The ribbing went on for another minute, until Austin got up and walked a lap around the building. He closed his eyes and pictured himself slipping into the green coat. Calm. Safe. They were just idiots. He had no reason to bristle. When he returned to his desk eight minutes later, the other guys ignored him. Why the change?
Stiles winked. Hmm, maybe … Austin dipped an inconspicuous nod. Thanks. Stiles nodded back.
By lunch break, Austin never wanted to touch a document scanner again. Fifty-something or not, Stiles must get bored, facing forty hours of this every week. Austin grabbed his coat and headed for his car, ready for a long workout with the day only half over.
“Hold up,” came a deep voice from over his shoulder.
What could Stiles want? Austin folded his arms, keys still dangling from one hand. “Yeah?”
“Why are you really stuck in paperwork today?”
Austin forced an eye roll that said, Man, I thought you were cooler than this. “Wrist slap, that’s all. Learning my place.”
“Did you question him?”
“Guess I must have.”
This wasn’t curiosity. Stiles’s dark gaze bored into Austin, and he tugged a pen from his jacket pocket and started to walk it through his long fingers. Hurry up and defuse this.
“Really, no worries,” Austin said. “He’s all bark, you know?”
The walking pen froze. The man lowered his hand to his side and took a step forward. “You’re obviously not paying attention, kid. Maybe I should walk away and let you learn by experience.”
Austin’s mouth dried. He pressed his heels into the blacktop. Don’t step back. Don’t give ground. But nothing about Stiles held a threat, other than his voice.
“However, I try not to leave people in their stupidity, so hear me on this. Jason Mayweather is the toothiest pit bull in the MPC. You cross him, he’ll tear your throat out.”
Maybe it was the reference to a mortal wound, or maybe the pull of Stiles’s frown and the urgency in his eyes. Understanding rained over Austin. Jason, Tisdale isn’t the only one who thinks you killed that guy. But Stiles didn’t show any fear. If anything, flickering behind his eyes … that might be hate. The kind that precipitated action. If only this man knew that a mile away, Brenner was …
“You know,” Stiles said quietly.
Austin shrugged. “Know what?”
“That it’s not just a rumor. What, did he brag to you and then regret it, put you down here as a threat?”
The proximity to the truth sent a chill down Austin’s back. He folded his arms. “It’s just a rumor, Agent Stiles.”
Maybe something could be done. Maybe Brenner could be transferred to official custody, and Jason would … would what? Regardless, a man was being abused to death a mile away. It had to stop. So either Austin stopped it on his own, or—
“What makes you so sure?” Stiles said.
Austin swallowed. This man could be testing him and reporting back to Jason.
Stiles stepped closer until Austin had to lean back, but his feet stayed put. No giving ground. The man’s finger poked Austin’s chest—not hard, but he had to move his feet to keep his balance. His arm swung up to block and their fists collided somehow and Austin’s brain went black as his body surged.
“Whoa!”
The deep voice penetrated the furious haze. Austin blinked. He’d seized Stiles’s arms, locked them behind his back, and shoved him face-first against the car.
“Hey, ease up, son, I—”
Austin twisted his arm. “Not your son.”
“Sorry. Comes with the graying hair. Listen, I got up in your space, and I apologize. I think we’ve both had a long week.”
True enough. Austin turned Stiles loose.
The man rotated his shoulders and turned slowly. “Agent Delvecchio, if you know anything, I’m asking you to tell me.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The words were like brands on his brain.
Stiles closed his eyes. “I’m talking about Jason Mayweather.” His eyes opened. “And the murder of Marcus Brenner.”
What are you going to do about it, Austin? Cry or hit back?
He had to tell someone. Someone who, when pinned to a car for no good reason, apologized instead of retaliating.
“Actually, sir … there hasn’t been a murder yet.”
8
“Go to the kitchen and wash your hands for—”
“Thirty seconds,” Violet said from the floor of the car. “And then I’ll come find you in the exam rooms. Really, Lee, we’ve done this a few times now.”
Not like this. Sam’s I have a patient for you texts had never coded the emergency higher than a six. The text she’d deleted half an hour ago still tied her stomach into a knot. No random sentence to make her smile, no Wassup homegirl, nothing but the number.
Ten.
She tried to sigh the tension from her body along with her breath. Not effective. Her “six” patient had suffered a dislocated shoulder, tears of pain streaking his face before she even arrived, much less relocated the joint. A ten could mean multiple patients. Burns. Gunshot wound. Anything. She parked behind the clinic and let the headlights shut off before opening her door. Violet sprang up from the backseat and followed her into the windy night. Inside, Violet started to head for the kitchen.
“Wait,” Lee said.
Violet glanced past her down the hall, toward whatever case awaited them. “Yeah?”
“You need to prepare yourself before you join me.”
“I’ve seen blood plenty of—”
“I don’t expect merely blood this time.”
“Maybe there’re two patients, and that’s why he called it a ten.”
Maybe. “If you can’t handle whatever it is, you need to let me know immediately and then leave the room.”
A month ago, Violet might have rolled her eyes. But she only sighed and nodded, then left to scrub in. Lee hurried to the exam rooms.
Sam sat on the edge of one of the beds, his back to her, shoulders hunched. Twice, she scanned the room. Everything was as she’d left it two days ago.
“Sam?”
He jolted to his feet and faced her, and her heart skipped. He stared at her, eyes too wide, the whites showing between dark irises and dark skin. In one hand, he gripped a pen, as if he’d been walking it through his fingers while waiting for her. Lee stepped nearer. The pen was broken.
“Where is my patient?” she said.
“Sit down.”
Understanding whipped away the cold shroud that had dropped onto the room. Sam had brought her here for a discussion, no doubt about her errors in judgment, bringing new patients here herself. “This. Is not acceptable.”
“Lee, I need to—”
“You manipulated me into coming here with an emergency code? A ten, no less, and there’s not even a patient? I brought Violet and—”
“Good.” He stuffed the broken pen into the pocket of his light blue polo, and black ink smeared the edge of the pocket.
“Good?”
“That you brought Violet. Now sit down and let me—”
Lee pivoted on her heel and stalked toward the door. Sam planted himself in front of her, and his eyes seemed even wider now.
“There is a patient. I put him in the guestroom.”
What? They’d furnished that room with only a mattress, pillows, and blankets for her, should she ever treat someone who needed round-the-clock, critical care. “The guestroom’s not for public use.”
“It isn’t public. He isn’t. I mean—Lee, sit. I have to talk to you. Before you go in there.”
“Did the patient die while you waited for me?”
“No, he—he’s—alive.” Sam scrubbed at his face. “Dang it, Lee, I can’t figure out how to tell you.”
“Then don’t.” She headed toward the room. Sam grabbed her arm, but she wrenched free. What was wrong with him? He knew what she saw every day at work. Just today, she’d lost an MVA victim ejected through the windshield.
Violet’s voice trailed behind her. “What’s going on, you guys?”
“It’s Marcus,” Sam said.
Lee’s feet stopped inches from the closed door. “I’m sorry, I misheard you.”
“You didn’t.” Sam pressed his thumbs into his eyes. “The patient is Marcus. Lee, listen to me, he—”
Her hand flung the door open. Her feet charged into the room. She scrutinized the patient on the mattress, ready to catalogue every feature that proved he wasn’t Marcus.
But he was.
His chest rose and fell once, twice, three times, while she stood there and waited for it to stop. It didn’t. Lee fell to her knees beside the mattress and pressed two fingers to his left wrist. His heartbeat was steady.
Respiration. Pulse.
Alive.
His eyes were fixed on her, blank. His faint gasp became a cough. His right arm pulled into his chest.
“I laid him down flat,” Sam said from behind her. “The pillow was under his head.”
Lee blinked. One detail came into focus—Marcus lay propped against the wall with the pillow supporting his back—and then all the rest sharpened too. Gauntness, shallow inhalation, unwashed clothes and hair and beard, eyes too bright. Fever. And the cough … he’d moved because he couldn’t breathe.
Lee wrapped her hand around his wrist. Alive.
“Marcus—” She cleared the burning from her throat. “How long have you been ill?”
His gaze didn’t waver from her, but he didn’t speak.
“Marcus?”
His right arm tightened against his chest.
Sam’s voice came nearer. “He hasn’t said a word so far.”
A fit of coughing seized Marcus, and he jerked his wrist from her hold to wrap both arms around … not his chest. His ribs.
The shirt left human oil on her fingertips as she pushed it up his torso. Behind her, Violet gasped. Black bruising covered most of his body, faded to yellow at his stomach, glaring fresh purple along his right side. A boot print, toe to heel. Not a kick, at least not that time. He’d been supine and stomped on. Lee reached out to raise his arms, but he shrank against the pillow and ducked his head.
“I need to remove your shirt,” she whispered.
The brown eyes that locked onto hers held no comprehension, no emotion.
“You can hear me, can’t you? If you can, I need you to nod.”
A muscle pulled in his jaw. He dipped his head in that single, jerking motion, as familiar as his laugh or his smile.
“You’ve been—” Brutalized. “Injured. Will you let me help you?”
His hands clenched against the mattress.
“Marcus.” She folded her hands on the bed, next to his left one. “Please.”
His gaze traveled to their hands, and he watched his own fingers uncurl. Then he met her eyes again and blinked. “Lee.”
“Yes?”
“Lee?”
“Yes.”
His head bowed. He clasped her hand between both of his and pressed it to his chest. “Lee.”
She tried to focus, tried to prioritize the damage, tried to turn and find Violet’s gaze. She couldn’t move.
A gentle hand squeezed her forearm. Violet’s voice choked on tears, but she steadied it. “What should I bring you?”
Thank you. “Stethoscope. Scissors. Ice packs. A water bottle, he’s dehydrated. Marcus, when did you last eat?”
He shook his head.
“He needs antibiotics,” Lee said, “but not without food. Bring whatever you find.”
“Be right back.” Violet all but ran from the room.
Lee rose from her knees and sat on the edge of the mattress. Marcus’s grip tightened when her hand shifted, but he didn’t lift his head. At the edge of her vision, someone moved. She looked up.
Sam stood against the wall. The broken pen had bled a circle of black ink onto the pocket of his shirt.
“They …” The rest of the words remained in her head, screaming. They had him all these months, and you missed it?
Sam’s voice rasped. “This wasn’t sanctioned.”
In what way was that supposed to matter?
“The case file still says he escaped in June. But from what I learned tonight, he’s been … since …”
One hundred thirty-eight days. He hadn’t been dead while she bottled up his laugh, his smile, his nod, his voice saying her name. He’d been breathing all this time. So many breaths in one hundred thirty-eight days.
“It was Mayweather, Lee, all of it. Operating alone, off the books. I knew he was … but I didn’t know he was …”
A finger of ice ran down her back. All of it. The boot tread on Marcus’s side.
“You have to run,” Sam said.
“Run?”
“When he finds that room empty … Mayweather’s going to come after you, and you’re not going to convince him you don’t know anything. You need to get out of Michigan. All of you.”
“What room? Where was he, what—”
Marcus’s grip nearly crushed her hand. She swiveled toward him, but he didn’t raise his head.
“Lee,” Sam said. He stepped forward but stopped in the middle of the room, well outside her space. “You need to hear me on this, on what has to happen.”
She would make Marcus well. That’s what would happen.
“You cannot go home, you cannot go to work.”
“Obviously.”
“What Mayweather did—I don’t know what other lines he’ll cross. I don’t know if he has any lines.”
“And where would we go?”
“Personally, I’d suggest Texas.”
“Sam.” She couldn’t imagine it. Well, actually, she could. Safety for Marcus. For all of them. But it was a dream, nothing more.
“Here’s everything.” Violet plowed into the room and knelt next to the mattress. She held up a Ziploc, its contents blurred by condensation from the inside. “It’s a sandwich from last time I was here—PB and J. The bread’s a little mushy.”
Protein and carbohydrates, good enough for the moment. First things first, though. Lee reached for the scissors, and Marcus released her other hand. His shirt was stiff with old sweat and grime. She cut upward from the hem to the collar, then did the same to the back of it while Violet held his shoulders to keep him upright. The shirt peeled away, taking with it flakes of dead skin. Four months without a shower. The smell registered in Lee’s brain for the first time. His muscular build had wasted to skin stretched over bone.
He flinched when she pressed the stethoscope first to his sternum, then to his back. Hope withered at the crackle in his lungs.
She set the stethoscope aside. “Pneumonia.”
“What does he need?” Violet said, still propping him up.
A hospital. Oxygen. A saline IV infused with nutrients, analgesics, antibiotics. She pushed away the impossibilities. “Amoxicillin, if it’s bacterial.”
“You want me to bring you some?”
“In a minute. Marcus, I need to check for rib fractures.”
He seemed to understand but didn’t respond. She palpated each rib, anterior and posterior. Four of them shifted under pressure, all on his left side. His only reaction was a pause in his breathing, but when she lowered him to the pillow, placing it to the left of his spine, he gave a shallow sigh of relief. Lee settled the ice packs against the darkest contusions, and he held his breath, then sighed again. His eyes closed. The furrow between his eyebrows could have been pain or something else.
“All right.” She forced the tremor from her voice. “The ice packs
will help with the fever as well as the bruising. For now, the most pressing needs are oxygen, nutrition, and hydration.”
Violet offered her the water bottle.
“Marcus,” Lee said, and his eyes opened. “You need to drink all of this.”
He licked his lips, and one crack began to bleed. Lee unscrewed the cap from the bottle and offered it to him, but he nearly dropped it. She held the back of his head and tipped the bottle to his lips. Violet jumped up and hurried from the room. What was she doing?
Marcus’s hand came up to curl around the bottle, brushing hers with too much heat. With a fever this high, he should be sweating, but his skin was only flushed. He gulped the water too fast.
“Slowly,” Lee said, but he ignored her. She pulled the bottle back, and his breaths wheezed. “Slowly.”
He jerked a nod. By the time he’d finished the water, Violet had returned with a small jar of petroleum jelly.
“Here.” She held it out.
Sensible of her. Lee dabbed her finger in the jar, touched it to his bottom lip. He watched her, then closed his eyes, and the wrinkle between them returned. When she’d finished, his lips were coated with a thick shine and her hand was shaking.
She cleared her throat. “Can you eat?”
He opened his eyes.
“Marcus, I … If you can, please answer me.”
He nodded.
“Can you answer me?”
Silence swelled until the walls might crack. Marcus pressed his lips together, then whispered. “I can. Eat.”
While he chewed each bite of sandwich for a long minute, Lee looked up at Sam. “I can’t move him in this condition. He needs three days for the pneumonia to start clearing up, and his ribs—”
“Move him? Where to, Texas?” When no one corrected Violet’s sarcasm, her eyes widened. “Really? You’re … leaving?”
“If we do, you’re welcome to accompany us,” Lee said. She is?
Yes.
Before Violet could answer her, Marcus pushed aside the second half of sandwich. He shook his head when Lee tried to persuade him to finish it but whispered, “Thanks.”
“When did you eat last?” Maybe he’d respond this time beyond a head shake.
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