At her beseeching look, the cabby shrugged, grabbed the wounded man by his already-torn shirt and hauled him upright. Rathe muttered a string of vicious curses in a variety of languages but stayed on his feet.
Nia tugged his arm across her shoulders and ignored the cloying smell of blood and pain. She was used to it. This was no different from any other patient, she told herself, though the fist around her heart and the sick roil in her stomach said otherwise.
This was different. This was Rathe.
“Lady.” The cabby shifted and looked uncomfortable. “I need my fare. I know he’s hurt. I wouldn’t ask otherwise, but it was a long ride.”
She dug one-handed in her purse. “How long?”
“He called from the westbound Framingham rest stop.”
“He was on the Mass Pike?” Headed west, miles from the city. The fist around her heart squeezed tighter. She glanced at his face, saw a glint of I’ll tell you later in his slitted gray eyes. “And you picked him up?”
Another cab might have driven by. City taxis knew better than to get in the middle of a bloody mess. But, she realized with another look at the shiny white cab, a suburban driver might not.
He shrugged. “He needed help. And he looked okay, you know? He looked…trustworthy.”
Nia looked at the torn, bruised face of her one-time lover and thought she’d never seen anything less trustworthy. But, damn it, she knew exactly what the cabbie meant.
She handed him two hundred dollars, the sum total of her walking-around money. “Thank you.”
And those two words, so often used as a meaningless social pleasantry, came straight from her soul.
“That’s too much!” He tried to give half back, but she held up a hand.
“You’ll need it to clean your car.” She didn’t look back at the bloodstained seat, but knew the image would stay with her too long.
With the driver’s quiet thanks in her ears, Nia hauled Rathe up the brick walkway, across the lobby and into an elevator. She ignored the doorman’s gasp and waved off the security guard’s questions with a curt, “I’ll deal with it.”
If only it were that simple.
Rathe didn’t speak until she got him into the apartment. He sank down onto the couch with a groan, then looked up at her. “Lock the doors. Call Detective Peters.”
She knelt down between his sprawled legs. “In a minute. I want to look at that cut on your wrist. You’ll need stitches, and maybe—”
“Nia.” He tipped her chin up with a dirty, scraped finger. “I’ll be fine. Call the cops. This is part of the job.”
But his eyes didn’t call her a weak woman or tell her to get off the case. They were weary and pained. And grateful, so grateful that he was alive. Safe.
Or maybe those were her emotions.
“Don’t cry.” He touched her cheek and lifted the tear away. “Don’t.”
“I was so worried.” Her voice shook on the words, but she forced herself to hold his gaze. “I knew something was wrong. I kept remembering how we’d been fighting stupid fights, and thinking what if—” Her voice broke. “What if you were injured.” Dead. Never coming back ever again.
“Nia,” he said again, then sighed in defeat. “Come here.” He drew her into his arms, cradled her face against his chest and curled her legs over his so they were wrapped together.
“No.” She tried to push away, but he winced wherever she touched. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Then quit squirming,” he ordered with something of his normal grouchiness. When she stilled, he rested his cheek in her hair. “Let’s just sit for a moment. Then we can call the cops.”
His heartbeat was steady beneath her cheek, and the smell of motor oil and blood surrounded her, all but obscuring his natural scent. But there was no mistaking the feel of his arms around her, the thunder of her heart at his touch.
She might have outgrown her crush on her father’s best friend, but she’d fallen back in lust with the man he’d become. There was no denying the truths uncovered in those last few minutes, when it had become clear he wasn’t answering his phone. She wanted him. She worried about him.
Worst of all, she liked him.
His heartbeat slowed; his muscles gradually relaxed. She wasn’t sure if he was even still conscious when she said, “I’m sorry about what I said before I left tonight. I know you weren’t playing me.”
He chuckled, then hissed in pain. Took a breath. “I’m sorry I made you feel that way. I don’t know what the hell to do with you, Nia. I don’t know what to do with this.” He squeezed her tighter. “I just know that when I was bouncing around in that trunk, trying to cut through the zip ties with a bent piece of metal, all I could think about was getting back here and making sure you were safe.”
Trunk. Zip ties. The images were horrific, nearly freezing the air in her lungs. But there would be time for explanations later. She burrowed closer, trying to avoid the burned place at the side of his throat. Road rash, she’d thought. Now she knew. He’d taken a header out of a moving vehicle on the Mass Pike. Luckily.
If he hadn’t, there was no telling where he’d be right now.
“I was frantic.” She pressed her lips to an unmarked inch of skin on his neck, not kissing to excite, but rather to heal. “I’d just activated the DOC-JAK locator when the cab pulled up.”
He stiffened. “DOC-JAK? Those phones have positioning technology?”
“Yes.” She pulled back to look at his face. Beneath the bruises and the swelling, the scrapes and the blood, his expression was suddenly intense. “Why?”
His eyes flashed with triumph. “Call the detectives. The bastards kept my cell.”
RATHE GAVE HIS REPORT bare-chested, sitting on the closed lid of the toilet in Nia’s apartment. Detectives Sturgeon and Peters crowded the bathroom door taking notes. Nia sat on the side of the tub with his wrist in her lap, carefully sewing him up with supplies she’d taken from her field kit.
No stranger to stitches, Rathe could ignore the tug of the sutures pulling his numbed flesh closed. He could ignore the faint popping noise the needle made when it pierced his skin, and the harsh smell of antiseptic.
But he couldn’t ignore the heat of the woman beside him, or the sight of his half-numb hand lying just below her breast. When she leaned over to knot a stitch, her shirt just barely grazed his fingertips.
“Dr. McKay? Are you sure it was the same man?”
There was a faint chuckle in Peters’s question, and Rathe wondered how long he’d been staring at Nia’s chest. He fixed his attention on the toilet paper dispenser because it hurt too much to turn his head and look up at the detectives. “Positive. Same acne, same smell, same face and voice. It was the guy who jumped Nia the other day.” Bastard.
“I thought he was in custody.” Nia’s breath washed across the sensitive skin of Rathe’s inner forearm. Earlier, when he’d held her on the sofa, he’d thought his body too battered for sexual excitement. Apparently, he’d been wrong. Maybe it was the ibuprofen caplets he’d swallowed with a can of cola.
Or maybe it was simply the woman. And what the hell was he going to do about that?
“Out on bail.” Peters’s answer was terse. “He’s got deep pockets.”
“Or his boss does.” Rathe gritted his teeth as Nia bent over him again and her breast touched his tingling fingertips.
“True.” Sturgeon glanced down at his notes. “Do you remember anything about the car? Make? Model? Color? Anything?”
So far, DOC-JAK was still searching for the signal. Nia wasn’t sure what it meant, and Wainwright had put his techs on the case.
“No. I can’t tell you anything about the car except that it was blue.” And it’d been going twenty or thirty when he’d bailed out onto the rest-stop exit ramp and prayed Cadaver Man and Pockmark wouldn’t notice. He’d scrambled off the road and into a ditch, where he’d hidden and waited for squealing brakes, shouting men. All the while his mind had clamored for him to find Nia. Pr
otect her.
Peters made a note. “Did the men ever call their boss by name?”
“No. Never. They called him ‘the boss.’”
They’d been over the evening twice, but Rathe would gladly talk all night if it kept him focused on the job, if it got them a step closer to finding the bastards who’d grabbed him. If it kept him from having to talk to Nia. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to say to her anymore, wasn’t sure it would come out right if he tried.
Somehow over the past few days she’d gone from being a nuisance to a necessity, from a past mistake to the woman he’d told himself he had to leave behind.
Which left them where?
With him confused as hell and both of them in danger. It was neither the place nor the time for an affair—or even an attraction. He couldn’t afford the distraction.
“Okay, all set.” She smoothed antiseptic over the spidery line of stitches and the nearby scrapes and gashes. She bound his wrist in an acre or so of gauze, but when she reached for his other hand, Rathe stopped her with a touch.
“Don’t bother. If you try to bandage everything that hurts, I’m going to look like a mummy in no time flat.”
Her eyes darkened. “I still think we should X-ray those ribs and get you a CAT scan for good luck.”
He took her hands. “I’m fine. I promise.”
He wasn’t fine. Every square inch of his body sang with pain. But it was bearable. The growing feeling in his gut was not. It spoke of danger nearby. Death.
Peters coughed into his hand. “We’ll go check on the GPS signal. Maybe our techs have managed to work some miracles.”
When they were alone, Rathe rose to his feet and pulled Nia up, as well. They stood chest to chest in the small bathroom, and he was acutely aware that the cops had taken his shirt, hoping fiber evidence could link him to the trunk of the car when they found it. If they found it.
At that moment all that mattered was that he was bare-chested and she was not.
She reached out and traced the boot-size bruise on his side. He caught her hand, pressed her palm over his heart, though he had no idea what he intended the gesture to mean. “Nia, I—”
“We’ve got the signal!” Excited voices rose in the living room, thumping feet signaled an exodus. “They’re out in western Mass and they’re not moving.”
Nia and Rathe separated just as Peters stuck his head into the bathroom. “We’ve found your phone. The GPS blip is weak, but it’s there.”
“We’re coming with you.” Rathe didn’t bother trying to leave Nia behind. If this was the end of her first investigation, she deserved to be in on it.
Peters didn’t bother to argue. He simply held out a windbreaker with Police stenciled on the back. “Sorry I don’t have a spare shirt for you.”
“This’ll do. Thanks.” The rayon jacket was cool against Rathe’s bruises and rasped across the road burn.
He gestured Nia out the bathroom door ahead of him. “Come on, let’s do this.”
She glanced at him, eyes full of questions. “Thanks, partner.”
He nodded. “You’re welcome, partner.”
But as he followed the others out of the apartment and made sure the door locked behind them, he couldn’t quell the low thump of unease in his stomach.
Perhaps it was a mild concussion or heartburn from taking the painkillers on an empty stomach, but he didn’t think so. Something wasn’t quite right.
There was safety in numbers, he assured himself, as Sturgeon ushered them to a drab sedan. And they were with the cops.
What could possibly go wrong?
Chapter Nine
The GPS signal brought them down the Mass Pike, to the edge of a wide lake forty minutes away from the city. Peters parked behind a string of local cruisers, and Nia saw a row of officers lined up at the water’s edge.
“This can’t be good.”
She started at Rathe’s voice. He had dozed most of the trip, or had seemed to. The detectives had kept up a low murmur of conversation as partners normally did, but she’d been too tired to join in. She’d passed the time looking out the window so she wouldn’t stare at Rathe’s bare chest.
Now, she glanced over. “Let’s see what they have before we jump to a diagnosis.” She ignored his sour look. “Do you need help getting out of the car?”
“I’m fine.”
Which is why he’d paled to sour milk and cursed under his breath when they’d first walked down to the car. Her healer’s instincts urged her to help him, but her self-preservation instincts said the opposite. Stay away from him, they said, he’ll only hurt you in the end.
She sighed as she watched him lurch out of the vehicle, stiff and sore. When had everything gotten so complicated? She’d begun this case with one goal in mind, to impress Wainwright and secure a position in the Investigations Division.
And now? She still wanted to solve the case, but it wasn’t that simple. She also wanted to stay alive and keep her partner alive. She wanted to hash things out with him so they could go their separate ways with clean consciences when this case was done.
Didn’t she?
“You coming?” And there he was, leaning back into the car and holding out a hand. The windbreaker gaped open around his lean torso, and the kaleidoscopic flashes of blue, white and red lights from the emergency vehicles cast his battered face into strange relief.
The boot-size mark along his side had darkened to an ugly purple. Without thinking—or perhaps thinking too much—she reached inside the jacket and touched the taut skin just beneath the bruise. “I still think you should have an X-ray.”
He stilled. There was a flash in the one slitted gray eye she could see through battered flesh. “Nia, don’t.” He grabbed her wrist.
She jerked back. Heat flooded her face and twisted in her stomach. Embarrassment tangled with irritation as she scrambled from the car. “Fine. It’s okay for you to kiss me when the mood strikes you, but I touch you and wham!” She snapped her fingers. “I’m being unprofessional. Fine. Don’t worry. It won’t happen again.”
She spun and stalked toward a gesturing knot of uniformed men, stopping only when Rathe’s voice called her name a second time. “What?”
He waited until she turned back. He spread his hands away from his sides. The flashing strobes darkened the bruises and blood tracks on his face and wrists, picked out the white of his bandages. “I’m sorry.”
After a moment her temper cooled. God, she hated it when she overreacted. “Yeah. Me, too.” She nodded toward the lake. “Come on, partner. Let’s see what these guys found.”
It was a dark sedan, half-submerged in the dark, oily looking water.
“Damn it.” Nia shoved her hands in her pockets because she wasn’t sure what else to do with them. “They left the phone in the car and took off.”
“Which leaves us no closer to finding Cadaver Man and Pockmark.” Rathe stood stiffly, and his words were slightly slurred from the beating his face had taken.
Nia wished she’d thought to substitute something stronger for the ibuprofen. Something that would’ve knocked him out and given his body a chance to recover. Otherwise, he’d keep going until he collapsed.
Which didn’t seem that far off.
“Tow truck’s here!” a voice called from the road, and the crowd of uniformed bodies shifted and shuffled to make way for the vehicle.
She found herself jostled between Rathe and Peters. She turned to the detective. “Is there anyone in the car?”
He shook his head, his attention fixed on the lake, where two officers waded into the water dragging a hooked cable. “Seems empty. We’ll know more once we get it on land.”
The sedan was hauled up within ten minutes, and she pressed forward with the officers to see inside, half excited, half afraid. Excited to find a telling clue. Afraid to see something horrible.
She got neither. Aside from Rathe’s phone lying on the dashboard, the car was empty.
“That explains the signal.
” Handling it by the very edges, Rathe flipped the waterproof unit open and glanced at the display. “Water must’ve distorted the signal. We’ll have to tell Wainwright that his DOC-JAK technology has a bug.”
“Hand it over.” Peters shot Rathe a dirty look for disturbing evidence, took the phone, and bagged it. “You can have it back after it’s processed.”
“Fine. Pop the trunk, will you? I want to have a look.” Rathe sauntered around to the back of the car, but Nia wasn’t fooled by his casual air. His shoulders were set, the lines of his body tense.
For the first time, she wondered what it had been like in that trunk, what he’d thought just before he hurled himself out onto the moving pavement.
She shuddered.
Peters opened the driver’s door with gloved hands, waited out the gush of water and hit the trunk release. Rathe eased a finger beneath the lid and pushed it up.
This time the gush of water was crimson.
“Whoa, we’ve got ourselves a DB!” At the young of ficer’s excited shout, the cops closed in and pushed Rathe and Nia out of the way. But she’d seen enough—and she’d probably be seeing the image for a long time to come.
Pockmark’s huge body was curled in a near-fetal position, his knees shoved to his chin, and his hands curled around each other with childlike innocence. One forearm bore a gaping bullet wound, and he’d been shot through the eye.
For an instant Nia’s mind substituted Pockmark’s face with another, lean and elegant, with cropped silver-blond hair. Rathe. She spun around, staggered to the edge of the crowd, doubled over and threw up into a clump of brambles.
A bullet whistled directly over her. Gunfire crackled from the opposite side of the road. The young officer who’d been excited to find the dead body, spun, gurgled and went down.
“Gun!” Rathe knocked Nia to the ground with a flying tackle that wrung a groan out of him. “Stay down!”
She wasn’t going anywhere. For one, his good, strong weight was pressing her into the ground. For another, she was too damn scared to move.
Another shot. The cops scrambled for the cover of their vehicles and returned fire.
Covert M.D. Page 11
