by A. J. Downey
I stared at her and was grateful that she looked better already, her complexion less pale than it’d been before and the ghastly sallow brown shadows beneath her eyes diminished. She was sleeping peacefully now, the line of pain between her eyebrows smoothed out. She was on some seriously good shit, and I was afraid of what that might be like for her when she had to come down off of it. The last thing she needed was to cross the circle of hell that was an addiction to painkillers. Good Catholic boy that I was, I prayed for her, crossing myself.
Anyways, our next stop had been across town to the precinct that housed Indigo City’s TARU, or Technical Assistance Response Unit. We needed their brain-trust to get our warrants for the information from the forum owners on the ISP belonging to screen name ‘H0M3RUN_H3R0’ which then had to spawn another warrant to the Internet Service Provider themselves to cough up the information on a real name and address for whoever was behind the screen name. It was a convoluted mess for sure, and was seriously grinding my gears.
We’d gotten our warrants, and lucky us, dude was in the city – which we’d figured – but him being in the city took the doxxing charge out of the fed’s hands and put the ball in our jurisdictional court. We just had to figure out what to charge him with on a local level. We had until tomorrow to figure it out, and I wasn’t worried about it. I figured between me and Jaime sleeping on it one of us would have one of our strokes of genius, I don’t think that there’d been a precedent set for this kind of a thing. I could always run it by Yale, one of the prosecuting attorney’s for the city who happened to be a Knight like me, before pulling any triggers on making an arrest.
Chrissy whimpered and shifted slightly and I sat up. She sucked in a long, deep breath and opened those dark eyes of hers and I stood up and went over to the side of her bed, where her arm wasn’t in a sling and propped up on pillows.
“Hey,” I murmured and her gaze finally fixed on me.
“You came back.”
“I promised you, didn’t I?”
“I… I don’t remember.”
“You’re on a lot of drugs, that’s to be expected.”
She tried to shift and gasped and I told her, “No, don’t move. I’ll get the nurse.”
“No, wait!” I stopped and she breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth a few times, getting a handle on her pain. “She’ll give me more and I won’t be able to answer your questions.”
“You gave me quite a bit the last time I was here. A solid lead.”
“Good, that’s good, but you need more, right?”
“Yeah,” I rolled the doctor’s stool over and sat down, reaching between the bed rails, and holding her hand on her good arm, careful of the IV running into the back of it. “What can you tell me about the guy that broke into your apartment?”
She started to shake her head and gasped, “He had on a red hoodie, white, um… brown hair, I think.” She winced and sighed out, frustrated. “I can’t remember everything. I want to, but it’s like it’s just not there.” She looked at me, a pleading look on her face and in her eyes and asked, “What’s wrong with me?”
I didn’t have to call a nurse. Something about Chrissy’s monitor must have tipped them off at the nurse’s station because one came in all on her own and went around me to the IV stand, punching buttons on the front of it.
“I don’t know,” I answered her truthfully. “Maybe because of the trauma or something, I’m a cop, not a doctor but it’s okay that you can’t remember, you just take it easy now and rest.”
She closed her eyes and pressed her lips together and it was pretty clear the nurse had upped her drugs. She turned to me, a blonde girl probably fresh out of nursing school, young and determined and said, “You might want to try in another day or two. It might take longer than that. Sometimes, when something this traumatic happens they never get their memory back but only time will tell.” I wondered if she was Nurse Jr., but didn’t comment.
“She doing good?” I asked, swallowing hard, and the nurse smiled.
“As well as can be expected. The doctor could probably tell you more.”
“Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.” She smiled and went back out into the ICU’s hub. I wanted to stay with Chrissy, but I was out of clean clothes and needed my own damn bed tonight.
“I’ll be back tomorrow,” I promised quietly and looked at her tray of uneaten food. “And I’ll bring dinner.”
I think she heard me, letting out this broken little whimper, but her eyes didn’t open and her hand was lax in my own.
It came to me on the ride home, what charge to pick up and hold H0M3RUN_H3R0 on. Inciting violence, possibly with a hate crime qualifier. It was barely into felony territory, but even a third-degree felony carried some scary time out here; about five to ten max. Add the hate crime qualifier it made it even scarier, upping things to ten to fifteen years if convicted. Maybe one of his internet homeboys had done some bragging to him after the fact, if he had, and we could get H0M3RUN_H3R0 to give them up, well then jackpot – that qualified the internet troll for a hefty charge of conspiracy to commit murder and attempted murder.
If he were the reason someone had beat down Chrissy’s door, then I would work with the DA to get everything needed to nail his ass with that conspiracy to commit murder charge and slap a hate crime qualifier on that, too. With how much the happy bastard had waxed eloquent about his pure, seething fucking hatred of women, getting the hate crime qualifier added on was going to be a breeze.
I was feeling pretty good about myself by the time my garage door was trundling open and feeling even more confident than that by the time I got off the front of my bike to head in. As always, my paranoid-self waited for the garage door to completely close before I went inside.
Roscoe, my cat, came trotting up like he always did yowling loudly and rubbing up against my legs demanding pets and food. I never could figure out which one he wanted first.
“Hey, buddy.” I bent down and scooped him up and went into the kitchen, setting my helmet on the countertop. I pulled out a can of his favorite cat food out from under the sink and he started squirming in my arms so I set him down. He ran back and forth in front of me as soon as I peeled back the lid, losing his goddamned kitty mind.
I laughed and shook the gelatinous meat-glop onto his clean, waiting plate by his gravity feeder and water bowl.
“I promise, it was a good reason this time.” My thoughts drifted back to Chrissy lying in that hospital bed back at Trinity Gen’s ICU and I sighed. I don’t think I’d ever seen anyone so alone, so afraid, or just so hurt before in my entire career. That being said, though, I have to say I was over the moon; just fucking glad it wasn’t the usual dead that I did see.
I listened to Roscoe purr and eat and decided I needed to get some sleep and hit it hard the next morning.
***
The next evening I was dragging ass up to Chrissy’s room. We’d gotten the information back on H0M3RUN_H3R0’s IP address and had it traced back to a Miriam Cohan along with her home address. My partner and I had gone there with a couple of uniforms, dragging a pretty disgruntled Officer Johns along with us after a closed door meeting with his commanding officer.
Johns didn’t have to be happy about it. He knew we’d done him a solid by keeping it in-house, so all he had to do was suck it up and toe the line. I’d been pretty sure, when we’d knocked on the old townhouse’s door that Miriam Cohan would be Mommy H0M3RUN_H3R0 and I was right. The second she opened the door, cigarette dangling between her lips, she asked, “What’s he finally done?”
“Excuse me, ma’am?” Jaime’d asked, and she’d rolled her eyes.
She’d screamed back into the house for her ‘delinquent’ son who turned out to be a fifty-two year old man well beyond the age of fuckin’ knowing better. She’d even helped us out by squealing on him that he’d been the only one home with her the night Chrissy’s address went up under his username.
Apparently, mom was si
ck of Kevin mooching off her social security and living in her damn basement. Kevin, on the other hand, was sick of rejection from the opposite sex, but considering his attire of sweatpants, holey tee shirt with what was probably days old food stains on it, with a grimy Skip Maguire baseball jersey over it all, I could kind of empathize with the fairer sex on that one. Dude had let himself go hard, and was pretty much all balding pate and ridiculous beer gut with a pair of glasses that went out of style sometime in the early nineties.
He kept screaming and squawking about how Chrissy deserved everything she got and he was glad she was in the hospital and mad as hell she wasn’t dead. We just Mirandized him and let him go, letting him rack up and solidify the charges against him. The damn idiot too stupid to realize that hate speech wasn’t free speech and for once, I was glad most of America either didn’t take or didn’t pay attention in their civics classes.
Still, we’d been the ones to end up flat busted for our efforts at the end of the day, the dude that’d shot our victims hadn’t done any bragging, at least not to Kevin, and we were no closer to making an arrest when it came to the perp who’d actually pulled the trigger. It was a solid stonewall dead end.
Still, at least I had a little good news and some way better food for Chrissy when I showed up. That was, until Merlyn stopped me in the ICU’s main hub.
“I’ve got all kinds of news for you, honey,” she said.
“Shit. Let me have it,” I said steeling myself for the news that Chrissy had coded or some shit.
“Bad news is, you can’t have that up here,” she indicated the bag of Chinese take-out in my hands, “Good news is, you can have it on the fourth floor, which is where your damsel in distress got moved this morning.”
“What’s on the fourth floor?” I asked.
“General care, honey. Your wounded bird is on the mend and got sprung from up here a few hours ago.”
I felt a flood of relief, “That’s good, no that’s great.”
“Mm-hmm, and I hate to rain on the parade, but I figured you needed to know. They tried bringing some flowers up here, had to reject them, not allowed, but it was a big bouquet of white lilies, pretty as can be.”
“How are flowers bad news?” I asked.
“Because this was with them,” she pulled a little white envelope from her scrub pocket and handed it over. I set the food on the nurse’s desk and turned it over, opening it up as she was saying, “Now I know I was being nosey, and I shouldn’t have opened it but I just had a feeling. I mean lilies I get, but white ones? Something was just all wrong and then I remembered why…” I read the card inside and shook my head.
For your casket. I’m coming for you, bitch.
“What tipped you off?” I asked, reading and rereading the card.
“Last time I saw white lilies was at my grandmama’s funeral.”
“What’d you do with the flowers?”
“Got everything back here, honey.” She indicated the door behind the nurse’s station leading into a supply closet or whatever the hell they had back there. I nodded.
“Hospital got your prints on file?” I asked.
“You know they do, but why?”
“Gonna need them for elimination purposes.”
I called Jaime to see if he’d left the precinct yet. He said he’d be right over and I told him; cool, and that I would be here waiting. Chain of custody in an active investigation and all that.
This girl just couldn’t get a break.
Chapter 4
Chrissy
I had been moved to a different room, and I worried that Tony wasn’t going to be able to find me. If I was even remembering things correctly, he’d been here every night since I had been admitted. The hospital had brought my dinner and the nurse had helped me by un-lidding everything so that I could eat. I guess I should be grateful that when the man who had shot me had aimed, that he’d shattered my left scapula or what people more commonly referred to as a shoulder blade. My left side was my non-dominant hand, but you never really appreciated how much it did for you until, well, it couldn’t anymore.
Right now it was in a navy blue sling that hugged my arm close to my body, cross ways over my chest and had another strap that buckled around my waist. It kept it pretty immobilized and I was told when I began occupational therapy to relearn both how to use the arm and how to walk because of my right hip and leg damaged by the other bullet, things were going to be tricky, but doable.
All I could focus on at the time was that I had to relearn how to walk and relearn how to use my arm to do things that I’d otherwise taken for granted until now. Things such as brushing my teeth, or stirring a pot. All I could think right now, with my thoughts still muddy and hazy from pain management was what did he do to me?
I went to raise a careful spoonful of soup to my mouth when someone shouted, “Ah! Hey! Put that down!” I jumped and immediately cried out in pain from the involuntary startle response reflex, my spoonful of soup flying and painting the napkin the nurse had laid over me orangey-red.
I froze and held still, breathing through the pain, a wall of black leather and blue denim approaching out of the corner of my eye saying, “Shit, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you, I was just trying to save you from yourself there. I brought you dinner.”
I forced myself to relax a muscle group at a time, turning my head slowly and at an awkward angle to look up at who’d spoken.
“Hi,” I said faintly, and Tony smiled. Those dimples of his that just made my heart flutter every time they appeared, flashing out at me.
“I am so fucking sorry,” he said, setting down the bag of take-out on my tray table and picking up the hospital cafeteria-style dinner tray. He moved it out of the way over by the sink. He pulled paper towels from the dispenser and came back to me, lifting the napkin off and gently dabbing at me where the soup had hit me where the paper hadn’t covered.
“It’s okay, I guess I just startled easy… I’m fine, really.”
“Well, I’m glad to at least see you’re with it today.”
“Yeah, it hurts and I’m still medicated, but its pills now. A little easier to deal with than whatever they were putting through my IV. I just feel awful, though… like I ache all over.”
“Morphine will do that to you,” he said and began unpacking the takeout bag. I blinked and looked at the white paper containers with the red printed battling Chinese dragon and phoenix on them.
“Is that Wah-Kue café?” I asked, perking up a bit.
“Yeah, you still go there?” he asked.
“Only the best Chinese food in the city,” I said, “This guy I used to date had me meet him there for our first one.”
He grinned and those dimples came out again, “Aw yeah? What happened to you two?” he asked, playing along.
I gave a mocking light sigh, “Well you know, he’d just made detective and I was clawing my way up the ranks as a defense attorney at this prestigious firm and sadly, it just didn’t work out.”
“Yeah, I dated a chick like that once. A real go-getter, I liked her for that.”
“Yeah?” I asked, surprised. I hadn’t known that was one of the qualities he’d liked about me.
“Yeah,” he said and went back over to the tray and grabbed my fork. “Can you hold this or are you going to need a hand for the time being.”
“I think I can manage,” I said, opening my hand in the sling. “If you can just put it there.”
He put the carton in my hand and let me close my fingers around it in my lap, moving the tray table back some so I could manage better.
“Ah, hold on just a second.” He went and pulled more paper towels and laid them over me and I grimaced.
“Afraid I’m going to be eating like a toddler or an old person for a while,” I confessed. “Wearing more than I actually manage to get in my mouth.”
“You got shot twice and in a real bad place. All that really matters now is that you’re still here.”
There
was no joking, no more clowning to his tone. If anything I swore I could hear relief in his voice and it very nearly brought me to tears. Of course, the tears did start to flow when I thought about Sami… guilt swamped me and I hated that I was here while she was gone. I swallowed hard and Tony just sat patiently beside me while I cried into my Shrimp Foo Young.
I was glad he was here. I mean, the nursing staff had been wonderful to me. All of them had been really great, the doctors, too, but that was their job. No one other than Tony had come to visit me from the outside world yet, and it meant a lot that I could hear it when he spoke, the gladness that I was still alive; the fact that someone would have missed me if I were I gone, too.
“Thank you,” I murmured, voice cracking and he smiled and wiped my tears.
“No crying into the Wah-Kue’s Shrimp Foo Young. I think it’s perfectly seasoned and doesn’t need any more salt.”
I laughed and bit down on the resulting moan. I said, “Don’t make me laugh please. It hurts to laugh.”
“Sorry, I’ll try to take it down a notch.”
He pulled up a chair and picked one of the containers, popping open the top and sliding a pair of chopsticks out of their paper wrapper. He snapped them apart and I smiled, remembering.
“You know that date was the first time I learned how to use chopsticks?”
“Oh yeah, I remember.” He laughed. “You got the hang of it pretty quick.”
“I did, didn’t I?”
He popped a bite of food into his mouth and said, “Mm-hmm,” as he chewed politely with his mouth shut.
We ate in silence for a bit, and I think that had more to do with him being polite and wanting me to get some food down because I could just tell he was burning to say something to me. To be honest, as good as the Chinese was, even if it was a bit cold, I wasn’t terribly hungry. I was pretty sure that had to do with all the medicine they had me on, though.
