by Beverly Bird
She couldn’t have said why she was unraveling now if her own life had depended upon it.
“Jerome lives in the same projects as Bobby,” she said, closing her fingers over the dashboard as they raced to the hospital, bracing herself as Danny took a curve too fast.
“Molly, I was right there with you in front of the rec center when Jerome told us that. I know.”
Molly brought her hands to her temples and dug her fingers in there. For some reason, she couldn’t remember the exact chronology of things. “So you know that he saw the ambulance pull up to Bobby J.’s apartment?”
“And he saw Bobby being scraped off the sidewalk and loaded onto the stretcher.” Danny could barely get the words out. He was suffering his own agony. I put him up to this. I told him to break free.
He hadn’t, really, but logic couldn’t find a toehold in his churning thoughts. What, really, had he said to the kid? He’d implied that if the money wasn’t helping his family, then maybe Bobby ought to rethink what he was doing. He’d told him to come back and bounce ideas off him, ways to extricate himself from his mess of a life before it was too late. He’d mouthed all the right platitudes, had made all the right gestures. But Danny knew without a doubt that Bobby J. had gone off half-cocked, anyway, because of something he’d said yesterday. He’d tried to get out of whatever it was he was doing. Danny’s guilt was vicious.
He’d told Molly he’d handle the situation. She’d trusted him with it. And he had failed miserably, with the worst repercussions possible.
“One of his sisters called 911,” Molly said hoarsely. “Danny, she had to watch that! She saw them beating the bloody hell out of him. A little boy!”
“Bobby gave up boyhood a long time ago.”
“Jerome said he was beaten to within an inch of his life.”
“And how much could Jerome see from a block away?” He was desperately trying to remain sane, calm.
What the hell had Bobby gotten himself into? Danny wondered again, peeling into the hospital parking lot. Would Carmine’s thugs beat a kid that badly in front of another innocent child? Adults—yeah, Danny thought. Carmine would give the order for something like this to be done in front of a loved one, usually because he felt there was a pertinent lesson to be learned. But kids?
It didn’t feel right. Something was wrong with this whole picture, Danny thought.
“It’s the mob, isn’t it?” Molly whispered. “That’s who he’s been involved with. They have cops, and they have kids.”
This time Danny was honest. “I don’t know. I just don’t know.”
He parked the car and they ran into the emergency ward. He spared her a glance as they shot through the doors together. What was happening to her bothered him, too. She’d never really gotten her focus back.
He nudged her aside when they reached the desk, but it took him a moment to pull his gaze off her. Then he turned to the nurse behind the Plexiglas window over the counter.
“A boy—a teenager—was brought in here by ambulance a little while ago,” he said. “We want to check on his condition, to see him if possible.”
The woman was dispassionate as only one who had spent long, long years in the emergency room could be. Danny could tell by the colorless tone of her eyes that she had long since burned out. “Name?” she asked.
“Bobby.”
“Last?”
Danny stalled. He looked helplessly at Molly. She’d been at the rec center a lot longer than he had. But Molly only shrugged and shook her head.
“I don’t know,” she said. “We just call him Bobby J.”
Okay, Danny thought. He could work with that. “His last name begins with a J,” he told the nurse.
She looked at him as though he had just tried to pull off a major heist. “You’re not kin then.”
“Does he have kin here?” Danny demanded. He was gratified when something changed in her eyes. “Stop playing games with me. You’ve got to know what kid I’m talking about. How many teenage boys have been brought in here in the last half hour, beaten to a bloody pulp?”
She sniffed, then she relented. “One. He’s unconscious. He’s in one of the exam rooms. And no, he has no family with him yet.”
“And he’s not likely to.”
“We don’t know that.”
“I’m telling you, we’re all he’s got, lady.”
“I can’t—”
Danny left her and headed for the swinging doors leading to the exam rooms. To her credit, she didn’t try to stop him.
It took Molly a second to realize what he was doing. She was dazed. She took off after him and caught up with him in the corridor behind the door.
The smells. Antiseptic, she thought, that was really nothing more than a disguise because the germs were never really banished and death was never really held at bay. Underneath the tang of that was the unmistakable odor of blood. She had come to recognize it early in her career—an almost metallic scent. They walked past an elderly man on a gurney in the hallway. There was the smell of aging, disintegrating flesh clinging to him.
She passed through this building on an average of once per week. Why had she never been so acutely aware of all this until today?
Just ahead of her, Danny stopped at the last exam room. “He’s got to be in this one. He’s not in any of the others.” She realized then that he had been poking his head into every room they passed.
They found Bobby on a gurney in that last room.
“Oh, God,” Molly prayed as she stepped inside after Danny. Bobby’s face was almost unrecognizable. One of his arms was twisted unnaturally over his waist. Molly sank to her knees beside the low gurney and reached for his hand. Just as she thought better of it—she didn’t want to hurt him—Danny pulled her to her feet again, anyway.
“Okay, we found him. Now get out of here. I’ll stay with him.”
“What?” It took her a moment to pull her gaze from Bobby to him. “What are you talking about?”
“I said, go. Do whatever you normally do at three o’clock in the afternoon. I’ll stay with him. I won’t leave.”
“I can’t—” Something bizarre was swimming through her head, dulling everything; she couldn’t think. “I have to go to work,” she realized.
“Then do it,” Danny said harshly. “I’ll call you as soon as I know something.” His voice softened. “Molly, you really don’t need to be here.”
Anger reared up inside her. “You want me to drive around in a patrol car while he’s lying here dying? I’ll just call in sick.”
“Sure, that’ll do you a whole lot of good with the IAD mess you’re in right now.” Danny took her arm and steered her back toward the door. He had to get her out of here. She was on the edge—and he knew why.
He figured she would try to hit him again as he dragged her up the hallway and this time he was prepared for it. When she twisted away from him and gathered her arm back, he caught her wrist. “I’ll carry you out of here if I have to.”
“Why are you doing this to me?” she demanded.
Because he cared about her even more than he cared about that boy back there on the gurney, Danny thought. But he didn’t dare say so. “Count of three, Molly. If you’re not heading out of here under your own power by then, I swear I’ll pick you up and do it for you.”
Her eyes narrowed. “I’ll kill you.”
“No, you won’t. I’m bigger and stronger.”
“Stop this. Let me go.” She struggled with him, trying to pull her wrist free.
“One…two…”
She took a quick, panicked step back.
“Smart woman,” he murmured. He let her go to dig into his jeans pocket for his keys. “Can you drive?”
“Can I or will I?” Her chin came up.
“Oh, you will. My only question is whether or not you’re going to wreck my luxury automobile in the process.”
His stab at humor didn’t work, he realized. Her eyes still wouldn’t quite focus. Then she turne
d away from him, and in a blink she was jogging back up the corridor toward Bobby’s room.
“Damn it!” He caught up with her in three strides and lifted her in his arms. “Don’t embarrass yourself,” he warned her, then he glanced at a nurse who passed them, looking concerned. “She’s fine,” he assured the woman. “Just stubborn.”
He carried her through the waiting area and out through the hospital doors before he deposited her on her feet on the tarmac. Then he took both her shoulders and he shook her a little. “Molly! Bobby isn’t your brother! You didn’t let him down.”
For a moment her face went even whiter. Fury tried to leap into her eyes, but she couldn’t hold on to it. Danny held her as she swayed.
Molly never felt herself unravel but suddenly the tears were there. They choked her, big gulping sobs. She didn’t know when she reached out for him blindly, but she knew when he was there, when those strong arms closed around her. She didn’t feel his breath on her hair or his hand as he stroked it, but she heard his voice, as gentle as a prayer.
“You’re all right now,” he said. “Shhh.”
“I didn’t…I’m not…”
“Yeah, you were. You went back there to that place inside you where you keep those memories. There was nothing you could have done, Molly, for either of them—sure as hell not for Bobby J.” He’d warned her that not all of the walls she threw herself at would fall down, he thought, but even he hadn’t guessed that she would react quite this way when it happened.
“Hold me,” she said wretchedly.
“I am.”
They were standing in front of the hospital, in full view of Mission Creek, Texas. It was insanity to do as she asked, to stay here, both because of her IAD problem and because of Carmine. Her fists came up between them and found his shirt front, wrapping themselves into it. Danny took them in both of his and loosened them, then he slung an arm around her shoulders to guide her to the parking lot. “Come on. You can do more for him on your shift than you can do here.”
They reached the Dodge. It took a moment for the meaning of his words to work its way through to her. It happened like the tremors of the earth after a quake, gentler than the first trauma but with the potential to be just as powerful. Molly let her breath roll out of her, and she leaned back against his car. “That’s the first time you’ve ever done that.”
He knew what she was talking about. Because he didn’t want to acknowledge it, he didn’t answer. He should have known, though, that she wouldn’t let it drop.
“That’s the first time you’ve ever admitted that I can do some good…being a cop.”
“Well, you’re not a bad cop,” he said uncomfortably.
“Tell that to IAD.”
She was coming back to herself, he realized. “I don’t think they want to talk to the likes of me.”
Why the hell was he holding her hands? he wondered. When had that happened, and why was he running his thumbs over her knuckles? Because, he thought, something horrible had almost happened to her heart back there, and he hadn’t been able to bear it. Yeah, he thought, he loved her.
“Are you okay now?” he asked finally.
Molly hesitated. “You were right. I feel like I let Bobby down, like I wasn’t there for him, either. I’ve been too busy with the task force.”
“No, Molly. No. I think I said something wrong to him yesterday. Or he didn’t get the message.” And the guilt clawed again.
“You couldn’t have known—”
“Neither could you,” he interrupted.
“Go back inside to him, Danny. Somebody needs to be there when he wakes up. I’m fine now.”
“Right.” But neither of them moved.
“Thank you for holding me together.”
“Yeah, I saved the day. You were about to come unglued.”
She laughed hoarsely. “You’ve really got to work on that humility problem you’ve got going on there.”
He almost grinned, but she held him captive. Her eyes were bright now and focused…on him. He was drowning in them. “Later,” he said finally, hoarsely. “After I go see about Bobby.”
“Danny?”
He tried to let her hands go. “I know. I’m leaving now.”
“That wasn’t what I was going to say.”
“What then?” he asked impatiently, anxious to get away from her and to get back to being himself, a man he could recognize.
“I want you to kiss me now.”
“What?” She hit him with it out of the blue. And he felt something inside him quake.
“If you won’t, then I will.”
Molly went up on her toes and found his mouth with hers. Finally. It was the only thought he had when the surprise wore off, and for a moment his mind simply stopped there.
His blood gathered instantaneously. He was hard, hot, ready…all with that first touch of her mouth to his. He’d known, somehow, that it would be this way. He wanted to know how she could do that to him. He’d have to figure it out later. For now he finally let himself taste her.
Those strong, muscled arms of his wrapped around her hard. And his mouth relented against hers, his tongue sweeping inside. Crazy, was all Molly could think. She was risking everything—her job, her world, her own ideals—for this moment, for this single taste of him, because for a little while he’d seen through her like no one else could. And because he’d cared enough to back her down when she would have driven herself to the edge. Then he turned her fast and suddenly until his own back was against the Dodge. He dragged her into him and she couldn’t think anymore at all.
There was only sensation…so many little sensations. The way her legs fitted between his, denim straining against denim, and beneath the fabric, her skin was alive with every brush of contact. One of his hands came up to take a fistful of her hair with a strength and intensity that almost hurt. His other arm hooked around her neck, pulling her deeper into his kiss as his mouth worked on hers.
She’d thought he’d be punishing, tough, all part of that bad-boy image that had first captivated her. But his lips slid over hers like warm silk and his tongue was gentle, seeking, then finding. He kissed her as if he had been waiting to do it all his life.
She tickled his tongue with the tip of her own, playing, and Danny could feel her mouth smile against his. Mindlessly and wordlessly she promised all the things they’d teased each other about for so long now. His fingers splayed over her ribs, sliding until he could feel the weight of her breast in his hand. He was ready to drag her down to the tarmac without a care for anything else in the world because his blood was beating hard and his mind was glazed with craving her. Then he heard a car door slam shut somewhere else in the parking lot.
They were in the hospital parking lot.
Danny realized that he was shaking a little as his mouth left hers. He let his lips cling a little. Then, feeling suddenly cold as though the sun had left the sky, he found he had to lean in and kiss her again one more time. He finally eased her from him so he could step away from the car.
He ran a hand over his mouth. His legs felt unsteady. That had never happened to him before, either.
“Well, that was worth the wait.” There was a tremor to her voice. So she wasn’t rock solid right now, either, he thought.
“You’ve…uh, really got to work on this timing problem you’ve got going on here.”
She laughed hoarsely, and Danny wasn’t sure he trusted himself to say any more. There was too much in his head, in his heart. He was a man who had been cautious all his life—and now he had just wrapped himself around her in a public parking lot as though there could be no repercussions for that in the world. And all because she’d asked him—just asked him.
She was everything wrong for him, and somehow she had tunneled her way into his life, making everything right.
He wanted to promise her that he would fix everything—the mess he’d made of his life, and hers, too, by association. But he still didn’t know how he was going to do that. He t
old himself she was safe no matter what they had just done because those papers he’d written out were still where they were supposed to be, and Carmine was still sitting happily by his telephone, no doubt giving the orders that would chop his other enemies off at the knees. But Danny was still scared. Because whoever had called this shot against Bobby J. had no qualms, was hair-triggered, was liable to do anything in the world.
Was it Carmine? Was it the mob? He had to get back to the boy.
Molly opened his car door and slid behind the wheel. “I think I can drive now.” He caught the top of the door, and she glanced up at him, her brows lifting. “What?”
“Just for the record, we’re not done with that yet.”
Her heart did a slow somersault and never quite got its proper position back. Molly nodded, then she forced herself to swallow as she watched him walk back to the hospital. She put the key in the ignition and sat for a long time before she remembered to close the car door.
She’d lied. She couldn’t drive.
But somehow, after she left Bobby and Danny, she managed to do just that. She got herself home in the hideous lemon-yellow Dodge—there was no time to swing by the rec center and exchange Danny’s car for her own. She was probably going to be late for work as it was. Her Camaro would still be there after midnight, and there was no help for it.
There was a part of her that was fiercely glad about that—at least they might guess from this that she wasn’t going to buckle easily. It would be like a slap in their faces. Then, as she showered and dressed, nasty thoughts crammed her head, bumping up against each other almost painfully. By the time she pulled her hair into a bun, they started to line up more cohesively.
It was all linked. Somehow it was all linked, Molly thought.