by Asia Marquis
There's a lot wrong with prison. You never really can trust anyone, for one thing. Lots of problems that wouldn't even have been an issue outside of the joint.
The biggest problem, though, the one that tops all the others, is the raw damn boredom. So much time to pass. Days stretch on forever. It doesn't much matter what you do to try to pass them. Nothing will work as well as you want it to.
When you have eight straight hours, there's not many books will last you more than a day or two. You can go through the whole library in a year or so. And that's including shit you would never even consider under normal circumstances.
I take a deep breath and look around. I may as well get as much as I can out of my last day of being outside iron bars. It takes me a minute to be sure, but I recognize the car coming up behind me. I've seen it before, a dozen times at least.
What surprises me a little bit is that the guys in front don't seem to notice, or at least aren't doing anything about it. Maybe they're trying to hide in plain sight, I don't know.
Maguire pulls up alongside the car. I can see Brian in the seat next to her. He doesn't look good. Ragged. But he's alive, which is a surprise.
I hear Donaldsen curse in the front seat, and pull out his phone. A second later he's talking into it.
"I thought I told you to hold him."
A long pause. I don't like the ideas I'm getting about who he's talking to, nor the ideas about what they're talking about. Hold who?
I don't need to wonder. I already know who, and that's what's got me upset. The goon steps on the gas. We're not in anything special, though. I don't think we're going to get away.
The anger, dissipated into melancholy, starts burning bright again. This mother fucker thought he would use my own family against me? As a weapon?
He orchestrated this whole setup. He's the one responsible. The answer isn't hard, but getting the motion right, quickly, is. Slow is fast. Slow is fast. I can't afford to get ahead of myself.
I rock forward and at the same time slip my arms high above Donaldsen's head. My hands go down, and my weight comes back. I feel the strain in my shoulders almost immediately.
The chain between my hands goes tight in Donaldsen's fleshy throat. There's enough time for my arms to start really hurting before the goon notices, maybe two or three seconds.
I don't need long to get my revenge. Three seconds isn't enough.
"You let him go right now," he growls, reaching awkwardly for the pistol at his waist. Another precious couple of seconds wasted, and another precious few seconds of Donaldsen's air, gone. "Or I swear to God, you won't make it to D.C."
My knee goes up to brace against the back of the seat in front of me. It lets me pull tighter.
"You tried to kill my brother."
He gets the gun free and points it at me. He thinks I can be threatened into stopping. He's got a lot to learn.
"Your brother is fine," the goon growls. "Let Inspector Donaldsen go."
"Put the gun down."
"I can't do that, you know I can't."
He doesn't seem to realize the other problem with this scenario, though. For a big guy in the A.T.F., he's awfully dumb. All the time that he spends pointing that gun at me, keeping his eyes on me, he isn't keeping his eyes on the road.
The car slams hard into the corner of another. I can feel it forcing Donaldsen forward, but I've got him held back. It's almost like a harness, in addition to his seatbelt. My arms feel like they're going to fall off.
The car goes spinning, hard. Tail hits the concrete barrier, and we finally spin back to a stop. My entire body hurts. For the first time in what must have been thirty seconds, I loosen my arms around Donaldsen's neck.
He doesn't move to do much of anything. I pull my arms back into the back-seat. This might have been a mistake, I think. I feel a little woozy. My head might have hit the roof a little. I can't really think straight.
The goon's moving, but he looks out of it. He picks his head up off the steering wheel slow, like he's just waking up in the morning. Like the next words out of his mouth are going to be 'where am I?'
I lean back. Good enough. I got my revenge, and if that's all I get, then it'll have been all I could have asked for. Then the door opens, and an angel reaches inside to grab me.
Chapter Forty-Seven
MAGUIRE
God, I can't believe how heavy Ryan is. He looks so small, and yet, pulling him free of the car, feels as if I'm going to pull something in my back.
Oh, well. I can hurt later. I have to get him free. I can see Mitch starting to wake up. I can also see Donaldsen, and he's decidedly not waking up. I don't know how to feel about it.
I know what my professional life says I should think. That it's a damn shame. That he's been a cornerstone of the A.T.F. for more than ten years. That he's served with distinction.
I also know what my personal feelings are, and I know that if I had the time to I'd kick his dead body. Ryan's starting to really come around, now, his feet scrabbling ineffectually at the ground to try to stand on his own legs.
I keep pulling. I don't have time to wait for him to find his legs again. It's only another few feet to the car. I'm committing a crime, doing this, but I can't leave Ryan in that car. It's tantamount to killing him.
The Crazy Horses want him out of the way, and they want it bad. Bad enough to kill, but they had assurances that he'd be taken care of, and soon.
Well, now the man who'd given those assurances died in a car crash. All the promises in the world don't mean a thing any more. They have to hope that others will follow his lead, or they'll have to come after Beauchamp themselves.
His boots get a good grip on the lip of my car and he helps me push him in onto the seat, laid out flat in the back. I close the door, careful to avoid slamming it on his ankle, and pull into the front.
I look over to check on Brian. He's got his eyes closed, his head leaned back.
"Brian!"
He jolts forward. "I wasn't sleeping."
"I know you weren't. Just resting a second. But I need you to navigate for me, alright? We have to get your brother to the hospital."
In the rear end, I can see Ryan pushing himself upright, but his arms aren't playing nice, and he slips and loses the weight, falls back against the back seat.
The car starts going again. Not only shouldn't I drive away from the scene of an accident, but it's damn hard when, between the two cars involved, they take up three of the four westbound lanes.
Still, I find a space and slip into it and before I know it, I'm back to driving. Back into anonymity. Back on the way to the hospital, only now I have double the reason to get there as fast as I possibly can.
Ryan finally gets himself upright, slides into the back.
"Brian, are you okay?"
He turns and gives a thumbs-up sign. It's low, and I can tell it's not because he's just a low-signalling kind of guy. He's struggling to raise his any higher for more than a second or two.
"You alright? That was a pretty bad crash."
I can see Ryan in the rear-view, smiling. "I've got a pretty hard head."
"No, you never did wear a helmet, I suppose, did you?"
"Nah. Head's harder than a helmet, and I get to feel the wind in my hair."
I chime in. "That's dangerous, you know. You could hurt yourself."
"Sure, I could. Then again, Brian here could get picked up by drug traffickers. And we all know how likely that is."
Brian turns back in his seat, apparently too tired to stay twisted around. "Never happen."
"See? It'd never happen."
The signs say we're thirty minutes out of Tucson, if we obey the speed limits. We're interpreting them very liberally, though, at the moment. I figure twenty-five. I shut my mouth and let them talk to each other.
Part of me gets nervous about the way that they both seem to be treating their wounds with a very cavalier attitude. The way Ryan's eyes were rolling around in his head like that, he loo
ked like he had a concussion, probably pretty bad.
Brian can rarely keep his head up for more than a few minutes before he has to lay it back on the headrest for another minute. To regain his strength.
But here they are, talking like they're immortal. Like none of it matters, like none of it affects them.
Each is trying to be stronger for the other. I don't know if it's working, but they sure are trying like hell. For me, it's just a constant reminder of how bad the A.T.F. fucked this all up.
Now, I keep being reminded, it falls to me to clean that mess up. To make sure that the guilty get punished. Well, the Crazy Horses have got 2 down, and 1 un-accounted for. 2 more are sitting in this car, and it'd be a damn shame for that to be how it ends.
My list isn't looking as good, but I've got my first big win. If there's a head to this snake, I have to think that it might have just gotten cut off, whether it was luck or fate or what.
There are signs pointing me in the direction of the nearest hospital, right off the interstate. Convenient. I follow them a little ways. It doesn't take long to find some place. Nice and big, white walls.
It looks quite nice. Pristine, even. I can't complain one bit. I pull around to Emergency and jump out of the car. Brian, appropriately, starts to get himself out of the passenger seat as if he's going to walk himself in.
I book it inside to grab a wheelchair, and happen to find a promising-looking nurse along the way. Between the two of us, the boys are brought inside. Their names are on the list, but the list looks long.
Just in case, I show my badge, and make a few notes as to their condition. One was in an accident, possible concussion. The other's lost a lot of blood. A lot of blood.
The nurse takes that all down. I like to hope that she's taking it more seriously, but I really can't say if she's just putting on an act for my benefit.
I settle into one of the cheaply-made chairs and for the first time in what feels like days, I can finally relax. The rest of the world can wait. I lay my head back against the stucco walls and close my eyes. I've got a lot of catching up to do.
Chapter Forty-Eight
RYAN
I don't know how long I've been sitting in this room, waiting for something to happen. Long enough to remember that I hate hospitals. Long enough to remember why I hate hospitals, other than that most injuries I get are from the sorts of things that you don't go to hospitals after you do them.
If you get shot robbing a place, you don't go to a hospital. Cops are all over the place looking for that sort of shit.
I don't know if they'll be in here, looking for me. I know that there's going to be trouble, sooner or later. I just don't know how bad yet, and I don't know where it's coming from.
Part of me frustratedly wonders which will show up first—a real doctor, or someone planning to have me shot or arrested. Cops will only shoot you if you resist, after all. Very different.
I haven't even seen Maguire in a little while. Then again, she was asleep in the lobby when the nurse came to take me away. Let her sleep. She looked like hell. Like she was only half-way in the living world.
A nice long nap will do her a lot of good. Once she wakes up, things will hopefully turn around.
I hope to hell she gave them a false name. I reach down to try to grab my own chart, read the name off of it. It's not there. The bin, where I'd expect a chart to be, it's just empty.
How wonderfully typical. I have always hated hospitals, hated stayting in them, and this only proves that I was right not to like them. Well, nothing I can do now. I'm already inside, already too deep to do anything to change my situation.
I'd like to have a gun. I know damn well that there's nobody in here checking for them. Maybe if you blocked really badly, and a security guard saw. You could get checked for them. Could even get ejected from the building.
As far as metal detectors? Nah. So someone clever just carries something small, keeps it in someplace where it won't show too bad. Small of their back, maybe. Then they walk right in.
The call with Scheck ended quite abruptly. I don't think he got the chance to hang up before the crash, which means she'll have heard it. I don't know how good she is at figuring things out from sound alone, but putting the pieces together won't be hard.
She just has to turn on the damn television and see the news. Big old crash on the I-10. It'll have coverage across Arizona. Anywhere she goes, it'll be on the news, at least every few minutes.
If I'm not there, and I'm not, then the questions start piling up, and the answers aren't hard to figure out. Not for anyone smart enough to run their own damned drug empire.
Which means that it's a matter of time before someone figures out where I am. It's only a matter of time, and I'm going to have to hope to hell that I'm out of here before that time comes. It's feeling unlikely.
I lay my head back against the starchy pillow and try to relax. One of three things has to happen. A man in a white coat walks in, Maguire walks in, or trouble starts. In a god damned hospital gown, I'm in poor condition to deal with any of them.
But there's nothing I can do about that. My gun is still in the trunk of Donaldsen's car. Evidence transfer, in theory. I never used it for anything criminal, but it sure would be nice for them if I had.
What that means is that I might as well rest until something happens, because no matter what it is, I'm not going to stop it now.
I don't know how much later it is, when something finally does happen. It could have been a very long sixty seconds, or an hour, or more. I just don't know. But eventually, a doctor walks in, carrying a manilla folder and flipping through papers.
"Good afternoon, Mr. Blake." I silently thank Maguire for having the forethought to bother with fake names. "It says here you were in a car accident. Can you tell me about it?"
"Guy driving wasn't looking at the road. I hit my head, uh… I was holding on pretty tight to the, you know, the overhead handle? And we spun pretty bad, so… my shoulder hurts pretty bad."
He nods. He's got a look on his face like he's pretty impressed with himself, but he's putting on a solemn expression purely for my benefit. As if, the son of a bitch.
He drops the chart into the space at the foot of my bed, and then comes on over.
"Tell me if this hurts." He rubs at my elbow. Nothing much. Then he moves up a little, a little more. The minute he hits the shoulder, though—
"Ah!"
"Okay, we'll have to get an X-ray on that. Could be a strained muscle, could be a fracture. Now, look into this light for me?"
He pulls out a light. Hard to look right at it. I try my best, but…
"How are you feeling?"
"I dunno. Tired, I guess. Long day." I hadn't really thought about it.
"Can you stand up?"
I haven't tried. I tell him so.
"Alright, then. Give it a shot now. I'll be right here, I won't let you fall and hurt yourself."
I don't need his assurances of that. I'm not going to hurt myself trying to stand up.
I come up to my feet. It's a little hard to stay up. My legs still feel like jelly underneath me. As if I'm trying to stand on the deck of a ship, rather than a solid floor.
The doctor frowns. "Okay, you can lay back down."
I do as I'm told. I'm already in this mess, no reason to cause trouble now.
"Yeah, possible concussion. Hm. Okay. Well, we'll get you into an X-ray as soon as we can."
"Wait—doc, how's my brother? He came in at the same time as me, lost a lot of blood."
He blinks. I don't like it. He's hiding something, but it might just be surprise, since the next words out of his mouth were, "I'm sorry? I don't have anyone like that on my rounds. Might be we have another doctor handling him."
"Could you have a nurse check on it for me?"
"Of course. Lay down, you need your rest. We'll get you into an X-ray as soon as we can for that shoulder, and then you can get some food."
"Alright."
&nbs
p; "Good?"
"Good."
He stands off to the side of the entrance on the way out the door. Someone else is coming in, and he's going to let them. I'm more than a little relieved to see a breathless Sara Maguire at the door.
"Are you alright?"
I smile at her, and I hope to hell that I don't look half as bad as I feel. I wouldn't want to worry her.
"The doctor just came in, told me I'm as healthy as a horse."
He's not there to correct me, and that's about how I'd hoped for it to go.
She settles into one of the chairs beside the bed. She looks more worried than I think she'll admit to me, or anyone else, for that matter.
"Healthy as a horse, huh?"
"Sure."
"Good, cause you look like you got kicked by one."
"Now hey, that's not fair." I can't get the smile off my face, not even to look pouty. Something about her being there just forces the smile on. "That's got nothing to do with the way I look, I was born this way."
"Do you need me to get you anything?"
I lay my head back. "Don't you go babying me, Maguire. I don't need that kind of shit."
"I talked to the nurse. Your brother's in surgery. I couldn't get anyone to give me anything more than that, but he's going to be fine. Okay?"
"When you say it like that, makes me nervous."
"Well," Maguire says, letting out a long breath. "Don't be."
"You're right. How could I have been so foolish?"
For a minute, joking with Sara, I almost forget that any time now someone looking to kill me is going to come through that door and make an attempt at it.
Chapter Forty-Nine
MAGUIRE
There's not a lot to talk about right now. Nothing changing. There's a lot I want to avoid talking about, and a lot that Ryan wants to avoid, I'd bet. He fades in and out. He smiles at me.
I don't know how to feel about the way that it makes my stomach get all fluttery. I haven't ever been that kind of girl. The kind to get weird around a boy. Maybe I should have been. Maybe it would have saved me a lot of trouble.