by Cat Connor
Damn, I was sick of sickos taking a shine to me and sick of this godforsaken headache. Maybe Hawkeye was right and there was something wrong with me. I really didn’t feel well.
Think, Ellie. Stop and think: anger, faint headache, feeling generally off: you know this. Oh crap. Everything began to blur and not in a good way. My hands were still trembling. I couldn’t get my phone out of my pocket. Something poked annoying holes in my vision – black holes – no matter how I moved my head, I couldn’t see around them. Infuriating! The voice came back, ‘Brilliant, Ellie, you flounce off and now look what happens. I saw the ground floating and wobbling around me.
A thought manifested. I could see it in a speech bubble, ‘This is going to hurt.’ I fell backwards, unexpectedly grateful for the dark and the peace that came with the fall into blackness.
Surprising things happen in that muddled place between wakefulness and sleep. Ideas that helped break cases floated in that space. Sometimes seemingly random links that offered hope and direction broke through and stayed with me. I hoped something helpful would materialize this time.
A familiar, worried face swam in and out of focus. When it disappeared altogether, I realized he was shaking my arm and calling my name.
A distant whisper. “Ellie.”
“Go away, I’m sleeping.”
“Ellie, you’re not asleep.”
How did he know what I was doing? Get out of my head. I’m tired. A sharp pressure on my arm hurt.
“Come on; wakey, wakey.” I could hear him clearly now. I even knew I was in a strange place and there was an earthy smell. Wet earth. I didn’t much like that turn of events.
My eyes opened. Mac was in my face.
“You pinched me!” I accused.
“Sit up.”
Mac helped me into a sitting position.
I looked around, delighted that the holes in my vision were gone and mumbled a soft, “Sorry.”
“How’s your head?”
“Okay.”
Mac guffawed like a dumbass. “I rest my friggin’ case!”
“You what?” I was so lost.
Another voice laughed before speaking, “I owe you five bucks,” Lee said.
Now what was he doing? Wasn’t Lee supposed to be waking up Judge Rubinstein and searching for files?
“What?” I was still lost.
“Nothing, sweets,” Mac replied; he had one hand on the back of my head.
“What are you doing?”
“Despite you being okay, I’m not fussed about your blood running out of your head.”
“My blood doing what?” I must’ve heard wrong. Mac waited for my mind to catch up. “I hit my head?” I really didn’t want to hear that.
MRI and CAT scan here I come. I couldn’t afford another head injury, even one that wouldn’t bother most people. My glass skull and I were fast becoming liabilities. It was bad enough that I’d failed to explain the extent of the optical events, associated with the migraines I experienced, to my doctor and Mac.
Lee smiled. “You still okay?”
“Yes,” I replied with a scowl.
His smile widened.
“Quit it! What did I hit?” Please don’t let it be stone, concrete or anything else hard.
Mac replied, “There was a piece of broken glass in the grass.”
“How freaking typical. Is it in my head?”
“No. You need this checked out though and maybe a few stitches.”
I grabbed his arm. “Help me up.”
“You feel sick or dizzy?” he asked.
Absolutely. But I wasn’t admitting to anything. It would pass; it always does. “Nope. I’m wet and muddy and feel like a freaking fool. Will that do?”
I tried hard not to say that I was okay.
He nodded and pulled me up, holding me by the shoulders while he made sure I was steady.
“Thanks, how much time have I wasted? Are the computer boys here?”
Lee and Mac looked at each other. I sensed a conspiracy.
“Not as much as you’re going to; we’re getting you checked out.” Mac replied, “And yes, they’re here, they were here,” he corrected himself, “They’ve removed the computer and taken it back to the lab.”
They’d moved a lot faster than expected. But once in the lab things tended to grind to a halt. The computer they’d taken would be added to the end of the queue.
I could feel my jeans clinging to my legs. My butt was wet and muddy. I imagined that the back of me looked like a swamp, complete with twigs and leaves stuck to my hair and clothing. I wondered if I could opt out of the whole checkup process, “I need to clean up before you get me checked out.”
There it was again, that knowing look they gave each other. It would be more annoying if my head weren’t so cotton-wool-like. They weren’t going to let me go home.
Then things rapidly turned a whole hell of a lot worse. My legs turned to Jell-O, black swirled in front of my eyes, vomit sprayed onto the ground in front of me.
Mac cursed as he grabbed me. My vision cleared. My head throbbed. I heard voices and knew Lee was talking to someone but it wasn’t Mac.
Mac whispered in my ear, “We’re taking you to the emergency room.”
Everything in front of me swam in a fine mist. I thought I heard Hawkeye but the accent was all wrong. I had no idea why I thought it was Hawkeye. It was obviously Doctor Luka Kovac. It wasn’t Korea. It was some modern American hospital, in Chicago. At first it seemed absurd but that feeling subsided as I listened to Luka Kovac talking to John Carter. I listened, expecting to hear Abbey’s voice join the conversation but all I heard was running feet and wheels clicking on linoleum.
At that moment I realized I’d gone from MASH to ER. At least ER was a recent TV show. I should’ve been relieved; I thought it was way better than MASH. I’d take Kovac and Carter over Hawkeye and Trapper any day. There was a good chance George Clooney would appear any second: he trumped them all.
How could it get worse? I wondered. Like this: the next voice I heard said, “Christ, Mac. You want to explain this to me?” Caine. Yep, that was worse.
I looked into Caine’s steely eyes. “You’re standing in my puke.”
A paramedic took my arm. “Watch your step, ma’am.” He escorted me to a gurney.
We were going to leave the courtyard and I couldn’t see any way out of a hospital visit. I glared at him. “No way! I’ll go with you but I’ll be walking!” I swept my arm to encompass the gurney and equipment bag, “This is all unnecessary.”
Caine’s voice bellowed from behind me, “You will do as you are told.”
I yelled back, “Not in this lifetime.”
“Conway!”
“Grafton! I am capable of walking.” I knew his blood pressure would soar and it made me feel better.
The accent spoke from somewhere close to me: Luka. “Gabrielle, let them help you.”
There was an audible collective intake of breath as a cone of silence dropped over the area. No one breathed, not even the paramedics. I turned to face Mac, Lee, Caine and the hunky Luka.
“I’m sorry, for a minute I thought you said Gabrielle.” With an intense, cautionary tone, I continued. “We. Don’t. Use. The. G. Word.”
Mac and Lee were motionless. Caine’s mouth twitched just at one corner.
Luka’s eyes sparkled, he disarmed me with a smile, “I’m so sorry, Ellie. Please forgive me.”
Oh God! Unfair! He looks like that and he apologizes. He closed the ground between us and the next thing I knew, I was laying on the gurney. Mr. Tall Dark and Hunky had tricked me. Mac was talking to him. Surely Luka would come with us; after all he is an ER doctor. Damn, I had to be insane. The corridors moved past me, or I moved through them; either way something moved. It felt peculiar. When everything stopped, Mac touched my arm, “Ellie, what’s up?”
I noted he didn’t ask if I was okay.
“What’s his name, the guy who looks like Luka from ER?”
; Mac smiled. “At least it’s not MASH this time. His name is Misha, Officer Misha Praskovya.”
I was okay: he wasn’t really Luka, which was groovy. Part of me was a little sorry though. I almost enjoyed the ER sequence. Mac was right about one thing, it was better than MASH. And both were way better than the Mills & Boon romance that wouldn’t quit.
I wondered what Praskovya’s agenda was. It seemed an astonishing coincidence that he would arrive in our world. Yet another Russian connection. Yet another Selena connection.
Chapter Nineteen
Last Cigarette
I discharged myself as soon as the doctor had glued the small cut on the back of my head. No big deal. I convinced them that I had already scheduled an MRI and CAT scan, so no point getting all bent out of shape trying to set up an emergency MRI. It wasn’t a lie. I had several unheard voicemail messages and one of those would be from my doctor’s office about the tests. Just because I chose not to listen to them didn’t make the appointment any less real. I wasn’t in the right space to deal with that yet. Dr. Kapowski was bound to have some kind of aneurism when news of this latest debacle reached him. He’d get over it. The killer wasn’t going to wait until I felt better.
Anyway it was just a little stress episode, nothing more than a smallish migraine – understandable considering the circumstances. I was pretty sure it wasn’t some kind of transient ischemic attack. I was fully functional and had no muscle weakness, slurred speech, or facial numbness. A few painkillers for the headache before it became significant and I would feel okay.
Lee was searching files and would then visit Sam. Mac and I were taking Praskovya home with us. He needed to learn how we worked. We needed to know what he knew.
Mac made coffee and checked the answering machine. Twenty-seven messages from his mother. I told Praskovya to make himself comfortable in the living room and joined Mac in the kitchen to listen to the messages. They were the best yet. The first fifteen dealt with Mac’s avoidance of her, ranting about how he never answered the phone anymore. The next five were thinly-veiled threats about her coming on down to teach him a lesson on telephone etiquette. We switched off the machine at that point.
“Yeah, she’s definitely grandmother material,” I said, then hustled out of arm’s reach.
“Smartass!” he called after me, “Ask Praskovya how he has his coffee.”
Praskovya yelled back, “Black, thank you.”
The phone messages lightened my mood. Mac’s mom had become the comic relief in our lives. I felt calmer and less bogged down by the case. I really wanted a cigarette. I satisfied the craving by imagining I’d already had one, created from all the secondhand smoke that poured down the phone and into our answer machine, courtesy of my manic mother-in-law. Excellent. Mac’s mom was transformed into a nicotine fix. That worked for me. Now to get Praskovya working for me. Darkness, or a sort of dark cloud, edged into my mind whenever his name came up. It billowed like his overcoat in the breeze that morning.
I had to stop thinking in romance novel terms. The billowing had to stop. I knew it was too late when a cloud parted and revealed Praskovya, all dark and mysterious, standing under an old stone bridge. He looked expectantly across the river that tumbled over moss-speckled green stones. White foam gathered in small pools among rocks. A woman with long dark hair and a flowing purple cloak picked her way carefully towards him.
This new madness was getting out of hand. He wasn’t even my type.
I sighed, cleared the scene from my head and dropped into an armchair across the room from Praskovya. In my usual fashion I pulled up my legs and tucked them under me.
He smiled.
I smiled back.
“How is your head?”
“It’s, oh … fine.” Almost let an ‘okay’ slip out. Damn men, ganging up on me, ruining my word.
“You have a nice home.” He tapped the fingers of his left hand on the arm of the chair. He wore a wedding ring on his right hand.
“Thank you.” I still wasn’t getting anything from him. I needed to break him out of the small-talk phase and get to the guts. “Do you know who the Unsub is?”
He crossed his right leg over his left knee. The tapping ceased. His dark eyes looked directly into mine. I looked back. It was like looking into a black hole.
“We don’t have a name,” he said.
“How do you know this ex-officer is after our Unsub?”
“She followed his trail across Eastern Europe and we followed her.”
“It’s the same person?”
“Yes.”
“Who is she?”
“I told you, she is Selena Vadbolski. An officer with Spetsnaz.”
“Yes, so you told me. How did she become a terrorist?” This woman was important, maybe not to us, but to him. Why? It irked me.
Mac came in with the coffee and placed the tray on the coffee table in the center of the room. He passed Praskovya’s first, then mine. Guests first.
“Thank you, Mac. Very nice coffee,” Praskovya said. “Do you grind your own beans?”
He really liked the small talk; quite the Chatty Cathy when it came to subjects other than work-related topics.
Mac said, “Not often, we have a coffee shop close by that makes a very nice blend for us.”
I looked from Mac to Praskovya and back again. And blew my theory that Praskovya wasn’t my type right out of the water. I prayed that the ridiculous Mills & Boon scenes would cease to interrupt my cognitive processes. The whole intrusion was akin to running with scissors. At any moment I might trip and slice myself on the sharp edges of the book covers generated by my imagination. Would he swoop to my rescue? The Mills & Boon interludes had to stop.
I pulled him from his coffee discussion with Mac and back to my topic of choice, “Praskovya … how does an officer with Spetsnaz become a terrorist?”
“What drives one to do anything? Why did you become a FBI agent?”
I smiled, but only because I had succeeded in ridding myself of the romance novel connotations. He was less charming now and more infuriating. What if I took my gun and pressed the muzzle against his temple? “Tell me about Selena.”
He uncrossed his legs and placed his mug on the table. “Do you know much about the Russian Federation?”
I shook my head, “No, I’m sorry, I don’t.” A little voice in my head kicked in, telling me to listen and not float off: it wasn’t a history lesson, it was pertinent stuff. I hate that little voice; it invariably means it’s boring stuff that I have to wade through before the good stuff comes out. It took all the little voices to keep me on track. I listened as well as I could, while Praskovya told us of life in The Russian Federation: the crime, the corruption, the unemployment and how the country was desperately trying to recover economically.
They were fighting fires on all fronts and making little progress. Crimes covered up, or simply not investigated during the communist reign, were oozing like septic wounds. One of those things was the high level of serial killing and serial rape. Yet none of this explained how a Spetsnaz officer found herself as a terrorist. Or did it?
“Praskovya, why exactly is she a terrorist?”
He blinked and looked up, astonished. “She committed an act of terrorism.”
It would have felt so good to hold my gun to his temple, or maybe just smack him about a few times. I could break his arm in two and hit him with the soggy end. I sucked it up and remained polite. “Which was?”
“Selena Vadbolski detonated a bomb that blew up a police station, killing forty police officers and support personnel.”
“She blew up a police station?”
“And made threats against other police stations. She planted bombs in five stations. The explosive was stolen from the army.”
“She killed police, she stole explosives and, okay, I understand how that would piss off everyone. Why the hell does she want our Unsub?”
Praskovya sighed. “We don’t know.”
And just like
that, the blackness reappeared. He slipped back under cloud cover.
“You don’t know?” I couldn’t believe it. I was back to square one.
Praskovya’s eyes met mine. He didn’t speak.
“Where are you staying?” Mac asked.
“The Marriott.”
Mac smiled. “Which one?”
“On 12th Street I think, in Washington.”
Mac nodded. “Yeah, we’re familiar with it.” It was the first hotel we’d stayed in together, during another difficult case, a lifetime ago.
“I’ll get a car to come pick you up,” I said. “Tomorrow you’ll be given a cell phone with our numbers pre-programmed. Contact one of us if you think of anything that might help find our Unsub and your terrorist.” I reached over to a small wooden box on a shelf behind me and took out a business card. “Before you get the phone, you might need to contact us.”
I uncurled my legs and stretched them. I handed Praskovya the card, then went out to our office to call Caine. I told him his replacement for Sam sucked. I heard Caine grind his teeth. He made no comment. I suspected his jaw was locked shut from all the grinding. After a brief rundown on the nothing we’d got out of him, I hung up before he could speak. It wasn’t necessary to hear him growl: I just wanted him to know how things weren’t progressing.
I called and checked in with Lee. He was still at the hospital. Sam was doing well. Lee was manually searching through hospital records. He mentioned that Marie Kline’s file was hefty and scattered. Apparently she’d used several aliases.
He was busy tracing all the components and trying to assemble a clear medical history and find the obstetric notes. Lee being Lee, he’d managed to get several of the women in the records department to help.