be in the morgue. Alarms were ringing and people appeared to be in panic. I plummeted down the stairs and forced my way through the doors into the morgue. Two men and a woman wearing white lab coats stood in shock when they saw me storm into the room. I delivered a palm strike to the larger of the two men, sending him to the floor, and I grabbed the other man by the throat.
