In His Protective Custody

by Marie Ferrarella

  She hoped this wouldn’t take long. She wanted to get to the lockers. That was their meeting place, hers and Zane’s. Waiting for Zane to come was her favorite part of the day. Well, one of her favorite parts of the day, she amended as she waited for several people to get off on the first floor. She loved waking up in the morning with him beside her, loved falling asleep at night with his arms around her. Loved every moment she spent with him. Even the silences were good.

  She was the only one left on the elevator as the doors closed again. The elevator took her down to the basement.

  Unlike the other floors, there was no one around when the doors opened. No one around in the immediate area either. One of the florescent lights was out, casting the hall more into darkness than light.

  Alyx hurried down the corridor to the pharmacy, wanting to get this over with. Approaching the office, she glanced in through the glass enclosure.

  The room was empty.

  “Curiouser and curiouser,” she murmured under her breath. Opening the door, Alyx walked in. “Hello? Drake?” She called the pharmacist’s name. “It’s Alyx Pulaski.” There was no response. “You just paged me.”

  Maybe he’d changed his mind, she thought. Oh well, she’d tried. Time to go.

  Turning toward the door, Alyx stopped dead. A pair of feet stuck out from behind a small, white table in the corner. She hurried over, not knowing what to expect, trying to be braced for anything.

  The sight still startled her. The pharmacist was on the floor, unconscious and bleeding from what looked like a head wound. Had he fainted and hit his head? But the wound was in the front of his head and he was on his back. If he’d hit his forehead, wouldn’t he have pitched forward?

  Then why—

  The next moment, a scream filled her lungs, but never had an opportunity to emerge. Instead, it throbbed in her throat like a stifled echo.

  A hand tightly covered her mouth. So tightly she could hardly draw in a breath. Someone had come up behind her, clapped a hand over her mouth and roughly yanked her up to her feet.

  The first disjointed thought that streaked across her mind was that a junkie had broken in and she’d stumbled in on his attempt to rob the pharmacy.

  She tried to peel his hand from her mouth. The arm around her waist tightened harder, feeling as if it were cutting her in two.

  And then she heard his voice. Her blood froze in her veins the second she recognized it.

  “Thought you’d get away with it, didn’t you?” the deep voice taunted.

  McBride.

  How had he gotten in here? And what had he done to Drake? Was the man dead? She hadn’t been able to check for a pulse before he grabbed her.

  The next moment, his large hand still covering her mouth, McBride spun her around to face him. The look in his eyes was pure evil.

  He seemed to relish the glimmer of fear she knew had to be evident in her eyes. She struggled to bank it down. “That’s right. Me. I don’t like leaving loose ends. And you, you bitch, you’re a loose end.” His smile was cold, threatening. “But not for long.”

  She jerked her head back. The sudden movement separated his hand from her mouth. “What do you want from me?”

  “Same thing I wanted before. In the elevator that first morning. Remember? Your heart,” he snapped when she made no answer. “Except this time, I want it on a platter. Literally,” he emphasized. “Because you made me kill Abby before I was ready. Hell, I might not have even killed her. I really liked her. She did everything I told her to, was everything I needed her to be.

  “But then you came along and ruined everything,” he accused. “Talking to you made her mouthy. Abby told me you said she didn’t have to put up with me. That she had the right to leave. To leave me,” he yelled angrily, hitting his chest with his fist. “I showed her she didn’t,” he declared smugly. And then his eyes narrowed as he accused, “But that was your fault.”

  And he was here for revenge. She could see it in his face. He meant to kill her. She needed to stall. Someone had to come down here sooner or later. She had to keep him talking until then.

  “Look, whatever you have planned, you’re not going to get away with it—”

  “Well, we won’t know until I try, will we?” he laughed nastily.

  The next moment, before she could say anything, McBride caught her completely off guard. Pulling back his arm, he punched her in the chin. He hit her so hard that he knocked her unconscious.

  As she crumpled, McBride caught her. In one smooth motion, he slung her over his shoulder as if she weighed no more than a wet towel.

  “Payback time,” he announced, laughing.

  Zane was early and he knew it. But he wanted to take her out to dinner to make up for the lunch he hadn’t gotten a chance to share with her. Going out to dinner would surprise her, and he liked the way she looked when she was surprised. Pleasantly surprised, he amended.

  He nodded at the receptionist at the ER admissions desk. The woman, Jillian, nodded back and automatically pressed the button to release the lock on the inner door that would allow him to come inside.

  “She’s not here,” Jaime, the orderly who’d taken Mr. Weinberg up to his room earlier, told him as their paths crossed. “She was going to look in on Mr. Weinberg and then leave—unless she was waiting for you,” the young man added with a grin.

  Bad sign, Zane thought. They—he and Alyx—were looked upon as what his mother had once referred to as “an item.” The people Alyx worked with were thinking of them as a couple. He was going to have to change that.

  Soon.

  But not yet.

  “What room’s the old man in?”

  “I put him in 314,” Jaime answered just before he rounded a corner to get a blanket from the supply closet for one of the patients.

  Zane debated waiting by the lockers the way he usually did, but what if something came up in the interim? What if the old man—Weinberg, was it?—wouldn’t stop talking? He decided his best bet was to go upstairs and let her know he was here.

  “She’s not here,” Alvin Weinberg told him the moment Zane looked into the room.

  He took a few steps in. “I can see that. Has she come to see you?”

  “Sure she came,” Weinberg said, rising to Alyx’s defense. “The doc doesn’t break promises the way my son does—”

  The man gave every indication that he was about to launch into a long story. Zane cut him off before he could get started. “Do you know if she went to the lockers after she left you?”

  Mr. Weinberg shook his head. “No. She got a page from the pharmacy. Something about a prescription not being filled. She said she had to go down to straighten it out. Cut our visit short,” he complained.

  “She’ll make it up to you,” Zane replied, hurrying out of the room.

  He didn’t bother with the elevator. Instead, Zane opened the door to the stairwell and quickly went down the four flights to the basement, his passage propelled by the uneasy feeling that had taken hold of his gut.

  Something was off.

  He couldn’t put his finger on it, or even explain why, but he knew. And the feeling mushroomed, as did his sense of urgency, the closer he got to the basement.

  Zane ran down the last flight of stairs.

  Chapter 15

  W as it just his imagination, or did it seem like every second light in the basement hallway was out or dimming?

  It took Zane a moment to orient himself when he emerged out of the stairwell. He’d had no occasion to come down to the basement before. Scanning the walls and raising his eyes toward the ceiling, he searched for printed signs that would tell him which way to go to find the pharmacy.

  The obvious one, the one for the cafeteria, was large enough for even people with severely impaired vision to be able to read. The way to the pharmacy was only indicated by a small sign composed of red letters across a white arrow. The arrow was pointing one hundred and eighty degrees away from the cafeteria. The hallway was empty in either d
irection. He seemed to have hit upon a lull.

  Although it appeared that no one was around to hear him, instincts had Zane hurrying as quietly as possible. If she could see him now, Alyx would probably laugh at him—and he really hoped that she would because that would mean she was unharmed. That he was just being overly paranoid for no reason. He could live with that. Live with practically anything as long as Alyx was all right.

  Why shouldn’t she be? he silently demanded and then realized that some of her eternal optimism had obviously seeped into his brain. But after all, he reasoned, falling back on logic, there’d been no sightings of McBride since he’d suddenly disappeared. As apparently was his habit after “losing” a spouse or girlfriend.

  Wiring Harry McBride’s photograph—lifted from his last driver’s license—to the various police departments that had been involved in the other abuse and assault cases he’d managed to dig up had gotten Zane the positive confirmation he’d been looking for. And it also established a pattern. McBride always took off after his dealings came to light. Whether it was abuse, or, in the Tennessee and Alabama cases, suspected murder, no one ever saw him again. And it was definitely McBride. Each department made a positive ID.

  That information didn’t exactly make Zane happy either, because although it established a pattern, it also meant that McBride was probably out there biding his time. Waiting to make the most of the element of surprise. And that meant that McBride could strike at any time, take his revenge against Alyx at any time.

  The thought left him numb. Not to mention scared.

  Zane wasn’t accustomed to being scared. To his recollection, that was one of the emotions he’d successfully blocked out.

  Until now.

  Alyx had managed to upend a lot of things in his life.

  Zane supposed that he would have to put in a little more time watching over Alyx, keeping her safe. As he rolled the thought over in his mind, he waited for the feeling of confinement to set in, which in turn would make him feel as if he was suffocating. Unable to breathe.

  It amazed him that the feeling didn’t materialize. Didn’t even whisper across his mind.

  But fear did.

  He couldn’t shake the feeling that she was in trouble. That she needed him.

  Turning a corner, he thought he saw someone disappearing around the far end of the corridor. At the same time, he passed by the pharmacy. No one appeared to be inside the glass enclosure. Didn’t that old man say she’d gone to talk to the pharmacist?

  Then he saw the man lying on the floor behind the table.

  Zane didn’t stop, didn’t go in to check on his condition. Instead, gut feelings told him to go after the guy he’d just seen disappear around the corner. Whoever it was hadn’t been in hospital scrubs and he wasn’t wearing a white lab coat. There was no reason for anyone who wasn’t part of the staff to be down here in this part of the basement. There were nothing but a few supply closets on this end. No patients, no laboratories or rooms with radiology equipment. Just windowless rooms used for storage. Alyx had told him that the other day. He couldn’t remember why the subject had come up.

  A sense of urgency propelled him on.

  Picking up speed, Zane started to run.

  “Hey, you there,” he called out. “Stop for a minute. I want to talk to you.”

  In response, he heard the sound of crepe soles squeaking against the vinyl flooring. Quickly.

  Someone was running.

  Running away from the sound of his voice.

  Zane knew he had to catch the person before it was too late. If whoever he’d just glimpsed made it to the exit, all bets were off.

  Pouring it on, Zane ran as if this was to be the race of his life. Because maybe it was.

  Whoever he was chasing had Alyx, he could feel it in his bones.

  “Stop, I’m a cop,” Zane called out, his voice echoing down the winding corridor. Going around another corner, he saw his quarry.

  McBride.

  And the man had Alyx slung over his shoulder like dead weight.

  Zane didn’t even remember pulling out his weapon, but suddenly, there it was, in his hand. He took careful aim at McBride.

  “Stop or I’ll shoot,” he warned.

  McBride swung around. It was then that Zane saw he was brandishing a gun of his own.

  “You do and her brains are going to be splattered all over this hall,” McBride threatened. “My way, you put your gun up and she gets to live.” The smile on his face turned malevolent. “At least for a little while. Now, drop the damn gun!” McBride barked.

  Even at this distance, Zane could see that McBride’s eyes made him look possessed. He wasn’t in his right mind. There was no telling what the man would do, but he couldn’t take a chance on provoking him.

  “Don’t hurt her, McBride,” Zane called out to him. “Take me instead. Nobody’s going to bother you if you have a cop as a hostage.”

  “Tempting,” McBride said sarcastically, pretending to roll the idea over in his head, “but let’s face it, you’re not my type. Little doctor-do-gooder here,” he hit her across the buttocks with the barrel of his gun for emphasis, “needs a lesson in humility, and I intend to give it to her, a number of times,” he added, punctuating the promise with the kind of nasty laugh that made Zane’s flesh crawl.

  Zane’s mind raced, searching for a viable way to save Alyx. If McBride managed to get out of the building with her, Alyx’s chances of survival decreased a hundredfold. The man undoubtedly had his car parked right outside the exit.

  He couldn’t be allowed to reach it.

  Zane made up his mind. He was going to rush McBride even though he had no cover available to him, nothing to hide behind from here to there. No way to avoid being shot. But if he didn’t try to rush McBride, the maniac would get away and there was no telling what he would do to Alyx before he killed her.

  Bracing himself, Zane was about to charge into McBride, but before he could, McBride shrieked in surprised outrage. Piercing the air, the horrible sound ruptured the huge bubble of tension that throbbed about them.

  Zane had no idea what was going on until he saw McBride drop Alyx. She sprang to her feet and hurled herself against her attacker, causing McBride to stagger backward and ram his back against the wall.

  All Zane could think was that McBride was still holding his gun.

  “Alyx, get away from him!” Zane shouted, sprinting the short distance that separated him from McBride.

  But even as he yelled out the warning to her, McBride fired his weapon. The shot went wild. It completely missed Alyx who was angrily pounding on McBride with her fists. She landed several well-aimed blows across his chin and managed to knock McBride out.

  All in all, she was one tough little cookie, Zane thought, steadying himself. A tough cookie who could have gotten herself killed.

  “I’ll take it from here, Alyx.” Authority echoed in Zane’s voice despite the fact that there was now a stinging pain running through him. But the pain was nothing in comparison to the way he’d felt just a few moments ago, when he thought McBride was going to pull off kidnapping Alyx.

  Holding his gun trained on the crumpled figure on the floor, he gave Alyx a quick once-over. He didn’t see any blood. “Are you okay?”

  “I will be if you let me hit him a few more times,” she told him, glaring at the unconscious man on the floor.

  “You have to leave something for the judge to sentence,” he told her with a relieved smile. “What the hell happened?” he asked. “How did he manage to get his hands on you and why did he just scream like that?”

  “He had Drake—the pharmacist—page me. When I got there, Drake was on the floor, out cold. McBride got the jump on me and punched me in the face. I guess I passed out. I came to when he was yelling at you—and I bit his shoulder,” she said matter-of-factly. “It was the only way I could think of to keep him from shooting you at point-blank range.”

  Relieved, amused, Zane started to laugh. But ev
en as he did, the very act seemed to intensify the sharp darts of pain shooting through him. This wasn’t a new pain. He’d felt this way before, he realized. Just recently when—

  McBride suddenly scrambled to his feet as he uttered a guttural yell. At the same time, he lunged to grab Alyx again. What happened next was sheer reflex. Zane spun around and shot McBride in the chest. It was a single kill shot.

  McBride was dead before he hit the floor.

  The iron grip Alyx had managed to keep on her emotions cracked then. Although she tried hard not to, she could feel herself begin to shake. The horror of what could have happened echoed in her brain.

  Relieved to be still standing, to have Zane still standing, she threw her arms around his neck.

  “Oh God,” she murmured into his shoulder, struggling to keep the sobs that were choking her from escaping. As she buried her face against his shoulder, she felt him wince.

  Alyx instantly pulled back. “You’re wounded,” she cried, then raised her eyes to his face. “Again.”

  Zane glanced at his shoulder. There was a steady trickle of blood emerging now. That explained the stinging feeling. Initially he’d thought that it was just the wound he’d received last month acting up. Apparently not.

  “Lucky for me you’re so damn good at what you do.” His shoulder was really beginning to ache now. Digging into his pants pocket with the wrong hand, he pulled out his cell phone and put in a call to the precinct for some backup.

  The first to arrive on the scene, Detective Tony Santini, took one look at Zane’s shoulder and told him to have it seen to.

  “Like now, Calloway,” he emphasized when Zane made no move to leave. “Sasha would have my head if I let you stand here, bleeding, while I asked you questions. Go. I’ll take over here.”

  “Am I free to go with him?” Alyx wanted to know.

  “I’m counting on it. You’re the one who’s got the needle with his name on it,” Tony cracked. He made a point of waving both of them on. “I’ll get your statements later,” he promised, “when your body starts replacing all that blood you lost.”