by Jolie Mason
"How's our secondary system?"
Ace paused a moment. "Working beautifully. Interior cameras are down. This guy moves fast. Secondary visual puts him at the gardeners entrance. Damien owes me fifty bucks."
She looked at Damien. "I bet him the garage entrance. It was one or the other."
Hayden fought down the laugh that threatened. "Suspect is in. Playing audio file." Music began to quietly drift from the intercom system.
Hayden rolled her eyes as the first notes hit her ears. "Sleeping Beauty? Really?"
Damien whispered, "I think it's kind of poetic."
Finally, the lights went out in their part of the house. Hayden had grabbed her weapon and move around the counter. They each moved to take cover, and Hayden reached to pull Gray with her behind the sofa.
Murphy had switched the circuit hoping one of them would go check.
Yeah, not today, buddy. She spoke softly into her wrist comm. "Ace, any sign it's working?"
"He's still moving in. Full night gear, Damien."
Damien cursed softly, then , seeing her confused look, said, "Lost twenty bucks."
"Forget I asked."
"He's approaching from the north side door. Shit, he has a canister, D."
"Hot damn, back up to fifty. I bet he'd disable us first."
"God give me strength," she whispered to the air.
Serious Gray decided to get in on the witty banter. "I didn't think you were religious."
"I am today," she said tightly.
Damian said softly, "Tony."
The man just melted into the dark and out the east doorway, seeming to understand without words what his partner meant. There was very little light getting in the room from outside, and none of them had night vision so it was a good thing some of them could read minds.
She heard the struggle before she saw it. Out in the hallway, Tony had gotten the jump on the man from behind and removed the canister from play, while Damien moved in quickly and efficiently from the north door. Shots zipped off walls causing her to duck again, just before she heard the sickening thud of bullets hitting flesh and then the groan as a man went down.
She began steering Gray toward the other door. One of the other men were still fighting with Tanner. The escape had been pretty well choreographed. She was to lead Gray out toward the front entrance where a capture unit was waiting on standby to remove the witness.
They didn't make it that far before Tanner Murphy shouted, "Dr. Kerry!"
Kerry slid to a stop at the sound of Tanner's voice. "Tanner?"
She could hear the trampling of feet as the capture unit tried to move in. There was enough light in this corridor, more than enough for Hayden to see Tanner's hands shaking on his weapon. He had them in very close quarters, and there was zero cover if he started firing.
She wondered if they could talk their way out. Tanner didn't look like a mindless robot. He seemed conflicted, staring at Gray like he was looking at an oncoming transport from the middle of a highway.
"Tanner," she said. "May I call you Tanner? I'm Hayden. Let's talk, Tanner. Just put the gun down and let's talk."
The poor man started to tear up as he said mournfully, "I can't. I can't."
"Why can't you, Tanner?"
"The box won't let me. It tells me what to do and I do it. Dr. Macy said he'd fix it, but he didn't. I went to the Park. This song is pretty." He looked up at the ceiling for the source of the music. Was it working, she wondered.
Tanner stood with manly tears dripping down his cheeks, growing more and more agitated. "No one would help me," he howled. "And now they're all dead, like soldiers. All dead." He waved his gun wildly toward Gray
"Tanner!" she shouted. "Look at me, Tanner!" She even stomped her booted foot to get his attention.
"Tanner! I can help you," she said stepping forward, between her suspect and Gray. "Tanner, I can help you if you let me."
He looked more agitated, with wild brown eyes as wide as they could stretch. Hayden noticed the flex of his fingers on the trigger. The compulsion to fire the weapon was getting to him.
"Tanner, how can we help you?"
"Get it out. I need it out."
"We can do that, Tanner. Put the gun down, and we'll see about getting you medical help. I believe you. You can prove to everyone that you didn't do this. You didn't kill anyone. Just tell me who did this to you."
"But, I did kill people, didn't I?" Hayden tried to get a read on his body language, his expression. He was slipping. "Clean kills. The voice wanted clean kills, but I wanted someone to know."
"You wanted us to know what?" Hayden watched him closely. The distance in his eyes broke for a second, just a moment, and Hayden thought she might be seeing the shadow of Tanner Murphy in her killer's eyes.
"Wanted you to catch me."
Hayden breathed in. Okay, that was Tanner Murphy all right. She wanted to keep the information flowing, so she filed away the horrific image of what he'd done to his victims in order to attract police attention.
"Tanner, which doctors did you see besides Gray? Where did you see doctors?"
"Happened at the park. The park." He rubbed a hand down his face. The conflict in him was growing. She was losing him again. His hand visibly tightened on the weapon. "Can't you hear them?" he asked in confused dismay.
"Tanner!" she shouted, but he didn't appear to hear her. He kept his eyes on Gray behind her.
She hit her comm. "Capture go. We need our suspect alive."
In seconds, Tanner lost whatever control he'd been fighting for, and he let loose a poorly aimed spray of bullets. While she dove for Gray, he grabbed back at her and pushed her to the floor beneath his own body. She hit the floor with the full force of his weight.
Distantly, she waited to breathe again, and realized her arm burned like fire. Capture had swarmed the hallway and taken her suspect alive because she could still hear him crying.
"Gray," she said giving a shove. "You can get off me now."
Nothing happened. "Gray!"
She slid sideways and pushed at the same time. He had a bloodstain blossoming like a macabre flower deep in his shoulder and chest, far too close to his lungs for her peace of mind, and, as she inspected, she found a deep gash in his side where he'd missed a horrifying injury by inches.
His eyes opened, but he only moved his mouth. He didn't actually say anything.
"Medic!" She called. Capture would have one. She watched as the man began working on Gray and Gray's blood continued spilling out onto the stark white tile.
She needed to question her suspect. She needed to know Gray was going to be fine. Suddenly, Ace appeared and wrapped her in a bear hug, and she realized that she had needed that much more.
"Gray," she said to Ace.
The medic spoke up. "We're taking him in. He needs a surgeon."
Ace took charge. "Gray still needs police protection. You handle him, and I'll see that Tanner Murphy gets back to the precinct in one piece."
She nodded. That was when Ace noticed the blood on her upper shoulder.
"Damn it all. Christ, Hayden. Why didn't you say anything?"
"Didn't really feel it."
"Liar," Ace scolded.
She followed Gray's stretcher to a transport where she was examined en route to the nearest trauma center.
Gray's eyes met hers as she watched the thin lines of pain contort his mouth and turn his square jaw into a hard marble line. His eyes watched intently as the medic cut her shirt sleeve away and checked the wound.
"You'll need the adhesive to close it. No surgery," the woman assured her. Then, she took out a small tube of wound care and started spraying it on the cut left behind by the bullet.
She whimpered a bit as the gel hit the wound, but she locked it down. Neither of them said anything in the ambulance.
Once they reached the hospital, she was sent with a medic to make sure her wounds checked out, and Gray was sent up to surgery. As soon as the medic finished with her shoul
der, she was upstairs and waiting at the surgery door. She doubted they could mobilize anyone so fast, but Gray was still a target for Romanov and friends. No one was getting past her.
Her comm dinged and she stepped away to answer.
Ace rumbled through the audio link. "How's Gray?"
"Nurse says they're patching the shoulder and the chest bullet missed everything important. He got lucky."
"I'm not sure I'd qualify it that way, but he's alive. That has to count for something."
She agreed. "Is he talking?"
"Singing like a little bird. We'll put him in local holding in the next hour, then transfer him sometime tomorrow to our precinct where we can question him longer."
"Can you believe," Ace complained. "This Borough has restrictions on how long a suspect can be interrogated at a time?"
She could believe it. But, in this case, she didn't mind because she really wanted in on the interrogation.
A nurse in the deep blue uniform denoting the surgery department came out into the waiting area very obviously looking for someone.
"I'll comm you later when I know more. I think they may be finished."
The nurse saw her and waved her over with a kind smile. "He's still under, but the damage was minimal. We'll get him admitted as soon as he wakes."
"What does he need?"
"Just overnight observation and you can take him home tomorrow. Medicine is a wonderful thing these days."
Hayden breathed in deeply and smiled. "That's excellent. Just excellent. Can I see him now? I'll need to stay in his room until he checks out."
The nurse led her through a set of double doors with a nod. "We can have a cot brought in. You must be tired. I hear you two are quite the heroes tonight."
"Not quite. All I did was stand there and be me." They rounded the corner and she set eyes on his sleeping form on a hospital bed. "That guy is another story."
She walked into his small section of recovery and started pulling curtains around the bed. "We'll need restricted access on this patient, and he's not here when anyone asks."
The nurse entered a code into a console and glass walls began to descend from the ceiling. "Restricted protocols are engaged, Detective."
"Thank you," she said watching the walls click into place. "That was very... dramatic."
Laughing,the nurse left through a door that slid open to reveal itself. "We'll get him to a real room soon."
It took three hours to get him moved to a private room that met all the stipulations of police protection protocol, and, if she were honest with herself, she would admit she hadn't made that easy on the staff of Mercy Hospital.
The room was near a set of stairs as stipulated and locked from the inside with no exposed outer windows.
She watched the staff carry in a cot for her use, then she walked over to the sink, put her gun on the counter and threw cold water over her face. She stared at her tired face in the dim light from a bedside lamp.
She was tired and pale, a little vulnerable maybe. She looked too young to be a detective. How many times had she heard that? Dismissing that reflection and what it had to say, she turned away from the mirror.
There was something so eerie and still about a hospital room at night. Every sound seemed amplified in the sterile environment of a sick room. It was probably all the hard surfaces creating echoes, she reasoned.
Somehow, that didn't help. She looked over at Gray and took up her weapon again, securing it in the shoulder holster. Her wrist unit could display work files and books in holo form. She pulled it off her wrist and activated that mode. She flipped through a current magazine, until she drifted off to sleep in the chair, unable to keep her eyes open any longer.
CHAPTER SIX
*
Gray moaned, then thrashed in his sleep during the night, bringing her up off the cot in a flash with her weapon drawn. Making the round of the room, she realized there was no actual danger, only pain and discomfort. She put the gun back in her holster, and stumbled tiredly to his bedside.
"What is it, Gray?"
He looked around dully in the dark, probably confused by the lack of light and abundance of drugs in his system.
"Where are we?"
"Mercy Hospital in West Borough. You were shot. Do you remember?"
He winced and gasped as he attempted to sit up in the bed. "It's all coming back to me now. Oh, my god, this arm hurts. We got access to drugs?"
She smiled and reached for the pain popper. That was the name she and Ace, who'd had more than his own share of gunshot wounds, gave the little automatic IV that you got as a gift with purchase when you signed up for a gunshot wound. It put in just enough to take the edge off at your command, and you couldn't overdose. She thought it was called a hypo-injector or something typically official and professional, but, to them, it was the pain popper.
He leaned back in utter relief as the drug did its work.
"Oh, that's better."
"He's talking," she told him. "He's implicated Romanov at this point. We have people trying to bring him in as we speak. There's already a warrant for questioning and arrest."
He grabbed her hand and pulled her close. "You're referring to Tanner, I assume. I don't care right now. How's your arm?"
She tried to keep her weight off him, but he'd pulled her awkwardly close and she only ended up pressed against his leg and supporting some of her weight to keep it away from his bandage. Somehow in the madness of this whole mess, she'd missed how strong Gray actually was.
She pulled away one more time, then assured him, "It's good. All bandaged up, doesn't hurt."
"Hayden," he said sternly. "Get over here."
"You are injured. What can you possibly want with a woman in your bed?" she joked. It was a bad joke considering the circumstances.
"I have a brilliant, problem solving mind, I've been told. I'll figure something out." His tone wasn't making light of the words. He meant it.
She finally met his dark, serious eyes. "We can't. You know we can't. You're still in protective custody."
"You've proven it time and again. You can be protective and sexy at the same time," he said.
"But, Romanov is still a threat...," she began, then stopped, studied him closely, and said, "You think I'm sexy?"
He gave her that slow, secret smile he was so good at that first day in the research lab. The cocky Gray Kerry who could out think most of the world was fully engaged, and trying desperately to get her into his hospital bed.
" A capable woman who could kill me with her pinky finger is always sexy, however, you, Detective, are far more than that."
He carefully pushed himself higher on the bed and to the side making room for her, she presumed, then tugged hard until she was draped beside him, trying to give his body room. She filled up the space a little too well to keep her distance. Too much pizza, probably.
She made a few sounds of protest about his wounds, about her size, but there wasn't much fight in her when she half-heartedly tried to fend off his suddenly purposeful touch as he reached to play in her hair and touch her neck, her face.
"I'm not this sexy," she said impatiently. He buried his hand in her soft, shoulder length hair which she'd let fall around her neck in all the confusion and chaos of the day. Her ponytail was long gone.
"Hayden", he whispered intently. "Do you like me?"
She sighed and stopped wiggling, which wasn't accomplishing much anyway, and breathed out, "Too much."
"Give me this much, will you?" He kissed her nose in such an endearing, caring way that she couldn't resist it. "When this is all finally over, will you be here?"
She let her right hand drift down over the bandage on his upper left bicep. The patchwork square was smooth under her fingertips. So was his skin. Smooth and warm.
"Will you?" Hayden hated the vulnerability in the question, but she had to ask it.
He let his eyes drift closed and covered her hand with his good one. "If I can be, I will be."
Gray pulled her closer, cupped the back of her head again, and whispered into her furrowed brow, "Then, I will regret you my whole, short, miserable life."
"Why does that make me so very sad, Gray?"
"Because you feel this, Hayden. You feel what we could be if the world would just give us a minute to breathe."
He wasn't wrong.
It was a deep, bone deep wanting. Something she'd never experience in quite this way. She wanted him, wanted to know what this was between them, and she thought it would take a good, long while to find out.
It wasn't simple. It was complex and complicated, intricate, like clockwork. She leaned forward and brushed her lips over his, softly.
"I'll be here." It was a promise, and they both knew it.
He'd needed that assurance because he gave her a breathtaking, mind-bending, toe curling kiss that he should not have been physically capable of, and then he gave her another and another.
She lost track of where they were and what they were doing, lost in the rightness of it. He shifted again, and it hurt this time. He breathed in and winced, stopped the kissing for a moment to swear softly.
"You're hurt. You need to behave."
He dropped his mouth to hers again and shook his head slightly. "Uh uh. I don't care."
Confused, Hayden could sense that he needed this somehow. Maybe, he only needed to know he was alive or that she was alive. Maybe, he needed to forget for a while, but he needed her.
So, she let him brand her mind with kisses she'd remember until she died, and she let him write himself into her heart in such a way that she feared he'd never erase, even if she wanted him to later.
They kissed and touched and talked. She learned that his dog, Ghost, had run onto a highway after a rabbit. He learned that she'd grown up in foster care. He'd had a girlfriend named Alison he'd thought would marry him. She'd never really dated for all her bluster, not really. She didn't trust enough.
They told each other everything that came to mind in between long, slow kisses that Hayden knew she wouldn't forget even if some crazed scientist tried to rewrite her mind.
Relaxed and with her body humming, she drifted off in his arms, still clothed, still periodically whispering nonsense.
