Zach dragged his lips slowly across Moni’s cheek to a spot right below her ear and whispered, “Yeah, but once I did slow down, I made it up to ya. Didn’t I, baby?”
Harrison, Vic’s older brother, threw back his head, laughing hard. “Oh, now they’re sitting over there acting like they’re deaf. Don’t go there, Vic and A.J.”
Lincoln waved his hand in front of him until he got A.J.’s attention. “Man, what did you tell her?”
A.J. took a sip from his bottle of Perrier. “I told her I didn’t know if I wanted to marry her.”
Stunned, everyone looked over at A.J., then at Vic, before they yelled out at the same time, “What?”
A.J.’s eyes lovingly raked over Vic. “I also told her she needed to convince me.”
Alex lifted his brows. “That’s a joke, right?”
K-Mart pulled out his cell phone and flipped it open. “What’s Cates’ number? We need to run another CT scan on you, doc.”
Chandler sat next to K-Mart. “That’s right, baby. Tell him to make that two, and schedule Vic’s first.”
“Whatcha mean, convince?” Ray shouted loud enough for the neighbors next door to hear him. “Ain’t raising four kids persuasion enough? In a minute, ya gonna need a Hummer to transport everybody.”
Mama Z sat to the right of Louise and whispered, “Must be waiting on blessings from the church.”
Alcee nodded. “That’s right. It takes about six months to get approval for a Catholic wedding, you know.”
George Vincent lifted his brow. “Well, we Baptists got it down to a three-step process.” He gently nudged Louise. “Huh, baby?”
Louise nodded. “That’s right. A license, the preacher, and fifty dollars, and it’s a done deal.”
Zach reached over and grabbed a chicken leg off a platter. “So, Baby Girl, what did brother-in-law tell ya?”
The only thing Vic could do was smile at the memory of how she’d convinced Baptiste to marry her. It was a night she’d never forget. She tossed a sultry wink at him. “Nothing.”
“You couldn’t talk him into marrying you,” Moni gasped, in disbelief.
Vic shook her head. “No, I was able to convince him.”
“How?” Moni asked.
Vic smiled. “We eloped.”
“Eloped?” everyone shouted.
Vic nodded and tugged at her left earlobe.
* * *
Three days later, Vic was happy that Baptiste’s sisters, Brie, Moni, and Aimee, along with Chandler and Tara, talked her into having her bridal shower, which was hosted by her new sister-in-law Caitlyn. She loved all of them even more for insisting the event take place at the hospital so that Valerie, Brianna and Chloé’s mother, could join in the festivities. Even though Valerie had long recovered from her injuries, Vic was happy that her husband and Zach had somehow arranged for her to remain at the hospital for her own safety while waiting to learn if she qualified for the Witness Protection Program.
After opening Vic’s gifts, the women spent the next hour looking at the new pictures and videos of Bébé and CeCe that Vic had brought along for Valerie to see. Then, Vic turned to Valerie and made an announcement.
“All right,” Vic said happily, looking over at Valerie. “Are you ready to receive your presents?”
Valerie’s eyes glossed with tears when Vic unwrapped a gift box and lifted out a silk bed jacket. “Thank you, Vic.” She ran her hand along the surface of the smooth, turquoise-colored garment and choked back a sob. “I-I ain’t had nothing this pretty before.”
“Well, that’s only one of your gifts,” Vic said as she helped Valerie slip into the bed jacket.
Valerie looked up at Vic, baffled. “There’s another one?”
Vic nodded and leaned over and whispered in Valerie’s ear.
Valerie was speechless for a moment and then stared, stunned, at the smiling faces of everyone in the room. Vic had told her Zach gave his permission and that Bébé and CeCe were downstairs in the lobby with Louise and Mama Z, waiting to see her.
“Are you ready to go?” Vic asked.
Valerie beamed with excitement. “Oh, yes. I can’t wait to see my babies again.” She looked around the room at Brie, Moni, Aimee, Caitlyn, Tara, and Chandler. “I’ve had so much fun today. Thank you for having Vic’s shower here, and thank you for my presents.”
Vic gave Valerie a big hug. “We’ve had fun, too, sweetie.” Vic rolled a wheelchair next to the bed. “Come on and get in.”
“Why do I have to go in this?” Valerie asked, frowning, but followed Vic’s instructions.
Vic smiled. “Officially, you’re still a patient and it’s hospital policy that patients be transported in a wheelchair, even if they don’t need it.”
Valerie nodded. “I can’t wait a minute longer,” she said gleefully. “Come on, Vic, let’s go.”
Vic chuckled. “All right, all right. Ready?”
One of the floor nurses walked inside the room and stared at everyone. She shifted her focus dead on Valerie. “And just where do you think you’re going, young lady?”
Vic stepped in front of the nurse. “She’s on her way to the imaging department downstairs.”
The nurse frowned. “I don’t recall that request in her chart. Wait right here,” she advised and quickly walked out the room.
Valerie glanced up at Vic with a panicked expression on her face. “She’s not going to let me go, Vic. What we gonna do?”
Caitlyn nodded in agreement. “Vic, we’ll never get Valerie past the nurses’ station now.”
Vic chuckled. “Child, I’ve been around Baptiste too long not to get past this. I’ve also managed to pick up a few tricks of my own,” she added. She pulled her cell phone from her purse and made a call.
“Oh, Vic,” Tara said fretfully, “we’ve got to hurry before that nurse comes back.”
“Settle down,” Vic said with confidence. “Betcha we get Valerie downstairs to see her babies.”
Vic noticed how everyone stared at her with their mouths wide open, and she couldn’t much blame them. Even she noticed the calmness of her demeanor. Before, she would have walked the nurse up one side and down the other. Patience had never been her greatest virtue, and here she was now calmly waiting, assessing the situation at hand, and contemplating a clever way to get around it.
Chandler quipped, “Lord, have mercy. Yeah, you changed all right. Ain’t even worried about the time, either.”
Vic chuckled. “Y’all know that man of mine don’t rush for nothing.” She shrugged. “Guess a little bit of that has rubbed off on me.”
The nurse entered the room again with Valerie’s chart in her hand and flipped through the pages. “I was right. There are no orders in here for her to go down to imaging.”
“Is the patient ready?” Louise asked when she rushed inside the room after receiving a call on her cell phone from Zach, who told her the trouble Vic was having with the nurse on duty. She stopped by the ER to change into a set of scrubs.
The baffled nurse stared blankly at Louise. “Who are you?”
Louise quickly flashed her employee badge. “Imaging department.”
Vic’s eyes traveled over the nurse as her mind played out the steps of what she’d told Zach she was going to do, and she knew her timing had to be precise. She glanced over at Moni with a knowing look. Moni winked, acknowledging she understood the unspoken request, and eased next to Brie to nudge her in the side. In return, Brie nudged Aimee.
The nurse shook her head and flipped through the sheets once again, starting from the beginning. “But there isn’t an order from her doctor for any X rays—”
“What?” Moni cried out. “Let me see this…” She plucked the chart from the nurse and began thumbing through the pages.
“You lost our sister’s orders,” Brie exclaimed.
“Get her doctor on the phone, right now,” Aimee shouted.
“No, no,” the nurse stuttered with a baffled look and pointed to Valerie’s medical c
hart. “I-I’m sure the orders are in there someplace.”
Tapping her foot, Moni handed the chart back to the nurse and tilted her head at it. “Well, start looking.”
The nurse looked a second time and briefly raised her head to give Brie a panic-stricken stare.
Brie gestured at the chart. “Don’t look at me.”
Aimee peered over the nurse’s shoulder when she stopped to scan one of the pages. “That’s not it. Keep going,” she instructed and drew her arm around her back, flashing a thumbs-up to Vic.
While her sister-in-laws had the rattled nurse, who was now mumbling to herself, preoccupied, Vic pushed Valerie’s wheelchair to the door and mouthed to Caitlyn, “Open it.”
Vic chuckled out loud once they’d all crowded inside the elevator, along with Valerie’s police escort, and headed for the lobby. If the nurse got that flustered over not being able to find a medical order, she wondered what would happen once she discovered she was by herself in an empty room.
* * *
The next day, A.J. groped for the phone the moment it rang and woke him from a dead sleep. He glanced at the clock on the nightstand. The red illuminated numbers indicated it was three o’clock in the morning.
“Dr. Baptiste,” he answered drowsily, pushing himself upright in bed.
Vic stirred and sat up as well, staring intently at Baptiste’s face. She mouthed, “Who is it?”
A.J. nodded. “I’ll be right there.”
“Baptiste, what’s wrong?”
He turned to her, the color draining from his face. “That was Zach.”
“Baptiste, what’s wrong?” she asked anxiously, her heart pounding inside her chest. “Is it Moni? Little Zach?”
A.J. shook his head and sighed. “It’s Valerie.”
Chapter 16
“Oh, Jesus,” Vic whispered against the hand covering her mouth. The moment she and Baptiste rounded the nurses’ station, she looked at the scene in front of her and grew numb.
Her eyes darted wildly at the swarm of police officers along the hospital corridor. When she noticed the yellow tape used by law enforcement at a crime scene stuck across Valerie’s door, her heart lunged out of rhythm.
As soon as Baptiste told her something had happened to Valerie, she’d phoned her parents, Louise and George Vincent. They, along with A.J.’s father, Alcee, arrived within fifteen minutes to care for the girls. Afterwards, she and Baptiste raced over to Highland Hospital.
Vic spotted Zach a few feet away from Valerie’s room and ran up to him. “Zach, w-what’s wrong? W-What’s happened to Valerie?”
Zach, who was talking to a detective named Wallace, faced Vic. “Come on, y’all. Let’s go somewhere more private.”
Zach, along with Wallace, led A.J. and Vic down the hallway toward the waiting area. He dragged his hand down his face, and blew out a hard breath. “Baby Girl, I-I’m sorry to tell ya this…” He paused, staring at the floor. “Valerie’s dead.”
“D-Dead?” Vic stuttered, in shock. She stepped backwards, her back colliding with Baptiste’s chest. “B-But how?”
Zach opened his mouth, and then closed it. Planting a hand at the base of his neck, he tried again. “One of the nurses went to check and found her unresponsive. “He gave A.J. solemn look. “Appears to be a drug overdose.”
“How?” A.J. asked, his voice wobbly.
“Had to be an injection, brother-in-law, ’cause we found the syringe next to her.”
Vic shook Zach hard by the shoulders as tears began to roll down her cheeks. “No! I-I just saw Valerie yesterday. She was happy. She got to see her babies…and hold them.” She shook him even harder this time. “Zach, no,” she whimpered. “No…”
Zach drew Vic to his chest to comfort her. “It’s gonna be okay, Baby Girl.” He patted her quivering shoulders. “I know how ya feelin’ right now.” After several moments, he placed both hands on Vic’s shoulders and positioned her upright. “Valerie was under a under a lot of pressure. Guess she just couldn’t handle things no mo’.”
Stunned, the only thing A.J. could do was rock on his heels. Of all the drug-addicted teenagers he’d treated in the past, he felt Valerie had the best shot of overcoming her addition. Hearing the news that she’d succumbed to her addiction shook him to the core. “Zach…when did it happen?”
“A little past one,” Zach said. “As soon as the nurse found her, she reported it to the officer on duty at the time. He called me. I got here as soon as I could.”
Vic backed away from Zach, her spine rigid, her temper escalating. “Somebody better start talking to me…and talk fast,” Vic cried out hysterically. “How did Valerie get a hold of drugs in the first place when she’s been under 24/7 police protection?”
Zach pursed his lips, and then finally said, “Baby Girl, apparently Valerie was using all along. Found out I gotta a low-life cop on my team, and from what I can gather, he’d been slipping drugs to her on his shift. Don’t worry. I know who he is, and I’m gonna arrest him personally.”
Vic brushed the tears from her face with both hands. As a nurse, she was familiar with death, but had never received the news that someone close to her had died. Her legs grew numb and she slithered weakly to the chair behind her, bursting into tears again.
“Morgue?” A.J. asked.
Zach nodded. “Got my men contacting Valerie’s next of kin now.”
Zach sat next to Vic and grabbed her hand, squeezing it tight. “Baby Girl, ain’t nothing mo’ ya can do now. Let brother-in-law take ya back home, all right?”
Vic shook her head. “I-I want to see her, Zach.”
“Honey…” A.J. uttered gently, taking his seat on the opposite side of Vic.
“I’m not going anywhere, Baptiste,” Vic said in a cracking voice, filled with fierce determination, “not until I see Valerie.”
A.J. placed his hands on Vic’s shoulders. “Honey, you can’t—”
“B-But, Baptiste,” Vic cried, even though she knew he was right. Although it had been a while since she’d worked in a clinical setting, she knew the protocol—that when a patient died, their body was taken to the hospital morgue until the next of kin was notified.
“Brother-in-law’s right,” Zach said. “Listen, I know how tight ya was with Valerie. But ya also know the rules. The coroner is on his way, and after he officially rules on the death he’ll release Valerie’s body to her next of kin.”
Wallace hesitated for a moment before he said, “Lieutenant—”
“Wallace, why don’t ya escort Dr. and Mrs. Baptiste back to their car,” Zach suggested, jerking his head toward the elevators. “We just ’bout to wrap things up here.”
A.J. urged Vic to her feet. Slipping her hand inside his, they followed Wallace toward the elevators. They’d gotten half way down the corridor when he patted the detective on the shoulder. After speaking to him briefly, he placed a light kiss on Vic’s cheek and headed back toward Zach.
* * *
“Zach, have you been able to locate the car that hit Honey?”
It was the one question A.J. had pondered constantly since Vic had undergone hypnosis nine days earlier. But their elopement to Las Vegas, coupled with Vic’s bridal shower, had prevented him from finding out the answer.
Zach turned to face A.J., nodding. “Yeah. Ran the plates before you and Baby Girl left the police station.”
“Well?”
“Belongs to a Carmen Jenkins.”
“Did she explain how someone else ended up driving it?”
“Nope. She said it was stolen two days before the accident.”
With his gazed fixed on the wall, A.J. rubbed the muscles that had started to knot at the back of his neck. Carmen Jenkins. Why was this particular name so familiar? Then he remembered there was a nurse Vic had hired from the nursing registry to help out at the clinic for a couple of days after it first opened. But were they one and the same? “Honey told me she’d fired a nurse named Carmen Jenkins the day Valerie came to the clinic.”
/>
“Do tell,” Zach said, quickly retrieving the notepad from inside his jacket. He jotted down everything A.J. had said.
“So, how did Scooter end up driving her car the night of the accident?”
“Can’t answer that for ya right now, brother-in-law. Gimme a couple of hours, though.” Pulling back his jacket, he slipped the notepad back inside and tucked his pen behind his ear. “Ya can best believe if I was sporting around in a $250,000 Lamborghini and it came up missing, everybody in the state of California would know about it.”
A.J. sighed, frustrated. Nothing that he’d seen or heard in the last thirty minutes made any sense. Somehow he managed to focus his attention back on the issue at hand. “You do plan to talk to the Carmen Jenkins I’m referring to?”
Zach answered with a wink.
“Have you talked to Scooter yet?”
“Naw, ’cause he don’ gone deep undercover. Ain’t been able to locate him—yet. But ya can put this on my grandmama’s headstone.” He inched up to A.J., only inches separating them. “Don’t care if I gotta look under every rock in town,” he paused, spacing his words out evenly, “I’ma find Tony Grice.”
* * *
A couple of days later after Valerie’s cremation, Marcel and Ray, along with Alcee and K-Mart, hosted a bachelor party for A.J.
After Marcel had made a round of drinks, everyone lifted their glasses up in a toast to the groom. Afterwards, they all retreated to the family room for a game of pool.
“Brother-in-law,” Zach shouted out to Marcel, walking in thirty minutes later, after he’d gotten off duty. “Need my…” His words stopped when everyone pointed to a bottle of Crown Royal and a shot glass sitting on top of a table.
A.J. walked over to Zach. “What’s wrong?
“Been out tryin’ to find our friend Scooter.” Zach took a big gulp from the drink he’d poured and sighed. “That’s the reason I’m late.” He glanced around the room. “The women ain’t here, are they?”
A.J. shook his head.
Zach sat heavily on a barstool as everyone surrounded him. “Good. They don’t need to be hearing none of this no way.”
When a Man Loves a Woman (Indigo) Page 17