by Faye, Amy
"Agh! God, that hurt."
"That's why you don't tease your wife, you big idiot."
Dan looked up at her a long moment, his eyes slowly narrowing as a question rose out of the fog of his mind, and then he was already starting to pull himself out of bed when it hit him, before he started to speak the words. "Where are the girls?"
Sarah's hands were surprisingly strong, or he was surprisingly weak, but she managed to hold him back surprisingly well by one shoulder.
"They're fine," she intoned. "They've got them down at the nursery. So I can sleep, a little, they said."
"Did you sleep?"
"A little."
"Good to hear it."
She let out a long breath and he let her guide her back to the bed. For a long time, she watched his expression. Watched his face. What she was watching for, he didn't know.
"I'm gonna be fine."
"I know," she said. She bit her lip again.
"You're very pretty when you're tired, you know that?"
"No I'm not," she said, automatically. Like she'd been practicing.
"I'm serious. You're very pretty. I'm telling you."
"Thanks." She didn't sound like she believed him, but at least she wasn't arguing. There was something else in her expression, too. Something he decided not to push.
"You should go lay back down. Or call someone to take you home. I'll be fine here."
She frowned at that. Pinched her forehead together, chewed on her lip. At the same time, he assumed that she was chewing on what she ought to say to the suggestion.
"I think I'll stay here."
"They're not trying to kick you out or whatever? Visiting hours, or something?"
She looked at the door. It was hidden from his view by a big, thick corner of wall, but after several seconds, nobody came inside.
"Nobody's tried to make me leave yet," she said.
"I'm going to make you leave, if you're not careful," he said, hoping that the smile made it clear that he wasn't upset. He was thankful, if anything. There were a thousand things that could have happened to her, and being told that she was fine probably wasn't going to be good enough.
After the beating that Dan had given him, Cole Greer was probably 'fine.' A broken nose was nothing. Particularly when compared to a stab in the gut. A woman who'd gotten clobbered was going to be fine. Just a little black eye.
There was a mile's gulf between fine and untouched. Of course, for him, there was an equally big difference between 'hurt' and 'hurt bad.' He'd taken worse injuries than he'd given Greer having a good time. Walked off several sport fields with a smile on his face and blood pouring down over his mouth.
It would take more than a little thing like a few stitches in his stomach to stop him from making sure that Cole, or anyone else who wanted to put a hand on his wife or her daughters, understood exactly how wide that gulf could be, and what it felt like to travel it.
29
Sarah didn't know when she fell asleep; she wasn't planning on falling asleep at all. But somehow, it happened, just like it always seemed to. She was almost used to it going that way by now, after months and months of getting only the sleep that she could eke out between Allison and Chelsea's totally different sleeping schedules.
But this time it was a little bit different. A feeling in her gut told her something was wrong, and as much as there had never been any reason to worry any of the other times she'd felt this way, that didn't make her feel any better about it now.
She took a deep breath in and forced herself up from the uncomfortable three-quarter sized sofa, which was probably little more than a chair for oversized people, and rubbed at her eyes. There was someone outside the room, talking.
They'd been talking in her dream, too. Saying how they needed to come in and speak with her immediately. They hadn't said it like that, of course. They'd been very professional. "With Mrs. Bryant," they'd called her.
In the dream, they'd been working with the CIA to capture her for alien experiments. The details of the dream faded as she woke, and it sounded absurd to her even though only a few moments beforehand she'd completely bought into the whole thing. Her heart still beat hard with the fear that they would figure out a way to catch her.
She rubbed her eyes and stood up unsteadily, preparing for them to come in. There was someone else talking back to them. The nurse, she saw. The one who had offered to let her sleep. Now she had her hands up and a defensive posture and she spoke too quietly to be heard clearly but she was upset about something and Sarah could tell that even without hearing the words.
"Hello, can I help you?"
The guy talking to her nurse friend started to push past and the woman put her hands out, and this time she spoke loudly enough to make herself heard.
"I'm sorry, sir, but I'm not going to let you in there."
"What's going on?"
"Mrs. Sarah Bryant, formerly Miss Sarah Jones?"
"What's going on?" She repeated the question as if he might not have heard, but he'd heard. She knew he had.
"We need you to come with us for a few minutes, answer a couple of questions."
"I'm not going to let you in there," the nurse repeated as the man stepped past again. She shuffled to the side like it was a rehearsed dance, and blocked the guy off.
She was a petite woman, not much bigger than Sarah herself. The man was big and wearing a dark suit, but not a terribly expensive one. A working man's suit.
"I'm not going anywhere until you tell me what this is about," Sarah said. She looked over at Dan, who was asleep again. She thought very hard about how worried he'd been about her. About how worried he'd been about the girls.
And then she thought very hard about the fact that these two men had so far patently refused to identify themselves, refused to tell her what they wanted, and now they were trying to push past without doing either. Sarah swallowed hard.
The other one, smaller and wider at the waist, like John Belushi in the Blues Brothers, stepped forward. He had a hat on, which Sarah thought dimly was inappropriate in a hospital for reasons that she couldn't put her fingers on.
"Karl, take a walk."
The big guy turned on him, and she suddenly realized that however long this had been going on, it had gotten the big man riled up.
"Mrs. Bryant, I'm with the police, and we'd just like to ask you a few questions about what happened earlier."
"Why aren't you showing me your badge?"
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a wallet. "Because you were asleep, until just a moment ago, and then my partner had already picked a fight with this lovely young woman here."
He flipped the wallet open. Inside was a shiny nickel-colored badge. He fit a finger into a fold in the wallet and held that open, too, and there was a picture of his face, in a little tiny box.
"I'm Lieutenant Rigsby, and my friend, who I understand if you're uncertain about, is Detective McCallister. We're just going to need to ask you a few questions, is all. Nothing for anyone to lose their tempers over."
He said it like he meant 'nothing for anyone at all, and I have no idea who might,' but she could hear a little edge of 'so you can back off now, ma'am' in his voice. The nurse didn't. She blocked the door very effectively for a woman who barely took up half the doorway with her arms at her sides.
"Do I need to go anywhere?"
"Maybe. That depends."
"On what? I didn't do anything wrong. Neither did my husband."
He turned suddenly to the nurse, like he'd just thought of an important question he needed to ask her. Sarah wasn't sure how much of it was an act, and she was less sure how much of it she trusted.
"Is there someplace more private we could talk? Doesn't have to be real private, at this point. Could be a cafeteria, for example, or a meeting room. This time of night, there's probably not too many people around anywhere like that."
Sarah rubbed at her eyes. Why couldn't everyone just let her sleep, for once in her damned l
ife?
There was a long, long moment before the nurse nodded at him. Sarah stepped out into the hall to follow behind. Something about all this felt odd. Such a late-night visit? She looked up. Not that late, after all. It was more like early morning, at this point. The clock made a vertical line, canted just a little bit. Five-fifty-eight.
She thought that she would like a cup of coffee, and opened her mouth to say so. She was really too tired for all this. But then she remembered. Can't have coffee. She's got to keep herself steady, because she's got to breastfeed, at some point. In a little while she'd be able to go get the girls again, and show them in to Dan's room and let him see that they were okay, same as her.
They turned down a corner, then down another, and another, all in rapid succession. Then the nurse fished for a key, put it into a lock in a big pair of double doors, and pushed them open. The room was dark until she flipped the light, and then she leaned against the wall as Sarah and the Lieutenant followed her inside.
A dozen or more tables spread out to make maximum use of the room filled the space; a turned-off television was on one side of the room, and a little food-prep space that would have been inadequate in even the smallest apartment, suitable only for peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, took up a corner on the opposite wall.
The Lieutenant pulled back a chair, and then seemed to think better of it and took a different one. He gestured to the seat he'd left open like it was meant for her.
Sarah sat down with a furrow between her brows. "Mrs. Bryant, do you mind if I call you Sarah?"
"I don't care," she said. "What's the problem? I'm very tired, I'd really like to get this over with."
"Good," the guy said. He smiled at her pleasantly. His eyes were sharp, attentive, focused. Totally unlike how she felt right now. "I'd love to get this taken care of myself. How are you feeling?"
"I told you, I'm tired. I have two seventeen-week old little girls, and they keep me pretty busy. And then of course, I was up late worrying about my husband. Then, I was woken up twice in the night, which isn't a record for me, but it's hardly a good time, either."
"Right. How silly of me. Of course you're tired. You want a cup of coffee?"
"I can't have any," she said, rubbing at her temple. It hurt, bad. Her eyes hurt. She never took anything for the pain, but it wasn't usually this bad.
"Oh, right. Cause of the girls. Okay. Forget I asked."
"It's very kind of you to offer," she said, vaguely. It didn't count for anything, that offer, but it wasn't rude, either. No reason to lose her temper at this guy when he hadn't done anything wrong.
"Okay, well, I'll cut right to the chase. There are a few things that we'd like to ask you about. I guess, we'll start with the story of how you met your husband."
"How I met Dan?"
"Yeah, that seems like a good place to start. As good as any."
She tried to think of the fabricated lie that they'd come up with to explain their whirlwind romance. It was a simple one, but her head felt like it was floating.
"Uh. A couple weeks ago, he ran into me, at the courthouse. He asked me if I wanted to get married, and I said yes." The man frowned. "I'm sorry if that's not very storybook."
"No reason at all?"
"Two very good reasons," she said.
"Your little girls?"
"Is that a problem?"
"No, it's not a problem. You're not in any trouble here, at this point."
"At this point?"
"Not yet, anyways," the guy said. Like he was commenting on the weather.
"What do you mean, 'not yet?'"
30
When Dan had woken before, it had been a slow thing. First, the pain came. Then the sense of the rest of his body. His eyes opened, but sight came before he actually could tell what he was seeing. He felt like he was slowly rising from the bottom of a very deep, very dark pool of water, and it wasn't until he finally reached the top that he was really awake.
The second time was completely different. He snapped awake like someone had slapped him in the face. They hadn't, of course.
No, that would be unprofessional. He'd been shaken awake at the shoulder. It was gentle, as far as people physically laying their hands on him went. That was a completely different question from how he felt about it.
"Good, you're awake," a voice said. His eyes flicked over to the source of the voice, and saw a big guy. He wasn't as broad as Dan was, but he was at least as tall, and weight didn't count for a whole hell of a lot when you're laid up on a hospital bed.
"Who are you?"
The man's face was solemn and perhaps even a little bit contemplative.
"Mr. Bryant, right?"
"What do you want?" Maybe it wasn't polite, but he was past the point of being polite. There were limits to politeness, and 'sleeping off intense agony, and then being suddenly woken up by some strange asshole in a hundred-dollar suit' was pretty far past.
"I need to ask you a couple of questions."
"Who the hell even are you?"
"Sir?"
"I asked who you are. What right do you have to ask me anything?"
He nodded for a long minute. "Right. I guess I didn't introduce myself. I'm Detective McCallister, with the Detroit Police Department. I'm investigating the disturbance that took place yesterday evening." He pulled a note pad out of his pocket and flipped it open. "Seven in the evening, in the dining area of 'Xochimilco authentic Mexican dining.'"
"What's the question. There were a thousand witnesses."
"We're just trying to get a fairly complete picture of what happened, from beginning to end."
"The beginning was, he stabbed me. The end was, I clobbered him. Anyone would do the same, I think. Particularly with my wife right there. Imagine what he'd have done to her?" Dan shuddered involuntarily just imagining it. He'd avoided that possible reality, but the very notion that it could have happened was revolting.
"Of course," the man said, as if Dan had ignored the question, but he'd expected it. "But you don't think it's odd that he would come straight to you? Like he knew where you were?"
"I'm sure that he did," Dan said.
The other man blinked. That was a surprise. Dan wasn't particularly interested in whether the surprise was that the boy had known where to find them, or that Dan would admit it.
"Oh? Okay, then. How would he have known?"
"I got a call from my business partner, Jane Rients. She said that she got a call from a client, and he wanted to join me for drinks that evening, sooner better than later. So I told her where I was and to pass the information along."
"And you believe that client was Mr. Greer?"
"That, or he was working for him. I don't think it's that hard to get someone to make a couple phone calls for you."
"And you knew this at the time?"
"Of course I didn't know it at the time. The kid's a creep. I didn't think he was a knife-wielding creep, or I'd have stayed a little further away."
The detective made a note in his little notebook, and Dan frowned. "So when he texted you from his personal cell phone number, and I quote, 'I'm close...'"
"I texted him back with the place where he could find our seat. Apparently. Is it really necessary that we do this right now?"
"I'm sorry if there's any discomfort, sir, but we're on a tight deadline."
Dan rolled his eyes and then caught himself and tried to hide it by blinking. "So, what's the problem?"
"Well, this wasn't your first altercation with Mr. Greer, was it?"
Dan raised an eyebrow. "I never touched him before this, but he hadn't made the Christmas list with the way that he acted before this."
"We heard from his father, you nearly struck him once before."
"Are you suggesting I'd get myself stabbed so that I could slug the kid a few times?"
There was a long pause, as the detective made another scribble in his notebook. It made Dan a little uncomfortable, which he guessed was the intention. Otherwise t
hey could just use an audio recording. At the very least, he could have asked about it. But he hadn't. Straight to the notebook.
"That wouldn't make a whole lot of sense, would it?" The Detective smiled with an oddly robotic smile. "You mind if I sit?"
Dan looked around for chairs. There were a few, he saw, more or less stuck in the corners. "Yeah, go ahead. It's a free country."
"Of course you wouldn't have baited him in if you thought he had a knife. You said so yourself. That was a surprise."
"The whole thing was a surprise," Dan corrected. His stomach hurt, and he wanted to know where all this was supposed to be going.
"I'm sure it was," the man said. He made another note in his notebook, as if one of them had said something.
"You want to tell me where my wife's gone? She was here last time I woke up."
"No idea," the guy said. He cocked his head, and gave a look like 'you got a problem with that?'
Of course Dan had a problem with it. There were a thousand problems with it, and most of them were inherently obvious. As in, didn't need explanation.
"You took her somewhere, I guess?"
"I don't know. I took a walk."
Dan's nostrils flared for a moment, and he could feel annoyance flaring up with them. He was going to get mad at this guy, but the way that he was acting was so obviously intentional that he forced himself to stay calm. He had to.
"So, what, you got your partner talking to her right now?"
The guy shrugged. "I don't know what my partner's up to. Maybe he's getting an early-morning slice of pizza for all I know."
"Should I be making a call to my lawyer?"
The guy cocked his head again, the other way this time. "I don't know. Do you think you need a lawyer?"
"I just want to know why you're yanking me around, Detective. I know when someone's playing straight with me, and I know when someone's trying to get a rise out of me."
"Oh yeah?"
"I know I may look dumb, but that's just a disguise," Dan told him, sarcasm touching his voice.