by Toby Neal
“No thanks. I’m a fighter. MMA. Hazards of the sport.” Sophie’s smile hurt and didn’t seem to reassure the nurse.
“Well, okay. He’s on the fourth floor. Room 427.”
Sophie took the elevator back down, realizing she was a little lightheaded. She never had eaten anything that day, but at least the depression was back in its box.
There was still an officer outside Alika’s door, which she was relieved to see. Though she’d given Waxman her creds wallet, she still had a departmental ID badge, which she showed.
“Anyone with him?” Sophie asked, avoiding the officer’s curious eyes on her face.
“Not right now. The parents said they had to take care of some errands and business.”
His parents probably still had to work, might even have to leave the island soon. She felt a pang of worry and pushed the door handle down, bracing herself.
Alika seemed better. He was still prone and unmoving on the bed, but the swathes of gauze covering his head were down to one big bandage. The only tubes running into him were an IV and a catheter, tactfully concealed by bedclothes. His broken leg was lowered now, and his bruises had gone down, leaving his face recognizable, if still discolored.
Sophie sat in the chair beside him. “Hi Alika. It’s Sophie.”
She wriggled a bit, gazing at him, wondering if they were still supposed to talk to him, wondering if he was even in a coma anymore since it had been a while since her last update. Curious, she got up and tried to read the chart hanging on the wall, but there were no clues in the little boxes filled with squiggles and code.
“I don’t know anything about how you’re doing, but I want to tell you I’m looking pretty bad right now, too. Took a bit of a pounding this afternoon from that Japanese fighter. You remember him, right? They call him The Breaker. Well, he didn’t break me, but I lost, that’s for sure.” She fingered her swollen, split lip. “I was in the mood to take on a whole football team today. Work has been really challenging, and I needed to fight or go down. Whichever. Didn’t matter. I know you understand.”
Sophie gazed at him, still hoping for some response. There was none. She let herself really take in the sight of him.
His eyes, shut, sunken in pouches of bruised flesh left from his beating. Chest rising and falling evenly. Skin sallow and multicolored with bruising. Heart monitor blipping in the corner. He’d shrunk in mass, the muscular body seeming to melt away. It was going to be a long road for him back to health and fitness when he finally woke up.
She reached over and traced the triangle tattoo on his slack shoulder muscle.
“I can’t tell you about my case and work even if you’re in a coma, but let’s just say it’s been even more stressful than usual, and now I’m off on admin leave for the next two days. So I was in the mood to really go at it, and kudos to The Breaker. He made me work hard, and I know I gave him more of a run than he was expecting from a woman, if his insults were anything to go by.” She picked up Alika’s limp hand, brought it to her cheek. “Feel this. Got a nice contusion here on the cheekbone, and on my eye. Looks worse than yours right now.”
His hand felt clammy and limp. It made her sad to press it against her own wounded face. She set it down among the bedclothes, still holding it.
“Anyway, I haven’t been here to visit because I’m worried about my ex, Assan. He used to make threats when I was with him, tell me what he’d do to anyone I ever tried to be with. It was five years ago, and I’d put it all behind me because after we divorced I never heard anything from him. But I never gave him cause to act on any of his jealous threats until…until you.” She hung her head, still holding his hand. “I can’t take the chance that he had something to do with your attack. We’re going after his business and I feel confident we’re going to shut it down in the States, but I don’t know how to get him locked up. From so far away, I don’t know how to get him put away where he can’t hurt anyone. And until I do, I don’t want to take a chance of adding to whatever’s going on with you. I hope you understand.”
She gazed over at Alika. No change in his face. His chest rose and fell like a metronome. He seemed peaceful, at least.
She felt the prickle of tears and used a bit of sheet to dab them away, careful of her blackened eye. “Well, this is harder than I imagined. I brought you flowers. You’d probably hate them, but here they are.” She set the wrapped bouquet on the blanket in front of him. “I should get going. I have to put some ice on these bruises before they get really bad. And get on with finding Assan again, my admin leave project. Then, maybe someday we can be together.” She picked up his hand, kissed the battered knuckles, and set it down.
She went to the door, pushed down the handle, and glanced out into the hall.
No one was there.
Even the officer guarding the room was gone.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Even the police officer’s plastic chair was gone. Sophie tensed as she looked up and down the empty hall.
This could be nothing, or it could be the beginning of something very bad.
She withdrew back into the room and checked for some way to lock the door, but there was none. She grabbed one of the plastic chairs and propped it under the handle of the door. She pulled a pillowcase off one of the pillows wedged beside Alika’s head and, ripping off a bit of surgical tape from the roll inside the wall-mounted rack of supplies, hung it over the window into the hall so no one could see through the safety glass insert into the room. Then she hurried to the phone and called the nurses’ station.
The phone rang and rang and rang.
Maybe there was a major emergency that had called all the personnel away.
Maybe the officer had left his station for a bathroom break, knowing she was a Federal cop visiting the victim.
But she’d turned in her badge, creds and weapon, and even though she had her own gun, it was at home in a safe where it could do exactly no good.
“Always better to assume the worst in a combat situation,” she told Alika, glancing around for something to use as a weapon even as she dialed 911 on her cell phone. “You told me that.”
No Signal.
She’d experienced the notoriously bad reception in the hospital before, but the timing didn’t seem coincidental.
Sophie went back to Alika’s bed and hit the Call Nurse button on the cord beside his hand. A light went on at the back of his bed, and she suddenly wondered who saw those lights in the nurses’ station, and whether alerting a possible unsub that she was aware of a problem was worth the risk.
Too late now.
She grabbed the wall phone and instead of dialing 0 for the desk, tried an external line and called 911 again.
The phone was dead too, the absence of a dial tone as deafening as a siren in her ear.
Sophie lifted the makeshift curtain she’d made off the window and peeked out. Unfortunately, now she had only a limited range of view, but she still saw no one. She wondered if she had time to try to move Alika somewhere else, decided it was too risky to try to wheel him into the hall.
But she could try to shelter him from the line of fire through the door. And she needed a weapon.
Moving fast, she unhooked all the various bags of liquid from the tall steel IV pole beside Alika’s bed and set them on the bed beside him. It was wheeled, so she unplugged all the electrical units on the bed from the wall. This set off an alarm from the cardiac monitor, a high-pitched beeping that she hoped was going somewhere else in the hospital to bring help. She pulled the brake lever, and, grunting with the effort of moving the heavy, unwieldy bed, hauled it over out of range of the window and door. Anyone trying to get a bead on the bed would have to come inside the room and turn to do so. She wasn’t going to let that happen.
Sophie picked up the steel pole, hefted it.
It was solid, with clunky wheels on one end a T-shaped crossbar at the top. She unscrewed the wheel unit from the bottom and took up a position beside the door to wait, the po
le raised.
She didn’t have to wait long.
The door handle jiggled against the plastic back of the chair propped under it. Jiggled again. Jiggled a third time.
What if it was hospital staff? She had done all she could to alert the medical team to a problem in the room.
The glass of the door’s window shattering was her answer as something blew it out. The pillowcase she’d put up deflected the heavy glass to tinkle onto the floor beside her. The rest of the glass was knocked out of the window. She glimpsed the red metal of a fire axe.
No one called out. Medical personnel wouldn’t enter a room that way. The unsub was trying to get a look inside, see what was happening in the room and where the target was.
A hand appeared in the window’s opening, holding the silver gleam of a Sig Sauer with its barrel lengthened by a silencer. The gun’s muzzle lifted the pillowcase, questing for the bed. She was very glad she’d wheeled Alika off to the side against the wall with the bed’s back to the door.
Sophie brought the steel pole down like a guillotine on the wrist protruding into the room. There was a gratifying crack of snapping bone, a scream, and the Sig dropped at her feet. Sophie scooped up the weapon, and, staying beside the door, stuck her hand out the small window and fired blind into the hall.
The silencer made a sound like spitting watermelon seeds. Sophie hoped like hell she didn’t hit some innocent nurse coming to help.
Gunfire erupted from the other side of the door.
Sophie dove to the ground beside Alika’s bed. Shards of wood and metal blew out as the unsub unloaded another weapon on the door. There was no silencer on this one, and she covered her ears, head ringing from the blasts in the enclosed space. She tried to count the shots but they were coming too fast. A semi-automatic? Even so, she could feel the vibration of running feet through the floor as the unsub ran away when he’d emptied his clip.
Sophie scrambled up and looked at the door. Light shone through forty or fifty holes and the wall opposite the door was peppered with embedded ammo.
“It was a good thing I moved your bed,” she said to Alika.
The Sig in ready position, she depressed the handle and pushed open the battered door, peering into the hall.
Several people in white coats were running toward her, led by the officer who had been on duty.
She held the gun up in the air above her head along with her other hand, so they didn’t think she was the attacker. “Got this weapon off the shooter and moved the patient. He’s okay. But I think we’re going to need another room.”
Sophie didn’t leave Alika’s side all through his transfer, vigilant beside the staffers as they wheeled him, bed and all, to another room.
She called Waxman on her cell when he’d been moved and re-hooked up to all his support systems. She was finally sitting down, waiting to give her statement to Marcus and Marcella, who were on their way. The HPD crime lab team was currently picking bullets out of the wall two floors below her.
“I was visiting my friend Alika Wolcott in the hospital when someone tried to kill him,” Sophie said to Waxman. She turned the Sig over and over in her hands. It was evidence. And it was a nice weapon, the weapon of a professional, right down to the silencer screwed into the barrel. “Probably not related to any of my cases.”
“What?” Waxman said. “Say that again.”
“Just wanted to let my superior know an occurrence happened to me in the field while on administrative leave. I’m sure there’s a form I need to fill out or something.” She knew she sounded sarcastic.
“Are you okay?” Waxman’s voice sounded blank with shock. “Were you injured?”
“I’m fine.” She glanced down, noticed a long sliver of wood from the door protruding from her forearm. “Well, mostly fine. Few bumps and bruises, but I had those going in.” She set the Sig down and tugged out the sliver. Blood welled in its wake.
The door opened and she grabbed the Sig and spun toward the threat. It was Marcus Kamuela, scowling. Sophie didn’t ever want to be someone he was coming after.
“The officer investigating this has just arrived. I have to go, but I wanted to take a moment to apprise my superior.” Sophie hung up the phone and set the weapon down. “Better late than never,” she said to Marcus. “I hope you talked to that officer that was supposed to be guarding the door.”
“Sure did. He said he was called away on his walkie-talkie by someone claiming to be a fellow officer spotting someone suspicious in the stairway. When he got there, the unsub clocked him. Good thing you were inside and took steps to protect Wolcott. Let me get your statement.” He took out a voice recorder.
Sophie stood up and a whirlpool of black dots danced in front of her eyes. “I’m not feeling so well.”
She came to a minute or two later, lying on the floor next to Alika’s bed, feet elevated on a spare pillow. Marcella knelt beside her, covering her in a thin blanket, and she had an IV in her hand. A nurse was hanging a bag of clear liquid on the same IV pole as Alika’s.
“Just some glucose and water,” the nurse said. “You were in shock and severely dehydrated. Take it easy. You’ll be fine in a little while.”
Marcella knelt by Sophie, tucking the blanket around her. “Looks like you had an encounter today before the gunfight,” she said, touching Sophie’s cheek lightly.
“You’ll do anything to avoid giving a statement,” Kamuela said, with weak humor. He seemed rattled by her fainting. “You look like hell, Sophie. Who gave you the beat down?”
“So embarrassing.” Sophie shut her eyes. “I didn’t eat all day and had a bout at Fight Club, then the attack…guess it got the best of me.” She sat up slowly. She was already feeling better, the IV working to rehydrate and energize her. “Sometimes I get so caught up in my head I forget to take care of the body.”
“Lie back down and tell us the series of events.” Kamuela pressed Record on his device.
Sophie went through the attack and how she’d ended up with the Sig. Marcella bagged the deadly looking weapon. “Hopefully, the rounds from the wall tell us something and so does this.”
“So someone came with intent to kill Wolcott. Or were you the target?” Marcus asked.
“Don’t see how they came for me,” Sophie said. “No one knew I was coming here and I’ve been staying away on purpose.” She told them her worries about Assan.
“So then we don’t really know who this shooter was going after.”
“I think it’s safe to assume the target was Alika.” Sophie got up slowly from the floor and sat down on a handy chair beside Alika, glancing over at him.
Alika was gazing back at her. His golden-brown eyes were circled in pouches of old bruising, but clear and conscious.
“Who are you?” He articulated each word clearly. “And what am I doing here?”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Sophie unlocked her apartment, feeling a thousand years old. Marcella was right behind her as she went in, deactivated the alarm and greeted excited Ginger, who badly needed to go out. That was the first thing the two women did, walking the dog out of the building and standing close together against the wall, still sun-warmed though evening was casting purple shadows on the patch of lawn trimmed in hibiscus hedge beside the building. The lab nosed around the grass and did her business
“They say amnesia is common with a head injury like he has,” Marcella said.
“That’s the third time you’ve said that and the fourth time I’ve heard it, if you include the doctor who told me the first time.” Sophie cleaned up after the dog and tossed the bag in a nearby garbage can. “Let’s go to that little noodle place on the corner. I need to move. My muscles are stiffening up.”
Marcella was subdued, and Sophie couldn’t think of what to say either, reduced by exhaustion and trauma to a zombie-like state as they proceeded down the sidewalk to the noodle shop where she and Ginger sometimes got meals.
“His parents were so happy to see him awake, but
he didn’t recognize them either.” Marcella was obviously still bothered for Sophie’s sake.
“Marcella, it’s okay. I’m just glad he’s alive and going to get better. As long as we can stop whoever’s going after him,” Sophie really believed that right now. The relief of seeing Alika awake had more than made up for the blow of his amnesia. She’d taken comfort from the fact that the forgetfulness seemed global. He hadn’t just mentally deleted her in particular. Ginger flopped down when Sophie secured her leash and they went inside, sitting at the long communal counter.
They earned a few curious glances from the various patrons of the restaurant, but the owner recognized Sophie.
“Hope you gave back some of the same.” He made a gesture that took in her battered appearance as he served her a huge bowl of saimin.
“I made him work for it.” Sophie scooped up fragrant broth with the deep square spoon. “But I didn’t win this time.”
They talked about the MMA scene as the proprietor served Marcella, and finally moved off to wait on other customers.
“So I might as well catch you up on Alika’s case. We’ve got the gang members who beat him in custody, and we’re following leads from their testimony.” Marcella slurped a mouthful of noodles and chased a slice of egg around in the broth. “Things are promising with prosecuting your ex. We can’t find any link between Alika and Ang, besides using the same shipper and storage facility. I don’t think this attack is personal, or about you having a relationship with Alika like you’ve been worried about. Everything we’re uncovering seems to point to him running afoul of the Boyz who control the construction trade. They set him up to appear like a wholesale drug shipper and then used him to send a message to other noncompliant developers. But we may not get anyone higher on the food chain for a while. Marcus is digging in for a long investigation into the activity in the construction trade. For now, I’m glad we brought in the hoods who beat him up. They were probably supposed to kill him, and the Boyz sent someone to finish the job at the hospital. Hopefully, we can put enough heat on them so they leave him alone now.”
