by Toby Neal
“I think Sheldon was in Hong Kong and heard that the saboteur was detected after our meeting with the top brass at Security Solutions. He disappeared, taking his software and assets, leaving Lee set up to appear guilty.” Sophie paused again and Waxman made a ‘go on’ gesture. She continued. “I think Hamilton’s the one because, while I don’t think Lee’s smart enough to be the saboteur, I also don’t think he’s stupid enough to load his computer full of cash and run money through a personal, traceable account in the Caymans.”
“Why don’t you think Remarkian is the saboteur?”
“Remarkian could be the saboteur, it’s true. But it’s Sheldon Hamilton who may have imitated a dog walker and broke into my apartment, by his physical description, and I verified Remarkian’s location as Hong Kong during our calls.”
“So do you know what Remarkian looks like?”
“Roughly the same height and weight as Sheldon, but blond and blue-eyed. Has an Australian accent.”
“Well. More will be revealed, and for you, that will be in two days. Give me your creds and weapon.”
Sophie pulled her gun, badge and wallet and smacked them down on the table. She stood, feeling anger waft over her in an energizing wave.
“You’re making a mistake. Ben.” She spat his name like it tasted bad, spun on her heel, and left.
Sophie went where she’d always gone when life was hard. When cases were complex. When hated emotions took over her brain. Where she went when the depression was bad, when it was gone entirely, where she’d gone in every range of need she’d had since she escaped Assan Ang and made Honolulu and the Bureau her home five years ago.
Fight Club.
After working the heavy bag long enough, the talons of depression’s hold finally began to uncurl.
Sophie looked around to find the gym going on as usual even with Alika in his hospital bed. Pairs of fighters were sparring in the warm up ring. The gleaming bodies of athletes worked exercise bikes, treadmills and ellipticals against one wall. The weight area clanked with the grind of metal on metal and the grunts of heaving lifters. The smell of leather, rubber, metal, and sweat was a familiar perfume that lifted her spirits.
Done warming up, Sophie climbed into the empty main ring, gloves on, and raised her arms in the air.
“Anybody up for a workout besides me? Bring it on!”
A ragged cheer rose from her gym mates. Minutes later Sophie was completely immersed in a fight with a Japanese jiu-jitsu champion with the attitude that women weren’t real competition. It took six hard rounds to disabuse him of that opinion, though she lost in the end.
Showering in the locker room, watching blood from her mouth and nose drain into the shower between her feet, Sophie decided the gym was what she’d been missing lately. And that it was way past time she visited Alika in the hospital.
Her eye swollen shut and her lip split, Sophie hid the rest of the damage under a concealing hoodie for her visit to Queen’s Hospital. She didn’t call first, but she stopped at the gift shop to pick up a bouquet of daisies. She held them up in front of her battered face to deflect questions on her appearance, and was surprised to be redirected when she reached the ICU.
“He’s stable now, so he’s been moved to a convalescent floor,” the nurse on duty said, peering suspiciously at Sophie’s face between the daisies. “Do you need some first aid yourself, Miss?”
“No thanks. I’m a fighter. MMA. Hazards of the sport.” Sophie’s smile hurt and didn’t seem to reassure the nurse.
“Well, okay. He’s on the fourth floor. Room 427.”
Sophie took the elevator back down, realizing she was a little lightheaded. She never had eaten anything that day, but at least the depression was back in its box.
There was still an officer outside Alika’s door, which she was relieved to see. Though she’d given Waxman her creds wallet, she still had a departmental ID badge, which she showed.
“Anyone with him?” Sophie asked, avoiding the officer’s curious eyes on her face.
“Not right now. The parents said they had to take care of some errands and business.”
His parents probably still had to work, might even have to leave the island soon. She felt a pang of worry and pushed the door handle down, bracing herself.
Alika seemed better. He was still prone and unmoving on the bed, but the swathes of gauze covering his head were down to one big bandage. The only tubes running into him were an IV and a catheter, tactfully concealed by bedclothes. His broken leg was lowered now, and his bruises had gone down, leaving his face recognizable, if still discolored.
Sophie sat in the chair beside him. “Hi Alika. It’s Sophie.”
She wriggled a bit, gazing at him, wondering if they were still supposed to talk to him, wondering if he was even in a coma anymore since it had been a while since her last update. Curious, she got up and tried to read the chart hanging on the wall, but there were no clues in the little boxes filled with squiggles and code.
“I don’t know anything about how you’re doing, but I want to tell you I’m looking pretty bad right now, too. Took a bit of a pounding this afternoon from that Japanese fighter. You remember him, right? They call him The Breaker. Well, he didn’t break me, but I lost, that’s for sure.” She fingered her swollen, split lip. “I was in the mood to take on a whole football team today. Work has been really challenging, and I needed to fight or go down. Whichever. Didn’t matter. I know you understand.”
Sophie gazed at him, still hoping for some response. There was none. She let herself really take in the sight of him.
His eyes, shut, sunken in pouches of bruised flesh left from his beating. Chest rising and falling evenly. Skin sallow and multicolored with bruising. Heart monitor blipping in the corner. He’d shrunk in mass, the muscular body seeming to melt away. It was going to be a long road for him back to health and fitness when he finally woke up.
She reached over and traced the triangle tattoo on his slack shoulder muscle.
“I can’t tell you about my case and work even if you’re in a coma, but let’s just say it’s been even more stressful than usual, and now I’m off on admin leave for the next two days. So I was in the mood to really go at it, and kudos to The Breaker. He made me work hard, and I know I gave him more of a run than he was expecting from a woman, if his insults were anything to go by.” She picked up Alika’s limp hand, brought it to her cheek. “Feel this. Got a nice contusion here on the cheekbone, and on my eye. Looks worse than yours right now.”
His hand felt clammy and limp. It made her sad to press it against her own wounded face. She set it down among the bedclothes, still holding it.
“Anyway, I haven’t been here to visit because I’m worried about my ex, Assan. He used to make threats when I was with him, tell me what he’d do to anyone I ever tried to be with. It was five years ago, and I’d put it all behind me because after we divorced I never heard anything from him. But I never gave him cause to act on any of his jealous threats until…until you.” She hung her head, still holding his hand. “I can’t take the chance that he had something to do with your attack. We’re going after his business and I feel confident we’re going to shut it down in the States, but I don’t know how to get him locked up. From so far away, I don’t know how to get him put away where he can’t hurt anyone. And until I do, I don’t want to take a chance of adding to whatever’s going on with you. I hope you understand.”
She gazed over at Alika. No change in his face. His chest rose and fell like a metronome. He seemed peaceful, at least.
She felt the prickle of tears and used a bit of sheet to dab them away, careful of her blackened eye. “Well, this is harder than I imagined. I brought you flowers. You’d probably hate them, but here they are.” She set the wrapped bouquet on the blanket in front of him. “I should get going. I have to put some ice on these bruises before they get really bad. And get on with finding Assan again, my admin leave project. Then, maybe someday we can be together.” She pi
cked up his hand, kissed the battered knuckles, and set it down.
She went to the door, pushed down the handle, and glanced out into the hall.
No one was there.
Even the officer guarding the room was gone.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Even the police officer’s plastic chair was gone. Sophie tensed as she looked up and down the empty hall.
This could be nothing, or it could be the beginning of something very bad.
She withdrew back into the room and checked for some way to lock the door, but there was none. She grabbed one of the plastic chairs and propped it under the handle of the door. She pulled a pillowcase off one of the pillows wedged beside Alika’s head and, ripping off a bit of surgical tape from the roll inside the wall-mounted rack of supplies, hung it over the window into the hall so no one could see through the safety glass insert into the room. Then she hurried to the phone and called the nurses’ station.
The phone rang and rang and rang.
Maybe there was a major emergency that had called all the personnel away.
Maybe the officer had left his station for a bathroom break, knowing she was a Federal cop visiting the victim.
But she’d turned in her badge, creds and weapon, and even though she had her own gun, it was at home in a safe where it could do exactly no good.
“Always better to assume the worst in a combat situation,” she told Alika, glancing around for something to use as a weapon even as she dialed 911 on her cell phone. “You told me that.”
No Signal.
She’d experienced the notoriously bad reception in the hospital before, but the timing didn’t seem coincidental.
Sophie went back to Alika’s bed and hit the Call Nurse button on the cord beside his hand. A light went on at the back of his bed, and she suddenly wondered who saw those lights in the nurses’ station, and whether alerting a possible unsub that she was aware of a problem was worth the risk.
Too late now.
She grabbed the wall phone and instead of dialing 0 for the desk, tried an external line and called 911 again.
The phone was dead too, the absence of a dial tone as deafening as a siren in her ear.
Sophie lifted the makeshift curtain she’d made off the window and peeked out. Unfortunately, now she had only a limited range of view, but she still saw no one. She wondered if she had time to try to move Alika somewhere else, decided it was too risky to try to wheel him into the hall.
But she could try to shelter him from the line of fire through the door. And she needed a weapon.
Moving fast, she unhooked all the various bags of liquid from the tall steel IV pole beside Alika’s bed and set them on the bed beside him. It was wheeled, so she unplugged all the electrical units on the bed from the wall. This set off an alarm from the cardiac monitor, a high-pitched beeping that she hoped was going somewhere else in the hospital to bring help. She pulled the brake lever, and, grunting with the effort of moving the heavy, unwieldy bed, hauled it over out of range of the window and door. Anyone trying to get a bead on the bed would have to come inside the room and turn to do so. She wasn’t going to let that happen.
Sophie picked up the steel pole, hefted it.
It was solid, with clunky wheels on one end a T-shaped crossbar at the top. She unscrewed the wheel unit from the bottom and took up a position beside the door to wait, the pole raised.
She didn’t have to wait long.
The door handle jiggled against the plastic back of the chair propped under it. Jiggled again. Jiggled a third time.
What if it was hospital staff? She had done all she could to alert the medical team to a problem in the room.
The glass of the door’s window shattering was her answer as something blew it out. The pillowcase she’d put up deflected the heavy glass to tinkle onto the floor beside her. The rest of the glass was knocked out of the window. She glimpsed the red metal of a fire axe.
No one called out. Medical personnel wouldn’t enter a room that way. The unsub was trying to get a look inside, see what was happening in the room and where the target was.
A hand appeared in the window’s opening, holding the silver gleam of a Sig Sauer with its barrel lengthened by a silencer. The gun’s muzzle lifted the pillowcase, questing for the bed. She was very glad she’d wheeled Alika off to the side against the wall with the bed’s back to the door.
Sophie brought the steel pole down like a guillotine on the wrist protruding into the room. There was a gratifying crack of snapping bone, a scream, and the Sig dropped at her feet. Sophie scooped up the weapon, and, staying beside the door, stuck her hand out the small window and fired blind into the hall.
The silencer made a sound like spitting watermelon seeds. Sophie hoped like hell she didn’t hit some innocent nurse coming to help.
Gunfire erupted from the other side of the door.
Sophie dove to the ground beside Alika’s bed. Shards of wood and metal blew out as the unsub unloaded another weapon on the door. There was no silencer on this one, and she covered her ears, head ringing from the blasts in the enclosed space. She tried to count the shots but they were coming too fast. A semi-automatic? Even so, she could feel the vibration of running feet through the floor as the unsub ran away when he’d emptied his clip.
Sophie scrambled up and looked at the door. Light shone through forty or fifty holes and the wall opposite the door was peppered with embedded ammo.
“It was a good thing I moved your bed,” she said to Alika.
The Sig in ready position, she depressed the handle and pushed open the battered door, peering into the hall.
Several people in white coats were running toward her, led by the officer who had been on duty.
She held the gun up in the air above her head along with her other hand, so they didn’t think she was the attacker. “Got this weapon off the shooter and moved the patient. He’s okay. But I think we’re going to need another room.”
Sophie didn’t leave Alika’s side all through his transfer, vigilant beside the staffers as they wheeled him, bed and all, to another room.
She called Waxman on her cell when he’d been moved and re-hooked up to all his support systems. She was finally sitting down, waiting to give her statement to Marcus and Marcella, who were on their way. The HPD crime lab team was currently picking bullets out of the wall two floors below her.
“I was visiting my friend Alika Wolcott in the hospital when someone tried to kill him,” Sophie said to Waxman. She turned the Sig over and over in her hands. It was evidence. And it was a nice weapon, the weapon of a professional, right down to the silencer screwed into the barrel. “Probably not related to any of my cases.”
“What?” Waxman said. “Say that again.”
“Just wanted to let my superior know an occurrence happened to me in the field while on administrative leave. I’m sure there’s a form I need to fill out or something.” She knew she sounded sarcastic.
“Are you okay?” Waxman’s voice sounded blank with shock. “Were you injured?”
“I’m fine.” She glanced down, noticed a long sliver of wood from the door protruding from her forearm. “Well, mostly fine. Few bumps and bruises, but I had those going in.” She set the Sig down and tugged out the sliver. Blood welled in its wake.
The door opened and she grabbed the Sig and spun toward the threat. It was Marcus Kamuela, scowling. Sophie didn’t ever want to be someone he was coming after.
“The officer investigating this has just arrived. I have to go, but I wanted to take a moment to apprise my superior.” Sophie hung up the phone and set the weapon down. “Better late than never,” she said to Marcus. “I hope you talked to that officer that was supposed to be guarding the door.”
“Sure did. He said he was called away on his walkie-talkie by someone claiming to be a fellow officer spotting someone suspicious in the stairway. When he got there, the unsub clocked him. Good thing you were inside and took steps to protect Wolcott. Let me
get your statement.” He took out a voice recorder.
Sophie stood up and a whirlpool of black dots danced in front of her eyes. “I’m not feeling so well.”
She came to a minute or two later, lying on the floor next to Alika’s bed, feet elevated on a spare pillow. Marcella knelt beside her, covering her in a thin blanket, and she had an IV in her hand. A nurse was hanging a bag of clear liquid on the same IV pole as Alika’s.
“Just some glucose and water,” the nurse said. “You were in shock and severely dehydrated. Take it easy. You’ll be fine in a little while.”
Marcella knelt by Sophie, tucking the blanket around her. “Looks like you had an encounter today before the gunfight,” she said, touching Sophie’s cheek lightly.
“You’ll do anything to avoid giving a statement,” Kamuela said, with weak humor. He seemed rattled by her fainting. “You look like hell, Sophie. Who gave you the beat down?”
“So embarrassing.” Sophie shut her eyes. “I didn’t eat all day and had a bout at Fight Club, then the attack…guess it got the best of me.” She sat up slowly. She was already feeling better, the IV working to rehydrate and energize her. “Sometimes I get so caught up in my head I forget to take care of the body.”
“Lie back down and tell us the series of events.” Kamuela pressed Record on his device.
