by A. J. Downey
He leaned down and looked me in the eyes, “That’s a good girl. Now, I told you the truth, so you have to do a solid for me.” He presented the paper cup and smiled, taking the bite out of his next words, “Take the damn pills and relax. You’re safe here.”
I smiled and some of the tension melted away. I met his warm and caring brown eyes and smile with a slight, much more nervous smile of my own, but did as I was told. I took the damn pills.
I was worried, though… what was Tony keeping from me?
Chapter 9
Tony
I was headed up the second flight of stairs from the garage when a dude crashed into me and knocked me back onto the first landing. A voice I knew was yelling something, and when I looked up, it was to Yale vaulting the railing, suit and all, to land next to me and take off down the last flight and slam out the door into the garage.
Pursuit training took over, and I pushed off the wall and vaulted the short flight to the cement landing, flying out the door right on Yale’s six. He was chasing after some guy in a black coat and hooded sweatshirt. The same black coat and hooded sweatshirt on the surveillance video from the flower shop.
I caught up to Yale who was sweating, chest heaving and overtook him pretty quickly. The dude reached the steel cables cordoning off this level from the next level down and put his hands on the top, leaping and coming down on the other side. We were right behind him but still, by the time I reached the cables there was no sign of him.
Yale caught up to me a half a second later and we listened, but there was nothing to hear except a car fire up.
“Shit, he’s coming up,” I said and pulled my weapon, ducking out from between the cars parked up against the railing into the garage’s lane as a late model gray sedan barreled around the curve, tires squealing. I stood in front and took aim but it was no good, I had to move my ass or get hit, and so I moved my ass, ducking off to the side and rolling, coming up in a crouch, weapon pointed but there was nothing to shoot at, not without potentially hitting either the parking attendant in the shack or someone beyond on the street.
The perp behind at least one known threat on Chrissy’s life had blown through the parking barricade’s arm, shattering it and didn’t even slow down, his tires screaming as he made the turn out onto the street. Horns honked, pedestrians cursed him out but there was no use, he was gone. I holstered my gun and looked over to Yale.
“You get it? Please tell me you got it.” I said between heaving breaths.
He stood there, panting, his shoulders dropping and nodded holding up his hand, the plate number from the car hastily scrawled on it. He bent, putting his hands on his knees and struggled to breathe and demanded between deep breaths, “Is it… always… like… that?”
I nodded, and he shook his head, “Look at the bright side,” I told him. “At least you’re good for cardio for the week.”
“Man, fuck you.”
I laughed and then he laughed, and we both took our time getting our shit together. The parking attendant was on the phone, likely with dispatch, his eyes wide in his face as he stared at me and Yale. I held up my badge and he hurriedly said something into the phone and I nodded, unable to really say anything else, but I was thinkin’, yeah, you’re cool buddy. We’re the good guys.
“I think I’ll stick to the DA’s office,” Yale said a minute later, as we listened to the sirens approach.
“I think you did fine, man… but what happened?”
He filled me in. That he’d gone to visit Chrissy, and was making like he was going to leave, even though he was going to post up outside her room. When he’d come out, the guy was asking what room she was in.
“I asked him who he was and he threw his bouquet, hit me in the face with it.”
“That how you got those scratches?” I asked, pointing to his cheekbone, above his trim brown beard. He touched his face and came away with a light smear of blood on his fingertips.
“Damnit, yeah. He had a big bunch of white roses, asked for Christina by name. He took off running the second I asked who he was. I gave chase; he knocked over a nurse’s cart in my way and hit the stairs. I don’t think he thought I would keep up.”
“Yeah, well, surprise!” I waved my hands in the air and Yale laughed.
“Yeah, surprise indeed.”
When the uniforms got there, we filled them in and I dropped into the driver’s seat of their cruiser and called, “Yale, gimme that tag.”
He rattled it off to me and I swore, “Doesn’t it fucking figure? Stolen.”
“The car or the plates?” he asked.
“Both, car and by default, plates.”
“Put out an APB anyways.”
“Thanks, Dad. I totally don’t know how to do my job. Whatever would I do without you?”
“Alright, alright, Youngblood. No need to turn into a butthurt princess on me.”
I shook my head. “Sorry man, this just chaps my ass.”
“You and me both.”
“You good to give your statement? I want to go up and check on Chrissy.”
“Yeah, go ahead, I’ve got this.” He jerked his thumb in the direction of the stairs and returned his hand to his hip to match the other one.
“Cool. Catch you later.”
I went up to Chrissy’s floor and was pretty much immediately stopped by her murse, that would be man-nurse, Pasquale.
“Oh, I am not even covering for you anymore, motherfucker.”
“Hey, are you even allowed to talk like that?” I demanded.
He put his hands on his hips, but on Pasquale, it just made him look like some kind of angry housewife. I honestly think I just pissed him off more by my lighthearted attempt to call him out on his language. I’d have told him to calm down, but telling an angry drag queen to calm down worked about as well as baptizing a cat. Typically you ended up scratched and bleeding either way.
“I do not care, g-man. I happen to like that girl and right now she’s in there a thousand times more scared than she should be not knowing what’s going on.”
“Relax, woman. I’ll handle that part, good news is, we’re more than likely going to get a real protective detail going after this. Now where’s those flowers?”
He dropped his hands off his hips and moved his head in that attitude filled way that queens just had and snapped a perfect turn, halting, and sashaying up the linoleum floor like it was the runway at NYC’s fashion week. He stopped at the nurse’s station and snapped another perfect turn and held out a hand as if he were Vanna fucking White, and raised one eyebrow.
“Thank you.”
“Don’t mention it,” he said and it dripped with condescension. He walked away and left me with the scattered roses and the switchblade tucked between the stems. Yep. Credible threat indeed… but curious. I waited for someone to come up and keep chain of custody intact, before I went in to see Chrissy.
When I went through her door she whipped her head in my direction and winced.
“Easy, you’re cool. Everything’s cool.”
“I don’t think it is.” she declared and in the very next breath demanded, “What aren’t you telling me?”
I sighed and dropped into the chair beside her bed and told her the truth, “There was a threat, while you were in ICU. We investigated but hit a dead end. With all the crazy surrounding your case, there wasn’t enough to it to consider it a credible enough threat to warrant a protection detail, but the guys in my club and I agreed there was something to it. So we mapped out volunteer shifts and they’ve been here keeping an eye on you.”
She didn’t look happy with me, but at the same time looked grateful, which was a hell of a thing.
“To be honest with you, though. We probably could have saved ourselves some trouble, at least while that nurse of yours was on duty.”
She scrunched down her lips and tried like hell to look disapproving or angry but couldn’t at the mention of Pasquale.
“He made me promise not to say anything,�
� she said finally. “He’s apparently been enjoying the ‘man-candy,’ as he put it.” I laughed and she smiled but it soon faded.
“Did you catch him?” she asked and my own smile melted away.
“No, but his attempt today gives us something to work with.”
“Was one of you out there?” I asked, “When he showed up?”
I smiled then, “No. He was in here, with you.”
She frowned and asked, “Damien Parnell is a member of your biker gang?”
“We prefer ‘squad’ not ‘gang’ and yeah, Yale is one of us.”
She frowned, “Parnell went to Columbia.”
“Long story, and how did you know that?”
“Courthouse gossip.”
I looked her over and sighed and asked, “Look, legit, are you okay?”
She rolled her lips and nodded carefully. “I think so, I mean, I never saw his face, so I couldn’t tell you if it was the same man who shot me or not…”
“That’s okay. Much rather when you ID that guy that he’s in custody and behind the glass. Preferably in a lineup.”
“I won’t argue with you there,” she said and I smiled.
“Well that’s a first.”
“What is?”
“A lawyer who doesn’t want to argue.”
She smiled again and with each smile that I won out of her, became more relaxed.
“I’m glad Parnell was here, and I’m glad you’re here now.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Silence for a minute as we just looked at each other, but finally my curiosity got the better of me and I had to ask. “Where’d those come from?”
She looked at the pink roses in the vase by her sink and said, “Parnell brought them.”
“Did he now?” I asked, and felt the vaguest stirring of jealousy.
“Yeah, one colleague to another, I guess.”
“You lawyers are so fuckin’ weird,” I said with a laugh to take any sting out of the comment. “No offense.”
She bowed her head and smiled some, “None taken. I guess you have to be one of us to get the whole adversarial friendship thing that we do.”
“What’s the popular word for it? Frienemy?”
She smiled and nodded again, “I guess that’s a good word for it.”
“I think you might be surprised at just how much I get that one.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. My Captain and I sometimes have that kind of relationship. I’m his favorite pain in his ass.”
She choked on a laugh and winced and I had to believe that her back and shoulder were hurting her some. Likely from being all tense and shit.
“Just take it easy. You’re safe now,” I said and she looked at me, and I mean really looked at me.
“I know, thank you.”
“You bet,” I told her, but the words were flippant and didn’t carry half the meaning I wished I could convey. For now, though, they had to be good enough. Eyes were about to be back on us and I was pretty painfully aware that I was something like two inches from a rip for insubordination.
Worth it, though.
Chapter 10
Chrissy
The next day I was discharged from the hospital into the care of a rehabilitation facility. The one I was supposed to go to was here in the hospital complex, but after what had happened, the police agreed that some extra steps to ensure my safety were warranted. So, in short order, I was secretly loaded into an ambulance on a gurney, and taken to a different inpatient rehabilitation facility across the city and checked in under an assumed name.
The media went ape-shit.
Headlines like, ‘Where Are They Hiding Christina Marie Franco?’ and ‘Lawyer Refuses to Speak’ were splashed across the newspapers and carried over to the evening news. Word of the incident at the hospital had gotten out and it’d seemingly whipped the situation into yet another froth… as if things hadn’t been bad enough already, I felt like a prisoner, even if my cage were a gilded one.
The facility they had moved me to was a nice one, and I spent the next week and a half learning how to reliably stand and walk on my own without any more assistance. That was a lot harder than it sounded. The bullet had gone in through low enough on my back that it could be considered my butt and had lodged in my pelvis, fracturing it badly. I’d been lucky, though. The doctors had told me a little bit higher; it would have destroyed my kidney. More to the left, it would have impacted my spine…
I didn’t quite consider myself lucky at all, but I suppose any port in a storm, right? I mean, I had to try and find what silver lining I could in all of this mess. Whenever I thought about it like that, though, I could only come up with one… and he was walking up the hallway now, dressed in his casual attire of black leather and denim.
I watched him go to the front desk and speak to the receptionist, admiring how his black leather chaps framed his extremely nice ass in the jeans he had on. I felt a very definite pang of disappointment that he’d been too much of a gentleman at the time to take my up on my offer of some no-strings-attached fun. Then again, back then, I had been sort of glad for it. It’d meant he’d genuinely liked me and now… well, now who knew?
The receptionist pointed past Tony and I quickly looked down at my kindle so as not to get caught blatantly ogling his behind. I was sitting in the facility’s atrium, soaking up some sunshine and making use of one of the park benches they had out here. When I felt his eyes on me through the long line of floor to ceiling windows, I looked up and smiled. He smiled back but it was Mary, the receptionist behind him that caught my eye. She was grinning just a little bit too hard at my expense. She’d seen what I’d been doing and when Tony turned his back on her to look at me, she gave me two thumbs up behind his back and moved them out and in my direction and back in, twice.
I felt myself begin to color but was saved, Tony turned around, presumably to thank her, but Mary’s hands were folded on top of the desk, and she was giving him a wide-eyed and innocent look. I laughed and he, asked her for directions. She leaned forward and pointed down the hall and he headed further into the building to come around and access the door to outside.
Mary and I exchanged a look once he’d moved out of both of our sights and both burst out in a fit of giggles. It felt good; nice, normal, and light.
Tony found the door leading out here and trudged across the grass in my direction, but by then Mary and I had both regained our composure.
“Hi,” I said, laying my kindle in my lap and he grinned at me, dropping onto the bench beside me.
“Why do I think that I’ve missed something here?” he asked, looking between me and Mary who was pointedly staring at her computer monitor, fingers clacking against the keys, and away from us.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said innocently and Tony laughed.
“You know for a lawyer, you’re a bad liar Franco.”
“So I’ve been told.”
We each had a light laugh and he looked me over.
“You’re looking good.”
“Thank you, Pasquale came to visit me the other day and was nice enough to bring me some real clothes. I gave him the key to my apartment, but I think he had other ideas.” I looked down at myself, I’d never owned an outfit like it, but he’d come back with two perfectly matched and fashionable jean and light sweater pairings with some fabulous boots in something like six shopping bags. Had dropped my keys into my hand and said, ‘Let’s go, paper princess, I am not about to dress you any other way.’
“Not your clothes?” Tony asked.
“I’m not even sure that he stopped at my place, to tell you the truth.”
“Looks like he spent a small fortune on you. Stuff’s nice.”
“I thought so, too, but apparently he got them at a clothing swap the LGBTQ community here in the city puts on once a month.”
“Nice, look at you, making friends wherever you go.”
I nodded and smiled,
and tried not to let what he said get to me. I missed Sami Lynn so much, but Tony hadn’t meant anything by it, I knew that. It hurt that I couldn’t see her family. The press were hounding them for information about me and David had called and said that his parents were going on a sort of vacation to get away from it. That I shouldn’t take it personal and that there was no resentment and that they wished very much that they could be here for me. I understood, but it still hurt.
Tony searched my face which must have given it away because he said, “Sorry,” and bowed his head. “My fuckin’ mouth, sometimes it gets away from me.”
“It’s okay, I know you didn’t mean anything by it.”
“I didn’t. I mean, I really didn’t.”
“It’s okay,” I said again. “Really, can we just change the subject?”
“Sure. So I hear you’re gonna be busting out of here, soon.”
“A week more,” I said softly. “Then I get to go home and deal with outpatient care and physical therapy.”
“The fun just doesn’t stop, does it?” he asked and I sighed and put on a brave smile.
“Party all the time,” I agreed.
He chuckled and leaned back and I shifted. It was hard to get comfortable, my arm still in its sling, trapping it close to my body. It didn’t really come out of this position except for the occupational and physical therapy exercises designed to strengthen it, which of course, hurt like hell.
“What’d they say about it?” he asked, gesturing to the arm.
“I’ll never regain full range of motion when it comes to the shoulder. It will always be stiff and ache with changes in the weather. It’s got a super long way to go, and I’m going to need help with things like brushing my hair and showering for a while still. I’m doing better with getting dressed, but still need help there, too. It’s a bitch doing anything one-handed.”
He nodded and sighed, dropping his head and turning to look at me, searching my face before saying, “Yeah, but if anybody can come back from this stronger and better than ever, I have a feeling it’s you.”
