by Beverly Bird
“Lines. Den. Coss.” And then he closed his eyes again.
Molly reached frantically for his pulse one more time. It was still there. He’d just passed out again. She breathed, then she heard footsteps behind her.
She turned around in the chair. Danny had come back with a sprite of a woman who instantly set Molly’s teeth on edge—simply because she was the kind of woman Molly would never be—tiny but somehow voluptuous, with the kind of breasts the hero in every story always went for. She had nearly platinum hair that only another woman would know did not come out of a bottle. She had porcelain skin and perfect blue eyes. The nurse’s uniform should have negated some of her looks, but this girl would be beautiful in army fatigues, Molly thought with a sigh.
“I’m so sorry,” the nurse said. “I don’t know how this could happen.”
“I told you how it happened,” Danny said harshly. “He’s been lying here for hours because he has no insurance.”
The nurse looked honestly stricken. “I don’t know where Dr. Walters is. I usually work with him in pediatrics. I’m just filling in here in the E.R. tonight for someone else. But you can believe me—he would be here if he had gotten his page.”
“Told you so,” Molly couldn’t resist saying to Danny.
“Then get someone else,” Danny said to the nurse. “If you can’t find that doctor, get another one.”
“Dr. Walters is the best.” Her tone brooked no argument. She adjusted an IV for Bobby, moving busily around the room. “If we don’t get a call back from him soon, I’ll…I’ll do something.”
She would, too, Molly thought, feeling better. There was grit here. And the flush on the nurse’s cheeks told her she was angry.
“He says his head hurts,” Molly reported. “Can you at least do something about that while we’re waiting?”
“I already have. That’s what the IV is for.” She finished with the boy and turned to face Molly. “I’m Caitlyn Matthews. And our patient here talked about more than his head when they first brought him in. I checked up on him a couple of times before I turned him over to the nurse on shift in this room. He was more cognitive then. He was talking about lions.”
“Lions?” Lines. What the hell? Molly thought. She looked helplessly at Danny and shrugged.
“He could well have been already delirious because of the pressure building inside his skull,” Nurse Matthews said. “We did some scans on him as soon as he arrived. He’s bleeding in this area.” She motioned to an area of the boy’s head.
Molly’s heart tried to stop but she appreciated that the nurse wasn’t mincing words. “Tell me.”
“Are you family?”
“Nope. Want to make something of it?”
The nurse gave a flickering smile. “Just getting my bearings here, Officer.”
“Molly will do just fine.”
Nurse Matthews hesitated, then nodded. “Okay. Let’s just say you’re asking in the line of duty, Molly. That clears me to divulge the information to you.” She paused. “We’ll need to bore a small hole in his skull to let the blood out. It sounds worse than it is. Until that happens, the pressure just keeps building. It will gradually block out more and more of his capacity for speech and reasoning, but not for pain.”
Molly winced. “You’re tough.”
“Yes, but don’t tell anybody.”
Damned if she wasn’t ending up liking this woman. “Thanks for your honesty. If I can ever do you a favor in return, just yell.”
The woman gave a tiny, wry smile. “One can only hope I never need the police. Excuse me. I’m going to page Dr. Walters again.” She started to turn away, then to Molly’s surprise, she paused in front of Danny. “As for you, why didn’t you come find me sooner? As I said, this wasn’t my assigned room, but I’ll find out who had it and they’ll hear about this.”
Danny looked nonplussed. Caitlyn Matthews went to the door, then she stopped one last time and looked back.
“Oh, one other thing about those lions he was speaking of. I know this sounds bizarre, but I got the feeling he was talking about…well, cops. He said they have some sort of…what did he call it? A den somewhere.” She paused to rub her forehead as though she had suddenly developed a headache. “I’m sorry, but I got the impression that they’re the ones who beat him up. I was going to try to call it in when my shift was over, but to be honest, I didn’t know what to say or who to tell. Now you’re here, and you seem like his friend, so I wanted you to know. As I said, it’s entirely possible that he was just delirious, but there had been limited internal bleeding at that point. So medically speaking, I would tend to believe him.”
She finally left the room. If Molly hadn’t already been sitting, she might have fallen.
Cops beat him up. Bad cops. She had been right all along. She’d been right. She looked at Danny, her heart hammering even as nausea shoved its way up her throat.
“He said lions to me, too. And he said den. Coss was cops. Dear God, Danny, do you understand what this means?”
He leaned one shoulder hard and suddenly against the wall as though to steady himself. “He was working for cops.”
“The bad cops must be called the Lion’s Den! Bobby knows who my bad cops are. And you thought he was working for the mob! This has got to be proof that the bad cops are linked to the Mercados!”
“Maybe.” But in all his years with Ricky and the mob, he had never heard about a Lion’s Den, he thought. He didn’t know anything about this. For once—for maybe the only time—there wasn’t a single thing he could tell her to help her.
Rage was still a physical pain inside her when Molly left the hospital forty minutes later. It pounded in her head. It clawed at her throat and kept her from swallowing. It filled her stomach with acid.
Cops had beaten Bobby—probably because he’d tried to leave Carmine’s employ, as Danny had done.
Cops had helped the mob frame Danny.
Cops had bombed the Men’s Grill. She was sure of that now. It was why they wanted her off the task force. They were afraid she’d figure that out.
And, lest she forget, cops had thrown her to the mercy of the IAD wolves.
They had named themselves, she thought. They had a cute little tag for their nasty group. “You’re done,” she whispered from between clenched teeth as she drove her patrol territory. “I’ll get you now. I will.”
Twenty minutes later she picked up her radio handset and called in just to make sure everything was working right. The dispatcher was being uncharacteristically quiet tonight.
She’d been out of her car for an extended period of time at the hospital, Molly thought. She’d thought that dispatch would be frantic by the time she returned. They had probably tried to reach her and gotten no response. Normally she would have reported that she was leaving her vehicle. But she hadn’t thought she’d be in the hospital very long, and she hadn’t wanted to give anyone any more ammunition to use against her. Bobby wasn’t her case and she had no business checking up on him on city time.
Had they known she wasn’t in her car because they were actually following her?
She couldn’t believe that no one had tried to raise her during the entire hour she’d been in the hospital. One way or the other, eventually she’d have to explain where she’d been. It would mean another reprimand in her once-spotless file. But until then, there was a bright side to the whole situation, she thought, grinning slowly. If the Den guys didn’t know where she had gone, it would drive them crazy. And if they knew she’d been with Bobby, then they would be really worried.
Her radio finally buzzed. Molly grabbed it. “Four-Delta, Officer Molly French responding.”
“Four-Delta, respond to 612 Hacienda Place on report of a domestic dispute.” It was the same dispatcher who had been throwing her the trench calls all week, Molly realized. The woman had a flat East Coast accent.
Molly waited, but the dispatcher didn’t continue with the usual details. “Are there weapons involved?” she ask
ed finally.
“Not at this time,” the flat voice responded.
“Might there be at some other time?” She had a right to know what they were sending her into.
“Unlikely, Officer. This woman is a little paranoid. She has a restraining order in place against her ex-husband and she calls in periodically because she thinks he’s lurking in her bushes.”
One of those, Molly thought. “Four-Delta received and responding from—” she peered at the next street sign she passed “—Sage and Main.”
She found the address on Hacienda Place. It was a small, pretty stucco home with pyracantha bushes bracketing the front porch. Molly parked and headed up the walkway to knock on the door.
The woman who opened it was disheveled, distraught—and drunk. “You came,” she said, weaving slightly in the door frame.
“Yes, ma’am. Do me a favor now, and stay inside. Go back in there and close the door. I just wanted to let you know I was out here. It’s me you’re going to hear pawing through your hedges for the next fifteen minutes or so. Okay?” Translation, Molly thought, don’t shoot me because I’m not your husband.
Molly left her and made a tour through the infamous bushes, poking at them here and there with her flashlight. There was no one in the vicinity, she discovered, not even a stray cat.
Where was her backup? she wondered, leaving the pyracantha to look up and down the street. Domestics were the most potentially dangerous of all calls. No unpartnered officer was ever sent to one alone. Another patrol car was always signaled to follow the initial unit to the location. What games were they playing with her now?
Molly went back to the front door and knocked again. This time there was no answer. She moved a little farther down the porch to peer through the bay window there. The woman was passed out on the sofa. Molly sighed and went inside to make sure she was all right, then she returned to her patrol car to call in.
“Four-Delta,” she said to the dispatcher. “False alarm. There’s nothing going on here, and the woman who made the call seems to have…ah, gone to sleep for the night.”
“Four-Delta, your sergeant requests that you remain at the scene, anyway.”
Molly frowned. “Remain here? What for?”
“To make the woman feel safer.”
“I just told you. She’s passed out.”
“From what?”
“Judging by the smell of her? Liquor.”
“One moment, Officer. I’ll report that back to him if you’ll hold your position.”
“I’ll hold,” Molly grated.
The woman came back on the radio a few minutes later. “Sergeant Connelly reiterates, remain at the scene until you hear otherwise.”
“Who the hell is this woman? A senator’s wife? Some major contributor to the presidential campaign?”
“Not to my knowledge, Officer.”
“Okay. What the hell.” Molly hung up the radio. If they wanted her to sit here for the rest of the night, she’d do that. It was better that wrestling with drugged-out boys who outweighed her by sixty pounds.
She was just getting comfortable when her radio buzzed again. “Four-Delta, Officer Molly French responding. Can I leave here now?”
“I’m just patching a call through, Officer,” said the East Coast voice.
“Dandy.” Maybe this would be her reprimand for leaving her car earlier, Molly thought, then she shook her head. No, they would nail her for that when she came in at the end of her shift.
“They put me right through,” came Danny’s voice. “I guess this is what it’s like to be on the right side of the law for once. Am I on your good side, Molly?”
Molly’s heart rolled over at his dry, familiar tone. She found herself grinning for the first time in hours. “Hello to you, too.” Then her heart stalled.
She knew why they had put him right through. It was on the record now. She’d gotten a radio communication from her ex-con. But she couldn’t tell him that.
He’d blame himself. “How’s Bobby?” she asked instead.
“Cutting to the chase, Officer 432?”
“How do you know my badge number?” Oh, how he lightened her night!
“You were wearing it at the hospital earlier.”
“My, you’re observant.”
“They teach it in ex-con school.”
“Don’t say that on here!”
Then Molly realized that it didn’t matter anymore. It didn’t matter at all. She knew about the Lion’s Den now, and she was prepared to fight fire with fire. Anything they did to her, she would come back at them with one better.
They were through using Danny against her. When she was done with them, he wasn’t going to be an ex-con any longer.
Danny gave a long silence to her outburst. “Right. I’ll catch up with you later on all this.”
“No. Wait. It’s okay.”
“What do you have up your sleeve now?”
Molly didn’t answer, but he figured it out, anyway.
“Ah, Molly, you can’t fix my mess. It’s another wall you don’t need to be throwing yourself against. I am what I am and what’s done is done.”
“Oh, I can fix it,” she murmured quietly. “But don’t let it go to your head. Maybe I’m not doing it for you.”
She thought whimsically that she could hear him grinning in the pause on the line. “Then who are you doing it for?”
“For me. I want to consort with impunity.” That got to him, she thought, as she heard him choke a little. “Are you still there, Mr. Gates?”
“I’m here. Define consort.”
“Later,” she promised. “With the rest of our unfinished business.” She’d never known her heart could beat this fast. Anticipation thrummed in her blood, staining her cheeks.
She wanted him. She wanted all of him this time. And she wanted him soon. She wanted to resume what they’d started this afternoon.
She loved him.
“Oh, God,” she murmured aloud.
“What?” he asked sharply. “Are you all right?”
“Sure. I’m fine. Just fantasizing.”
“Jeez, Molly! Can you be talking like this on here?”
Yes, she thought again, yes, she could. Because they weren’t going to suspend her any more than they were going to set her loose with a worker’s comp claim. They’d want to keep her on duty to pin her down. They couldn’t know it was already too late for that.
She changed the conversation anyway to somewhat safer ground. “How’s Bobby? You never answered me.”
“He’s out of surgery. But he’s no longer responding to pin-pricks and whatnot.”
“What does that mean?” Something in his voice scared her now.
“Molly…I’m sorry. He’s officially in a coma.”
Molly closed her mouth against an instinctive cry of protest. “He was in and out of consciousness all night. Why is this different? Did they relieve the blood in his skull, let it out?”
“Yeah, but there’s bruising, trauma to the brain. They’re saying that it has sort of…I don’t know, shut itself down to give itself time to heal. He could come out of it tomorrow, next month, next year.”
“Or never,” Molly supplied the blank he’d left, her voice strangled.
“That, too.”
She didn’t realize she was crying until she saw the drops on her trousers. Hot tears slid down her cheeks, landing in her lap. “Damn it, I never do this. Until lately.”
“What?” he asked, his voice hitching with concern.
“Cry.”
“You’re crying? Because he’s not going to be able to tell you anymore?”
“No. Because he’s Bobby.” She sniffed, then the gunshot rang out.
There was a distant ping and spider-web fractures erupted over the right side of her windshield. Molly screamed and dived for the seat. “Got to go.”
“What?” Danny bellowed. “What the hell was that?”
She dropped the radio handset back into its holder and c
ut him off. “Bastards.” She wouldn’t cry. She would live. But all she could think of was the dispatcher’s voice. Your sergeant requests that you remain at the scene.
Molly wormed her way across the seat to the passenger side door. It was the safe side of the car. She was pretty sure the shot had come from her left. She tugged up on the handle there, crawling out and crouching. This domestic had not been an honest, legitimate call. Someone had shot at her.
She waited for more gunfire. There was none. But the woman in the house had been awakened by the explosion of the bullet. She was on her front porch, screaming now.
Molly reached a hand back into her car and found the radio handset. Her hand was shaking. She willed herself to sound calm. Damned if she’d let them know they were terrifying her.
“Four-Delta, requesting that backup you never got around to sending me. I have shots fired here.”
“I’ll radio, Officer.” There was a long pause. “There’s no other officer in the vicinity, Officer. I can send one from the next quadrant, but that will be a while.”
Molly beat back a stream of curses. “Get someone from there then. Tell them to try using those nifty little lights and sirens these cars come equipped with. Tell them to hurry.” Please, someone please hurry. She took a deep breath and deliberately cleared her head. “Sergeant Connelly’s VIP lady is currently standing on her front porch howling like a banshee. She’s wide open, dispatch, in plain line of fire. Without someone to cover me I can’t get to her and move her safely back inside.” Then again, Molly thought, they all knew nobody was going to shoot at her. Unfortunately, it was the only threat she had.
“I’ll relay that information, 4-Delta.”
“You do that. I’m not moving out from behind this car without cover,” Molly said. “Repeat, I’m not moving.”
She waited, her heart thrumming. Finally, her radio beeped again. Molly depressed the button with her thumb. “Four-Delta responding—and becoming highly agitated by this situation.”
“Detective Gannon is on call tonight,” the dispatcher said. “He lives a short distance away from Hacienda and can be there quicker than the others. He says he will respond. He’ll be in his personal vehicle, 4-Delta. It’s a late-model silver Acura.” The dispatcher gave her the license plate number. “He says not to mistake him for the shooter.”