“We don’t need an Indian lecturing us.” Fiske snickered, pleased to be the one who knew something the others didn’t. “You believe it, Bobby? They sent us an Indian to treat Conroy. Surprised he doesn’t have a rattle and some kind of magic dust with him to sprinkle on Conroy.” He shook his head contemptuously. “These hospitals are just falling apart, letting anyone who wants to practice come in here.”
She saw anger flare in Lukas’s eyes and hurried to prevent a confrontation. The condescension toward Lukas galled her, but she had to pick her fights and right now, that couldn’t be one of them. She needed to defuse the situation before it turned ugly.
“You wanted a doctor, you got the best. He saved your friend’s life twice.”
Her words made no impression on Johnson. “If you stinking FBI people hadn’t shot John in the first place and let us get our point across the way we were trying to, none of this would be happening,” Johnson yelled at her angrily, shaking her. Lukas saw Lydia try not to wince. “Now get him well enough for us to get out of here.”
“And just how do you propose to get out of here?” Lydia asked as Lukas moved past both of them, crossing to Conroy’s bed.
“How do you think?” Johnson sneered nastily, his eyes ravaging her. “We’ve got you for that. You get your people to get us safe passage out of here and onto a jet—”
Maybe they weren’t as professional as she’d first thought. They certainly hadn’t thought out a decent plan. “There’s no place to land one around here,” she pointed out. She’d gotten the particulars on Blair Memorial when Conroy had been admitted. “All we have is a helicopter pad on the roof.”
Mention of the landing pad evoked a hoot of pleasure from Fiske. “That sounds good. I’ve never been on a helicopter ride,” he said to the older supremacist.
Johnson looked at Fiske with contempt. There was no love lost between them. “Make the call and get one,” Johnson ordered.
With all this gun waving going on, Lydia knew it was just a matter of time before one went off. She wished both men would keep their weapons still.
“I left my cell phone outside,” she told Johnson, fervently wishing there had been time for her to get fitted for a wire. That way, Rodriguez and the others would have been able to hear what was happening. But Fiske had never taken his eyes off her and she hadn’t wanted to risk upsetting the cart by temporarily ducking out of his range of vision.
“I hate careless women,” Johnson growled.
His eyes were malevolent as they swept over her. Aerospace engineer or not, there was no doubt in Lydia’s mind that the man was unbalanced. She just prayed he wouldn’t go off the deep end and start shooting people before she had a change to disarm him.
Crossing to Conroy’s room, Lukas passed his uncle’s bed. Rather than fear, there was only concern on the older man’s face. Despite the impatience of their captors, Lukas paused by Henry’s bed. Lukas took his own turn with guilt. If he’d insisted on sending his uncle to another hospital, the man would be having the procedure done now, out of harm’s way.
“You all right?”
Too weak to sit up, even with the help of the adjustable bed, Henry still managed to smile at his nephew.
“Don’t worry, today is not a good day to die,” he joked.
Lukas didn’t like the color of his uncle’s face. It was far too pale.
The next moment he felt Fiske prodding him with the muzzle of his weapon.
“You two can powwow later,” the youngest supremacist sneered condescendingly. “You’re here to fix Conroy, remember?”
All he needed was a clear shot at him with his bare hands, Lukas thought. But Fiske was brandishing a weapon while standing too close to Henry. He couldn’t afford to do anything yet for fear of Henry getting hurt.
Lukas was forced to do as he was told.
Walking into the small space allotted to Conroy, he paused to check the monitors surrounding his bed. The readings were good. Progress was slow, but that was to be expected, given the circumstances.
“Can’t you give me something?” Conroy complained angrily. “It hurts like hell.”
Lukas took hold of his wrist, gauging Conroy’s pulse. “You were shot and you had heart surgery, you’re lucky to be feeling anything.”
Unable to remain still for more than a few seconds, Johnson was pacing at the foot of Conroy’s bed. “Just fix him so he can travel, medicine man.”
He knew that, to buy some time, Lydia wanted to perpetuate the ruse that they were going to be given everything they wanted, but he felt he had to give them the truth about Conroy’s condition. The man had still been unconscious as of last night. His being awake was sapping all of his energy for the time being.
Lukas avoided looking at Lydia, knowing her reaction to what he was about to say. “You move him, you do it at your own risk.”
Johnson hit the black bag with the muzzle of his weapon. “There’s gotta be something in that bag of yours, medicine man, to do the trick. Maybe you just need some incentive. Maybe,” his voice grew harder, “if we start eliminating the people in the room, you can see your way clear to doing what I tell you. How about it, medicine man? Who goes first? The old lady—” He swung his weapon toward Wanda, who looked back at him defiantly. Lukas mentally took off his hat to her. “Or maybe your pal, here?”
As he said it, he aimed his gun at Henry. Lukas could feel the muscle in his jaw grow rigid. If they hurt Henry in any way, he was going to kill them with his bare hands.
“Better yet, how about her?” This time Johnson aimed the gun at Lydia. “They can only kill me once and they’ve already made up their minds to do it because of that kid who died at the mall.”
“Worthless punk,” Conroy gasped. “Served him right for coming out to see the exhibit. What the hell’s wrong with people, coming out to gape at some useless scribbling and calling it a tribute. Tribute, huh. A tribute to dirty, marauding scum.” Angry, red-rimmed eyes turned on Lydia. He nodded at Lukas. “You know his kind killed my daughter? Killed Sally? Gave her all sorts of garbage to mess with her head. I found her in the bathroom. My daughter, dead in a pool of vomit on the bathroom floor.” He fairly shrieked the words. “They’re all worthless, drug-snorting, foul-mouth lowlifes. I wish I’d gotten more of them.” His eyes narrowed. “Next time.”
“There’s not going to be a next time if you go joyriding on a helicopter,” Lukas told him.
“I’m touched by your concern,” Conroy sneered. “Just give me something to kill the pain and have the government pig get the helicopter,” he ordered. “Otherwise, we’re going to have ourselves an old-fashioned massacre here.” He looked at Lukas with hatred as Lukas took out a syringe and a vial of morphine. “You know all about that word, don’t you?”
Lydia had heard just about all she could stand. “I think you could have been forgiven if your scalpel had slipped during his operation,” she told Lukas.
“Gimme a gun,” he ordered Fiske. The latter handed him Lydia’s own weapon. Conroy’s lips curled at the sheer irony of it. He’d use her own gun on her. There was justice for you. Weak, his anger strengthened him. “Say your prayers, FBI bitch, we’ve got ourselves enough hostages, I’m taking you out. An eye for an eye, right? You shot me, I’m shooting you.”
With that, he raised the gun and aimed it at Lydia.
Chapter 15
Lukas didn’t remember thinking, he merely reacted. He jabbed the needle into Conroy’s arm. Jerking, Conroy screamed in surprise and pain. His shot went wild.
Lukas doubled up his fist and swung at Conroy’s jaw, knocking him out.
The distraction was all Lydia needed. She swung around and kneed Fiske, who was standing behind her, frozen in place, gaping at what had just transpired. As he doubled up in pain, howling and cursing at her, she grabbed Fiske’s gun away from him and spun around to find Johnson, the gun cocked and ready in her hand.
The moment she turned, she saw Johnson backing up, the gun he was holding trained di
rectly at her head.
Triumph shone in his dark eyes.
“Drop the gun,” he ordered.
Lydia caught her breath, frustrated beyond words. But the gun remained in her hand, aimed at him.
“Maybe you should follow your own advice,” Lukas told him.
Johnson spared a look to the side. He was staring down the muzzle of the weapon Lukas had taken from Conroy. Rather than exhibiting any fear, the supremacist’s lips peeled back in an evil smile. He was clearly enjoying himself.
“What we have here is a what they used to call a Mexican standoff.”
“Wrong,” Lukas contradicted evenly, not a single muscle giving away the very real concerns he had. Even if it didn’t manage to get Lydia, or him, a stray shot could hit any one of the patients or the staff. He had to get Johnson to drop his weapon. “A Mexican standoff is when there’s a balance of power. In case you forgot how to count, it’s two to one here. Not in your favor.”
“You can’t kill both of us, Johnson,” Lydia told him, her gun still raised.
The wild look in his eyes intensified as he swung the muzzle of his weapon from Lydia to Lukas and then back again. He cocked the gun. “No, but I sure as hell can kill one of you.”
His choice of victim evident, Johnson squeezed the trigger before he finished his words. But the shot went wild, passing through the ceiling as he fell to the floor, dead. His eyes were wide, glazed and unseeing as they stared at Lukas.
Lydia stared, dumbfounded. Lukas had fired his gun before she could even squeeze her weapon’s trigger. Training that had been rigorously drummed into her had held her back until the last possible moment.
And that last possible second would have been too late. If it hadn’t been for Lukas.
Rounding the bed, Lukas was beside her the next moment, his eyes taking swift inventory of all her parts. “You all right?”
Numbed, she nodded.
“Everybody else okay?” he asked, tossing the question to the room. A murmur of uneven, shaky voices answered in the affirmative.
Crossing to Johnson, Lydia dropped to her knees over his body, feeling for his pulse more out of obligation than expectation. She wasn’t surprised not to find any.
But she was surprised by what had just happened. She looked at Lukas, kneeling beside her. “Where did you learn to shoot like that?”
He sat back on his heels. There would be no life-and-death battles waged over Johnson. That fight was over. “The reservation. Billy Standing Bear could get his hands on almost any weapon you could think of.”
His life in the wild band he had run with in his youth had included experiences about which he’d told no one, not even Henry, although he figured his uncle had had his suspicions. It was funny how things worked out sometimes. If he hadn’t been part of the gang, he wouldn’t have known his way around weapons and wouldn’t be looking down at a dead man now. And Lydia, in all likelihood, would have been the one on the floor in his place.
Satisfied that Johnson no longer posed a threat, Lydia swung around to check on Fiske. He was still on the floor, writhing in pain. She looked at him with contempt. “We need something to tie up the junior terrorist with before he slithers away on us.”
Lukas had a roll of white adhesive tape in his hand. “Way ahead of you.” Crouching, he went to work.
Lydia hurried to the door to call in the others and to call off the SWAT team. She glanced over her shoulder and saw that Lukas had Fiske’s hands and feet pulled together behind him.
He felt her looking at him. Lukas commented. “Not unlike tying a calf in a rodeo.”
She shook her head. The man had hidden talents. “Someday, you’re going to have to tell me about that childhood of yours.”
Someday. The word shimmered between them as he watched her hurry into the corridor. He took it as a promise, not a slip of the tongue.
“Dr. Graywolf, I think you’d better get over here.”
Wanda’s voice brought him around. He didn’t like the tone he heard. He tested the integrity of the tape he’d just wound around Fiske’s hands and feet. Satisfied that Fiske wasn’t going anywhere in the near future, Lukas rose. Only then did he realize that Wanda was standing next to a bed.
His uncle’s bed.
Adrenaline shot through him like a flare. Rushing over, he felt Henry’s neck in an effort to deny what he saw on the monitor. The screen was flat-lining.
“Crash cart. Get me a crash cart!” Lukas shouted, beginning manual CPR. Panic ate away at him the way it hadn’t when he’d faced down Johnson an eternity ago. “C’mon, old man, we’ve been through worse things than this. This was just a little noise, a lot of shouting. It’s over. Don’t die on me now.”
Counting in his mind, Lukas administered one round of CPR before the nurse came running back with the crash cart.
At the same moment, Lydia returned with Special Agent Rodriguez following behind her like a shadow. Keeping up was the assistant director and several other FBI agents who entered the room in their wake.
“He’s all yours.” She indicated the hog-tied Fiske on the floor, then nodded toward Johnson. Blood was pooling around his upper torso. “And you’ll need a body bag for that one. Conroy was strong enough to hold up a gun, so I think he can be transferred to the medical ward in the county jail.”
The assistant director looked down at the unconscious prisoner. “What the hell happened to him?”
“A little doctor-patient interaction,” she replied, looking around for Lukas. Any other words faded as she saw Lukas standing over his uncle, charged paddles in his hands. Relief fled as something tightened in her chest. “Lukas?”
Exhaling as he silently rendered a fragment of a prayer of thanks, Lukas replaced the paddles on the cart and waved it back.
“We’ve got a pulse. Call down for an O.R.,” he instructed a nurse beside him. “Tell them I’ve got a man up here who can’t wait.”
Closest to the wall phone, Wanda made the call to the first floor. Lukas didn’t wait. Taking the safeties off the wheels, he mobilized the bed and began pushing it toward the double doors.
Not waiting to be asked, Lydia quickly took over the other side, helping to guide the bed down the corridor. Between them, the old man lay unconscious, lost to the drama he had instigated.
“Lukas, what happened?”
He hadn’t even looked at her. His face was a grim mask. He was afraid that if he allowed himself the slightest bit of emotion, it would crack everything else apart, including his strength.
“He had a heart attack,” he answered crisply, punching the button for the elevator. “I guess seeing a gun pointed at me was too much for him.”
The service elevator car arrived almost immediately and they pushed the bed in. Lukas pressed for the ground floor. Praying. Praying to remember how to pray.
Unable to help herself, Lydia took the old man’s hand in hers even though she knew he wouldn’t feel it. Silently she tried to will him her strength. “Is there anything I can do to help?”
Lukas looked at her over his uncle’s inert form. “Do you know how to pray?”
She hadn’t prayed since her father had been shot. An ocean of prayers had turned out to be useless. Her father had still died. “I’m not sure I remember how.”
“You might try remembering,” he told her as the doors opened again.
Quickly, they made their way through the throngs in the corridors. Though questions followed them, people got out of their way. The emergency operating rooms were located next to the elevators at the rear of the hospital.
As they arrived at the doors of the first operating room, Lydia reached over the bed to touch Lukas’s hand to get his attention. “Is there anyone I should call for him?”
He shook his head. “There’s just my mother. She thinks he’s off on a fishing trip.” He set his mouth grimly, not wanting his thoughts to stray. “It’s better that she doesn’t know.”
Lydia watched helplessly as Lukas disappeared through th
e double doors. She disagreed with his assessment of the situation, knowing that if she were his mother, she’d want to know that her only brother was on the operating table, fighting for his life. She’d want to move heaven and earth to be there.
But it was Lukas’s call to make, not hers. She let out a shaky breath. All she could do was be there for him when it was over.
Suddenly at a loss with what to do with herself, Lydia went to the lounge where family and friends were supposed to wait sedately while those they cared about were half a corridor away being operated on.
The moment she walked in, she was enveloped in an embrace. It took her a second to realize that Elliot’s wife was pressing her tear-stained face against hers and hugging her for all she was worth.
“He’s going to be all right, Lydia. Elliot’s going to be all right.” Stepping back, Janice covered her mouth with her hands, physically holding back a sob of joy. “They’re admitting him overnight, just to be sure, but the doctor says he’s going to be just fine. It looks like he just needs a transfusion. Nothing vital was hit.” Fresh tears shimmer in her eyes. “Lydia, I can’t thank you enough—”
Lydia shook her head. All she could think of was that if it hadn’t been for her, Elliot wouldn’t have been shot in the first place. “There’s no need to.”
“Oh, but there is,” Janice insisted. “If you hadn’t traded yourself for him, he could be—” She stopped abruptly, unable to say the horrible words.
There was no point in going over everything, assigning blame and denying it. What mattered at this moment was the end result. Elliot was going to be all right. Lydia smiled at the other woman.
“Hey, I’m in no mood to break in a new partner. I had no choice but to get him out of there.” She gave the woman a quick, warm hug. “Tell Elliot I’ll be up to see him later.”
Watching her back away, Janice called after her. “Where are you going?”
“I’ve got a promise to keep.” Lydia commandeered a folding chair and looked at the hospital attendant sitting behind a small desk in the corner. Eyeing her. “Okay if I take this? I’m just going into the hall with it.”
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