by Juno Rushdan
The first room was no good—a janitorial closet. Neither was the second room. Nor the third.
One cop with a beard strode around the nurse and moved in the direction of the treatment rooms, with his head on a swivel.
Her chest tightened. Any second, he’d spot her. As his head turned toward her, his hand on the hilt of his weapon, a large orderly stepped into his line of sight.
Charlie turned the next knob, opening the fourth door, and ducked inside. She breathed a sigh of relief. Finally, it was the one she wanted.
There were two refrigerators. Through the clear doors she saw vials of medication. Moving past the regulated drugs, she hurried to the shelving unit with medical supplies.
She quickly rifled through things and grabbed what she needed. Sterile gloves, gauze, saline solution, antibiotic ointment, topical anesthetic spray and a suture kit. Aiden’s wound still needed stitches. They’d left all their supplies back in the SUV.
Once they had a moment to catch their breath, she’d patch him up properly and make sure it didn’t get infected.
She went to the door and pulled it open.
On the other side stood the bearded cop. He drew his sidearm.
Charlie shuffled back into the room, forcing him to follow her inside.
The officer stepped across the threshold, the gun leveled at her head, and let the door close.
A mistake. On his part.
“Hands in the air!” the cop said.
She dropped the supplies and did as instructed. Her small gesture of compliance emboldened him, made him think her arrest was in the bag.
“Turn around and put your hands on the back of your head,” he said.
She didn’t move. Didn’t breathe. Didn’t blink.
“Now!” His second mistake was getting close enough to touch her. He put his hand on her shoulder and tried to force her to turn around.
Charlie moved fast.
She snapped her hand up, catching the body of the pistol while shoving the muzzle sideways to keep her head out of the line of fire in case he pulled the trigger. Then she twisted the gun hard, not enough to break his wrist, just the right amount to sprain it badly.
The gun dropped to the floor.
The cop yelped, clutching his wrist.
Charlie kicked the gun, sent it sailing into a corner and threw her elbow into the side of the officer’s head. A follow-up punch to the side of his neck and he fell into a boneless sprawl.
The neck was a vulnerable spot; you could crush a larynx or, as she’d done, deliver a sharp strike to the vagus nerve. At a minimum, it would cause disorientation. In the case of the cop, unconsciousness.
The emergency ward was crawling with police. For Charlie to get out, she needed to make herself less conspicuous.
Taking off her rifle, she grabbed two hospital gowns from the shelf. She threw one on like a coat, completely covering her back, and the second on the right way.
She took another, using it as a makeshift sack for her rifle and the supplies, and put on a white face mask.
Cracking the door, she peered into the hall. An officer was walking past the nurses’ desk. She slipped out of the room and turned right, heading away from the cop.
Quickening her step, she shoved through a set of double doors and hustled down the corridor.
She glanced over her shoulder. The cop hadn’t noticed her and was checking the rooms. Three more doors and he’d find his partner unconscious.
Charlie faced forward as she rounded a corner and slammed into a hard wall of muscle.
Aiden. Her throat loosened.
She hadn’t heard any movement coming in her direction. His stealth never ceased to amaze her.
He was wearing scrubs over his clothes and carrying a gym bag that must’ve had his vest and rifle inside. “The cops have the employee entrance locked down,” he said.
No. They had to get out of the medical center.
If they were arrested, no one would listen to them. Even Draper was ready to think the worst and he had known them for over a year, had witnessed firsthand their work ethic and integrity.
No one would believe anything they said, and Edgar would be tortured and killed.
Think. She had to think.
“There’s another way, but we have to hurry,” Aiden said, giving her a wild flash of hope.
He handed her a lab coat, scrub pants and a cap, then stuffed her makeshift sack into the gym bag.
They went down the hall as briskly and discreetly as they could, with her changing along the way. She ripped off the gowns, handed him her vest, which he stowed in the bag, and she put on the white coat.
As she finished shoving her legs into the pants and put on the cap, a nurse came through a set of double doors. If the woman hadn’t been looking down at her cell phone, she would’ve caught Charlie in an awkward position that would’ve been difficult to explain.
Charlie pushed the balled-up hospital gowns into the trash, and they passed the nurse, who was still preoccupied with her phone.
Aiden led her through a mini maze of hallways. They moved with confidence, acting like busy people who were supposed to be there.
They strode past a small elevator toward an unguarded door.
“That elevator goes directly to the maternity ward. This is a separate entrance for people with newborns, so the babies aren’t exposed to germs. I overheard a nurse escorting a family through here.” Aiden winked at her.
Warm pride filled Charlie’s chest. He was brilliant. She wanted to hug him tight and kiss him. On the cheek only and not all over, she had to remind herself.
She was so attracted to him that it scared her. Attracted to the point where she worried that it distracted her on the job sometimes.
The moment they had first met, there’d been off-the-charts chemistry. Not a simple spark but a lightning bolt. And she knew he posed an indefinable threat. Whenever they’d got close to kissing or anything romantic, instinct cautioned her to keep away, the same sense of self-preservation that warned someone not to get too close to an open flame.
There was a line that she’d never cross. The problem was that the line with Aiden was drawn in sand, easily washed away by waves and redrawn. Sometimes it inched forward; sometimes it was pushed back. While knowing she couldn’t have him made it worse.
The automatic door swooshed open. They stepped out together, breathed fresh air. The door sucked shut behind them.
“Now what?” Aiden asked.
“Leave that to me.” Charlie gestured for him to follow her. “I’m going to hot-wire a car.”
“What?” The surprise in his voice matched his expression. “Why am I just now learning that you even know how to hot-wire a car?”
She shrugged. “I guess it’s the first time I’ve needed to do it.” As an adult. “We’ll need to find an older model.” Those were easier. “Ten years at least, but the older the better.”
“If we wander around, checking vehicles, we’ll look like car thieves.”
“We are car thieves.” She’d never thought the day would come when she’d say such a thing, and definitely not to Aiden Yazzie, the most upstanding, principled man she knew.
There was a parking lot to the left, across a wide expanse of blank blacktop, in full view of several police officers. They rounded the corner to the left.
Ahead of them was the smaller parking lot for employees. A guy got out of a luxury sedan and hit the key fob, locking it. The lights flashed and he tossed the keys in the right pocket of his suit jacket. Looking frazzled, the man jogged toward an entrance, where one police officer was busy on his radio.
“Better idea,” she said. “Head to that sedan. I’ll meet you.”
They separated. Aiden quickly disappeared among the other cars in the lot.
Charlie picked up her pace, put
ting herself in the man’s path. As he was about to pass her, she bumped into him, slipping her hand into his pocket and grabbing the keys tight in her palm, without letting them make a sound.
“I’m so sorry,” she said.
“No, excuse me.” He gave her a hurried look-over, but kept going, none the wiser.
By the time Charlie had reached the car, the man had already cleared the cop and was in the medical center. She hit the key fob button. The car lit up inside, turn signals flashed once and the door locks clunked open. They climbed inside, and he threw the bag in the back.
She pushed down on the brake, pressed the start button, got the engine going and pulled out of the lot.
Charlie went west on the side street, at a speedy but not suicidal pace, as if they were late for an appointment, past a market and veterinarian and eateries. At Mission Gorge Road, she made a left, going south.
A thwopp, thwopp, thwopp sound had them both peering low through the windshield and up at the sky. A police helicopter was inbound, heading to the hospital.
Farther down the road, on the opposite side, a string of police cars raced north. Lights flashing. Sirens blaring.
At least ten squad cars flew past them.
The police would have the entire medical center locked down and under aerial surveillance within minutes.
They’d made it out in the nick of time.
“We need cash,” Charlie said. They wouldn’t be able to use credit cards since those left a digital trail anyone could follow. “Then we need to get a car that won’t be reported stolen.”
She drove to Seaport Village. A fourteen-acre waterfront complex of shopping, dining and entertainment. The meandering walkways and beautiful plazas attracted tons of tourists and locals. It also had one of the few banks in the city with ATMs inside that allowed up to a three-thousand-dollar cash withdrawal.
The police would eventually monitor the activity of their credit and debit cards, but for right now, the cops thought they were pinned down somewhere inside the hospital. On the off chance that they were already plugged into their financial transactions, it would be easy to hide in the crowd and disappear. It wasn’t as if they were going to hang around the area waiting for the police to arrive.
She parked the sedan as close to the bank as she could while staying away from CCTV cameras. It was impossible to avoid all the cameras between the parking lot and the bank, but every little bit of prevention helped.
In case the car was reported stolen sooner rather than later, they decided to ditch it. Aiden grabbed the bag from the back. They hustled to the bank and both made withdrawals, not knowing how much money they might need.
Better to have too much than not enough. This was their one chance to get cash.
On the way out, she spotted the Green Line trolley pulling to a stop.
“It’ll take us where we need to go.” She pointed to it.
Aiden nodded and they ran, hopping on board just before it pulled off.
“Whose car are we taking that won’t be reported stolen?” Aiden asked, whispering in her ear.
“Someone who won’t miss it.”
Nick McKenna. Fellow marshal and former lover, currently out of town visiting his girlfriend, Lori Carpenter, who happened to be in WITSEC. They’d fallen in love on a yearlong assignment where he’d protected her.
A solid, stand-up guy, Nick could be relied on in a pinch. At least Charlie hoped so, considering their baggage.
Before she joined the SOG and was assigned to San Diego, she’d been at the Omaha field office. Her work relationships there had got so ugly they’d become toxic. When a woman slept with multiple colleagues—it was a small town and choosing lovers from the work pool was pragmatic—she developed a reputation that a man never would’ve had to contend with.
San Diego was a fresh start. She’d been careful. Then one night after dinner and drinks, she’d wanted Aiden so badly she ached. But what she shared with him was the most important relationship in her life, and she wasn’t going to spoil it acting on an impulse that they’d regret.
So she’d taken the convenient bait of Nick’s overtures and gone home with him.
A stronger woman, a better woman, a sober woman would’ve picked a random stranger. Someone anonymous. Someone disposable.
It had been fun, casual, easy, until she realized it had been a lie. Nick wasn’t capable of emotionless sex. To him, none of it had been casual. Or easy.
“We’re going to take Nick’s truck,” Charlie said.
A muscle jumped in Aiden’s jaw. If she’d blinked, she would’ve missed it.
“What is it?” she asked as he straightened away from her. “What’s wrong?”
Chapter Eight
Aiden reined in the sudden storm of emotions rolling through him, locked them up tight and washed his expression clean.
The day Charlie had been assigned as his partner and they’d shaken hands, the rush of endorphins was immediate, the attraction visceral. He’d been in a relationship at the time, but the more he got to know Charlie, slowly over time, the less he could silence the little voice whispering that she was the one.
So he’d broken it off with the other woman. Believing it was only a matter of time for him and Charlie until their point of happy confluence and they’d be together.
“What is it?” Charlie asked. “What’s wrong?”
Every single detail from that night in the restaurant was burned into his memory. The flush on her cheeks from the alcohol. Candlelight on the table sparkling in her animated eyes. He’d put his palm on her thigh and she’d leaned into his touch, pressed her cheek to his. The way she’d smelled of wild summer flowers, the warm heat of her breath on his face. He’d caressed her jaw, her skin was delicate, soft, and every atom of his being screamed kiss her.
Then she’d straightened away from him, as if waking from a dream before he could, and gone to the restroom. He’d wrestled with his feelings and what to say, not wanting to still be stuck as just a friend in the morning.
Aiden wasn’t interested in a brief fling with Charlie. He wanted forever.
But she’d never made it back to the table. Nick had found her at the bar, or she’d found him.
Either way, Aiden wouldn’t think of the devastation.
He recalled happy things instead—riding a horse with the wind in his hair, making it through SOG training, the sound of his nieces and nephews laughing as they played—and pulled on a soft grin.
“Nothing’s wrong,” he said, doing his darnedest to sound laissez-faire. “It’s smart.” And it was. “Nick won’t miss his car while he’s curled up in bed for a week with Lori.” Aiden watched, waited to see if an ember of jealousy sparked in her.
Charlie didn’t bat a lash. “My thoughts exactly.”
He wasn’t sure which hurt more. The fact she’d slept with someone in the office, his friend Mr. Dark-and-Stormy with that carved-in-stone jaw, or that it had meant so little to her.
Nick was everything Aiden wasn’t. A super serious loner, choosing a scowl over a smile. Hotheaded and impulsive to a fault. In many ways, Nick was like Charlie.
Aiden thought the fling would’ve lasted two nights, two weeks at most.
It’d gone on for two months.
Two months of dinner and drinks and public displays of foreplay. Two months of watching Nick’s infatuation grow while Charlie maintained her “touch, but don’t feel” approach, guarding her heart like the gold reserve at Fort Knox, and Aiden played man-trapped-in-the-freaking-middle.
Sixty-five days of torture.
Charlie had been blind to the pain it caused Aiden. She still was. In her defense, he worked very hard to blind her.
She wasn’t property that he owned. They were friends, close as family. She had a right to sleep with whomever she chose without a guilt trip, without pettiness, without judgm
ent on his part.
Aiden only wished she had chosen him.
They got off the trolley in the Gaslamp Quarter, two blocks from Nick’s apartment building. The urban center was the heartbeat of the city.
Aiden preferred his tranquil condo overlooking the water. There he had peace of mind and the quiet to reflect.
Whereas Nick enjoyed the hubbub with energy always circulating, always something to do to keep him from thinking about life. Perhaps that was why things had lasted so long between Nick and Charlie. They’d been objects in constant motion bouncing between work, activities down at the Seaport, entertainment here in the Gaslamp Quarter, which turned into a playground for adults after dark, and then off to the bedroom.
Pushing it from his mind, Aiden followed Charlie into the residential parking garage. They walked to Nick’s designated spot and found his Dodge Ram.
“Can you break in without smashing a window?” Aiden asked her.
“No need.” She dropped to the ground by the front wheel on the driver’s side and felt around for something. “Bingo.”
Charlie stood, holding a magnetic key box. Inside was an extra fob.
Aiden had no idea it was there. Nick was like a Boy Scout, always prepared, but it was salt in the wound realizing that his buddy and his best friend—the woman he loved—knew things about each other outside the bedroom that Aiden didn’t.
The stab of longing and jealousy in him was sharp.
No way was he delving toward things inside the bedroom.
Aiden tossed the bag in the back. They stripped off the scrubs and he got behind the wheel, firing up the fully gassed truck.
They took I-8 East. The first step was to get out the city, then the state.
“We need to find Albatross,” Charlie said. “Finish what we started.”
It was their duty to save him, if they could, but it went deeper now. “As well as clear our names. Everyone believes we’re guilty because of this alleged eyewitness. I can’t wrap my head around it.”
“Pretty convenient, isn’t it?”
“Too convenient. Too tidy.” The whole thing reeked.
“Do you still have the hit man’s burner phone?” Charlie asked.
