Ruby Dawn

by Raquel Byrnes

  “What?”

  “Well, if Dakota was robbed by a dealer, why take his body and leave it miles away under a bridge? He couldn’t have gotten there on his own.”

  “Are you going to look into it?” I asked, concerned.

  “Not my department. I’ll pass along my notes, but Homicide detectives don’t generally ask beat cops for their opinions, even if they are cousins.”

  “You’re being careful, right Ben?” I asked suddenly. “Out on the job, I mean?”

  “I’m being careful, Ruby, I promise.” He smiled. “Are you sure you’re all right? You seem really bothered.”

  I remembered Antonio’s threats to those closest to me. Tom’s words from that night at Dakota’s crime scene echoed in my head.

  Antonio isn’t bluffing. I think the blood all over the grass proves that.

  Ben looked at me with expectation, and I realized I’d missed his question.

  “I’m sorry, what?” I asked.

  “I asked where you stayed last night. You lived at the clinic, right?” Ben’s concerned gaze searched mine. “I can help you find a place, if you want.”

  My stomach tightened. I really didn’t need this right now. “Tom let me use his condo for the night.”

  “Oh, that was…nice of him,” Ben said, the strain in his voice evident. He tried for uninterested and failed miserably. “How is he? Didn’t get too burned, did he?”

  “I don’t know, Ben. He didn’t stay the night. Since I have no idea how to get in touch with him, I’ll have to wait until he shows up again to let you know.”

  “Oh.” Ben’s face reddened. “Sorry, I’m doing it again.”

  “Tom and I are…not together. Not last night, not for a long time. I needed a place to stay, he had one. That’s all there is to it.”

  I flashed on Tom pulling away from our kiss and my stomach twisted with the sting of rejection.

  Ben’s gaze went to my hand and then to my face.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “I’m worried about you, Ruby. With so much happening, maybe you shouldn’t go back to work at the hospital. At least, not right away.”

  “I doubt anything more could happen, Ben. With my car and the clinic gone, there’s not much more I can lose at this point.”

  “You can lose your life.”

  “I know. I’ll be careful.” Jotting down my new cell phone number, I handed it to Ben. “Call me if you hear anything more about Dakota, OK?”

  We chatted for a few more minutes about trivial things, and then I left. My trip to the station hadn’t been very fruitful. I didn’t get any more information about Dakota. The ballistic and toxicology reports would take weeks. I was no closer to stopping Antonio or proving he murdered Dakota.

  My shift started in a half hour. Once at the hospital, I changed into new scrubs. I hadn’t had a chance to see what happened to Renee’s SUV after the clinic fire and I didn’t want to face her. The SUV was in my care for all of two days before I parked it next to a building that blew up.

  Already late, I rushed out of the locker room door, messing with my stethoscope and not looking. I ran right into someone. He caught me halfway down and helped me to my feet.

  “Tom,” I said breathless. “I didn’t expect to see you here.”

  His baseball cap, pulled down low on his brows, hid his face, along with the two-day stubble and sunglasses. He looked like he slept in his old jeans and rumpled T-shirt. I wondered where he went after he left me at his condo last night. Did he go back to the blonde? My stomach twisted.

  “Ruby,” Tom whispered and propelled me back into the locker room. “We have to talk.”

  Startled, I followed. He put his finger to his mouth and walked down the rows of lockers checking for anyone else in the room. He did the same thing for the bathroom stalls.

  “What is this about?”

  Tom walked back and sat on the bench against the shower room wall. He looked angry. “Someone pulled my file.”

  “Huh?”

  He took off his sunglasses and stared at me with bloodshot eyes. “Farrell pulled my file, my expunged file.”

  “That was erased, gone. That’s how you got into the DEA in the first place, right?”

  “I don’t know who Farrell knows, or what kind of buddies he has, but he pulled a sealed file. How did he get my last name?”

  “Not from me.” I shrugged. I had no clue. “But I thought it was gone. That’s what the judge said.”

  “It was expunged, not zapped from the universe,” Tom said frustrated.

  “Well, what was in it? Was everything in it?”

  He rubbed his eyes. “You went to see Farrell this morning. Did he say anything?”

  I looked at Tom, shocked. “How would you know that, Tom? I didn’t even know Ben was there until I got to the station. I went there to talk to the lead detective in Dakota’s case.”

  Tom watched me talk, his gaze skipping from my eyes to my mouth, and then back again. Was he trying to see if I was lying? “He didn’t ask you anything about your past?” he asked.

  “No, he just warned that I might be in danger.”

  “Wow, and he’s not a detective yet?”

  “Don’t get nasty. He’s a nice guy.”

  Fiddling with the sunglasses in his hands, he chewed on the inside of his lip.

  “You only fiddle when you have bad news, Tom.”

  “Guys from my DEA group are looking for you.”

  “What does the DEA want with me?”

  “They want to question you.”

  “Like an interview?

  “No, Ruby,” Tom said quietly. “An interrogation.”

  22

  I changed back into my street clothes and followed Tom down the rear stairs that led to the parking garage. I didn’t even have time to let Blaine know to cover my shift. We got in a beige sedan and he drove us away from the hospital. His gaze kept going to the mirrors, nervous.

  “Are you angry that I left the condo?” I tried, his silence making me nervous. “Because you had no food there.”

  “No. It’s actually good that you left.” Tom said through a clenched jaw. “They’ll probably check there.”

  “I thought no one knew I stayed there.”

  “I’d check there if I was looking for you.”

  “Tom, what’s going on?” My voice cracked.

  Tom took my hand and kissed my palm.

  “OK…My boss’s name is Phillip Lopez. He’s the DEA Group Supervisor. I’m working with his guys right now.”

  “This is the task force you want to join?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did he ask you to bring me in?”

  Shaking his head, Tom swerved around a slow van. “No, he thinks I don’t know about this. I’m supposed to be undercover and out of the loop. I heard he sent out Agents Aaron and Sagebrush to look for you.”

  I asked the question that had bugged me since the hospital. “Tom, how did you know that I went to the police station?”

  “I have a guy following you; just in case Antonio goes after you again.”

  “But the clinic is gone. He won.”

  “I had somebody following Antonio since he trashed your car and vandalized the clinic. He didn’t do the firebombing.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “He put a hit out on you, Ruby. Those guys didn’t care about the clinic. They were trying to burn you alive. They fired on the door to keep you inside. It was a hit, a paid hit.”

  “How, how do you know this?”

  “After I left you at the condo last night, I met with a couple of guys I have on the street, some paid informers. They said Antonio made sure he was at a bar buying drinks and being seen, but his main enforcer wasn’t there. The guy’s name is El Payaso, the clown; he leaves the joker from a deck of cards at his crime scenes.”

  I looked at Tom horrified.

  “That’s both the stupidest, and the worst thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “H
e probably saw it in a movie. His real name is Jacobo Ruiz. My guys on the street said he was asking around about you the night of the clinic bombing. He flashed around a lot of money in the clinic neighborhood, looking for your address.”

  “They didn’t know I live at the clinic.”

  “No, they didn’t. Payaso likes to burst into people’s homes at night, tie them up, and make their families watch him hurt them. Home invasion is his trademark.”

  “Not firebombs?”

  “I guess he had to improvise when he couldn’t locate your house. So he came up with Molotov cocktails. Not very effective, actually.”

  “We almost died.” I looked at him, incredulous.

  “We had a lot of time to get out. Most of the front windows were boarded with plywood, remember? They had to chuck the bottles into the office and kitchen windows. Those are side rooms,” Tom countered.

  I didn’t recall last night in the same way, apparently. I just remembered fire and brain crushing panic. I looked at Tom in a new light. How dangerous was his world that last night wasn’t considered effective?

  “So you found out Antonio put a hit out on me and got someone to follow me?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Tom muttered.

  “Uh, thanks?”

  “Sweet, huh? Almost as good as flowers.” He got sarcastic when he was worried.

  “What else do you know, Tom?”

  “The other night, at the crime scene around Dakota’s car, I saw a guy from my DEA office, Agent Aaron, talking to the lead detective.”

  “Detective Riley?” I was surprised. “How fast did you get to the crime scene, Tom? And now that you mention it, how did you know about it in the first place?”

  He waved his hand in the air “That’s not important. They kept glancing over at you.”

  “Are you sure? I was standing next to Lilah; she is the mother of the victim.”

  “I wasn’t sure, so I swiped Aaron’s notes while he was dealing with his car.”

  “What was wrong with his car?”

  Tom tossed me a remote key. “His panic alarm kept going off.”

  “You stole his key?” I held it up. “A colleague’s key?”

  “Of course not. That’s a clone.”

  “Oh, well, OK then. Why would you run a risk like this?”

  “Aaron and Riley were definitely looking at you. His notes are all about you, Ruby.”

  “What?” Shocked, my mouth went dry. I realized that I just skipped out on my shift without letting anyone know. That had to look suspicious, too. A car honked and I looked out the window, not recognizing where we were. “Why do they want to interrogate me?”

  Tom pulled onto a street lined with bookstores and bars. The mid afternoon sun cast orange reflections on the shop windows hurting my eyes. I sat stunned and silent.

  He parked, turned the car off, and rubbed his face with both hands. “I think it’s my fault, actually.”

  “You did this?”

  “Remember when I said that I’d look into the clinic’s weird shipping paperwork?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, it looks like you’re behind the misdirected shipments. No one else’s name appears on the accounts. Not Lilah’s, not anyone’s.”

  “Well, I run it.”

  “Ruby, the shipments of drugs, the medicine you order, where do you get the money?”

  “There’s income generated by clients paying…which is almost nothing. Then there’s a grant from the hospital and a subsidy from the government.”

  “That’s why the DEA is involved now, the federal money.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I pushed Scott to get a warrant for Ship-System’s files on your clinic, because I wanted to see what was going on with your diverted shipments.”

  “OK.”

  Tom shook his head. “No, not OK, Ruby. All the paperwork has your name on it. All the orders to divert, all the phone calls resolving the shipping discrepancies, everything points to you.”

  “I realized that when I talked to them. There’s been some mistake. I never authorized any of that.”

  “But it looks like you did.” Tom ran a hand through his hair and looked at me. “Ruby, your clinic gets federal money.”

  “You said that…so what?”

  “Ruby, using federal money to buy drugs across state lines and then diverting the shipments for some unknown reason, raised flags at the DEA. As soon as the warrant went through and my boss saw your name all over everything, he opened up an investigation into you. That was what was in Agent Aaron’s files.”

  “What?” My heart skipped a beat. “He thinks I’m a drug dealer?”

  “According to the paperwork we subpoenaed, the clinic’s diverted shipments go to a storage facility downtown. We were watching it, but it’s abandoned, now. Somehow, they knew we were onto them, and the trail went cold. The storage place is registered to a P.O. Box with no name…it all looks like a front, Ruby, one you’re a part of.”

  “But what about Antonio and his attacks on me? What about Dakota’s death?”

  “I can’t tie Antonio to the clinic bombing. He has an alibi for that night. Remember he was buying rounds and being seen?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “And Dakota’s death looks like your doing.”

  Shocked, I gasped, “My doing?”

  “Lilah tells you about some paperwork discrepancy and then her son goes missing? That makes you look guilty. Someone with your contacts, all the street kids and criminals you treat…you could get a gun.” Tom rubbed his eyes again and sighed. “According to Agent Aaron’s notes, that’s what they’re thinking.”

  “But Ben said they didn’t know who killed him,” I protested.

  “Ben doesn’t know that Detective Riley is working with the DEA. And they think you’re in deep.”

  “How…who am I supposedly selling all these drugs to then; my patients?” Fear crashed in my head making my stomach lurch.

  “The guy I’m investigating…he’s just a club owner. He owns Flow.”

  I frowned. Tom’s arms around the blonde came back to mind and I gritted my teeth. “What does he have to do with me? I’ve only been inside Flow once.”

  “He’s moving pharmaceuticals through his club. Oxycodone, Valium, all kinds of sedatives, even Ritalin, and we don’t know where he’s getting it. He’s…the guy’s name is Jason, he’s not connected. No gang ties, no nothing. And we were going crazy trying to figure out who his supplier is…I had a hunch it had to do with the hospital because his operation seems a lot like one I’ve worked before, but I had no leads.”

  “So you went undercover?”

  “I had an intact cover from Arizona that could work out here. Drug ties we confirmed with paid informants put me in business with Jason. I’m supposedly trying to buy drugs for my own clubs from Jason. The girl, the one from the club, she’s Jason’s sister, Mia. She introduced me as a possible buyer because Jason is trying to expand to sales outside of his club. He wants to move serious weight in drugs…and that greed was a perfect way in for me.”

  “How did you get her to work against her own brother?”

  “I had her for possession with intent to sell. Apparently ten years of jail looked worse than betraying her brother.”

  “So you think Jason is getting his drugs from the hospital? We keep a tight control on that stuff, Tom. It’s literally under lock and key.”

  “Which makes the idea of it moving through a smaller, less monitored place more likely.” He looked at me with worry. “A clinic would be the ideal place.”

  “And they think I’m doing this?”

  Tom took my hand, squeezing gently. “Remember I said it was unlikely that two big operations would be in the same city at the same time and not be connected?”

  My heart pounded. “Yeah.”

  “I’m not the only one who thinks that.”

  “The DEA is after me now?” My stomach flopped and I wrapped my hands around mysel
f to keep from shaking. This couldn’t be happening. “But I was almost killed over this clinic.”

  “Well, from their point of view, you could have set fire to your clinic to hide evidence.”

  “But you were there.”

  “I never told them that, remember?” Tom said frustrated. “And now they won’t believe me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because when Ben pulled my file, my boss got notified. He checked out what Ben was searching through and figured out how I know you.”

  “He knows about us?”

  “Even pictures of a teenage you are striking, Ruby. You’re memorable.” Tom put his hand on my cheek and smiled sadly.

  “What do I do now? Should I get a lawyer?”

  “Why would you need a lawyer?”

  “I can’t go into an interrogation alone, not with all this evidence stacked against me.”

  “Ruby,” Tom said with exasperation. “You’re not going in.”

  “What?”

  “I’m hiding you until we can figure this out.”

  “I’m not running from the cops. Tom, I’m innocent!”

  “You and I both know that rarely means you won’t take the blame.” He started up the car again. “I don’t think we were followed, but we should go somewhere else to talk. Cops cruise this area.”

  “Are the cops looking for me?” I looked out the back window, nervous. “I-I don’t think I can do this fugitive thing, Tom. I’m already a nervous wreck.”

  He looked at me and a shadow crossed his jade eyes. “I know. We’ll fix this, Ruby.”

  “But your boss will figure out that you’re helping me hide. You’ll ruin your career. You won’t get the task force job.” The thought of Tom not being able to stay made my heart tumble painfully. I didn’t want him to leave.

  “I only want the job here because it means I can stay with you. None of it matters if you’re in jail or worse…”

  “We can fix this, right?” I gulped down panic.

  Tom nodded, his face hard. “I didn’t fight my way back here to lose you.”

  23

  The dog park, winding running path, and man-made lake would have been serene had I not just been told that the DEA was hunting me down. I thought about Antonio and his connection to the unknown drug supplier. I was terrified of him, more than hiding out from the law.