All a Man Can Ask

by Virginia Kantra

  Son of a bitch.

  Aleksy charged from the screen of trees, stumbling down the slight slope to the road, and launched himself at Freer’s back.

  With a satisfying woof, the man collapsed under him, the air driven from his lungs. Aleksy braced himself on his knees and wedged one hand between their bodies, fumbling to unbuckle his belt so he’d have something to tie the guy up with.

  Freer reached back and grabbed Aleksy’s hair, scratching the gash in his head.

  For the second time, the world erupted in a blaze of stars. Pain. Nausea.

  Fueled by adrenaline and desperation, Freer heaved and scrambled on top. He laced his fingers in Aleksy’s hair. Pain, sickening, blinding, streaked through Aleksy’s skull. Tightening his hold, Freer yanked Aleksy’s head up and slammed it once, twice, three times on the hard dirt road.

  Aleksy was losing it. Losing consciousness. Leaving Faye to face—what?—alone.

  He had to fight. Had to—

  Clumsily he wrenched his hand free and, more by luck and instinct than anything else, clamped it on Freer’s bloody arm, dangling useless by his head.

  Freer screamed and released him.

  They rolled again while the night burned around them, Freer’s contorted face diabolical in the flickering red glare.

  “What can I do?” Faye’s feet, in neat, flat sneakers, danced at the corner of his vision. Faye’s voice, amazingly calm, drummed in his ears. “Tell me what to do.”

  “My…belt,” Aleksy managed. Beneath him, Freer groaned and pitched. “Tie…him up.”

  He felt her small, urgent hands tugging at his waist. Freer strained and cursed. Aleksy struggled to hold his kicking legs while she wrapped his ankles with the belt and pulled the buckle tight.

  “Now the arms,” Aleksy instructed.

  Faye hesitated. “What should I use?”

  He grunted. “His belt.”

  “I can’t reach his belt.”

  “Then use yours.”

  “I’m not wearing one.”

  “Okay.”

  Not okay. Aleksy tried to bend his mind around this new twist while Freer writhed under him and his thoughts fractured like a broken mirror.

  “What about my bra?” Faye asked. “It’s stretchy.”

  He was delirious. “What?”

  But Faye had already turned her slim white back. Her bra straps dropped down her shoulders. She wriggled and tugged under her torn blouse and turned with her bra in her hands.

  She knelt beside him. Clinging to consciousness, Aleksy shifted his weight.

  Freer screamed when Faye moved his wounded arm. She froze, her brown eyes enormous in her white face.

  The scene was fading in and out like a TV with bad reception. He was losing it.

  “Do it,” Aleksy commanded.

  Somehow she got the job done. She rolled him away, onto his back, so she could test the elastic straps binding Freer’s wrists and the thick leather around his ankles.

  He lay flat while the earth tilted under him and the stars whirled overhead. His nausea returned. He closed his eyes.

  Someone lifted his head—Don’t, he wanted to yelp—and then something soft cradled it. Under the acrid burning, the blood and the mud, a nice, light fragrance wavered. Flowers. And Faye, he thought contentedly.

  Funny that she should pick that moment to scream, a high, ululating wail that sounded exactly like—

  “Sirens?” he asked, opening his eyes.

  Faye nodded, her warm brown gaze concerned. “I called your brother. Before I left the cottage.”

  Of course she had. Smart, brave girl.

  Grateful, reassured, he let himself slide into the darkness.

  “Try not to worry,” Tess said, handing Faye a foam cup of hospital coffee. “I told you cops have incredibly thick skulls.”

  Faye nodded. Sipped. Winced. This was worse than the brew in the teachers’ lounge. Her stomach already churned from an uneasy blend of painkillers, reaction and fear. Adding coffee, bad coffee, to the mix was just too big a risk.

  She set the cup on a waiting room table.

  Tess must have observed the wince, because her full lips pursed in sympathy. “How’s the wrist?”

  Faye dragged her mind back from the memory of Aleksy’s white, blood-streaked face and held up her newly bandaged wrist for inspection. “It’s fine. I’m fine.”

  “You look whacked,” Tess said frankly.

  Beneath her skintight jeans and exotic good looks was a genuine maternal warmth that Faye found touching.

  She felt bludgeoned by the events of the past twelve hours. She’d been knocked down, robbed and made love to. Two people she loved had been threatened. She had nearly been raped. Or worse. She’d been battered by fear, racked by uncertainty, manhandled by a well-dressed thug and thrown to the ground in the aftermath of an explosion.

  “Whacked” summed up her feelings nicely.

  But she was trying hard not to let it show.

  She forced a smile. “I’m all right. Really.”

  “Just worried,” Tess said.

  It was a comfort to admit it. “Yes.”

  “It’s tough, being in love with a cop.”

  Faye met Tess’s understanding gaze. Another comfort. Another admission. “Yes.”

  The brunette sighed. “Look, it’s none of my business, but he’s not going to change.”

  It cost her, but Faye nodded again. In acceptance.

  “No,” she agreed softly. “I don’t expect him to change.”

  The question was, could she?

  Aleksy had warned her he wasn’t the marrying kind. That the only person who could understand what being a cop was like was another cop.

  Could she love him knowing she could lose him to the demands of his job or a bad guy’s bullet? Knowing he would forever shut her out of that part of his life?

  Could she take that risk?

  Did she even have the choice anymore?

  “Here’s Jarek,” Tess said. She hurried to her fiancé’s side. “Did you see the doctor?”

  “I did.” He covered her hand where it rested on his arm and smiled over her head at Faye. “The CT scan showed no bleeding under the skull or in the brain tissue. His skull is fractured, and that graze in his head took thirty-two stitches to close, but Alex is going to be fine.”

  “Thank God,” Tess breathed.

  Yes. Thank God.

  Faye sat, stunned with relief, absorbing the good news, letting it seep into every cell to heal her battered hopes and soothe her anxious heart.

  He was going to be fine.

  They were going to be—well, she didn’t know if they were going to be fine or not. The realization caused a little tear in her heart.

  “What about Jamal?” she asked.

  Jarek raised his eyebrows at her apparent lack of response. “I just picked him up from the ER. You can ask him yourself,” he said, and stepped aside.

  The teenager swaggered through the doorway, soot stains on his clothes and a rakish bandage on his head.

  “Hey, Harp,” he greeted her.

  “Jamal!”

  She jumped up and grabbed him by both arms. “What happened? I told you to stay in the car!”

  He rolled his eyes. “Oh, yeah, like I was going to sit tight while that Dick guy was threatening you.”

  “But what did you do?”

  “I couldn’t do anything at first, could I? Because the old guy is strapped and I’m not carrying. But I heard him tell you there were guns on his boat, see? So, once he gets you on the road, then I break through the woods to go get—”

  The boy broke off to look at Jarek. “Do I want to be careful what I’m saying here?”

  Jarek’s light gray eyes gleamed with humor. “You went down to the dock to go get help,” he suggested.

  Jamal grinned. “Yeah. Like the man says, I’m looking for help. Only there’s another guy with a gage down by the boats. So I wait until he leaves and I check out the boat.”

/>   “But…how did you know which boat to search?” Faye asked, bewildered.

  Jamal shook his head with all the worldly disdain of a seventeen-year-old boy. “There was a bullet hole in the window, Harp.”

  Despite the horror of the night’s events, Faye had to bite back a smile. “Yes, I can see that that would be a clue.”

  “Then you found a gun,” Tess prompted.

  He checked again with Jarek, who gave a slight nod.

  “Yeah,” said Jamal. “In one of those seat things, you know, that lifts up? Only it’s, like, an AK-47 or something. No way am I going to be able to shoot that. So I’m looking around some more, and I got to tell you, I’m starting to sweat, because it’s been a while since I left you with the Dick guy. And then—” He paused for emphasis, his dark eyes shining. “I found this grenade.”

  Faye felt faint. “A grenade.”

  Jamal beamed. “Yeah. It was so cool. Two of them, in a drawer.”

  “Oh, my God,” Faye said. “You could have been killed.”

  Aleksy could have been killed. They all could have been blown to bits.

  “No, Harp, it was okay. They’ve got those big circle things that you pull.”

  “Just like in the movies, he told me,” Jarek murmured.

  Jamal’s head bobbed in agreement. “Yeah. Anyway, I knew you called Chief Denko, right? Only he hasn’t shown and I’m thinking maybe he doesn’t know where you are.”

  “We were Code Two—normal response, no lights or sirens,” Jarek explained for Faye’s benefit. “Plus, it took longer than I expected to find a magistrate for the search warrant.”

  “Which at the time I don’t know,” Jamal said. “So, I’m thinking maybe I should send up, like, a distress signal.”

  “There were flares on board,” Jarek said mildly.

  Jamal sniffed. “Flares are for wusses.”

  Tess laughed.

  Even the police chief smiled.

  And Faye hugged him tight.

  Jamal hugged her back. Under his blackened jersey and bravado, his thin, lean frame was shaking.

  “Anyway, it worked, didn’t it?” he muttered against the top of her head.

  Faye stepped back and smiled at him with tears in her eyes. “It sure did,” she told him. “Thank you.”

  “It certainly speeded up response times for the rest of my department,” Jarek said.

  “And the fire department,” Tess put in. “And the EMS crews.”

  The teenager sobered. “How’s he doing? Denko. Aleksy, I mean.”

  “He should be in a room by now,” Jarek said. He spoke to Jamal, but his attention was on Faye. “Would you like to see him?”

  Her heart stuttered. “Can we?”

  “Well, it’s after visiting hours, but given that he was threatening to check himself out of here against medical advice if he didn’t see you, I think the nurses will make an exception.”

  The nurse on the floor, a pretty, round-faced woman whose name tag identified her as Sherry Biddleman, was willing to make an exception about the hours. On the number of visitors, however, she held firm.

  “Two at a time,” she said. “I can’t have a party in there waking the other patients.”

  “You two go,” Tess said, giving Faye a nudge and Jamal a push. “I’ll stay here and catch up with Sherry.”

  Faye hesitated. She wasn’t family. “You’re his brother…” she said to Jarek.

  “And he’s asking for you.” He smiled reassurance. “Go.”

  Aleksy’s eyes were closed when she entered his room. They had cut off his clothes and a lot of his hair. Above the bleached-out hospital gown, his face was gray with pain and dark with stubble. A line of black stitches marched across his strip-shaved scalp and puckered the arch of his forehead.

  Faye’s throat ached.

  “Man, you look terrible,” Jamal said.

  The dark eyes opened, jolting her heartbeat.

  “You’re no prize either, kid,” Aleksy said.

  Jamal hunched a shoulder and approached the bed. “Huh. At least I don’t look like Frankenstein.”

  “Nah. More like the Mummy.”

  Jamal grinned and touched the bandage wrapped around his head. “Like my new do-rag?”

  “Yeah. It suits you.” Seriously, Aleksy added, “You did good, Jamal.”

  Under his coffee-dark skin, the boy’s color deepened. “Thanks, man. You, too.”

  They performed some complicated male hand ritual over the rails of the hospital bed that tired Faye just to watch. When they were done, Aleksy’s hand slid limply onto the mattress.

  She almost could not bear to see him so hurt, to see his vitality sapped by loss of blood and the drugs that ran into him through a tube in his vein.

  She could not hide her feelings from herself any longer. She loved him.

  And she was panicked, scared of the daily danger he faced and terrified his job would take him away from her.

  It wasn’t just the hospital bed and the blinking, bleeping machines she feared. Because she could accept that. If she loved him, if he admitted her even a little way into his life, then she had to accept that this might be only the first of many times she would stand in the door of a hospital room and see him lying there.

  But if he loved her…oh, then it would be worth it. If he loved her, she could deal with the danger. She could put up with the hours and the absences and his preoccupation with the job. If he loved her.

  He’s not going to change, Tess had warned her.

  He looked so pale.

  She cleared her heart from her throat. “We should go. You need your rest.”

  “You’re not leaving me,” Aleksy protested.

  And as simply as that, her decision was made.

  She would not leave him. This time, she would not run away.

  As long as it lasted, as long as he wanted her, she would stay.

  Unable to resist any longer, she came to stand beside his bed. She wanted to touch him, needed the reassurance of his flesh. Constrained by Jamal’s presence, frustrated by the lack of time, she stroked the back of Aleksy’s hand. When he turned his palm over and laced his fingers with hers, she nearly wept.

  “I should leave,” she said. “Visiting hours are over.”

  He tightened his grip. “Stupid hospital rules.”

  With her free hand, she touched his rough jaw and the soft skin of his upper cheek.

  “The rules are there to protect you,” she scolded.

  He smiled at her sleepily. “You sound like a cop.”

  No. She’d just lost her heart to one.

  “When do you get out of here?” Jamal asked.

  “They want to keep me for forty-eight hours’ observation,” Aleksy said. He looked back at Faye, his pupils black with drugs or promise. “I’ll be out in twenty-four.”

  But it was thirty-six hours before the doctors released him.

  Faye spent many of them at the hospital, but it seemed there was always someone else in Aleksy’s room. Eric and Mary Denko came up from Chicago. Ten-year-old Allie spent half an hour one afternoon playing cards with her uncle on his hospital tray. Faye appreciated the loving support the Denkos gave one another, but it was hard not to feel excluded from that magic circle.

  There was another brotherhood that made frequent visits to Aleksy’s hospital room. Faye thought of them as the league of men in suits. ATF. FBI. CTC. RCMP. She lost track of the initials. She had trouble telling them apart, these quiet-voiced men with their short haircuts and hard or tired eyes.

  Defenders of our freedom, she told herself, and tried not to resent that they were keeping her from Aleksy. Tried not to mind when they came to her cottage with their tape recorders and persistent questions. Always in twos, like Noah’s animal pairs, a race of navy gabardine, a breed apart.

  This was what it was to love a cop.

  This is what it meant to be involved in his case. In his life.

  Outside of Aleksy’s hospital room, Jarek tried
to reassure her. “They’re almost done. We picked up Freer and Amir the other night. The feds are happy. We can hold our suspects on charges of assault and attempted murder while they make their case on gunrunning and terrorism.” Rare approval lit his eyes. “You were a big help.”

  “My bra in the cause of freedom,” she said.

  It didn’t seem like enough.

  It wasn’t.

  She had to repeat her story over and over to all the men and the one woman agent who came to question her. She signed statements and receipts for her broken camera and her photographs, and she waited for Aleksy to come back. To come home.

  But would he?

  With the men responsible for his partner’s death finally locked up, what reason did he have to stay?

  Her sense of isolation increased the following morning when Jamal announced his intention of returning to Chicago.

  Faye, bleary from lack of sleep and the pain of her wrist, blinked at him. “But…your parents?”

  “Hey, right now, I’m a hero. Denko called and told them all kinds of stories. I can do no wrong, you know?”

  It had to be said.

  “Jamal, you are going back to a place where it is far too easy to ‘do wrong.’”

  “Yeah. So?”

  She held his gaze, willing him to take her seriously. “So, what are you going to do about that?”

  “I’m clean now,” he offered.

  “That’s a start. That’s a good start. But you need to talk to someone who can help you stay clean.”

  “You mean, like a shrink?”

  “Yes, or—”

  “The county programs all got waiting lists. And my parents can’t afford a private doc.”

  She was afraid he was right. “What about something like AA?”

  “I was a druggie, Harp. Not a drunk. Anyway, that’s for old people.”

  “It’s for people who need help,” she said.

  “I don’t need it. I messed up, but I’m okay now.”

  “Promise me you’ll give it a shot anyway.”

  “Why?”

  “Art lessons?” she suggested, and was rewarded when he shook his head with exasperated affection.

  “You don’t give up, do you?”

  Not anymore.

  It felt good.

  She felt good.