by Sandra Brown
Galloway said when he came back on the line. "The cashier-Donna?-told me that Sabra has delivered."
"A baby girl. Both are… stable." Tiel glanced at Doc, and he gave her a small nod. "Assure Mr. Dendy that his daughter is in no immediate danger."
"Sheriff Montez informs me there's a local man in there with you who has some medical training."
"That's right. He assisted Sabra through the labor and birth."
Doc's eyes narrowed a fraction-the gunslinger about to draw.
"Sheriff Montez can't recall his last name. Says he goes by Doc."
"Correct."
"You don't know his name?"
Tiel considered her options. She had been totally involved with the labor and delivery, but she wasn't entirely unaware of what had been happening outside. She'd heard the clap of helicopter rotors. Some would be police and medical choppers, but she would bet they also indicated the arrival of media from Dallas-Fort Worth, Austin, Houston. Big stations. Network affiliates.
The active role she was playing in this unfolding story had automatically elevated its media-worthiness. She wasn't what she would term famous, but, in all humility, she wasn't a nonentity, either. She was seen nearly every night on the evening news in her television market. Those newscasts were also aired on cable stations in smaller markets throughout Texas and into Oklahoma, which amounted to several million viewers. She was a flavor-enhancing ingredient to an already juicy story. Throw into that mix the involvement of Dr. Bradley Stanwick, who three years ago had disappeared from the public eye shrouded in scandal, and you had a tasty potboiler that would cause a feeding frenzy among the press corps.
But Tiel wanted it to be her potboiler.
If she gave away Doc's identity now, she could kiss her exclusive good-bye. Everyone else would report it first.
The story would be broadcast before she had filed her initial report. By the time she could produce her own account of events, the resurfacing of Dr. Stanwick would be old news.
Gully would probably never forgive her for this decision, but, for the time being, she was going to keep this spicy tidbit as her secret ingredient.
So she avoided giving Galloway a direct answer. "Doc did an incredible job under very trying circumstances.
Sabra responds to him favorably. She trusts him."
"I understand he was wounded during the exchange of gunfire."
"A scratch, nothing more. All of us are all right, Mr. Galloway," she said impatiently. "We're tired, but otherwise unharmed, and I can't emphasize that enough."
"You're not being forced to say this?"
"Absolutely not. The last thing Ronnie wants is for someone to get hurt."
"That's right," the boy said, "I just want to be able to walk out of here with Sabra and my baby, free to go our own way."
Tiel conveyed his wish to Galloway, who said, "Ms.
McCoy, you know I can't let that happen."
"Allowances could be made."
"I don't have the authority to-"
"Mr. Galloway, are you in a position to speak freely?"
After a momentary pause, he said, "Go ahead."
"If you've had any interaction with Russell Dendy, then you can well understand why these two young people felt desperate enough to do what they've done."
"I can't comment on that directly, but I understand your meaning."
Apparently Dendy was within earshot. "By all accounts the man is a tyrant," Tiel continued. "I don't know if you're aware of this, but he has pledged to forcibly separate these two and put the baby up for adoption. Ronnie and Sabra want only the liberty to decide their own future and that of their child. This is a family crisis, Mr. Galloway, and that's how it should be handled. Perhaps Mr. Dendy would consent to a mediator who could help them work through their differences and reach an agreement."
"Ronnie Davison still has a lot to answer for, Ms. McCoy.
Armed robbery, for starters."
"I'm sure Ronnie is willing to accept responsibility for his actions."
"Let me talk to him." Ronnie took the receiver from her. "Listen, Mr. Galloway, I'm not a criminal. Not until today, that is. I've never even gotten a speeding ticket. But I'm not going to let Mr. Dendy dictate my baby girl's future.
From where I stood, I couldn't see any other way to get away from him."
"Tell him what we decided, Ronnie," Sabra called out.
He looked down at her where she lay with the newborn cradled in her arms, and his face took on a pained expression.
"Talk to Sabra's dad, Mr. Galloway. Persuade him to leave us alone. Then I'll release everybody."
He listened for a moment, then said, "I know they need to be in the hospital. The sooner the better. So you've got one hour to get back to me." Another pause. "Or what?" he said, obviously repeating Galloway's question. Ronnie glanced again at Sabra. She clutched her baby daughter tighter to her chest, and nodded. "I'll tell you in an hour."
He hung up abruptly.
Addressing his hostages, he said, "Okay, you all heard. I don't want to hurt anybody. I want all of us to walk out of here. So everybody just relax." He glanced up at the wall clock. "Sixty minutes, it could be over."
"What if her old man don't agree to let y'all alone?"
Donna asked. "What're you gonna do to us?"
"Why don't you sit down and be quiet?" Vern said querulously.
"Why don't you kiss my ass, old man?" she retorted.
"You're not the boss of me. I wanna know, am I gonna live or die? An hour from now, is he gonna start popping us?"
An uneasy silence descended over the group. All eyes turned to Ronnie, but he stubbornly refused to acknowledge the unspoken question in their eyes.
Agent Cain had either lapsed into unconsciousness again or was hanging his head in shame over his failure to bring the standoff to an end. In an event, his chin was resting on his chest.
Donna's elbows were subjected to more picking.
Vern and Gladys were showing signs of fatigue. Now that the excitement of the birth was over, their liveliness had waned. Gladys's head was resting on Vern's shoulder.
Tiel crouched down beside Doc, who was attending to Sabra again. Her eyes were closed. Baby Katherine was sleeping in her mother's arms. "How is she?"
"Too goddamn much bleeding, and her blood pressure's falling."
"What can you do?"
"I tried massaging the uterus, but rather than slowing the bleeding, it increased it." His brow was furrowed with consternation. "There is something else."
"What?"
"Nursing."
"Could she be lactating this soon?"
"No. Have you ever heard of oxytocin?"
"I assume it's a female thing."
"A hormone that helps eject breast milk. It also causes the uterus to contract, which reduces the bleeding. Sucking stimulates the release of the hormone."
"Oh. Then why haven't you-"
"Because I thought she might be on her way to a hospital by now. Besides, she's already had rather a lot to deal with."
They were quiet for a moment, both looking at Sabra and disliking her paleness. "I'm afraid of infection too," he said. "Dammit, they both need to be hospitalized.
What's that Galloway like? Typical hard-ass?"
"All business, definitely. But he sounds reasonable.
Dendy, on the other hand, is a raving maniac. I could hear him in the background issuing threats and ultimatums."
She glanced at Ronnie, who was dividing his attention between the parking lot and the Mexican duo, who were be-coming steadily and increasingly edgy. "He won't execute us, will he?"
Seemingly in no hurry to address her question, Doc finished replacing the pads beneath Sabra, then leaned against the freezer chest and raised one knee. Propping his elbow on it, he wearily raked a hand through his hair.
By city standards, it could have stood a trim. But somehow, on him, in this environment, the unkempt look was fitting.
"I don't know w
hat he'll do, Ms. McCoy. The misery that human beings are capable of inflicting on one another has never failed to fascinate and repel me. I don't think the boy has got it in him to line us up and shoot us, but there's no guarantee that he won't. In any event, talking about it won't affect the outcome."
"That's a rather fatalistic outlook."
"You asked." He shrugged indifferently. "We don't have to talk about it."
"Then what do you want to talk about?"
"Nothing."
"Bullshit," she said, wanting to surprise him and succeeding.
"You want to know how I recognized you."
He merely looked at her, saying nothing. He'd built up quite an armor, but part of her job was piercing invisible armor.
"When I first saw you, I thought you looked familiar but couldn't place you. Then sometime during the birthing process, just before the delivery, it occurred to me who you were. I think the way you handled Sabra was the giveaway."
"You've got a remarkable memory, Ms. McCoy."
"Tiel. And my memory might be sharper than that of the average Jane Q. Public. You see, I covered your story."
She recited the call letters of the television station for which she worked.
He muttered an expletive. "So you were among the hordes of reporters who made my life a living hell?"
"I'm good at my job."
He snuffled a deprecating laugh. "I'll bet you are." He readjusted his long legs, but his eyes never left hers. "Do you like what you do?"
"Very much."
"You enjoy preying on people who are already down, exposing their hardship to public scrutiny, making it impossible for them to pick up the pieces of their already shattered lives?"
"You blame the media for your difficulties?"
"In large part, yeah."
"For instance?"
"For instance, the hospital buckled beneath the weight of bad publicity. Bad publicity generated and nurtured by people like you."
"You generated your own negative publicity, Dr. Stanwick."
Angrily, he turned his head away, and Tiel realized she had struck a chord.
Dr. Bradley Stanwick had been an oncologist of renown, practicing in one of the most progressive cancer-treatment centers in the world. Patients came from all over the globe, usually in a last-hope attempt to save themselves from dying. His clinic couldn't save them all, of course, but it had maintained an excellent track record of staving off the ravages of the disease and prolonging life, while also providing the patient a quality of life that made living longer worthwhile.
That's why it was such a cruel irony when Bradley Stan-wick's young, beautiful, vivacious wife was stricken with inoperable pancreatic cancer.
Neither he nor his brilliant colleagues could retard its rapid spread. Within weeks of her diagnosis, she was confined to bed. She opted for aggressive chemotherapy and radiation, but the side effects were almost as lethal as the disease the treatments were intended to combat. Her immune system weakened; she developed pneumonia. One by one her systems began to falter, then fail.
Not wishing her senses to be dulled by pain-relieving drugs, she declined them. However, during the last few days of her life, her suffering became so intense that she finally consented to a painkilling drug that she could self-administer through an IV.
All this Tiel learned through background research. Dr. and Mrs. Bradley didn't become news until after her death. Until she died, they were just a sad statistic, the victims of an insidious disease.
But following her funeral, disgruntled in-laws began to make noises that perhaps their son-in-law had accelerated his wife's passing. Specifically, he had enabled her to kill herself by setting the dosage on the self-administering mechanism so high that she actually had succumbed to a lethal amount of narcotics. They alleged that her sizeable inheritance was his enticement to speed things along.
From the start, Tiel had thought the allegations were nonsense. It was a foregone conclusion that Mrs. Bradley's life expectancy was a matter of days. A man due to inherit a fortune could afford to wait until nature took its course.
Besides, Dr. Stanwick was affluent in his own right, although he put a lot of his income back into the oncology clinic to be used for research and indigent patient care.
Even if he had euthanized his wife, Tiel wasn't ready to cast the first stone. The controversy surrounding euthanasia left her in a moral quandary to which she had no satisfactory resolution. On that subject, she tended to agree with the last impassioned speaker.
But, strictly from a practical standpoint, she strongly doubted that Bradley Stanwick would risk his reputation even for his beloved wife's sake.
Unfortunately for him, his in-laws persisted until the DA's office ordered an investigation-which proved to be a waste of time and manpower. No evidence was found to substantiate the relatives' charge of criminal wrongdoing.
There was no indication that Dr. Stanwick had done anything to hasten his wife's death. The DA declined even to present the case to the grand jury, claiming there was no basis for it whatsoever.
Nevertheless, the story didn't end there. During the weeks that investigators were interrogating Dr. Stanwick, his colleagues, his staff, friends, family, and former patients, every aspect of his life was extensively examined and debated. He lived beneath a shadow of suspicion that was especially unsettling since the majority of his patients were considered terminally, irreversibly ill.
The hospital where he practiced soon found itself in the spotlight too. Rather than standing behind him, the administrators voted unanimously to revoke his privileges at the facility until he was cleared of all suspicion. No fool, Bradley Stanwick knew he would never be cleared of all suspicion. Once a seed of doubt is planted in the public's mind, it usually finds fertile ground and flourishes.
Perhaps the ultimate betrayal came from his partners at the clinic he had established. After working together for years, pooling their research and case studies, combining their knowledge, skills, and theories, forging friendships as well as professional alliances, they asked him to resign.
He sold his share of the practice to his former partners, unloaded his stately home in Highland Park for a fraction of its appraised value, and, with a "Screw you all" attitude, left Dallas for parts unknown. That's where the story ended. If Tiel hadn't lost her way and wound up in Rojo Flats, she probably would never have thought of him again.
She asked him now, "Is Sabra the first patient you've treated since you left Dallas?"
"She isn't a patient, and I didn't treat her. I was a cancer doctor, not an OB-GYN. This is an emergency situation, and I responded. Just as you did. Just as everybody has."
"That's false modesty, Doc. None of us could have done for Sabra what you did."
"Ronnie, okay if I get a drink?" he suddenly called out to the boy.
"Sure. Okay. The others could probably use some water too."
Leaning forward, Doc took a six-pack of bottled water from the shelf. After taking two of the plastic bottles for Tiel and himself, he passed the rest up to the boy, who then asked Donna to distribute them.
He drank almost half his bottle in one swallow. Tiel twisted off the cap and drank from her bottle, sighing after taking a long draft. "Good idea. Trying to change the subject?"
"Good guess."
"You don't practice medicine here in Rojo Flats?"
"I told you. I ranch."
"But they know you around here as Doc."
"Everybody in a small town knows everything about everyone."
"But you must've told somebody. Otherwise, how'd it get around-"
"Look, Ms. McCoy-"
"Tiel."
"I don't know how it got around that I once practiced medicine. Even if I did, what's it to you?" 'Just curious."
"Uh-huh." He was looking straight ahead, away from her. "This isn't an interview. You won't get an interview from me. So why not save yourself the breath? You might need it later."
"Prior to the… the episo
de, you lived a very active life.
Don't you miss being at the center of things?"
"No."
"You don't get bored out here?"
"No."
"Aren't you lonesome?"
"For what?"
"Companionship."
He turned his head and readjusted his position so that his shoulders and torso were almost facing her. "Sometimes."
His eyes moved downward, over her. "You volunteering to help me out on that?"
"Oh, please."
And when she said that, he began to laugh, letting her know that he hadn't been serious.
She hated herself for falling for the ruse. "I hoped you were above that sexist crap."
Serious again, he said, "And I hoped you were above asking questions, particularly personal ones, at a time like this. Just as I was beginning to like you."
Strangely, the way he was looking at her now, with that probing intensity, had a greater effect than the smarmy sexual insinuation. That had been phony. This was real.
Her tummy lifted weightlessly.
But then an uproar on the far side of the store brought her and Doc scrambling to their feet.
CHAPTER 8
Tiel had dubbed the shorter, stockier Mexican man Juan. It was he who had caused the commotion. He was bending over Agent Cain, lavishly cursing him-at least she assumed he was cursing. His shouted Spanish had an epithetical quality.
Cain was repeatedly screaming, "What the hell?" and futilely straining to free himself from the duct tape.
To everyone's dismay, Juan slapped a strip of duct tape over the FBI agent's mouth to shut him up. Meanwhile, Juan's taller companion let fly with a stream of Spanish that sounded both reproachful and confused by Juan's sudden attack on the agent.
Ronnie brandished his pistol, shouting, "What's going on? What're you doing there? Vern, what happened?"
"Damned if I know. I had sorta dozed off. I woke up when they started tussling and yelling at one another."
"He just jumped on him," Gladys contributed in her prissy manner. "For no apparent reason. I don't trust him.
Or his friend either, for that matter."
"Quepasa?"Doc asked.