by Toby Neal
Stevens, crouched by Anela’s body, looked at Lei and nodded agreement. Lei finally really looked at the fallen woman.
Anela’s pistol was still in her hand. She’d been turning to shoot, but Lei had gotten her first. There was a neat hole in her forehead from the small-caliber round from Lei’s snub-nosed ankle piece. She was sure the back of Anela’s head was messier. The woman had fallen backward out of the Jeep, and one of her feet, in a businessman’s loafer, still rested in the doorframe of the vehicle.
“One moment. Let us triangulate off your phone signal, and then the pilot will set the bird down as close to your location as he can,” the 911 operator said.
Lei sat down in the driver’s seat and felt the collective extremes of the last few days overwhelm her now that they were safe. Pain was talking to her from all over her body, but most concerning was a clenching in her guts, a punch to the lower back. She puzzled over how she could have hurt herself there, but with falling down the stairs of the plane, there was no telling.
Ben had reclaimed his phone, and they’d allowed him to call his wife—“but no one else until you give your statement.” The young man was pacing, talking, and gesticulating. Stevens had picked up one of the hunting rifles and reloaded his holsters. Bristling with weapons, he stood near, keeping an eye on their prisoners and looking out for any intruders.
Lei heard the thrum of the chopper’s approach overhead, and she looked up into the deep blue sky. Poufs of dazzling white cloud scudded by, and as she often did, Lei felt the contrast of the beauty around them and the ugliness of their humanity. She leaned her head on the steering wheel, conscious of the dead woman a few feet away, the thumping pain of her head, and of an increasing dull agony in her abdomen.
“You okay?” Stevens asked, frowning.
“I don’t think so. I think you better have them take me to the hospital. Something’s wrong.” Lei wrapped her arms around her waist and raised her eyes to Stevens, feeling her face twist at the pain and her eyes fill with terrified tears. “Something’s wrong with Baby.”
All the oxygen had gone out of the air. Stevens drew in breaths, but they just burned his lungs. He was smothering: buried, burning, drowning. He flailed, fighting for that last breath.
He woke as his thrashing elbow hit the wooden arm of the chair, sending a jangle of excruciating nerve pain up his arm. He sat up, holding his elbow in the dim glow of the hospital-room floor strip, and glanced over at the bed, hoping he hadn’t woken Lei.
She was awake. He saw the gleam of her eyes in the dim light, the shine of tears on her cheeks. He was already as close to her as he could be in the chair, but now he took her hand. “Are you hurting?” he whispered.
They’d given her some sort of medication to stop the contractions she’d been having. She’d been bleeding when they first got to the hospital, but the medicine seemed to have worked because the symptoms had backed off. Lei had refused any pain medications for her head injury, not wanting it to affect the baby.
The hours between when the helicopters had reached them and now were a painful and terrifying blur he hoped never to relive.
“Head hurts,” she whispered back. “Tummy hurts. I’m so scared, Michael. I want this baby so much. I never expected to feel this way.”
“Me too,” he said. He pulled her over so her forehead touched his, and their breath mingled in the warm space between their bodies. “But if something happens, there will be others.”
She pulled away from him, crossing her arms over her belly in that protective gesture he was coming to know. “I don’t want any others.” She turned her face away.
He wasn’t going to let her withdraw. He got up and gently moved her over in the bed, climbing in with her, turned on his side so he was wedged beside the support bars. He pulled her into his arms and, when she finally relaxed, her breath smoothing out in sleep, he wriggled them around until he was on his back and she on her side, her head in her special spot, her body stretched along his.
Warm, supported, sheltered.
He could feel their heartbeats falling into the same rhythm.
And when he finally slept, he didn’t dream.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Stevens sat with the Kaua`i detectives that had responded to the emergency call from Ni`ihau. He and Lei had been on the medevac helicopter, which had flown her to the closest hospital, Kaua`i’s Wilcox Memorial. They’d spent the night there along with the hijackers they’d shot. Stevens had turned both their peashooter revolvers in to the ballistics department, but they’d been too occupied with Lei’s crisis to give statements.
“It’s been a few years.” Lei’s former nemesis from her stint on Kaua`i, short, muscular Detective “Fury” Furukawa, clapped Stevens on the shoulder in male camaraderie. “Nice takedown out there.”
“Team effort with Lei,” Stevens said.
“Yeah. About that,” Furukawa said, flipping open a file filled with crime-scene photos of the Jeep. Anela’s body sprawled out of the vehicle, one of her feet still caught in the Jeep’s door. “How’s Lei doing?”
Stevens had the feeling Furukawa was asking strictly for form’s sake, and he was glad to know Lei’s former partner, Jack Jenkins, and Captain Fernandez, who’d always been supportive, were watching the interview. They had friends, even on Kaua`i, the most remote of the islands.
“Hanging in there. Not in any shape for an interview yet.” Stevens pushed a hand through his hair, deliberately turning his thoughts away from Lei, still curled up in that hospital bed.
“Well, then. Why don’t you start by walking us through the events.”
Stevens gave his statement, grateful when, halfway through, his union rep arrived to sit in. He didn’t entirely trust Furukawa or his sidekick, Flea, two men who’d resented his and Lei’s presence on Kaua`i when they’d worked there some years ago.
“So, when you whispered to Lei to get up shooting when the Jeep stopped, did you tell her to kill Anela Chang?”
“We were in a life-or-death situation. I told her to ‘take out’ Anela and the driver, because I thought I could push her up into a better position to shoot them than the men directly across from us, who I was in a better position to get. If I shot at Anela and the driver, I would have had to get Lei off my lap, stand up, turn, aim, et cetera. All we had was speed and the element of surprise. We were lucky it was enough.”
“I just find it interesting that Lei shot Anela in the head and the driver in the back of the shoulder.”
“We had to use deadly force. Anela has a gun in her hand, as you can plainly see, and Lei was close to her. Too close to miss.” Stevens felt his breathing hitching with agitation as he stabbed the photo emphatically with his finger.
“And yet you didn’t shoot to kill the men across from you.”
“Neither had their weapon at the ready. The Ni`ihau man had set his rifle down on his lap. The pilot had tucked his weapon in his belt. It’s a split-second decision. When I fire, I’m prepared to use deadly force in every circumstance—but I took a chance that it wasn’t necessary this time. Anela was the only one holding a weapon at the ready.”
“And she’s one of those behind the attacks on your home and family, if what the Big Island investigators say is true.”
Stevens set his jaw and didn’t answer. He didn’t like where this was going.
“So do you think a head shot was necessary to stop Anela Chang?”
The union rep finally interjected. “Lieutenant Stevens can only speak to his own actions.”
“So tell us again how you knew the plane was being hijacked.”
Stevens went through it again and again as Fury and Flea tried to find a hole, an inconsistency in the story, a variation that showed Lei and Stevens setting Anela up for slaughter—at least that’s what it felt like to Stevens. He was grateful that there were multiple witnesses, especially the pilot Ben, who could corroborate events.
Stevens’s phone had been vibrating in his pocket for the last half ho
ur when the union rep finally brought things to a close. Stevens checked his phone. Multiple calls from Wilcox Memorial flashed up at him, and his heart rate spiked.
“Excuse me. I have to see what this is.” Stevens stood and turned away to listen to a nurse telling him to return to the hospital. “Your wife’s taken a turn for the worse.”
Stevens ran out of the interview room, hitting the door with his shoulder. Jack Jenkins, his fresh young face worried, burst out of the observation room to fall into step beside Stevens as he headed for the front doors of the building. “Take me back to the hospital. Lei’s having trouble.” The lead ball of dread and fear in the pit of Stevens’s stomach made him short of breath.
Lei didn’t want to wake up. There was some very good reason not to, and as the cottony darkness of medication receded, she tried in vain to cling to it.
But slowly, inevitably, as if an unstoppable force like the tide was depositing her on a shore, waves of consciousness pushed her higher and higher into wakefulness. And there was nothing there she wanted.
She remembered now why she didn’t want to wake up.
Baby is gone.
Lei’s whole body convulsed in a thrashing movement of self-protection as she curled up tight around her empty womb, her arms and legs pulling in close, the IV in her hand snagging on something and bringing her up short.
She opened her eyes. Stevens was there beside her. He reached a fumbling hand to untangle the plastic tubing, trying to keep the needle from ripping out of the back of her hand. She reached up to touch his face.
“Tell me it didn’t happen,” she begged.
Instant tears filled Stevens’s arctic-blue eyes and welled over. Those blue eyes, haggard under dark brows, told her Baby was gone.
“No!” Lei cried. “No! No! No!” She rolled back and forth in the bed, arms tight around herself. The IV needle broke out of her hand, and the rails of the bed rattled as she banged against them.
She knew her wails of grief were inappropriate and weak, and she didn’t care. Nothing existed but this terrible rending, this loss of hope, future, and love—the death of someone she’d known in a magical way, if even for a short time, and that she’d wanted to know all her life.
So many losses. All of those losses piled on her. She was drowning in them.
Her childhood, stolen from her by abuse and drugs.
Aunty Rosario, her guardian and beloved hanai mom, gone so recently.
Her mother, Maylene, lost to her addiction.
Her grandmother, Yumi, whom she’d never known.
Anchara murdered.
And now Baby.
People came. There were noises and soothing hands and Stevens trying to comfort her, but nothing made any difference, nor ever would. They must have given her something, because finally, merciful darkness closed over her head.
The next time Lei woke up, it was because light was stabbing the backs of her eyes. There was a dull throbbing in her uterus. Her mouth was cottony with thirst, but she also had to pee.
She remembered.
The energy for any movement was gone. She lay still, feeling utterly flat.
Flat and mangled, like roadkill.
Flat as an open desert road with nothing for miles in any direction.
Lei opened her eyes. The room was empty, and she was relieved no one was there. She didn’t even want to see Stevens right now. She reached over and pressed the button that lifted the bed up. She noticed her left hand was bandaged where the IV had been torn out. They’d put a new one in her right hand.
Carefully, Lei swung her legs to the side of the bed and used the steel pole with its rolling wheels to help her stand, and shuffling like a crone, she went into the bathroom.
Lei’s underwear crinkled with a bloodstained pad as she went to sit on the toilet. Tears welled at the sight. She managed to pee and then got herself back into bed.
The feeling in her body, mind, and heart was like being an Egyptian mummy, she decided. Her organs had been chopped up and pulled out through her aching throat with a hook. Her body was a hollow wreck wrapped in bandages, her soul waiting for some far-from-certain resurrection.
“Ba-ba-ba!” Lei heard from the door, and her eyes flew open.
“Kiet!” she exclaimed. Stevens came toward her holding the baby. Kiet strained toward her, his mouth open with that pearly single tooth gleaming, rooster tail of black hair aquiver.
Lei folded the baby into her arms, and he felt wonderful and smelled perfect, like powder and milk. She burst into noisy tears at how good holding him felt and how utterly devastated she still was. Her emotions were a tornado, swirling and conflicted.
She’d lost Baby, but she still had Kiet.
Kiet went rigid with fright at the sound of her crying, arching his back and letting out an uncertain wail. Lei looked for Stevens to take him, but he and her father were out in the hall, conferring.
This is motherhood, Lei thought. You get a grip on yourself and do what’s right for the kid’s sake. Her own mother had never known how to do that, and Lei wasn’t going to make the same mistakes.
Lei gulped down her tears and smiled through them, snuggling and rocking Kiet close. “It’s okay, little buddy. Mom’s just a little emotional. It’s all good.” And she blew on his neck gently, and he hunched, even his toes curling up, and made a little sound like a giggle.
Her dad came across the room, sat in the chair next to the bed. “Lei-girl. I’m so sorry.”
“Me too.” Lei took Kiet’s hand, waving it, smiling at the baby to keep tears at bay.
“Wasn’t meant to be,” Wayne said. “But there will be others.”
Lei speared him with a glance. “Please don’t ever say that again. Nobody say that again.”
Wayne sat back in the chair and ran a hand through his hair. “Sorry, honey. I never know what to say about this kind of thing. Thank God you are both safe. Kiet missed you guys. Fussed all the time. I was at my wit’s end when I got the call you were here.”
“You did the right thing, bringing him to me,” Lei said.
Wayne smiled at her, gratitude in his face. “I didn’t know what else to do. He needs his mama.”
Stevens came in, carrying a big Starbucks cup and a bag. “Got a chocolate croissant for you.”
“Let me start with the coffee,” she said. “When am I getting out of here?”
Right on cue, a doctor had appeared in the doorway. He was a grandfatherly, kind-looking Asian man who looked vaguely familiar to Lei. “I’m Dr. Kim. Would you mind taking the baby out for a minute?” he asked Wayne. “I’d like to speak to the parents alone.”
“Sure.” Wayne got up with alacrity and took Kiet from Lei, carrying him out of the room.
The minute the baby was gone, Lei was aware of her emptiness again. She crossed her arms over her stomach and waited as Stevens sat down on the chair beside her. He handed her the cardboard cup, and she took it for something to do.
“So. You had a spontaneous miscarriage. You were in so much pain and distress, we gave you some pretty powerful medications to assist the process and to keep you comfortable. Then, as you signed consent for, I did a procedure called a D & C to make sure the uterus was clear. You have a healthy reproductive system. No lasting damage that I could determine.”
Lei blinked. The tears had started again, and they just kept trickling out. She didn’t remember any of it. She’d probably had one of her black-hole memory blips because of the trauma. She took a sip of coffee, her hand trembling. Stevens took the cup from her, taking both of her hands.
Still the tears trickled out of her eyes. “Was it my fault? Did I hurt the baby?”
“No. No, ma’am.” The doctor sat down on the edge of the bed beside her and flipped open his folder. “You had some injuries—a slight concussion from a blow to the head, a contusion on your eye. But nothing that would have caused trauma to the uterus or reproductive organs.”
“But what about stress causing it to happen? I was really
stressed out the last few days. We...we had a house fire. And a raid. And a hijacking.”
“No. None of that should have affected the fetus. Tons of stress hormones aren’t great for a developing baby, but there have been babies born in the most horrendous of circumstances—in the middle of wars—happy and healthy. Sometimes these things just happen. There’s usually something wrong with the fetus.” He shut the folder. His eyes were kind. “Don’t blame yourself. Take some time. Enjoy the child you have. And when you’re ready, try again. You’re young, and there are no problems with your reproductive system that I could see. You should be able to get pregnant again with no trouble.”
Lei shut her eyes. She couldn’t imagine being ready to take such a risk, but at the same time, the loss felt overwhelming. Never to have a baby, ever...Her brain shut down, unable to deal with the dilemma.
Stevens rubbed her hands. “How soon can we go home?”
“Tomorrow. I want you to stay one more day, just to rule out any complications or blood clots, that sort of thing.”
“Thanks, Doctor. I’m sure you did the best you could to help us,” Lei said, making herself look at him.
“Thought we’d saved your baby, but it just wasn’t meant to be this time,” the doctor said, standing up. “Feel better.” He left.
Stevens pulled her into his arms. “It wasn’t your fault.”
“I’ll never believe that,” Lei said, pressing her face into his shirt, her voice choked. “I should never have gone to the Big Island.”
“If we’re going to play the blame game, I should have caught you when that asshole pilot cracked you on the head and you fell down the stairs,” Stevens said. “I just couldn’t get there in time.”
