Critical Condition

by CJ Lyons

  Jerry took another step into the lobby, coming perilously close to the puddle.

  “Stop, Jerry. Go. Now!”

  Harris laughed. “There’s nowhere for him to go. Nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide.”

  Jerry, confused, stared at Gina. She couldn’t try to warn him, not while Harris was watching. To her relief, he lowered his gun and took a step backward. Hopefully far enough—not like Gina had ever tried this particular experiment before.

  “Drop the gun, Gina,” Harris said.

  She held the gun out in front of her, moving in slow motion as she squatted and placed it on the floor, skidding it away from them both. As Harris’s gaze flicked to follow the movement of the gun, she pressed the buttons on both LifePaks hidden at her feet, releasing all the current at once.

  Sparks flew from the defibrillator pads. Harris screamed and jerked, his body jackknifing into a bizarre salute. Smoke billowed from his feet and hands. His gun careened across the floor into the dark. Then he fell forward, landing with a thud in the saline.

  The stench of ozone, burned flesh, and blood filled the air, mingling with the crackling noises coming from the puddle.

  “Don’t move,” Gina called out to Jerry, trying to find him with the otoscope, which now flickered as weakly as a firefly. “Don’t go near the water—it will still be charged.”

  Jerry had backed up against the wall. “Is he dead?” “No way of checking until the current dissipates. What were you thinking, waving that gun around? You knew you had no bullets.”

  Jerry shook his head as if bullets were meaningless. “You okay?”

  Gina skirted around the puddle and collapsed in his arms.

  Lydia came sprinting around the corner from the ER, holding an industrial-sized flashlight, feathers flying from one arm, her body caked with snow, and smelling, Gina wrinkled her nose, like dead fish.

  “Gina, Jerry, are you okay?” Lydia shone her light around, taking in Harris’s body. “I take it that’s one of the bad guys? Any idea how many more there are?” She held her gun at the ready.

  “Amanda and Nora are in the auditorium with the other hostages.”

  “South African’s down,” Jerry put in.

  “I think that’s everyone,” Gina said. “Unless there are still men searching upstairs.”

  “The police will be here soon; they can take care of them.” Lydia nodded to Harris. “You sure he’s beyond helping?”

  “If you’re gonna help anyone, help Lucas,” Amanda said, hauling Lucas into the circle of light. She had her gun in her free hand, slipping it into the sash of her dress when she saw only friendlies waiting for her. Lucas had blood dripping from his arm and was leaning heavily against her. “He’s hurt.”

  “What happened?” Lydia asked as she rushed to help.

  “I think—I think I was shot,” Lucas said in a stunned voice. “I didn’t feel anything—not until I looked down and saw all the blood.” His voice trailed off and he slumped against Amanda who propped him up against the auditorium door, scattered light streaming through it.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have moved him. He doesn’t do well with blood. Keeps fainting.” Amanda told them, glaring at them as if daring them to scoff. She and Lydia helped Lucas down to the floor, and his eyes fluttered open once more. “He was a hero, saved a lot of people.”

  Lydia made quick work of stripping Lucas’s lab coat off and tearing his shirtsleeve to assess the damage. “Hate to say it, Lucas, but it’s only a flesh wound.”

  “Really?” He seemed embarrassed. “Hurts like hell.”

  “You’ll be fine,” Amanda said. “I’ll take good care of you.” She handed Lydia a radio. “I called upstairs. No one has heard or seen any bad guys since they came through looking for you, so I think the coast is clear.”

  Gina turned to look inside the auditorium. Nora was rousing people and herding them toward the doors, despite the fact that hanging from her wrists were two cut plastic handcuffs.

  “All right, everyone, let’s get to work,” Gina said to the hospital workers streaming through the doors. “We need to unblock the exits to the floors upstairs, check on all the patient wards, triage anyone who needs immediate attention.”

  Lydia smiled at her and Gina stopped. “What?”

  “Nothing. Just that was exactly what I was about to say. Good work, Gina.”

  Gina smiled back. It was the nicest thing Lydia had ever said to her.

  “You guys look like hell,” Lydia continued. “Why don’t you find a warm corner and some blankets?”

  Jerry held his arm out to Gina like an old-fashioned courtier inviting her to dance. She hooked her arm through his and turned to leave the auditorium and the chaos behind.

  “You’re not going anywhere!”

  Harris, one hand blackened and burned, his hair standing straight up, smoke still steaming from his clothing, had climbed to his feet, holding his radio in his hand.

  Jerry raised his Beretta—and then his eyes went wide as he realized that it was empty. He lunged in front of Gina, placing his body between her and Harris.

  From the corner of her eye, Gina saw Lydia reach with her left hand, reaching for her gun. “No, don’t,” she yelled. “That radio is a detonator.”

  “That’s right,” Harris said, wobbling a bit. One eye was milky white, and he seemed to have a hard time focusing. But he didn’t need to see in order to incinerate them all. “I go, you go, we all go. Happy New Year’s!”

  They stared in numb disbelief as Harris pressed a button on the radio.

  Nothing happened. No explosion, no fireworks, no smoke alarms, no whoosh of a fireball.

  Harris frowned, glanced down at the radio. Jerry used that flicker of distraction to make his move. He rushed Harris, his unbalanced gait sending him tumbling into the other man. Amanda and Lydia quickly joined in, prying Harris’s hand from the radio. Gina scooped it up and backed away from the melee.

  “It should’ve worked, it should’ve worked,” Harris kept muttering.

  “Check him for any other weapons,” Lydia told Amanda.

  The lights came on.

  Everyone hushed for a moment, holding their breath, waiting to see if a wall of fire accompanied the return of power.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Trey’s voice boomed over the intercom, “I give you the miracle of electricity. And since the time is now one minute past midnight, Happy New Year’s.”

  But that wasn’t the most surprising miracle of the evening. When Gina turned around, she spotted a large black man dressed in a snowmobile suit and flanked by two other men storming down the corridor toward them.

  “Regina Freeman!” he bellowed. “Why did I learn of your mother’s accident from a damned onboard computer instead of my own flesh and blood? And would someone tell me where the hell my wife is?”

  TWENTY-SIX

  Monday, January 3

  LAROSE WAS MAKING GOOD PROGRESS—SHE’D EXPECT no less of herself, of course. In fact, as Gina watched her mother maneuver through the parallel bars, listening intently to the physical therapist’s instructions, she had to admit that if LaRose set unreasonably high standards for everyone else in the world, she sure as hell didn’t cut herself any slack.

  “Good work.” Gina praised her mother once the therapist released LaRose and returned her to her wheelchair.

  “Really?”

  Gina was taken aback to see that her mother appeared surprised by her praise. Maybe it was a two-way street.

  “They told me you were up here,” Moses boomed as he pushed through the doors, regal in his John Phillips of London suit. The room seemed to shrink with him in it, as if he used up all the oxygen and needed all the space. “Are you done already?” he asked LaRose, favoring her with a kiss on the cheek. “Sure you don’t need more? We want you out of this place”—he dismissed the Angels staff and facility with a one-shouldered shrug—“as soon as possible.”

  “She’s doing fine, Moses. Believe me, she’s pushing herself as
hard as she should. We don’t want her blood pressure to go sky-high.”

  Moses barely glanced at Gina, ignoring her as if his only child didn’t exist, taking her place behind LaRose’s chair and pushing it toward the door.

  Gina watched him go, no longer angry—the years had wrung that out of her—but suddenly sad, thinking about the potential father-daughter relationship that both she and Moses had lost out on. As they moved toward the door, she expected LaRose to smile, basking in the glow of his attention.

  LaRose surprised her, yanking on the wheelchair brake and stopping before they could reach the door.

  Gina jogged over. “Are you okay?”

  “Tell her, Moses.”

  Moses remained silent, his gaze hovering somewhere between Venus and Mars on the horizon, far away from Angels and the concerns of mere mortals.

  “We’re going to establish a scholarship in the name of your two friends, Ken Rosen and Jim Lazarov,” LaRose said, barely slurring her words at all. “We—I—want to thank them for saving my life.”

  Gina was stunned. No press conference to make the announcement? No media event complete with Moses’s favored politicians and celebrities?

  “That’s great,” she finally said. “Thank you, LaRose.” LaRose nodded toward Moses and Gina relented. “Thanks to both of you. Ken would have liked that.”

  She had to blink back tears at the mention of Ken’s name—too many emotions still swirling around that open wound. LaRose patted her hand, her own eyes glistening.

  “They aren’t the only ones I should thank,” she said. “You belong here, Gina.”

  “She does not,” Moses thundered, startling the physical therapist and her next patient, the room’s other occupants. He lowered his voice, still not talking to Gina but rather directing his comments to LaRose. “No child of mine is going to work in this, this cesspool—”

  LaRose snapped her head up, stealing her husband’s thunder with her glare. And then she said something Gina never dreamed she’d ever hear. “Shut up, Moses.”

  NORA GLANCED UP AS THE SURGICAL RESIDENT dropped the first patient’s chart on the clinic nurses’ desk. “Can I help you, Dr. Cochran?”

  “Nora.” Seth did a double take, his eyes growing wide as he took in her outfit, making Nora especially glad that she’d dug out her old nursing uniform, complete with tight-fitting skirt and white pantyhose. “What are you doing here?”

  She grinned, loving his surprise. He’d been dreading today, returning to work only to drudge away in the surgical follow-up clinic. Especially since, with the city still digging out from the New Year’s storm, the clinic was certain to be slower than normal.

  She lowered her chin and batted her eyelashes demurely. “Don’t you think I can handle suture removals and dressing changes?”

  “But you hate the clinic.”

  Nora slipped out from behind the desk, glanced around to make sure no one could see them, and then grabbed him by the lapels of his lab coat and pulled him to her. “Depends on which doctor is working. You know those surgical residents can be so bossy and so—”

  He kissed her, his hands squeezing her hips as their bodies rocked together. “So . . . what? Intelligent, handsome—?”

  “Hmmm . . . not sure about that.”

  He tickled her belly. She twisted away only to have him snag her by her waistband and pull her back. He kissed her again, making sure to take the time to do a thorough job. Her cheeks heated—she never had done anything like this, not at work. Tillman would have had her fired if he knew. Too bad the obnoxious CEO had been fired himself after the board heard of his gross mishandling of the New Year’s crisis.

  Besides, after the events of the past few weeks, she’d finally learned not to waste a single second worrying about the rules. People came before silly rules and regulations—and, of all the people in her life, Seth came first.

  “How about sexy?” he asked, his breath brushing against the small hairs on her neck as he tasted her. “Do you think surgical residents are sexy?”

  A soft sound caught in her throat. “Oh yeah. Definitely sexy.”

  “That’s good. Now, let’s go lance a boil.”

  She pushed him away, laughing. “Ooh, right. Because there’s nothing sexier than draining pus with the man you love.”

  “Hey, say that again, I like the sound of that.”

  “Draining pus?”

  “No. The other part.”

  She pursed her lips as if she couldn’t remember the words, turning to grab an instrument tray and packing gauze. “Oh, you mean the part about the man I love?”

  He took her hand as they walked down the empty corridor. “Yeah, that part. That’s my favorite part.”

  “Mine too.”

  IT TURNED OUT THAT “MR. BLACK” WAS ACTUALLY Felix Moreno, a high-powered mover and shaker in California politics who had maneuvered a number of men into office. Along with them had come power and influence—all of which stood to be lost if a certain thirty-year-old video ever came to light.

  Finding the video hadn’t been hard, once Lydia remembered to think like her mother. Maria with her fairy tales, spinning gold from the stars as they slept on the beach, making each charm on Lydia’s bracelet—the only thing Maria had ever given her daughter—come to life in her bedtime stories.

  In the end, the charms were the key, literally. The bracelet had a pair of ballet toe shoes, a cathedral, a heart, the Golden Gate Bridge, and a brass key.

  The Golden Gate Bridge, for San Francisco. Toe shoes, for the ballet, though Lydia doubted that Maria had ever really danced. But across the street from the building where the San Francisco Ballet performed, the Metropolitan Opera, was City Hall. Which looked exactly like the charm Lydia had always thought was a church cathedral. Except that on the bottom of the charm was carved the number 308, which wasn’t the address for either City Hall or the Ballet.

  “But you said she talked about taking lessons,” Trey said. “Maybe she meant the ballet school. It’s here on the map.”

  Lydia looked where he pointed. The January wind here in San Francisco had the same knife-edged chill as it did in Pittsburgh, but to Lydia the Pacific air felt cleaner, more refreshing. As if it were trying to scour her clean rather than chill her to the bone and steal her warmth.

  From where they were at City Hall, the school was only a block away, so they walked to the school. Now you could see only the dome of City Hall.

  “The address here is four fifty-five,” Lydia said. They walked down Franklin Street to the end of the block. The school stood on the corner behind them, and if they looked to their right there was an open plaza that revealed a frontal view of City Hall.

  And directly across from them, at 308 Fulton Street, was Hart Bank and Trust. Could the heart charm stand for the Hart Bank? A long shot, but totally in keeping with the way Maria’s mind had worked. And besides, there was still the small brass key unaccounted for.

  At least, it seemed like a long shot, until Lydia went inside the bank and spoke to the manager. It appeared that Hart Bank and Trust specialized in what the manager termed legacy preservation. As he verified Lydia’s credentials—which turned out to require the charm bracelet that matched faded Polaroid photos he had in a file that bore no names—he explained that people from all over the world stored their valuables with Hart’s because they could prepay for up to one hundred years and access to the safe-deposit boxes could be controlled by a variety of unconventional means, such as the use of a child’s charm bracelet.

  “We’re the only company I know of that continues to allow its patrons such flexibility,” he said with pride. “As long as your key fits the box, of course.”

  Which it did.

  So, less than an hour later, Lydia was delivering the thirty-year-old video to an FBI agent that Janet Kwon had contacted. The FBI had already expressed a great deal of interest in Felix and his accomplices, and the Pittsburgh police were cooperating with them fully.

  “I feel like she’
s finally been allowed to rest,” she told Trey as they drove from San Francisco to Plumas, the Indian reservation just outside Reno where Maria—Martha—had grown up. No one there would remember her—she had no relatives left—but Lydia felt an urge to walk the same streets as Maria, to see the place that had made her who and what she was.

  They arrived late and checked into a motel on the outskirts of Reno—quieter than the ones near the casinos. Most of the long drive had been spent in silence, but it had felt like a good silence. One full of promise and understanding rather than the angry silences that had punctuated the past few weeks.

  Lydia thought she might finally be ready to share her final secret with Trey. She’d been selfish to wait, she knew, but she needed time to think everything through to be certain that she knew exactly what she wanted—which had been silly, because everything she wanted was right in front of her.

  She changed for bed and stood in the open bathroom door as Trey washed his face and brushed his teeth.

  “I have two questions for you.”

  He kept brushing, spit, then said, “Sure.”

  Tugging in her breath as if it were a lifeline, Lydia plunged right to the heart of the matter. “Knowing who I really am, where I came from, do you want to marry me?”

  He gagged and spun around to her, toothbrush hanging in the air, toothpaste drool slipping down his chin. “Don’t kid about that.”

  “I’m not kidding.”

  Trey’s whoop filled the air as he grabbed her and spun her around, not even jarring her cast. “Yes! Of course, God yes!”

  Finally he set her back on her feet, then frowned, scrutinizing her. “We can do it now, tonight, today, right here!”

  She laughed. “Guess that depends on the answer to the second question. Do you want a boy or girl?”

  He stumbled, off balance, knocking his elbow into the counter top, toppling his shaving kit into the sink and not noticing. “For real? You’re pregnant?”