“Why don’t I help you inside? I can show you where the waiting room is.”
“Oh. Yes.” She went along like a puppy on a leash. “Thank you. They… they didn’t say where I should go, when they called.”
Justin wasn’t sure if by “they,” she meant the hospital or the police, and he knew that both parties could sometimes be less than forthcoming with information given over the phone.
“How much did they tell you?”
“Only that my sister was sh-shot.” She swallowed. “Again. And that she’s in surgery, and I should come.”
Justin steered her toward a secluded corner of the waiting room. When he gestured her toward a seat, she settled herself, smoothing her skirt over her long legs. Then she looked around as if not quite certain how she got there.
He sat down beside her.
“I’m not her doctor,” Justin told her “so I can’t give you a status report or a prognosis, but I can tell you what happened. The bullet hit Natasha in the neck, nicking the carotid artery as it passed through.”
“The carotid artery?” she said. “That’s one of the ones that bleeds so much, isn’t it? Oh God.” She brought trembling fingers to her lips.
“The artery was nicked,” Justin said “not severed, which is a point in your sister’s favor. Also, I was able to clamp it before exsanguination could occur, so –”
“Wait. You clamped it?” She shook her head, then looked around again. “I’m sorry, I guess I’ve just gotten so used to talking to you every time Natasha almost gets herself killed that it didn’t even occur to me that this isn’t your hospital.” She looked at him, her eyes clearer. “What are you doing here?”
“Natasha came to see me tonight, at my home. I live on the Isle of Palms.”
“Oh. How… was she shot then? I thought maybe this was another drive-by.”
“We were sitting on my porch, talking. She stood up to get something from her car, and that’s when the shooting occurred.”
Anne sat back, nonplussed. “I’m sorry. But that just doesn’t make sense. Did someone deliberately shoot her? Or was it a… a random shot? Like an accident?”
“The police are going to be able to answer those questions for you.” He hoped. “I can only tell you the circumstances.”
“Were you injured?” She leaned to the side to look him over. “You’re bleeding!” She laid her hand on his arm, dismay lending her voice volume.
Justin twisted his arm, locating the smear of blood above his elbow. “That’s not my blood,” he assured her, and then she drew her own conclusion.
“Natasha’s,” she said. “You said that you clamped her artery, but I’m afraid my comprehension is a little slow just now. So you’ve saved her life yet again.”
Justin figured it was best just to be blunt. “I did what I could for her. She’s far from out of the woods, though.”
Her shoulders sagged. “Did she say anything? When you were helping her, I mean?”
“Well,” Justin said “it’s a little tough to talk when you’ve just been shot in the throat.”
“Of course. I’m sorry.” She gave a rueful shake of her head. “It’s just… we had a bit of a spat earlier. She’d fought with her roommate, and then spent the night in my guestroom. I suggested that she needed to sever that relationship altogether, because it didn’t appear to be healthy, and Natasha – being Natasha – told me I couldn’t tell her what to do. I… I then told her that she was ungrateful for all I’d done, sacrificed for her. I hate to think that that was our last conversation.”
“I understand.” Justin heard similar sentiments all too often. People tended to forget how very fragile life could be, assuming they’d have all the time in the world to iron out misunderstandings. “But remember that your sister is a fighter. I’ve treated her in the field, so to speak, for two gunshot wounds, so I can attest to that. Not to mention the trauma she had as a child.”
“Yes, the car accident,” Anne murmured. “It was awful.”
“It seems she had a lot of other ailments as well.”
Anne shot him a look. “She told you about that?”
“Yes.” Justin raised a brow. “Is that a problem?”
“No, no. Of course not. I’m just surprised, I guess. That was… a challenging period. For both of us. I was pulling my hair out, constantly trying to figure out what to do with this little girl who was always sick, and… well. There was some question as to whether some of it was psychological. Her illness, I mean. After the accident, she craved security and attention – more attention than I could give her, or maybe just a different kind. She began to make up wild stories, grew paranoid, insisted that she was in terrible danger. A lingering effect of the trauma, the psychologists said. She, um, she fixated on one of her doctors. A replacement father figure, I guess.”
“Yeah,” Justin said slowly. “She told me about that, too.”
“Really?” This time Anne’s brow winged up. “She must really trust you, then, to bring that up. She doesn’t talk about him often. She was devastated when he died.”
“Died?” Justin said, but just then a nurse entered the waiting room.
“Excuse me,” she said as she came closer. “Are you Natasha Griffin’s next of kin?”
Anne darted a look at Justin, her face draining of color. “I am. Is she –”
“The doctor would like to speak with you,” the nurse interrupted, not unkindly. “Your sister made it through the surgery, but… well. You need to speak with the doctor.”
“Thank you.” With another glance at Justin, she followed the woman out the door.
Justin watched them go, having read the look on the nurse’s face, then leaned back against the wall.
He wondered if Natasha Griffin would make it through the night.
KATHLEEN shone her flashlight across the interior of the car.
“They already bagged everything from the glove box and the console,” James said from behind her. “And the trunk.”
“So I see.”
“Looks like there might be a ball of lint over there that they missed, though. Maybe she’s a psychic, but instead of tea leaves she reads lint balls, and this particular one told her that Justin was in danger.” He paused. “After talking to the detective in charge, I’d actually be more inclined to put my faith in the lint ball.”
Kathleen paused, then looked at him over her shoulder. “Are you always this big of a smartass?”
“Pretty much.” His arms were crossed, a black scowl twisting his features. Apparently he’d gotten into a verbal kerfuffle of some sort with the detective on the case, and there was no love lost on either side. Since Kathleen strongly suspected that James’ surly disposition was a result of anxiety for his brother – not to mention the young woman whose blood still stained the floorboards in Justin’s front hall – she was inclined to cut him some slack.
Also, the detective hadn’t been especially forthcoming with regards to what they’d found in Natasha’s car. Not particularly impressed by the fact that Kathleen was a fellow cop, he hadn’t been willing to let her look at said evidence to see if anything stood out to her.
“That guy’s a douche.”
Because Kathleen was actually inclined to agree with him, she sighed and clicked off her flashlight. “He’s just… territorial,” she said.
James snorted to indicate his opinion on that.
When she turned, she found him staring at the blood smeared across the floorboards of the porch. It gleamed black and menacing in the moonlight, like the slimy trail of some creature from the deepest bowels of Hell.
“It was pretty brave of you to leave the house and help Justin, considering there was an active shooter in the vicinity.”
“What, like I was going to leave him out there to fend for himself while the chick bled to death?”
“Some people might.”
“Some people are assholes.”
A corner of her mouth lifted. Then she clicked the light back on,
and shone it along the ground, and into the tree line. She looked back at the porch, judged the angle. “That was either a lucky shot, or a skilled one.”
“Or a miss.”
When she turned around, James shrugged. “Just something I was thinking about. That maybe Justin was the target. After all, Natasha said she had proof he was in danger.”
Feeling lightheaded, Kathleen briefly closed her eyes. Emotion wanted to let panic rise, but she shoved it ruthlessly aside in favor of logic. “If he was the intended victim, then why didn’t the shooter take advantage of having him pinned down? He’s not exactly a small target, and he was pretty exposed.”
“Especially when he threw himself bodily on top of Natasha.”
Very much as he’d done to her when the shooting had started in Jugs. Damn hero, Kathleen thought, with a mixture of affection and frustration.
“But yeah,” James agreed. “It doesn’t make much sense, I guess, to think that he was the target this time.”
“This time?” Kathleen repeated, growing interested.
“You know what I mean.” He shrugged, looking a little uneasy. “The stalking.”
“Well,” she pointed out, “Mandy’s dead, so I think we can rule her out for this one.”
“Yeah, but…” he trailed off, then shook his head. “Never mind.”
“You can’t tell a detective to never mind. That just makes us mind.”
James visibly hesitated.
“James.” Her tone held a warning. “But what?”
Justin’s little brother frowned, crossed his arms again, then finally came to some sort of decision. “I don’t think it was Mandy. Who’s been stalking Justin, I mean. Not unless she found a way to send mail from the great beyond, anyway.”
“Mail?”
James nodded. “Yeah. I turned it over to that douchebag that was here earlier, just in case it related to this somehow.” He nodded toward the bloodstained porch. “But Justin got something weird in the mail the other day, sent after Mandy killed herself.”
“What kind of weird are we talking about?”
“You know he’s gotten gifts, right? The ornament all done up in fancy wrapping and the book in the frou-frou little bag. Well this time it was just a gift tag.”
“A gift tag?”
“Yeah. Sparkly little paper rectangle that said A Gift For You.”
“But no gift.”
“None that we could find. I know it doesn’t sound like much, but after the other things that’ve happened…” he shrugged. “This sort of creeped me out. Because I don’t think whoever sent it simply overlooked the actual gift. So what the hell did they intend to give him?”
“James,” she said slowly, as in the back of her mind, something tried to click. “What color was the sparkly paper?”
“Uh, kind of… silvery, I guess. What?” he said, grabbing Kathleen’s elbow when all the color drained from her face.
Kathleen drew a steadying breath, then pulled her phone from her pocket. “Let’s just say I’m a little creeped out, too.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
JAMES pulled into the first parking space he found, not particularly caring that it was at the ass-end of the hospital parking lot. Kathleen had gone into clam mode again after calling her partner and asking him to meet her, but not before making it perfectly clear that she wanted James to attach himself to his brother like a flea on a dog’s ass. Obviously the gift tag thing had meant something to Kathleen, and whatever it meant had her concerned for Justin.
He’d tried to contact Corelli to see if he’d found out anything about that post office box, but hadn’t heard back from him yet.
James was pretty much vibrating with repressed frustration.
Caffeine wasn’t going to help alleviate that, but he grabbed the insulated mugs that held another round of coffee for himself and Justin, since it looked to be a long night. Apparently Natasha had survived the surgery but remained in critical condition, and Justin didn’t want to leave the hospital just yet.
Which meant that James couldn’t leave the hospital, either.
Of course, he couldn’t stay at Justin’s house anyway, given the fact that it was a crime scene.
So much for that relaxing stay at the beach while he figured out what to do with his life.
Wondering at the vagaries of fate, which had placed him in Charleston just as the eye of his brother’s personal storm was making landfall, he locked Justin’s truck and strode toward the door.
“Doctor Wellington?” came a voice, seemingly from one of the thick, leafy bushes that softened the clinical feel of the hospital grounds. James looked around, wondering if he’d somehow passed Justin without realizing it, but then he saw the woman waving her arm at him from where she sat on a bench, all but buried in the shrubbery.
James glanced over his shoulder, then down, realizing that he still wore the scrubs he’d changed into earlier. Apparently, in the dim light, the woman had mistaken him for Justin. He veered off toward her, prepared to disabuse her of that notion, when recognition kicked in.
“Hey,” he said, a surprised smile on his face. “It’s… wait, don’t tell me. Shelley, right?” He recognized her from Murphy’s – she’d waited on him several times – though her pretty, flirtatious countenance was drawn into lines of worry, her caramel-colored skin gone the color of ash. “Hey,” he said again, concern replacing pleasure. “Are you okay?”
She blinked at him, then stood up, rubbing her hands on the thighs of her jeans. “Sorry,” she said, looking slightly embarrassed. “I thought you were your brother.”
“Well, the scrubs don’t help. We get that a lot, anyway, despite the fact that he’s older and a whole lot less fun.”
She smiled, though it faded quickly. When she wrapped her arms around herself in an apparent attempt to keep warm or to keep herself together – he was betting on the latter – he hesitated, then nodded toward the bench. “Why don’t you sit back down?”
She stared at the bench as if she’d never seen it before, and had no idea as to its intended purpose. Stifling a sigh, James figured he’d lead by example. He lowered himself, placed the two travel mugs between his feet and then patted the seat beside him. The metal still retained the faintest trace of warmth from her body.
Shelley sat. Then she drew in a deep breath, expanding her lungs in such a way that James would have appreciated immensely under normal circumstances, but since she was clearly in some kind of distress, he forced himself to look away.
“Sorry,” she said again, then turned her head toward him. “I’m in… shock, I guess.”
“What happened?” he asked again.
“My f-f-friend was shot.” When her teeth started to chatter, James reached down for one of the travel mugs. She appeared to need it more than he did. “Here,” he said. “Hot coffee, with plenty of sugar. I think you could use some.”
She shot him a glance, then looked at the coffee a moment before accepting. “God, that’s good,” she said, closing her eyes in pleasure after taking a sip. “Thanks.”
“No problem. I’m sorry about your friend. What happened?”
This time the look she gave him held surprise. “You don’t know? I thought that was why you were here.”
“I’m here to see my brother.” Then the pieces came together. “Wait, Natasha Griffin is your friend?”
Shelley nodded, clutching the coffee mug like a lifeline. “My roommate. That’s how I met your brother – when he saved her life before. I thought you knew.”
Now that she’d mentioned it, James thought he remembered her saying something about Jugs – the scene of the other shooting – the first time he’d met her. “Yeah, I just didn’t put it all together, I guess. I’m sorry,” he said, looking over at her. “I’m sure this has to be a shock, considering all you’ve both been through already. Any more news on her condition?”
She shook her head, staring at the lid of the coffee. “I don’t know. I’ve been afraid to go in. Na
tasha…” she took another deep breath. “Natasha and I had a fight a couple days ago. A pretty bad one. The police,” she hesitated, then seemed to gather up her courage. “The police asked me a bunch of questions. About my car. I came out of work one night and found the front bumper dented – like someone had backed out in the parking lot and hit it, you know? But they said how my car had been involved in some kind of accident over in Mount Pleasant. I mean, what? How’s my car supposed to be running people off the road while I’m working? Like it’s Christine or something? If I hadn’t had a solid alibi, they probably would have arrested me. But since dozens of people saw me in Murphy’s, they asked did anyone else have a spare key. And while the answer to that is no, Na-Natasha knew where I kept one.”
She took another sip of coffee. “So I had to ask her if she’d been borrowing my car without telling me, and one thing leading to another, it ended up with her walking out. We’d been having some issues anyway, what with her overdosing and then trying to say as how she hadn’t done it herself and coming up with stories about drug dealers trying to kill her, and me, having some experience with addiction, tried to get her to just come clean, you know? If she had a problem, we’d deal with it.” She shook her head. “And now she’s lying in there, another bullet in her, and I have to live with the fact that I didn’t believe her and that maybe the last words we had between us were hard.”
She blew out a breath, looked at James. “Wow, did I just unload on you or what?”
“It’s okay,” he said, offering a reassuring smile even while his mind was working.
“You’re a good listener,” she said, then her eyes narrowed. “Of course, so was that asshole the other night.”
“What asshole?”
She waved a hand. “Just some guy. Came on to me in the Murphy’s parking lot, sweet talked me into having coffee with him, and now that I look back on it, managed to finagle a whole bunch of information out of me about the dent in my car. Mighty suspicious timing, you ask me, since the cops questioned me not two days after. Probably undercover, hoping to trip me up or something,” she muttered. “Jerk.”
The Southern Comfort Series Box Set Page 150