Ten Plagues

by Mary Nealy

  With soothing tones that Paul knew she practiced, the woman said, “We can put out the word she died. I know the guy you’re talking about.”

  “What is this crawling all over her?” one of the paramedics asked, his voice strangled with horror.

  “Frogs,” Paul said hoarsely. “Last week it was a plague of blood. This week is a plague of frogs.”

  The paramedic who asked made an inarticulate sound of disgust.

  “Where are you taking her? What hospital?”

  “We’ll go straight to Cook County,” the woman medic said.

  Paul said, “I’m here with a police officer. She chased the man out the south side of the park. I’m going after her!”

  The sound of gunfire froze everyone in their tracks. Paul whirled to face the direction of the sound. The direction Keren had run.

  “Wait for the police, sir! They’re equipped to handle this!”

  “Just don’t let anyone know she survived. Please. Send the police after me.” Paul turned and raced in the direction Keren had gone. The sky opened up and poured.

  Paul sprinted toward the shots, sick at heart from what he might find. He heard a car roaring away and tore down one alley after another. He almost tripped over Keren, lying unconscious on the pavement. He had his cell phone out for the second time in minutes, calling for help.

  Blood coursed down the side of Keren’s face. The rain pelted her and turned the trail of blood into a red river. Paul fumbled at her wrist for a heartbeat and, when he found a strong, steady pulse, he relaxed for just a second. Her breathing was even and deep. He started checking her for gunshot wounds. It was so dark that he had to wait for lightning to flash for him to see. She had her gun still clutched in her hand, and he pried it free and checked the load. He’d counted the shots. He knew her gun’s capacity and that she’d keep it fully loaded. It was empty now.

  All the shots had come from her gun.

  The bleeding on her head must be from a nasty scrape, not a bullet. A welt the size of an egg was swelling up from under the scrape. He pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and held it out to the rain to wet it then pressed it against her head to staunch the bleeding.

  Paul ran his free hand over her inert form and found no more blood, except on her hands, which were grated raw. He did his best to check for broken bones, and when he found none, he gently held out her hands to the rain to rinse away the worst of the dirt and gravel.

  He noticed movement in the alley across from them. All they needed to end this dreadful night was to be mugged. He glared at the alley, hoping he would finally have the chance to do more than just call for help. He had a visceral need to fight back.

  Keren distracted him when she moaned softly. It was the most beautiful sound he’d ever heard.

  “Keren? Keren, did he shoot you?” He knew the answer but couldn’t stop the panicked question.

  “No,” she groaned, trying to sit up. “I shot him!”

  “Don’t move. An ambulance is on the way. You’re bleeding, honey. You’ve got to lie still.” Paul held her down with little trouble, because she was still semiconscious. Trust Keren to fight the world standing on her own two feet, even when she was battered and bleeding.

  She said in a husky voice, “I’m drowning.”

  Paul realized the now-pouring rain was hitting her right in the face. He leaned over her to shelter her with his body. “Did you really shoot him?”

  “No!” she snarled, then she tried to sit up again. “I didn’t do anything! I didn’t see anything! I shot at him and I got a couple rounds into the car, but I didn’t even slow him down. They might as well get me a Seeing Eye dog!”

  Paul held her down. Then he thought of something that might help. A little. “LaToya’s alive. The paramedics are taking her to Cook County Hospital.” A gust of wind blew the rain sideways so Keren got hit in the face. Paul leaned closer.

  The distant sound of an ambulance told Paul help was on the way.

  “Is she going to make it?” She sounded like knowing LaToya was alive really had made her feel better.

  “I don’t know. But she’s got a chance. Thank God, she’s got a chance.”

  “Will you pray with me, Paul?” Keren asked. “Pray for LaToya?”

  “I’d love to pray with you.” Paul began speaking to the Lord. “Dear God—”

  “Wait a minute,” Keren interrupted. “Something is crawling around inside my clothes.” She reached under her shirt.

  Paul realized he had a few wiggly spots, too. “Frogs.”

  Keren shuddered. “Gross.” She tossed one frog out and went back after another.

  Paul said doubtfully, “Maybe we’d better keep them. They might be a clue.”

  “Can you store them in your shirt?” Keren groaned. “I’ve had about all I can take for one night.”

  “Yeah. Sure. I don’t mind amphibians in my clothes.” Paul thought gloomily that this was what chivalry had come to. He caught the frogs as she extracted them. She found two, he found five on himself. He gently bundled them up in the front of his sweatshirt.

  As the ambulance pulled up, Keren groused, “Did I hear you call me ‘honey’?”

  “It must be the head injury,” Paul said.

  “It had better be.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Pravus, in his fury, brought down a nightmare on Melody Fredericks.

  He didn’t play out the ritual like he’d planned, but the satisfaction was surprisingly intense.

  Terror such as he’d never known followed him home. He could feel the eyes on him. Surely someone had seen what happened.

  Pravus prepared quickly for his artwork. He’d listen and be ready to run, but he couldn’t move yet. The beast was like a starving wolf licking its jaws. He had to paint. He had to create.

  Because she’d fallen into his hands, he had no time to prepare, so that would come now. There was an address in her purse, so he could find her house. The reverend wouldn’t even feel pain over this. So why involve him?

  Pravus quickly carved the sign for this plague. It wasn’t his best work, but Melody Fredericks wasn’t worthy, so it hardly mattered.

  Finishing the plaque in quick time, he slipped up to her home. A pretty house in a nice neighborhood, not the isolated, dreary apartment he was used to. He quietly hung the plaque in place and went back to his creation.

  Only to find she wouldn’t supply him with paint. Dead women don’t bleed. He looked from his latest creation to the empty white gown and fumed.

  There was no help for it. The only one available to bleed was himself. Pravus raised the chisel to his own arm. The pain was pleasure and the beast was content.

  Paul spent the night between Keren’s cubicle—where she seemed determined to make every doctor and nurse who came in contact with her reconsider their occupation—and the waiting area nearest LaToya’s operating room. When O’Shea came barreling into the hospital, Paul turned the tiny frogs over to him.

  O’Shea, befuddled, stuck them in a plastic evidence bag as if they might contain fingerprints. They stared, wriggling pathetically, through the bag. O’Shea muttered, “Airholes.” He poked a few before he gently lowered the bag into the pocket of his brown suit.

  Then Agent Higgins came.

  Paul felt like a criminal under interrogation.

  Keren heard them talking and demanded loudly, from behind the curtain, to be included.

  “It’ll probably kill her,” the doctor said sarcastically. “But the nurses are pooling their money to hire a hit man anyway, so what the heck. Go on in.”

  She was sitting up, so Paul didn’t take the doctor’s dark warnings of death very seriously. The hit man? Maybe.

  Paul had to go through it again, with Keren adding details.

  “You got the make and model of his car at night, on a dimly lit street, after you’d been run down?” Paul asked incredulously.

  Keren rolled her eyes. “Some of us do this for a living, Rev.”

  O’
Shea said, “I’ll put an ATL on a dark-green Malibu with a broken taillight and bullet holes.”

  “An Attempt to Locate for possible connection to a homicide.” Keren nodded. “It’s got to be the same car we saw those men driving outside the mission.”

  “But when he was questioned, Murray had already reported it stolen.” Paul shook his head. “The cops remember him because he was so upset. He’d just bought the car. The first car he’d owned in his life. That’s why he was giving everybody a ride. It was stolen before he’d owned it two days. I can’t believe it’s him.”

  He saw Keren and O’Shea exchange a glance of pity and didn’t even have the gumption to snarl at them.

  “A stolen car is really convenient,” Keren said. “If he’s got a place to hide it, he can use it once in a while and it’ll all be blamed on someone else as long as he’s not caught.”

  Paul ducked away while they grilled Keren. No one else was there for LaToya but him. The paramedics had already “slipped” and told a reporter she was dead. The police were in full agreement that it was best she be declared dead for now. It made Paul sick when he overheard a spokesman for the hospital say the words. It was far too close to the truth.

  There was a nurse in the operating room who spoke to him every time she came out. “They’re bringing in a plastic surgeon to try to fix the cuts in her arms with the least scarring possible. We’ve taken pictures from every angle, as the police requested. We’ve already handed the white dress over to the detective.”

  The next time the nurse came out, she said, “She’s sedated, but the EEG shows she’s in a deep coma. The final stab wound was the only potentially fatal wound, but the cumulative effect of all that trauma and blood loss is extensive. It’s the doctor’s feeling that she’s probably been in a coma for the last twenty-four hours.”

  Paul ran his hands through his dark hair and felt it standing on end. “I saw her move just an hour ago. I saw the man who did the cutting on her strike the last blow. She rolled away from him. She saved herself.”

  The nurse shook her head. “That’s not possible. The doctor is estimating how long she’s been out, so it could be less than twenty-four hours, but it’s definitely longer than one. There’s no way she could have made any defensive movements so recently.”

  “But I saw her,” Paul insisted.

  “Maybe she rolled because the hillside was steep and the man leaned against her wrong. Whatever caused her to move saved her life.”

  Paul quit protesting. He didn’t need to find out more. Whether LaToya had done the impossible and awakened or Pravus had shifted his weight and knocked her aside or God had simply sent her rolling away from that chisel, the end result was the same.

  Paul had witnessed a miracle.

  His heart filled with the blessing of it. LaToya would live. God had directly intervened to save her. It wasn’t yet her time. In that dimly lit, lonely waiting room, he shook off the cop and found the pastor and praised God to the highest reaches of heaven.

  It was only after he’d spent time in praise and regained a modicum of his peace that he remembered the moment he’d demanded Keren hand over her gun.

  “Give me your gun!”

  If he could have wrestled it away from her, he’d have gone after Pravus and …

  God, forgive me. Paul sat with his legs spread, hands clasped between his knees. His head hung in shame. I’d have killed him.

  Paul began again, his earlier closeness to God lost. He prayed for forgiveness, and as he prayed, he knew that it wasn’t God who was going to be the problem. God was there pouring love and forgiveness down on him in abundance. It was himself. This side of himself—the violent, cynical side that had been such a neat fit for the way he’d acted when he was a cop. Now, with Pravus to fight and the police at hand constantly, he was being pulled back into that life.

  God, please, I don’t want that to be me. Give me a peaceful and contrite heart. Give me humility. Paul buried his face in his hands as he prayed. Make the longings of my heart be love and joy and sacrifice. Take away this willingness I have to fight and hate. Please, Lord, forgive me for wanting to kill that man.

  Paul wasn’t fighting for his soul. His belief in his own salvation was rock solid. It was his own nature that he fought. In the end, he didn’t find the satisfaction he hoped for. Even as he prayed, he felt the hunger to close his hand over that gun and hunt down Pravus personally. Paul felt like he’d lost five years of spiritual growth in a single week.

  Keren was part of the problem. She’d pulled that gun with lightning speed. She went running headlong toward danger. She did what a cop was supposed to do. Paul was afraid that if he became involved with Keren—which he wanted to do very badly—the life she led, or more exactly, the lure of it, would swallow him whole.

  The nurse appeared again with another update and the news that it would be hours before LaToya was out of surgery. The chisel had pierced a lung and severed muscles. And she had deep cuts that needed sutures. Paul remembered the police questioning Keren and went back to the room where she was corralled.

  He went behind her curtains, expecting to find her in a hospital gown. She was almost dressed, just tucking in her shirt.

  “Hey!” She glared at him. “Knock next time.”

  “It’s a curtain. How do I knock on a curtain? What are you doing with your clothes on?”

  “Not a question a reverend should be asking,” she replied smartly. She sat in a chair and reached for her socks.

  Paul said, “Get back in that bed! I heard the doctor say he wanted to observe you overnight because you have a concussion.”

  Keren began pulling on her socks. “Says the man who checked himself out of the hospital without his doctor’s approval.”

  She flinched when she leaned over to grab her shoe. He pushed her hands aside and knelt in front of her and lifted her foot to rest on his knee. “They needed the room because of the explosion. That was an emergency. They’ve got plenty of room for you.”

  Keren didn’t wrestle him for her shoe. She straightened gingerly in the hard chair and Paul heard her squelch a sigh of relief. That tiny show of weakness must have made her mad. “Didn’t you take that cervical collar off a week before the doctor said you could? And quit wearing your sling the minute his back was turned?”

  Paul lifted her other foot and slid the black Nike on gently, thinking of all her bumps and bruises. “I was fine. Doctors have to be overcautious, because they’ll get sued otherwise.”

  “Amen.” Keren stood. “I’m out of here. I promise not to sue.”

  Paul steadied her when she wobbled. “You’re not supposed to sleep for twelve hours because of the concussion.” Paul knew he was right, but he didn’t kid himself he’d ever convince Keren.

  “No problem. I’m going back to work, so I’ll be up.”

  O’Shea called from outside the room, “Her head’s a hard one, Pastor P. She’ll probably be all right.”

  Higgins was out there, too, and he laughed.

  Paul pulled the curtain aside and let Keren step out ahead of him. “I can’t leave. I’ve got to stay and see how LaToya does.”

  “I’ll stay with you.” Keren seemed to forget her plans to begin tracking down Pravus.

  “If you’re staying in the hospital anyway,” Paul growled at her,

  “why don’t you just lay back down there?”

  Keren narrowed her light-colored eyes at him. The blue had turned to a gunmetal gray that looked like she wanted war. “How about this for a compromise? I’ll do exactly as I want, and you shut up.”

  “That’s the deal she always gives me.” O’Shea laughed and slapped Paul on the shoulder. “Take it, kid. It’s all you’re going to get.”

  It had been so long since someone had called him “kid,” Paul almost liked it. “At least when you keel over and I have to call 911 for the third time tonight, it won’t take the paramedics long to get here.”

  “Sounds like a plan.” Keren turned to th
e FBI agent, still in his black suit even in the middle of the night. “Are you done grilling me, Higgins?”

  Higgins said, “For now.”

  He and O’Shea turned to leave. Keren and Paul headed for the surgical floor.

  “I’ll be right back, Higgins.” O’Shea’s voice turned Paul and Keren back.

  O’Shea came up close and spoke in a whisper to Keren. “There are going to be questions about tonight, so get ready for them.”

  “What questions?” Keren asked.

  “You discharged your weapon.”

  “At a fleeing felon.”

  Paul noticed Higgins reach the exit door then stop and look back, one brow arched on his movie-star handsome face.

  “Anytime you fire your weapon, you answer for it—that’s routine. You’ll need to file an incident report.”

  “I know that.” Keren sounded cranky, but Paul suspected she was just in pain and taking it out on the world.

  “You fired at a moving vehicle, in the dark.”

  “He ran me down.” Keren ran one hand into her hair and fiddled with her weird barrette. She took a quick look at Higgins.

  Higgins started back toward their secretive little group.

  “You ran out of an alley into his path. You could have run into the path of any oncoming car. You didn’t know who was driving it.”

  “I did. It was him and you know it.” Keren scowled.

  “I do know it. But you made a real fast judgment call, and I’ve yet to hear you say you saw the guy’s face, saw him get into that car, kept your eye on him the whole time. You need to get your story straight. I understand how you could be sure it was him, but IA isn’t going to trust you like I do.”

  Paul felt his blood chill as he thought of the headaches of an internal affairs investigation. Keren could end up suspended, even fired. And he needed her on this case.

  “I appreciate you mentioning it. I’ve got nothing to hide.”

  “Good.” O’Shea turned just as Higgins came up.