Sleight of Hand (Outbreak Task Force)

by Julie Rowe

  “Where would the fun be in that?”

  He pulled his hands away from his face to find her smiling, but it was quieter, less silly.

  “I don’t care if you’re bitchy,” she said, the humor not quite leaving her face. “As long as you do your job. You back me up when I need it, and I’ll do the same for you.”

  “Sounds reasonable,” he said.

  All traces of comedy fled from her face as she said in a tone so hard and sharp it could flay the skin off his bones, “But if you try to fuck me up or fuck me over, I will bury you.” Her gaze was clear and direct. “Do you get me?”

  Joy Ashiro, trauma nurse, had a scary side to her, and damn if he didn’t find that both admirable and attractive as all hell.

  It was Gunner’s turn to grin. “That is the best deal I’ve heard in years.”

  Chapter Two

  February 14, 2:30 p.m.

  Joy paused outside her office door and kicked it with one foot in lieu of knocking, both hands busy holding up a precariously piled high pillar of coffee cups, pumpkin muffins, and a container of her killer pumpkin cream cheese icing for the muffins.

  Gunner had a soft spot for pumpkin-flavored treats. She’d found that out a few months ago when she’d popped in with food for whoever was on duty over Thanksgiving weekend.

  He hadn’t been overly friendly, but the sight of the pumpkin pie amongst the containers of food had turned him into Mr. Cooperation.

  He’d kept looking at the pie like it was going to spontaneously combust at any moment and cheat him of his opportunity to consume it. Did he look at a woman he wanted with the same laser-intense focus?

  She’d gotten hot just thinking about it.

  Gunner wasn’t classically handsome, but his broad shoulders, fit physique, and direct blue gaze heated her blood, turning it molten. She wanted to touch him, to see if skin to skin contact raised her temperature even more. Or if it was her imagination creating something out of nothing.

  She’d been leery of this assignment to work with him, especially after she’d heard a multitude of asshole behavior horror stories from his past partners. So far, he’d been occasionally grumpy, but she’d discovered he simply needed time to inhale a couple of cups of coffee before he was ready to talk to anyone. That, and a neat and organized work space.

  Last week, she’d brought in another pie to eat with lunch and shared it with him. He’d been positively giddy the entire afternoon.

  DS even asked what wonder drug she’d put in his coffee.

  Like she was going to hand over her secret weapon because he asked so politely. Hah.

  The office door opened.

  Gunner already had his mouth open, probably to bark, “What?”, but as soon as he took her and her burdens in, he stepped out of the way and grabbed the tray of coffee she had precariously balanced on the top of the food containers.

  She managed to make it to her desk with dropping any of her precious cargo.

  He followed her, staring at the food. “Is that what I think it is?”

  “As long as you think it’s pumpkin muffins with pumpkin cream cheese icing,” she replied.

  He stilled and closed his eyes. “You figured me out.”

  “What are you so worried about?” Joy shrugged. “Everyone has a weakness.” She lowered her voice to a stage whisper. “Mine is dark chocolate, by the way.”

  He opened his eyes and attempted to pin her with a stare. “Who knows?”

  “About your passionate penchant for pumpkin? No one.” She smiled. “Yet.”

  His eyebrows crowded low over his eyes.

  She sighed and shook her head. “I still don’t think you’re scary.”

  He glanced away then took a step closer to the food and examined the muffins. “You baked these yourself?” he asked, suspicion coating every letter.

  “I picked them up at that TV show cupcake store, but the icing is all my own creation,” she replied then watched him relax way too much at her answer. “Hey, the only thing I’ve burnt was my toast last week.”

  “You set off the fire alarm,” he drawled. “And completely fried the toaster.” He paused. “The ceiling in the lunch room has to be repainted.”

  “If you don’t stop complaining, I’m going to eat all the icing.” It was not an idle threat. She’d only brought one small container of her incredible cream cheese icing. She’d planned to share it, but if he was going to act like a jackass, he was going to eat his muffin naked.

  The mental image of Gunner of eating with no clothes on, and licking his fingers clean, only made her hungry for things other than food. Like a peek at his outstanding ass or shredded abs. She’d seen him shirtless a few times at the gym they both went to. Delicious.

  No. Bad Joy, very bad.

  Sometimes, though, it was good to be bad.

  “I’m not complaining.” He took a muffin and a coffee. “I’m stating a fact.” He spread some icing over his muffin. “Why the pastries?” he asked, his gaze taking in her face with narrowed eyes.

  Hah. What he really meant was, is this charity or pity? Because if it is, fuck off. She’d never met anyone so suspicious of kindness in her life.

  “You didn’t eat any lunch, and I was afraid you’d starve without someone dropping you an aid package.”

  His expression turned bland. “If you’re this desperate to get a job with the Red Cross, have no fear. I’ll write you a recommendation, and you don’t even need to feed me.”

  Cheeky bastard. “I’m trying to keep your blood sugar within normal limits. Eating crap out of the vending machines isn’t healthy.”

  He made a show of looking at his plate full of muffin-y goodness. “I doubt this is going to spare me from diabetes, and I’m absolutely certain it isn’t going to do my arteries any good.”

  She rolled her eyes. “You really make it hard for a person to like you.”

  “I don’t want anyone to like me,” he said almost cheerfully, taking his muffin back to his desk and sitting down. “I just want to do my job and go home.”

  What a load of bullshit.

  If she said that out loud he’d stop listening. “Too bad you have to talk to actual human beings in order to do your job.”

  “Yes.” He gave her a sad face. “It’s a struggle, but I persevere, adapt, and overcome.”

  “I think the adage is improvise, adapt, and overcome, and you stole that from the Marines.”

  “Pfft. You say potato, I say tomato.”

  She winced. “Um, that’s not how that one goes, either.”

  He didn’t reply, choosing to eat his muffin instead, but there at the corner of his mouth, was that a smile? Yes, the corners of his eyes were slightly wrinkled.

  The jerk was smiling.

  She pointed a finger at him. “You have a sense of humor.”

  That wiped the happy right off his face. “I do not.”

  “You sneaky son of a bitch,” she breathed. It was underhanded, camouflaged, and buried under a mountain of snark, but he definitely had a sense of humor.

  They stared at each other like two gunfighters at a fast-draw showdown.

  “Who are you going to tell?” he asked, breaking the silence.

  “No one,” she said without hesitation. “If they can’t figure it out for themselves, too fucking bad.”

  His gaze turned speculative. “You ever play good cop, bad cop?”

  “No, but I’d be curious to try good nurse, bad doctor.”

  His eyebrows went up.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake, not…that.”

  Not that she wouldn’t mind doing a little of that with Gunner, the man was hot, but anything more than fantasizing in her head would be stupid in the extreme.

  He flashed her a smile. The first genuine, real smile she’d seen on his face, and a concern that had paced restlessly in the back of her head stopped moving and went to sleep.

  “As long as I get to be the bad one most of the time…deal.”

  “How is that fair?�
� He wore his stubborn face. “Okay, fine. When you’re done, can we talk about your open cases? I’ve gone through them all, and there are a few things of note.”

  He finished his muffin, dusted off his hands, and pulled out a dog-eared notebook. “Shoot.”

  “The Free America From Oppression assholes are mentioned in nearly half of your notes,” she said, having made notes as she read through each case. “They can’t actually be involved in all of these, can they?”

  “Only if they’re paying union rates.” Gunner sounded as irritated as she felt. “I doubt it, but with bioterrorism scares on the rise, that particular organization is at the top of everyone’s mind. Plus, I think they sometimes take credit for shit they didn’t do.”

  “That’s awfully juvenile.”

  “It’s stupid and disgusting.” He shrugged to say, what can you expect? He was trying hard to appear casual, but the muscles along one side of his face were tense enough to stand out.

  It really bothered him. More than he was saying.

  “We’ll get them,” she told him with quiet confidence. “They’re going to fuck up, and we’ll catch them.”

  “Someone else will take their place.”

  “Then we’ll catch them, too.” She gave him an arch expression. “We don’t give up.”

  He glanced at her, and for a moment he looked exhausted, tired to the bone. Then, he took another bite of his muffin and said, “Who do you think we are, the postal service?”

  “We’re better than them. We’re the quiet, unseen superheroes who save the day without anyone knowing we were even there.”

  “You put something weird in the icing, didn’t you?”

  She didn’t bother dignifying that remark with an answer.

  Chapter Three

  February 24, Sunday, 9:00 a.m.

  Gunner parked the CDC van Joy and he were using outside of a quiet-looking university frat house.

  They’d gotten called in to work at about eight a.m., proving that disease, disaster, and dumb-assery didn’t take weekends off.

  After grabbing gear and a vehicle, they had driven to the address just off the Georgia State University campus. According to EMS, several of the people in the house were exhibiting signs of possible food poisoning. Something nasty was behind it, because two kids had been admitted to intensive care earlier that morning.

  Food poisoning, AKA foodborne illnesses, were common. Thanks to rigorous surveillance programs and hospital surveys, the CDC could reliably predict that approximately 48 million people in the USA would get sick, 128,000 would be hospitalized, and 3,000 would die every year from foodborne diseases.

  Most people got sick, rested up, followed doctor’s orders, and recovered without complication. A high concentration of illness within a group living in close proximity and with a narrow age range was not good news.

  A frat house wasn’t much different than a cruise ship for close contact living conditions. A foodborne disease could sweep through either like wildfire.

  Gunner took one step inside the house, Joy beside him, and stopped. He’d seen a lot of weird stuff in emergency rooms, clinics, and yes, even in hastily erected tents in disaster areas.

  What he was looking at right now, this morning, was something he’d never imagined seeing.

  The room was large, square, and overpopulated by men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two. No one was standing. Most were prone with a few sitting awkwardly in a chair or on a couch.

  All of them reeked of a cocktail of alcohol and vomit, an assault on his nose despite the particle mask he wore.

  At first glance, it looked like a mass, self-inflicted alcohol poisoning. If true, what these kids needed was a couple of days in the local drunk tank. The smell alone would cure most of them from ever drinking in such quantities again. If it weren’t for the two frat brothers who’d arrived at the Atlanta Central hospital with symptoms pointing to more than just being passed-out drunk or eating pizza a day too old. Rapid onset high fever, depressed kidney output, and worse.

  That meant Joy and he had to go through the motions and eliminate the possibility of one of several possible biological threats before he could turn this house of stupidity over to the police and the university.

  “For fuck’s sake,” Joy said.

  “I’m tempted to borrow a gun,” he said quietly.

  “No,” she said with patience. “You may not put any of them out of their misery.”

  “Spoilsport,” he muttered before calling out, “Is there anyone here who’s in charge?”

  Someone stumbled down the stairs, arriving on the main floor more by way of gravity than some concerted effort or plan. The man was young, had bloodshot eyes, and wore a shirt with the Greek letters of the house on it.

  He came to a stop a few feet away from Gunner. “Can I help”—he took in two ragged breaths—“you?”

  “Yes, you can—”

  The kid threw up. “Sorry,” he said right before depositing more on the hardwood floor.

  Yeah, this day so wasn’t going the way any of them had hoped.

  “How long has everyone been sick?” Gunner asked.

  “Um.” The guy wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. “I don’t know, maybe a few hours.” He looked around, taking in the sunshine coming through the windows. “Wait…what time is it?”

  “Ten o’clock in the morning,” Gunner replied.

  The guy blinked then glanced at the people waiting behind Gunner below the open porch. Police, paramedics, and university staff. “Why are you dressed like”—the guy waved his hand up and down Gunner’s body—“that?”

  Joy and he were wearing sets of Hazmat orange Tyvek coveralls, safety glasses, particle masks, and gloves.

  “We need to inspect the entire building,” he replied. “Take samples and talk to everyone here.”

  The kid glanced behind Gunner and Joy again at the four police officers, three university staff, and two lawyers all waiting to know was if it was safe or not for them to enter.

  “Don’t you need a warrant?” the kid asked.

  One of the cops stepped forward and handed a piece of paper to Gunner, who handed it to the kid.

  He opened it and blinked several times before reading it. “Um,” he said hesitantly. “Okay.”

  The cop began questioning the kid from about fifteen feet away.

  After telling the kid not to move from where he was, Gunner strode farther into the house and began examining the rest of the occupants where they were laying, sitting, or sleeping.

  One young man stared at Gunner with a fuzzy gaze. He used his pen light to check the boy’s pupils and found them normal. The smell from the kid, however, was awful.

  That was not a good sign.

  “Everyone says it’s coming out of both ends,” Joy said, coming to a stop a couple of paces away. She angled a thumb over her shoulder at two snoring young men on the floor. “Same over there. Asleep covered in their own body fluids.”

  “I’ll do an occult blood.” She didn’t sound optimistic. Joy wasn’t one to sugarcoat anything. She called herself a realist, but Gunner suspected she’d had the concept of basic human decency replaced with cynicism a long time ago.

  Joy swabbed the stained back of some kid who was snoring louder than an artillery barrage, wiped it onto the cardboard test surface, then added a couple of drops of a chemical reagent.

  “Positive,” she announced.

  Gunner examined the fallen, sleeping, and semi-conscious young men. “We need to check everyone.”

  Joy nodded. “If this were just a group hangover…” She didn’t finish. No point. “I’m going to check the kitchen, look for a possible source.”

  He met her gaze and saw the same resignation in her eyes that was probably in his own. “Call in EMS. Some of these kids are going to need more than time to sleep it off.”

  He walked to the doorway and spoke to the waiting group of concerned officials and law enforcement. “A cursory examination
of several of these people indicates a possible real threat. There are upward of thirty people in there. We’re going to need more EMS and ambulances.”

  “What do you mean a possible real threat?” one of the university people asked.

  “Whatever is making these kids sick,” Gunner told the man, “it isn’t your garden-variety bug.”

  “Isn’t this a case of too much partying?” There was a note of desperation to the man’s tone. “If you treat this as some kind of infection or poisoning, it’s going to cause a panic.”

  “This is the Sunday morning after a Friday night party. The majority of these kids should be up and around, not semi-conscious, disoriented, and still hurling. Some of them may be suffering from alcohol poisoning, which is bad enough all on its own, but with two serious cases at Atlanta Central hospital, I’m not so optimistic.”

  “What do you mean by serious cases?”

  “Their kidneys are shutting down, and there are early signs of sepsis.” He let his words sink in, then said firmly, “We’re required to investigate and determine what’s making all these kids sick. You saw the court order. Don’t get in my way.”

  The dude did not like that at all.

  After a moment’s surprise, the man narrowed his eyes, squared his shoulders, and said loudly enough for everyone within twenty feet to hear, “How dare you try to minimize the assistance of everyone here. We all have a role to play in mitigating the damage as a result of this”—he looked at the house president, who was shaking, pale, and sweating and seemed to have trouble swallowing—“misadventure.”

  This guy had all the hallmarks of a politician, right down to his insincere empathy and equally sincere desire to control the situation.

  Gunner managed to hang onto his temper then stomped down the steps and got into the asshole’s personal space to say in an even tone, “Fine. We all have a role.” He took another half step closer but wasn’t able to keep the snarl out of his voice with his next words. “Yours is to stay out of my way, or I’ll have you arrested for hindering a CDC investigation.”

  He glanced over at one of the cops. “Could you and this gentleman begin compiling the information we’re all going to need for our reports? Series of events, identities of all these people, everything they can remember of the party, what they drank, ate, everything.”