Her eyes burned from all the smoke. At least that's what she told herself.
"He was trying, Garrett. That's more than I can say for myself."
Watching the door of the rest room, he seemed not to hear her.
"Yeah."
She took hold of his sleeve.
He tensed.
She thought he was overreacting to her touch, and took back her hand.
"Would it hurt you to give him credit for that much? He must know he won't get another chan-Garrett? Garrett!"
He tore out of the booth blindingly fast. She screamed after him, "Garrett!"
But he was at the door of the rest room, his gun drawn, turned with his back to the corridor wall, aiming with both hands at the small crowd in the bar.
"Everyone on the floor! Now! Do it now!"
A scream rose up inside her but her throat was frozen. She bent over low and crawled from the booth, trying to see, to understand.
She saw him still aiming, hollering now for Vorees, who burst through the front door with his gun pulled as well. It was about her, she realized, about protecting her. Still, she didn't understand. But in the instant Vorees was there to watch over her, Garrett turned and threw himself against the door Burton had gone through.
A cry tore loose from her. The force of his impact split the panels in the fraction of a second before the lock tore loose.
What he saw enraged Garrett and he swore, "Dammit to hell. Somebody get an ambulance. Vorees, cover me," and then he was gone, racing through the kitchen and out the back door.
Amid pandemonium, furniture, bar stools, chairs, tables crashing to the floor, the jukebox played on, some wildly obscene happy little Carpenters tune. Kirsten scrambled across the filthy floor, half crawling, half on her feet to get to Burton while Vorees returned fire aimed at her from outside the window beside the booth.
She heard Vorees shouting at her to get down, get to cover, but all she could think was to get to Burton.
She shoved hard, but Burton's body splayed awkwardly on the floor in the path of the door. She forced herself through the narrow opening and crouched beside him. Of the crime scenes she'd photographed, few were so benign as this. She'd imagined blood sprayed everywhere, but there was none save a small, widening pool on the worn, peeling linoleum near Burton's shoulder. Still, her stomach pitched and clenched and roiled again.
She clamped her teeth hard against the biting sour taste surging into her mouth. Feeling for the wound that was bleeding so profusely, she stanched the flow of Burton's bleeding carotid artery with her bare hand.
transported to the emergency room in the ambulance with Burton, she held tight to his hand while the paramedics established an IV and ran fluids through a wide-open line. The van careened through streets inches deep in water, fishtailing nearly out of control countless times.
The ride could only have taken fifteen minutes. At its end, a crew met them at the E. R. entry. Burton was whisked out of sight, tri aged and taken so quickly to surgery that he was gone before she got in the door.
In shock herself, so numbed she hadn't even realized she'd been grazed by a bullet at her upper arm, she sat through the ministrations of a physician's assistant under the harsh E. R. lights till Garrett strode in. The PA gave one last turn of a self- sticking wrap to her arm before Kirsten dropped over the side of the gurney and into Garrett's arms.
He held her for the few seconds she allowed.
"They've taken Burton to surgery. I can't find out what's happening, they won't tell me, they" -He looked to the exasperated PA.
"I'm with the U.S. Attorney's office.
The bullet wound is a critical witness. Is there any way you can find out what's going on? "
"I can call up there, but"
"How about you go up there," Garrett asked softly.
"I'd appreciate it."
"Well, sure. If you're here with her, I could run up. I just don't want to come back and find Ms. McCourt passed out."
"I'm with her. Go. Please."
The PA strode off, bypassing elevators for a set of stairs.
"Garrett." Kirsten felt suddenly lightheaded, and sat down in the chair just outside her curtained area.
"Did you catch whoever did this?"
His expression tight, he shook his head.
"The area down there is a rat maze. There are uniforms covering the crime scene now, searching for the shooters. Vorees stayed to oversee everything, but I think our chances of finding them are nil."
"I don't understand how this could happen with Ross standing guard outside."
He knelt beside her.
"The shooter must have sneaked down that two-foot alleyway between the bar and the body shop. He used a silencer, took aim through the window in the can. By the time Vorees knew what was going down, he was inside on my orders. It makes me mad, but...! can't fault the guy. Vorees probably saved your life."
Her lips pressed trembling together.
"If Burton dies, it's because those bastards across the street knew that's what had to happen if I was ever going to get those tapes into my hands."
"Kirsten, he was a marked man. You know that."
"He could have been out of here a long time ago. He stayed, God knows why. He" -She couldn't get it out for the half-hysterical, erratic breathing that seized her.
The PA was back.
"They're right in the middle of resecting your guy's carotid artery. The word is 'guarded."
"
" What does that mean? "
"Better than not. Ms. McCourt, I'd like to give you a shot of calming medicine."
"No. I... I'll be fine. I don't want anything."
"If you're refusing prescribed treatment, you'll have to sign yourself out of the E.R. against medical advice."
Her chin went up.
"Show me the papers."
The PA looked to Garrett, who backed her decision.
"I can't help you."
Kirsten signed the necessary papers, then the PA directed them to the operating-room waiting rooms.
"The surgeons know you're waiting.
They'll be out as soon as Mr. Rawlings is in recovery. "
They were the only two present. All of the surgical suites were dark save the one where more than one doctor labored over Burton. Garrett paced the floor, talking urgently into his digital cell phone with how many people she didn't bother to keep track of.
She forced herself to sit still and drink a little hot chocolate.
Another hour ticked by before a couple of exhausted surgeons in blue scrubs came through the pneumatic doors off the surgical suites.
Garrett immediately closed up the cell phone.
"You're here with Mr. Rawlings?" one of the doctors said.
"Yes." He introduced himself, then Kirsten.
"Is he going to make it?"
"At this point, I'm not optimistic," the older of the two doctors answered, "even barring any unforeseen developments. He lost a lot of blood, at least three liters, more than half his normal volume. We've transfused him and resected the artery but-" "Can you bring him around?"
The surgeon looked hard at Garrett.
"We could. It wouldn't be smart."
Garrett met, even exceeded, the surgeon's implacable look.
"I need him conscious for thirty seconds."
"Garrett" -He took Kirsten's hand and held it tight, but went on bending one more man in a long chain to his will.
"Thirty seconds."
The doctor turned on his heel.
"Come with me." He slapped the metal plate on the wall that operated the pneumatics, then turned toward the recovery room and gave the nurses the medication order to bring Burton completely out from under anesthesia.
"You'll be damned lucky if he can answer even one question."
The nurse accessed a locked cabinet, came back with a small vial and syringe, then administered the medicine through a rubber port in Rawlings's IV line. Thirty seconds later, Burton came to, a
tight, hideous pain gripping his features.
Garrett pushed Kirsten ahead of him.
"Ask him, Kirsten, who's at the bottom of this."
Confused by the question herself, she turned to Burton and leaned over the gurney so he could see her. She took his hand.
"Burton? Burton, it's Kirsten."
He blinked.
"I'monna die, Kirs," he croaked.
"No you're not, Burton. You're not going to die. Please. Tell me if you can. Who's-Who did this?"
His eyes rolled to the back of his head, but he fought back long enough to utter the name. '"re- nallo." And one thing more.
"Friends... very high... places."
Grenallo. The truth of it, the sense of it slammed into her. Now they knew why at every juncture in the journey to bring Loehman down, they'd been denied.
Right from the start, John Grenallo, the vaunted, respected acclaimed U. S. attorney himself stood above and behind the sabotage of everything Kirsten had sacrificed so much to do--and everything Garrett had done in the past four years. From the vantage point of knowing the truth, she could see clearly that Grenallo had supposed her ill equipped to handle the job he'd given her, and then when she delivered, he'd simply adjusted and done what was necessary to see her evidence destroyed. He'd used Lane, fired her and refused to take the case to trial over the protests of more than one of his subordinates.
She couldn't even imagine what tampering and obstructing he'd done to Garrett's operation over the years, but in the last twenty-four hours he'd not only failed to get a subpoena, he'd blamed the judge, implicating the magistrate in Loehman's collection of 'friends in high places. "
Garrett drove home without a word. The anger burned so deep.
She ran from the driveway through the house and up the stairs, lighting every candle in her room against the cold inside her. She stripped from her bloodied clothes, and stood under the scalding spray of her shower, shivering so violently she couldn't begin to relax.
Ceaseless flashing images of careening through the streets in the pouring rain on a collision course with another murder tainted all the images of her life before, of Christo's life. And of Garrett holding her only a few hours ago, their kiss, so inevitable, swamping her soul with hope of making everything right for Christo and his father at once, swamping her body with a dampening tide of desire. all of it interrupted, denied by the specter of Burton Rawlings's life ebbing away.
One image bled into the next until finally it seemed as if Christo's life was slipping through her fingers, and all at once, she shattered.
Deep, wrenching sobs tore through her, and she sank to her knees in the claw-footed tub. She covered her face, trying to smother her own cries because she forgot the anonymous bastards weren't listening anymore and they shouldn't know they'd gotten to her, that they'd broken her.
She hardly knew when Garrett tore aside the striped shower curtain, twisted the wooden handles to stop the flow of water and sat on the edge of the tub. He bent over her and drew her naked and trembling into his arms.
Cradled as a child in a bath towel in his lap, she clung to him, burying her face against his shoulder as he held her close, his powerful arms surrounding her, his head bent low against her neck, uttering soft, deep, fiercely protective masculine sounds.
She wept as if it were the first time life had dealt her this kind of graceless, hideous blow.
It wasn't. But those times, ever her daddy's brave little scout, her tears were brief and contained, controlled and done and over with and a smile pasted back on her face before her heart had a chance to know the tears weren't done.
The images of Christo and kisses, the scent of a desperate, dying man and men who would murder and maim to protect themselves and their precious cause rose up again. The cry that came out of her was to her own ears the sound of something wild, trapped.
He shifted her in his lap until he could take her chin in his hand and turn her face up and bring his mouth down on her god-awful cries.
His kiss was nothing tender, but ravaged, fierce, aggressive, battling the darkness that threatened to eat her alive. She struggled against him like a woman drowning, certain of being dragged down, witlessly fighting the rescue. But he clutched her sopping hair in his hand and held her head tight and kissed her harder and deeper, dragging her up through the fathoms of torment, absorbing her ferocious protest until she broke free of the smothering darkness. He was her connection, the promise of her nightmare ending, her baby's father, and he became all there was, all she knew.
He rose, carrying her in his arms, turned and left behind the claw- footed tub and lay with her for an hour or more, molding his body to her shape beneath her blankets in the manner of pilgrims bundling.
He must have understood that there were no words to make it better or ease her anguish, and he held her against the darkness of night and the brutal hours, but though his warmth suffused her, she couldn't be warm, couldn't find her center, or the peaceable eye of the storm. She needed more, and somehow, he sensed that as well.
She turned in his arms and raised her head and naturally, his lips found hers. He groaned, uttered her name in a whisper so low, so close to her ear that it would otherwise have been impossible to hear.
"Ah, Kirsten."
"Garrett..." Likewise, a whisper, unlike all the hours before, when she had first wanted to distance and protect herself, then later, instead, to reveal herself. To say aloud, Garrett, my son is yours.
This time his name came naturally to her lips. And as if he'd been waiting to hear it, the sound of his name cut loose all his restraint.
He gathered her closer, his mouth covering hers, their kiss from his standpoint a barely understood echo of hello, from hers, a bid, a desperate invitation to recall that he truly had known her once in a sacred and biblical sense.
But even that powerfully un sated need in her gave way to his touch.
Their mouths separating in only the smallest bursts for air, she clung to him and he turned on top of her, astride her, holding his weight on his forearms, kissing her forehead, her cheek, her neck, burrowing deeper, deeper as one candle after another guttered out.
One remained.
His tongue dampened her nape and the ridge of her collarbone, the hollow above and the tight, aching, sensitive areola of her nipple below.
Transported now in a torrent of emotion and remembrance, of the power of love and sex and life and birth, she arched into the caresses of his tongue on her breasts and his large, work-hardened hands at her hips, as his thumbs, roughened and hard, stroked her flesh and her belly across the span of her pelvis.
She clutched the fabric drawn taut against his powerful back and drew it upward and he raised to allow her to pull it over his arms and head, to release the fly of his button-down jeans and strip them away as well. But in all of that, still kissing and caressing, silent as sensual wraiths moving against one another, he managed somehow to apply to himself the thin layer of latex against all the risks of unprotected sex.
Of which Christo was one.
Even as her body craved his, even as every feather touch, every torching stroke, every kiss took her higher and higher into a tight and thrilling spiral, her heart sank deeper and deeper still into a morass of her own making.
In protecting them both even in the heat of passion, even in the pitched battle he waged to restore in her a shred of hope that love and life would finally prevail, even then he revealed himself as a man of honor.
He would not even have owned a condom the night of the day he buried his beloved wife.
Garrett Weisz was not a man to heedlessly spill his seed without another care.
Shame crowded in on her again, coming on top of all the horror of what had become of Burton Raw- lings in that terrible, seedy run-down tavern.
While her body responded to wave upon wave of sensation and pleasure so deep inside that she felt her womb contracting, a tear seeped from her and coursed down her cheek. She'd intended none of what h
appened that night in the seventies disco of the Mercury or room 7054 of the Marquis, but she had gone to bed with a man she didn't know, knowing exactly what stand-in role she played.
She had Christo to show for it.
Garrett had only the dimmest recall, and still no notion that their union had resulted in Christo. Every hour that had passed, every time she'd let slip by her the smallest opening, made her silence in the hour before it just that much more unforgivable. It didn't matter that she'd had so little opportunity, or that she hadn't set aside her disappointment and taken the ones she'd had. Or even that the last time she'd tried, he'd been the one to silence her.
Carly Bishop - No Baby But Mine Page 17