by Carly Bishop
“Fine.” He straightened and let his arms fall away from her. They moved to the top of the wall, which was wide enough to sit on. He shoved their backpacks over the edge and heard them land with a soft thud. He showed her how to get on her knees, then to lie flat on her torso and let her legs down over the other side of the wall. “I won’t let go of you before you’re ready. You say when, okay? Can you do that?”
“Do I have a choice?”
He smiled at her, proud of her for hanging on to even a shred of humor. “None.”
“Then what happens?”
“When I do let go and you fall, curl up and try to relax. I’m going to lift you up now by your good arm so your body clears the top of the wall. Then I’ll lower you till I can’t reach any more. Got it?”
“Yes.” She hadn’t really. It all seemed somehow too much to comprehend. She would have to trust him as much as her own instincts.
“Okay, Eden. Take it easy now.”
He stood on the narrow ledge, bent over and clasped her left wrist. Her hand was nowhere near big enough to encircle his wrist. She clung to him as best she could and brought her right arm and hand in near to her body. He lifted her easily by her arm and leaned out so her body cleared the wall, then began slowly to lower her down.
She felt him controlling her weight, shifting his own, getting to his knees, crouching, finally lying flat as he lowered her, straining hard to take the brunt of the task. “Eden, that’s it. That’s as far as I can reach. Kick out from the wall now, curl up and drop. Easy. Real easy.”
“Easy for you to say,” she mumbled. She took two deep breaths, raised her knee, placed her toes against the wall, then consciously made herself take her lower lip from between her teeth and shove off.
Chapter Eight
She wished at the instant that Tierney released her that she’d eaten those cookies.
To make herself do this at all, to leap from a wall in the dark, she promised herself she wouldn’t have tune to feel the terror, that her landing would be into a feathery bed of leaves and compost and soft, willowy branches, that her shoulder wouldn’t hurt any more than it already did.
She was lying to herself and she knew it. She felt every harrowing second of the drop, from the mind-numbing horror of falling to the bone-jarring crash into harsh, stabbing brambles.
She heard Tierney make the leap, then fall to the ground. His landing was no easier by the sound of it, but he had collected the packs and made it to her side before she could get any air in her lungs again.
“You okay?”
She couldn’t do anything more than nod.
A car came roaring down the twisting road. He crouched low beside her. For an instant, the headlights caught them and she saw his face, the implacable set of his chin, the raw determination.
The car sped past. She doubted the driver had time to notice them at all. Tierney slung both packs over his shoulder and took her hand. He pulled her to her feet and then angled down the steep roadside slope to the pavement. They crossed to the other side of the road.
For what seemed to her hours, she managed to trudge along beside him in the soft night air. The downhill side of the road leveled off. Her fever continued to rage on. She could hear Tierney encouraging her for a time, but after a while, the dull roar of her heart pounding and her blood rushing drowned out his words. All she could hear then was the vague impression of a deeply resonant masculine voice.
Perspiration soaked her. She couldn’t think or reason. She clung to Tierney. Half-carrying her, he kissed her damp brow and urged her on. “Another few steps, Eden. That’s all, baby. Just another few steps.”
Without him, she would die. For a few seconds, her mind fixed on that one thought. Without him, she would sink to the cold, damp ground and surrender to the fever engulfing her.
Something inside her wouldn’t let go. Something inside her began overriding every nonessential function so that she could keep holding on to him.
Haltingly, she began to see things in a different light. He wanted her alive. She wanted to live. Stumbling blindly along beside him, she dimly recognized the truth about Christian Tierney. He only wanted to live again, too. He needed desperately to be free of the demons that possessed him, heart and soul, mind and body—like the fever that had her in its grip.
She had to survive.
She willed herself to put one foot in front of the other, again and again and again, endlessly, until they rounded a bend and came upon a deserted intersection. The road they had followed dead-ended. A green neon light glowed in the window of an old tavern built of stone.
Only three cars were parked in front. Tierney stopped, then ran a hand through his hair. Standing concealed in the trees, he pulled her into his arms and rested his head for a moment on the top of hers.
CHILLS CONVULSED her slender body. She shivered violently. Chris drew her closer for another long moment, murmuring softly to her. He couldn’t believe how incredibly hard she’d fought, how she’d stood up to him and doggedly followed him. How she’d climbed up that tree against all odds and then let him drop her over the other side of that brick wall. He knew men, good men, who would’ve folded.
Her grit all but shamed him.
He knew she couldn’t win this battle. The infection would spread, the fever only get worse. In the end, without immediate medical attention, she could die.
Indecision rankled in his head. He knew enough to fear that more than anything. He hadn’t slept in three days, couldn’t keep a clear thought in his head. He needed to get her to a hospital or to Margo’s place in Holyoke. The first required only that he get her across the road and make a call to an ambulance service. The second meant stealing a car, driving a minimum of three hours, praying he wouldn’t fall asleep at the wheel or get stopped along the way.
He had no choice. He couldn’t risk her life. Broussard had found a way to get to her, and if the assassin’s bullet hadn’t done the job, the resulting blood poisoning would. Chris’s own plans had gone so seriously awry that they no longer represented a viable option.
His heart pounded painfully in his chest. The heat coming off Eden Kelley’s body felt scalding to him. He couldn’t indulge his indecision a moment longer. He swallowed, stroked her hair, murmured something he wasn’t even aware of thinking, then picked her up and carried her across the road. He had to put her down long enough to open the heavy door leading into the tavern, then picked her up again.
The inside was nearly dark. All the tables were empty. Only a few patrons sat at the bar. The barkeep glanced up and saw Chris carrying Eden. His eyes widened to the size of saucers. He put down the glass he’d been polishing. “Holy cow, man! What’s going on?”
Eden had already lost consciousness.
“Get an ambulance up here,” Chris croaked. “Now. Please.”
THE LOCAL EMERGENCY ROOM admitted her under a Jane Doe.
Drawing on mental and physical reserves he hadn’t plumbed in years, Chris followed the paramedics in, past plastic-laminate chairs filled with sick and hurting kids and shaken parents. He calmly refused to take a seat or be denied entry beyond the swinging doors at the admissions desk. Once inside the large, brightly lit emergency room where the paramedics had taken her, Chris refused to let anyone but the head of the ER come anywhere near Eden.
Her vital signs were very poor. Respiration shallow at thirty-seven per minute, temperature 102.6, blood pressure low but not critical.
The attending physician, having taken Eden’s vitals from the ambulance paramedic and already put out with Chris’s peremptory behavior, took one look at the wound beneath his patch job on the front of her shoulder and ordered a shot of penicillin. She snapped shut the curtain hanging from the ceiling around the gurney, closing off the rest of the busy ER.
A slight, wiry, gray-haired woman with horn-rimmed glasses and the intensity of a war-zone surgeon, she fixed Chris with an angry glare. “I want to know what’s going on here. This is a gunshot wound. Is this woman
a Jane Doe because you don’t know who she is or because you shot her?”
He pulled his wallet from his back pocket and flashed his badge. “This woman is a protected witness. She’s Jane Doe because I said so.”
The doctor’s expression became pinched. “It doesn’t appear that she was protected, now does it?”
He drew a deep breath and agreed that it didn’t. He relied on his instincts about people, on intuition so deep it went to his core. He knew that, for himself at least, he could not survive in this job in any other way.
His gut feeling about this doctor was that he had only won a temporary reprieve. He would have to satisfy her questions, but if he could do that, if he could make a believer of her, if he could convince this doctor that he was legitimate, she might be persuaded to bury altogether the admission of a gunshot victim to her ER.
Seeing that the doctor was competent and that she cared, he knew his own best bet would be to get the doctor to see him in the same light.
He asked for and received permission to stay with “Jane Doe” while the doctor worked on her. Clearly concerned for the safety of the emergency-room employees, the doctor asked directly if there was any threat of harm to her staff.
Chris shook his head. For whatever reason, the doctor believed him. She asked if he was armed and nodded curtly when he answered that he was.
She called for the supplies necessary to sterilize Eden’s wound, and a local anesthetic. She ordered her staff, at Chris’s suggestion, to conduct themselves as if this woman had never been admitted at all. The doctor administered the shot of penicillin and then grilled Chris for the length of time it took to anesthetize Eden’s flesh and place the stitches.
Watching Eden, seeing her wide gray eyes flutter open now and again as she drifted in and out of consciousness, he indicated to the doctor that his witness was still very much a target of the man who had hired an assassin to kill her.
He lied when asked where the shooting had taken place but told the truth as to the number of intervening hours. He admitted that he was not only without a means of leaving the hospital, he was also without the necessary transportation to get his witness to safety.
The doctor grimaced. Her brow furrowed thoughtfully.
He held Eden’s thin, pale hand. His eyes were drawn again and again to the dozen or so small scratches from tree branches catching her in the face. He described the man who wanted her dead and the prodigious efforts of the Justice Department to defend her life.
The doctor placed the last of five stitches, then dumped the forceps and hook-shaped needle into a metal bowl. Stripping off her gloves, she discarded them into a biohazard waste container.
“Exactly how is it that this man, this ... assassin, ” the doctor demanded angrily, “got to this woman if she was a protected witness?”
Chris shook his head wearily. “I don’t know.”
“That’s not a very satisfactory answer, is it?”
He agreed again that it was not.
“Well.” The doctor stood back, removed her glasses to massage her eyes, replaced them, then breathed deeply. “I take it you do not trust your cohorts and the prodigious resources of the Justice Department at this point.”
He shook his head. “No.”
She nodded. Turning back to her patient, she examined Eden’s pupils with a penlight. Apparently satisfied, the doctor reached for a crushable ampule and snapped it near Eden’s nose. The scent of ammonia exploded in the air. Eden coughed a couple of times and squinted as her gray eyes opened.
Inclining her head toward Chris, the doctor asked Eden point-blank, “Do you know this man?”
Eden rolled her head on the pillow away from the doctor toward Chris, and stared at him. She blinked and coughed and kept staring. Agonizingly long seconds passed. He knew this was her best chance to escape him. All she had to do was let out a piercing scream. A whimper would do. A frightened swallow.
The doctor would give any such reaction every benefit of the doubt. He had no doubt that if that happened he could draw his machine pistol and, without ever firing a round, make his escape from the ER with Eden. But if she cried out her name or his, Chris would be screwed. Tafoya would be on to them in less than twenty-four hours. Who knew if Broussard would beat Tafoya again?
So here was Eden Kelley’s big chance, and he knew that despite her fever, she knew it, too.
“Well?” the doctor prodded.
He held his breath. He couldn’t remember a time when he gave a solitary damn whether another human being trusted him. Whether a woman trusted him. He hadn’t gone out of his way to endear himself to Eden, but he’d done what he had to do to save her life.
And he’d kissed her. Held her. Her gaze went to his lips, reminding him. He couldn’t breathe. Worn to her limits, sweaty with fever, fragile and dirty and scraped up and stitched, she struck a chord in him so deep he wanted to bolt.
She shut her eyes and turned her head away and murmured tiredly, “Yes.”
He shivered hard.
“Is he responsible for the gunshot wound to your shoulder?”
“No.”
“Has he harmed you in any way?”
“No.” Eden seemed on the verge of fading out again, but she rallied for another few seconds. Her whisper was nearly inaudible. “He saved my life.”
He stared at Eden, a little in awe. He wouldn’t exactly call it trust or faith in him that motivated her, but whatever it was, if Eden Kelley still meant to escape him, she’d passed up one hell of an opportunity.
He felt somehow ... pardoned, and dared breathe again at last.
The doctor sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose, then fixed Chris with her stern look. “Is your badge legitimate?” she demanded.
“Yes.” At least it had been before all this began. He thought the doctor would as soon not hear that reservation.
“Then I’m releasing ‘Jane Doe’ to your protective custody and purging all records of her admission to this facility.” She opened the curtain and pointed to a hallway clearly marked Authorized Personnel Only. “Follow that hall to an exit off the next hallway to your left.” She took a clump of keys from her lab-coat pocket and began twisting a set of car keys off the solid-brass dolphin ring. “Outside you’ll find an ’85 Mustang. Maroon. See to it you don’t mar the paint job.”
Chris took the keys and stared numbly at the doctor, not sure he understood her correctly, or if he had, that she meant what he took her to mean. That she was offering him a way out. “Why are you doing this?”
She looked down at her aging hands a moment, then met Chris’s disbelieving gaze. “Your Jane Doe deserves a break.” The doctor stuck her hands into her pockets. “God forgive you if she comes to any more harm.”
CHRIS PLANNED HIS ROUTE to Holyoke to avoid the toll roads and the Mass turnpikes. He stopped at a convenience store a few blocks away from the hospital for coffee, then headed north before crossing the Hudson River and going east toward Massachusetts, sticking to the secondary highways.
The coffee kept him functioning.
The drive kept him sane, soothing his jangled, caffeine-hyped nerves.
Eden Kelley kept him feeling.
He’d avoided that state of affairs for a very long time. The last thing he needed was to feel anything for anyone, least of all a witness to his wife’s murder, a witness whose life was in his hands. A witness he intended to set up like a sacrificial lamb to lure a mercenary, cold-blooded murderer. But in keeping with his determination to tell himself the truth, he knew it was already too late. He admired Eden Kelley and he cared what became of her.
He looked over at her sleeping fitfully in the passenger seat. The dash lights didn’t adequately illuminate her face, but he knew by the fine sheen of perspiration on her brow that the penicillin had not yet begun to work.
Killing off the infection would consume hours, perhaps days, even with the antibiotic, hours in which Tafoya would either track them down or lose their trail altogether. The sa
me hours in which, Chris had to assume, Broussard would be furiously tracking her, as well. His assassin had failed to kill her—assuming Eden pulled out of the life-threatening infection—but the attempt had succeeded in flushing her out into the open.
Broussard had his best chance now, before Eden could be relocated. He wouldn’t waste the opportunity.
Chris pulled off the road at Great Barrington and sought out a public telephone not far from the main drag. He found one to the side of an automated teller machine and got out of the doctor’s maroon Mustang, leaving the engine idling. He dropped the necessary coins in the phone, then dialed Margo’s number in Holyoke.
If Ed Bancroft, her yuppie doctor husband answered, Chris was out of luck. Or one of the kids.
The phone rang once, twice. Half a dozen times before voice mail cut in. Cursing under his breath, Chris hung up, dropped in more change and dialed again. Someone was on the line, ignoring the Call Waiting.
He tried twice more, then went back to the car, thinking he would try again in Otis. He found Eden awake, sitting sideways in the seat, curled up like a child, her face resting against the seat back, her eyes fixed solemnly on him.
Her lips curved, the barest shadow of a smile. He didn’t know what to think or say. Didn’t know how to respond because his chest tightened and because, exhausted and unguarded and like a child, she was looking at him with unutterable trust. She blinked a couple of times before her eyelids fluttered closed again.
He wanted to kiss her. The need came on him just that fast. He wanted to reach for her and cradle her sweet, battered face in his hands. He wanted to feel her warm breath on his wrists and touch his lips to her fragile eyelids.
He had rarely regretted his vow of self-honesty as much as he did in that brief moment because the feelings sapped his will to answer violence with violence. To deliver real justice to Winston Broussard.
Instead, Chris found himself wanting to make both their worlds right somehow, his and Eden’s. He wanted to create a space in each of them that all the ugliness and violence and tragedy would never taint.