The Kill Wire

by Nichole Christoff

  I pulled out my phone, got busy looking up flights to North Dakota. Fargo, Grand Forks, and Bismarck didn’t have the busiest airports in the world, even though the first two towns boasted international ports of entry, and none of them had an incoming flight from our neck of the woods until mid-morning. Not even Minot, with its U.S. Air Force base and international airport, could get us on the ground quicker.

  When I outlined this for Marc, he reached across the console between us, folded my hand in his. I still didn’t know all that he was thinking, or what he was feeling. But he didn’t let go until we’d descended into the bowl that cradled Colorado Springs.

  Chapter 21

  The corridors of Mountainview Community Hospital were cold that evening. Half of the ceiling’s long fluorescent lights had been powered off, too. Maybe this was some attempt to save money in an age of budget cutbacks—or maybe the nippy twilight was meant to nudge the patients closer to snuggling down in their beds and getting some real rest.

  In any case, I didn’t refuse Marc’s mumbled request to drop in on Helena Preble. After spending time with Sam Brewer, his ex-girlfriend’s solid ex-boss and supportive friend, maybe Marc felt Elena’s absence more deeply than he was willing to admit. Even if Elena was out of Marc’s love life, her mother remained a positive connection between them. Of course, maybe Marc planned to grill the woman about Elena’s alleged encounter with Lucy Ribisi. Or pump her for information about her daughter’s boyfriend, Dustin Toomey.

  Either way, Marc didn’t get the chance.

  We found the Prebles’ son, Robert, at his mother’s bedside, holding her listless hand. With wiry chestnut hair and a mobile mouth that trembled with suppressed emotion, he could’ve been Elena’s fraternal twin. The poor man practically broke down when he told Marc about his mother’s prognosis—and the funeral arrangements for his father.

  “I still haven’t heard from Elena,” Robert said, keeping his voice low so as not to disturb Mrs. Preble. “Something’s got to be seriously wrong.”

  “Have you ever met her boyfriend, Dustin Toomey?” Marc asked. “Is that serious?”

  “I don’t know. I wouldn’t know him from Adam. Mom seemed to like him, though.”

  Robert’s eyes drifted to his mother. She had more tubing running in and out of her than a high-velocity HVAC unit.

  “Do you have any way of contacting Toomey?” Marc persisted. “Did Elena pass along his phone number during a group text or anything?”

  Robert’s bushy brows knitted as he thought that one through. “No. No, I don’t think so.”

  “What about Elena’s other friends?” I asked. “Does the name Marley ring a bell? Or Lucy?”

  Robert’s face lit up. “Marley’s a coworker, right? I think her last name’s Jones. She lives in Manitou Springs. But Lucy?” He shook his head. “Does she work at the salon, too?”

  “I’m sorry. She doesn’t,” I said, dashing all of Robert’s hopes and mine right along with them.

  Robert’s face folded. I’d never seen a man more bereft.

  Marc clapped a hand on his would-be brother-in-law’s shoulder. “You staying at the house?”

  “I can’t. All the blood…”

  “Well, go back to your motel. Try to get some sleep.”

  “Dad would want me here with Mom. He’d want me to find Elena, to make sure Cody’s okay—”

  “Listen.” Marc pitched his voice even lower and glanced at the sedated Mrs. Preble. “Cody’s safe. I sent him to stay with my mother. And Jamie and I have a lead on Elena—”

  Robert’s reaction was electric. “Where is she? Does she know what’s happening here?”

  “We’re going to North Dakota in the morning to track her down.”

  “I’ll go with you!”

  “No, no. Sometimes leads like this go nowhere,” I cautioned him. “Marc and I will know how to handle it if that’s the case. We’re going to do our best for your family.”

  “It’s not just my family.” Robert slapped Marc on the back. “It’s our family.”

  Two red spots rose in Marc’s cheeks. I’d never seen him blush like this before. And from the way his black eyes slid away from mine, I knew he didn’t like having me witness the milestone.

  Maybe to escape my scrutiny more than anything, Marc walked Robert into the hall. The men talked quietly while I perused the get-well cards and other mementoes tacked to the bulletin board behind the room’s lone guest chair or propped on a rather narrow chest of drawers. None of the signatures on the cards or gift tags rang a bell—or pointed me toward Elena Preble’s current location.

  Mrs. Preble’s breathing eased without her son and Marc in the room. And I was reminded of research suggesting that heavily sedated or even comatose patients could not only hear, but actually process conversations around them. If that were the case, Mrs. Preble deserved better than to be a party to our frustrated speculation. And though I was a stranger to her, I leaned close to the lady. She smelled of latex and strong liniment—like modern medicine was all that kept her body and spirit together. Softly, I whispered in her ear.

  “You take care of yourself and get well, Mrs. Preble. I’ll take care of everything else. I promise.”

  I glanced up, found Marc watching me from the corridor. He crossed to my side, said his own respectful good night to Mrs. Preble. And silently, he led me from her room.

  In the hallway, his fingers twined through mine.

  And some emotion trembled through my soul.

  I couldn’t label it and I couldn’t allow it. I couldn’t have feelings for Special Agent Marc Sandoval. Not while there was Lieutenant Colonel Adam Barrett—and the mess I’d made of our relationship—to consider.

  “Marc…”

  My voice sounded weak, even to me.

  And Marc shook his head, already rejecting what I was about to say.

  “Don’t, babe. Don’t tell me to let you go. Not yet.”

  Marc’s plea plucked at my heartstrings. He was hurting, even if he’d die before admitting it. And I couldn’t just walk away from him.

  Hand in hand, we bypassed the nurses’ station, a moon-shaped desk where Mountainview’s angels of mercy could see down two wards at once. Two cups of tea steamed into the night, waiting for the nurses’ return. In the adjoining hallway, rubber soles squeaked softly on waxed linoleum, and I heard the swish of a curtain as a nurse whipped it closed to offer a patient some privacy.

  Downstairs, the lobby’s glass doors whispered open to let us pass. The parking lot, with its pole lamps throwing down bright rings of light, seemed so far away. But nearby, in the darkness where flat landscaping stones met the building in a riot of rangy bushes, massive shadows rose and fell with the sounds of violence. Two men at least were beating the hell out of a third. And when that third man cried out, I knew it was Robert Preble.

  “Hey!” I yelled. “Step away from him!”

  Marc drew his service weapon. “Federal agent! Get your hands where I can see them!”

  Dark forms morphed, emerged from the mulch bed. There were two of them, all right. In the gray press of the night’s half-light, I recognized them both.

  The first man had pulled a black peacoat over his undershirt, but his .38 still gleamed, tucked into the waistband of his jeans. I doubted if he’d learned to use it properly since the last time I’d seen him. And it was such armed ignorance that made him truly dangerous.

  Training and experience, however, made the second man deadly. With his state trooper’s buzz cut and gym rat’s physique, he’d already proven to me that he’d learned hand-to-hand combat the hard way. Even worse, he could anticipate Marc’s moves—just as he’d anticipated mine across the street from the Prebles’ house when he’d pulled me from the antenna tower to slam me up against the garage wall.

  “Drop your weapon,” Marc ordered Mr. Undershirt. “Slowly, now.”

  Mr. Undershirt slipped the revolver from his pants, held it high. He released it to thud into the dirt. But before it
hit, the dirty cop lunged at Marc, knocked him to the ground in a full-on tackle, and pinned Marc’s weapon between them.

  The guy was bigger than Marc and stronger.

  And that was saying something.

  A sick fear rolled through me as they wrestled. And adrenaline. Because whoever came out on top, with Marc’s handgun, would be the winner in more ways than one and the loser could lose everything.

  I had no weapon—no advantage—to save Marc or protect myself. And that’s when the goon in the undershirt suddenly had his .38 in his hand, retrieving it in a blur of motion and glinting metal. He pointed it at the struggling men, drew a bead on Marc.

  I darted through the dark to the garden’s border, snatched up a thick, flat landscaping stone in each hand. I hurled the first one in a fast pitch, nailed Mr. Undershirt in his center mass. He stumbled backward, into the bushes, firing his weapon into the air.

  Bang!

  Before he could clamber to his feet, I lobbed the second stone. I couldn’t quite see him struggling in the shadow of the building, but I could hear him scuttling through the evergreens. And I could feel every cell in my body come alive with the expectation that he’d shoot me where I stood.

  But in the parking lot, an engine revved. A black GMC truck roared around the corner of the hospital. It screeched to a halt at the edge of the lamplight. The man I’d incapacitated at Alpine Place with a strike to the knee hunkered over the wheel. His bald head bobbed as he reached across the seat to shove open the truck’s passenger door. The creep I’d clobbered ran for it, shooting haphazardly over his shoulder.

  Bang!

  Bang!

  I crouched low, scooped up a third stone. The dirty cop had Marc pinned. But raising the rock high, I brought it down on the dirty cop’s skull.

  The man grunted with the impact. And Marc threw him aside like an old blanket. Just as the whoop-whoop of the hospital’s security patrol sounded across the asphalt.

  Letting loose with a string of curses, Marc scrambled to keep control of his weapon, to clutch the dirty cop’s ankle, to grab his wrist, to subdue him in any way. But the creep rolled to his feet. He charged toward the truck—and stopped short when I stepped directly in his path.

  “You’ve been wasting your time,” I told him. “None of us know where Elena is. And Lucy Ribisi is dead.”

  Amusement curled at the corner of the dirty cop’s mouth. And then he lunged at me. I tried to sidestep his move, tried to let his momentum carry him forward, to use his own bulk against him, but he planted a massive palm on the side my face and shoved. My head whipped with the force of it. And the blow sent me crashing into the ground.

  “Get down!” Marc shouted. “Federal agent! Everybody down!”

  I rolled to my stomach, craned my neck to lay eyes on the suspect.

  He barreled toward his comrades’ truck, knocked a security guard aside like a bowling pin. Another guard fought to get his pepper spray free of his holster. Two more ran all out for the getaway vehicle.

  Marc, on his feet, leveled his weapon at our assailant, but the guards inadvertently blocked his shot.

  “Get down, damn it!”

  The dirty cop vaulted into the truck’s bed. The driver stomped on the gas. And they were gone, tires squealing as the vehicle skidded onto the roadway and into the night.

  Chapter 22

  The four-member hospital security team, who’d fumbled their way between the muzzle of Marc’s gun and the heavies that had beaten the tar out of Robert Preble, lingered in the common room outside the security director’s office like kids called to confess to the junior high school principal. The security director himself had probably been at home, in his recliner, with a beer in his hand when all this went down. Now, in person, he didn’t look too thrilled with tonight’s turn of events. Gray-haired with bushy brows and a thick mustache, he had the demeanor of a former law-enforcement officer who’d seen his share of felonious assault in the past and wasn’t happy to have one happen on his watch tonight.

  In the glass cubicle that passed for his work space, he insisted on questioning Marc and me before a pair of Colorado Springs police detectives showed up. Once they arrived, the director’s tiny office got crowded as the five of us went over events again and again. Not that Marc had much to say that any of them wanted to hear.

  “You were warned.” Marc’s patience was gone, his demeanor dark and dangerous. He planted his hands on the director’s desk and leaned across it into the man’s face. “The attending physician warned you that Mrs. Preble may be targeted by the perpetrators who garroted her husband—”

  “Is this true?” one of the detectives asked the security director.

  The director tried to wheel his chair beyond Marc’s reach—just in case the DEA agent lost his cool—but he didn’t get any farther than bumping up against the wall behind him. “Dr. Ekhardt requested that we keep an eye out, sure, but the man who got jumped in the parking lot wasn’t a patient here and—”

  “Jumped?” Marc’s fists clenched. “Robert Preble got the shit pounded out of him on hospital property and your sorry-ass security climate let it happen!”

  Past the detectives, Dr. Ekhardt waded into the waiting room outside. He met my eye, offered a subtle nod. Without waiting for permission from the director, let alone the police, I walked out to intercept him.

  “Mr. Preble’s going to be all right,” he told me while the director’s security guards tried to make themselves invisible in the little lounge. “I expect to release him shortly.”

  “What about Helena?” Marc demanded as he joined us. In the office, the detectives had put their heads together. And judging by the expression on the security director’s face, he just wanted to crawl under a rock.

  “She’s resting comfortably,” Dr. Ekhardt assured us. “I suspect you’ll see a police officer on her ward from now on.”

  “I’d better.” Marc threw a dirty look at the director in his office.

  I handed the doc another one of my embossed business cards. “You’ve got my number. If you see anything out of the ordinary…”

  “Don’t worry. I want Mrs. Preble to get well, too.”

  Marc’s face eased as he mumbled his sincere thanks.

  I seized him by the hand, and wishing the doctor a good night, towed Marc out of there.

  I made sure we bypassed the elevator and took the stairs instead. Rather than walking through the main lobby, I selected a side corridor to effect our escape. Its exit put us close to where we’d left our rented Jeep.

  Along the way, Marc said, “Those detectives aren’t done with us, babe.”

  “You can go back and tell them about your hunt for Elena, if you’d like. They’ve had time to touch base with the sheriff’s department that responded to the calls at the Prebles’, and you know they’re going to start asking in-depth questions about your present interest in Elena’s whereabouts.”

  Marc grimaced. “At least Cody isn’t caught in the middle of this craziness.”

  I agreed wholeheartedly.

  And then we reached the parking lot.

  “I’ll drive,” Marc decided.

  He stuck to side streets and back roads I didn’t know existed as we sped toward Hearth’n’Home. There, Marc stashed the Jeep behind the building. We needed to get in, get our gear, and get out. We couldn’t run the risk that curious cops would come to call and prevent us from catching our morning flight to North Dakota, where, we hoped, Elena herself would cough up some answers about her disappearance, the violence plaguing her family, and maybe even Lucy Ribisi’s death. We’d skip the check-out process, too, just to make anyone who came looking think we’d be coming back—but all that changed when I walked into my room, two floors below Marc’s.

  The room was as black as pitch when I nudged open the door. That shouldn’t have been a surprise considering I’d left the joint in broad daylight. However, when I flicked on the wall switch just inside the room, the desk lamp across the way didn’t respond.
In a split second, the fine hairs on the back of my neck went electric with warning. But before I could bolt, a woman spoke to me from the darkness.

  “Come in, Ms. Sinclair. Close the door behind you.”

  I didn’t recognize the voice. This wasn’t Marley Jones or even one of her coworkers from Shear Madness. And it certainly wasn’t Mrs. Vesterny, let alone Mrs. Sandoval.

  Elena?

  “Why don’t you step into the hall,” I suggested evenly, sticking to the doorway, “and say hello?”

  “Come in,” my mystery guest replied, “and I’ll turn on a lamp.”

  That was a bargain I wasn’t willing to make. Not when every instinct at the base of my brain screamed at me to run. I spun on the ball of my foot, already mapping the route to the fire stairs in my mind, and collided with a man. Gray suit. Sunglasses hooked in his breast pocket despite the evening hour.

  He grabbed me by the shoulders.

  I kneed him in the groin.

  The man doubled over; his hands slid off me. Clasping mine together, I raised them high, brought my knotted fists down with a quick strike to the vulnerable spot in his neck. He collapsed on the hallway carpet.

  His partner materialized on the threshold behind me. I set my feet, shot an elbow toward her face, aimed at the soft tissue of her nose. But she knew how to counter the strike.

  At the end of the stroke, she seized my wrist, used my joints against me to swing my arm down, back, and up, tipping me off balance and sapping my power. Gripping the nape of my neck, she shoved me face first against the door opposite mine. Pain exploded in my already bruised cheekbone and behind my black eye. She jerked my arm high to immobilize me. Fresh pain, hot and sharp, spiked through my rotator cuff—just as she slapped handcuffs on me.

  “Now,” she said, “was all this really necessary, Ms. Sinclair?”

  “Take the cuffs off,” I told her, “and I’ll show you.”

  “Why don’t we show your friend instead?”

  Between the woman and her limping partner, the two frog-marched me into the elevator and out again, onto Marc’s floor. She even knocked on his door for me. After all, the cuffs holding my hands behind my back made that courtesy more than a little impossible for me to carry out.