Witness Security Breach

by Juno Rushdan

  That was the nearest hospital, but Aiden recalled seeing a smaller medical center on the map when they were going to get Sharon.

  “There’s one closer.” Possibly five minutes. He hoped not any longer than that.

  Gently, they got Sharon into the back of the vehicle.

  Aiden took off south down Mission Gorge Road. Prayed his memory didn’t fail him and he could navigate them there.

  Charlie tore the sleeve from Sharon’s blouse. Applied direct pressure on the artery.

  “Tourniquet,” Aiden said.

  She nodded. “Okay. Yeah.” Charlie took the scarf tied around Sharon’s neck and wrapped it above the injury.

  Good choice of material. For some reason on TV shows and in movies, people always used a belt. But a belt was too rigid, and you’d never get it tight enough to stop the arterial flow in the real world.

  “I need a windlass.”

  A tourniquet without a windlass was a constricting band at best. Anything from a chopstick to a pocketknife could be used. Aiden pulled a carabiner from his utility belt and handed it to her.

  Charlie worked deftly. She held the tourniquet tight and kept up the pressure on the wound. “She’s so pale. Hurry, Aiden.”

  He was going as fast as possible, taking bends in the road harder than he should.

  “They didn’t have to do this to her,” Charlie said, her voice low.

  No, they didn’t, but it had worked. They’d known marshals would never abandon a wounded innocent. Aiden clenched his jaw and swallowed back the surge of white-hot anger.

  They had to be close to the medical center. Sharon’s life was literally draining away with each passing minute.

  There. Set back off the main road about where he remembered from the map.

  He saw a sign for the medical center that he’d overlooked before and took the turn. Followed the road and raced up to the emergency entrance, stopping in the ambulance parking area by a separate door.

  Aiden flew out of the car and inside, grabbing the first attendants he spotted. “Help! There’s a woman bleeding out. Cut to her femoral artery.”

  The orderlies got a stretcher and ran outside. Aiden helped them load her onto the gurney.

  So much blood.

  Charlie stayed at Sharon’s side, going with them. Aiden killed the siren, lights and engine, and he sprinted to catch up to them.

  By the time he did, after passing the treatment bay with curtains, Sharon was in a room for severe cases. A doctor and nurses swarmed around her, every medical person taking a specific action, each knowing exactly what job to do.

  It reminded Aiden of the team that had attacked them. Precise. Prepared. Executed with ruthless efficiency.

  “Excuse me,” a nurse said to them. “We’re going to need you to step out of the room.” She ushered them into the hall and to the nurses’ desk. “I need you to fill out some forms.” The nurse reached behind the desk and proffered a clipboard.

  Charlie looked down at the blood covering her hands and ballistic vest. The nurse directed her to the bathroom.

  Aiden took the clipboard with a heavy heart.

  “Also, her next of kin should be called,” the nurse said.

  “She’s going to make it, isn’t she?”

  “We’re doing everything we can for her.”

  Aiden called Sullivan Logistics and passed on the tragic news to the receptionist, who assured him that she’d call her children immediately. Then he filled out what he could on the forms and returned them. “Her children are on the way. They’ll have the rest of her information.”

  He paced in front of Sharon’s room, watching the medical staff work on her.

  Once the frenetic energy simmered down inside, the doctor stepped into the hall as Charlie came back from the bathroom.

  “I’m Dr. Patel,” the woman wearing green scrubs said.

  “How is she?” Aiden asked.

  “We’ve finally got her stabilized. The bleeding from the femoral artery is under control. She also suffered a severe head injury and has some broken ribs. I understand she was thrown from a moving vehicle at high speed?”

  “Yes,” Charlie said, her hands clenching to fists at her sides.

  “She has swelling on her brain. The major head trauma has put her in a coma.”

  Aiden swallowed hard, his anger swelling.

  “Is she going to recover?” Charlie asked, her expression tight.

  “She’s no longer in critical condition, but there’s no way of telling how long the coma will last or if she’ll wake up. We’re going to send her for an MRI. Her family should get here as soon as possible. Excuse me.” The doctor left.

  One vicious act of cruelty and Sharon with her kind face, earnest eyes and fierce love for her family might never wake up. It was beyond unfair.

  Two years ago, Aiden’s mother had died after a painful battle with cancer. Where his father was the backbone of their large family, his mother had been the heart. With five kids, she always made each of them feel special and loved. Her last wish had been to die outside, under the sky. Not to be mourned, but to be honored, and for her children to live a full life.

  Losing a parent wasn’t easy, but to have them taken away by violence was unspeakable.

  They’d failed to protect Sharon. This was their burden to bear, but that strike team had been a formidable force. Charlie tended to carry around guilt like sandbags. He didn’t want that for her.

  Aiden put a hand on her shoulder.

  Charlie pulled away from his touch, pounding her fists against her thighs. “Bad things shouldn’t happen to good people. I want to kill those men.” She stalked off down the hall, storming through a set of double doors.

  They’d get back out there, find Edgar and make those men pay for what they’d done. With any luck, the police already had them in custody.

  Aiden went after Charlie, pushing through the doors. He walked down another hall, past vending machines and through another set of doors into the waiting room near the main entrance. The handful of people seated inside gave them a once-over, dismissing their weapons after noticing their badges.

  Charlie stood still as stone, staring at the television mounted on the wall. He followed her gaze to the screen. Both of their pictures were featured on the breaking news.

  “Two US marshals aided and abetted gunmen,” the anchorwoman said, “in kidnapping a high-profile witness. In the process, they shot and killed a fellow marshal as well as a local police officer.”

  The bulletin was a punch to the throat.

  Charlie muttered a curse. “This isn’t good.”

  “That’s the understatement of the century.” Aiden grimaced at the television. “But I don’t understand. We haven’t done anything wrong.”

  “Not according to that.” Charlie gestured to the screen.

  “US Marshals Killinger and Yazzie,” the anchorwoman said, “should be considered armed and dangerous.”

  What was happening?

  Painful shock made Aiden’s legs feel wooden. To have their names and faces splashed across the news was a gross violation of protocol.

  The media could’ve only learned their identities from one person.

  “We need to find out what’s going on.” Charlie gave a furtive glance around, prompting him to do likewise. “And why the police think we killed Torres and a cop.”

  “I’m sure our favorite person, Mr. Wonderful, would love to tell us.” Will Draper.

  Charlie groaned.

  A little girl about ten years old was looking straight at them. Her gaze bounced to the television and then back to them. She turned to her mother, seated next to her with her face buried in a magazine, and tugged on her sleeve. The mother leaned closer, gaze glued to the article she was reading, and said something.

  The little girl whisp
ered in her ear as she pointed to the television.

  “We can’t hang around here unless we want to leave handcuffed in the back of a squad car.” Charlie nudged Aiden, guiding him through the double doors to the emergency room and around the corner out of sight.

  Everything boiled down to two responses for Charlie—fight or flight. There was a time and a place for each, but if they weren’t careful, they’d make a bad situation much worse.

  This was a misunderstanding. It had to be the result of a breakdown in communication. “Before we make a rash decision that we might regret and run off half-cocked, we need to understand what we’re dealing with first. Let me call Draper.”

  “Whatever he has to say, I’m sure it’ll make my head want to explode.” She drew in a deep breath. After a brief moment of hesitation, she nodded. “You’re right. We need to know what’s going on, but make it quick.”

  Aiden toggled his earpiece and dialed Draper’s direct line. Unlike headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, and larger field offices, the San Diego office didn’t have secretarial gatekeepers.

  “US Marshal Draper,” their boss said, answering his own phone.

  “Sir, Aiden Yazzie here.” He stared at Charlie as she tapped her Bluetooth comms device, conferencing in.

  “Aiden?” There was a muffled sound and a quiet exchange as if the mouthpiece had been covered while Draper spoke to someone else in the room. “What were you and Killinger thinking?”

  No mention of the witness or Torres. Not a good sign of how the conversation was going to go.

  “Sir, we were about to call with an update when we heard there was an all-points bulletin out on us. What’s going on?”

  “I could ask you the same question. What happened out there? Did you two snap? Or are you doing it for the money?”

  Charlie squeezed her eyes shut, frustration stretching tight across her face.

  “We were doing our jobs. We had Albatross,” Aiden said, using Edgar Plinski’s code name, “and had just picked up the wife when we were ambushed on Mission Gorge Road. Torres was killed, along with a police officer that stopped to assist. Albatross was abducted and the wife was injured. She’s in critical condition and the doctors aren’t sure she’ll pull through. But we had nothing to do with it, Draper.”

  “Nice touch on your part, trying to save the wife and calling in. It’d be enough to give me reasonable doubt about you two, if it weren’t for the damning evidence against you.”

  Aiden’s heart stuttered. “What evidence? We would never kill an innocent person, especially not a colleague or a police officer. You know us. You have to believe me.”

  “I believe money makes people do horrible things that they otherwise wouldn’t. Before today, I would’ve thought you and your partner were the best marshals I had, but you wouldn’t be the first ones in this office to sell their soul.”

  “Doesn’t that say more about you than it does us?” Charlie snapped.

  “Killinger.” Draper sighed. “With a chip the size of an iceberg on your shoulder, perhaps I shouldn’t be too surprised about you.”

  Charlie barely suppressed a snort.

  Draper had some nerve, standing on his self-righteous soapbox, spewing whatever garbage was going to help him sleep at night. There was absolutely no love lost for the man. Still, Aiden narrowed his eyes at Charlie. A silent warning not to get sidetracked.

  “We’re not traitors or murderers,” Aiden said. “Why is there an APB out on us? Why do you think we killed Torres?”

  “There was an eyewitness who saw it all and called 911.”

  Eyewitness?

  Aiden sucked in a shallow breath, the taste somehow acrid, making his eyes burn.

  Charlie slipped her hair behind her ear, her expression giving away nothing.

  The bombshell unnerved her, too, although no one else would’ve been able to tell. Her Rock-of-Gibraltar demeanor appeared unflappable to the untrained eye, but Aiden knew better. Knew her well. The little hair tuck, a seemingly insignificant gesture, betrayed her emotions.

  In that moment, she was feeling just as vulnerable as he was, even though she wanted the world to believe she kept her heart frozen in a block of ice. But when Charlie Killinger felt threatened, watch out. She became dangerous with a capital D. Went into take-no-prisoners attack mode, illustrating why a person should never corner a feral beast.

  “That’s impossible,” Aiden said. His vision tunneled. “There were no witnesses.”

  “I guess you two weren’t as careful about covering your tracks as you thought.” The bitter accusation in Draper’s tone was thick as ipecac syrup.

  Aiden wanted to vomit. “Other than the police officer who stopped to help us, there was only a group of four guys who attacked us. There were no other cars on the road. No one else around.” A strange numbness seeped through him.

  Even if there had been someone, how could they have seen anything clearly through all the smoke from the grenades?

  “Unfortunately for you two, that’s not the case. Yazzie, you and Killinger disgust me. You should be ashamed of yourselves. As if this office didn’t have a big enough mess to deal with, now you dump this in my lap. There’s no way I can clean up this kind of nuclear fallout.”

  A tide of fury rose in Aiden, washing out his anxiety over being railroaded. Only someone as self-absorbed as Draper could turn this around and make it about himself.

  “We called the police when we were tracking the men who abducted Albatross,” Aiden said, “before they threw his wife out of a moving vehicle. Have the cops located the two black vans we reported?”

  “There’s no sign of those supposed vans. The chief of police is ticked that you had them spinning their wheels on a wild-goose chase when they should’ve been looking for you the entire time. Listen to me. Stay put at Mission Medical. Surrender your weapons to security. Cooperate with the police and go with them willingly. Don’t endanger any more civilians.”

  The GPS trackers in their phones pinpointed their exact location. There was no doubt in Aiden’s mind that as soon as Draper had been notified by the police, their boss had given them up without hesitation.

  Not as if they’d been trying to hide. They’d taken the police cruiser of the dead cop to the medical center.

  Charlie’s gaze pinned him. Her cool, stony expression didn’t waver, but he caught the flicker of fear in her piercing blue eyes as she took out her cell phone, removed the battery and smashed the screen against the wall.

  A second later, she’d chucked it in the trash.

  She was preparing to run.

  There has to be another way out of this.

  Charlie pointed to her watch, reminding him not to waste precious time if they wanted to avoid incarceration, and peeked around the corner. Whatever she saw, she must not have liked. Her index finger went up behind her back and she twirled it vigorously. The signal to wrap up, now, end the call.

  “Draper, this doesn’t add up.” It didn’t make any sense why anyone would falsely accuse them. “We’re not guilty of this, and the real shame here is your utter lack of support.”

  There has to be another way out of this.

  “I got an update right before you called. The eyewitness just arrived at the police station. He’s seen pictures of you that I emailed after the chief of police notified me what was happening. The witness is swearing out an affidavit as we speak, identifying you and Killinger as cold-blooded murderers.”

  If there was another way out, Aiden couldn’t think of it.

  Chapter Seven

  Two police officers entered the medical center through the main entrance and looked around the waiting room.

  Charlie stepped back out of sight around the corner. “We have to get out of here.”

  Aiden hung up. “The dead cop was wearing a body camera on his torso. The footage should exonerate us.
It’ll show that we didn’t kill him.”

  “We don’t know what it’ll show. There was a lot of smoke and he was hunched down behind his door. But they will have clear footage of me checking to see if he was dead. On the remote chance that it did clear us of his murder, it doesn’t help us with Torres. Any time we spend in handcuffs, answering questions, is time lost to find Albatross before it’s too late.”

  Aiden popped out the battery on his cell and tossed the phone in the trash bin. “We won’t get far.” He gestured to their vests and rifles.

  They stood out like sore thumbs.

  “Yes, we will.” Determination fired through her veins. Surrender was not an option.

  They’d been ambushed on an isolated strip of road where there hadn’t been any CCTV. The two black vans had disappeared. There was an alleged eyewitness accusing Charlie and Aiden of collaboration and murder.

  Only two people could clear their names. One was in a coma. The other was alive, but not for much longer.

  They had to save Edgar. But first, they needed to get out of the medical center.

  “Find the employee locker room and get us something to blend in,” she said to Aiden, her pulse quickening. “Then meet me at the employee entrance.”

  No questions asked. No hesitation. He just nodded and took off.

  That level of complete trust he had in her, and she in him, she’d never known with another soul, and she cherished it.

  She went down a different hall back to the emergency room. When Sharon had been brought in, one of the nurses had run from the treatment room in the direction she was headed in now and returned with medication.

  Another squad car with flashing lights pulled up to the ambulance entrance and parked behind the police vehicle they’d left. Officers rushed inside.

  The emergency room buzzed with activity.

  Staying close to the wall, she looked for the room she needed.

  The officers were working their way in her direction, searching the emergency ward, pulling back curtains in the bay area. An infuriated nurse jumped in their path and read them the riot act about patient privacy.