I clenched my jaw. I knew she had no idea who Nicole was or that she’d been murdered, but that didn’t lessen my rising anger. I could now feel my body moving in her direction.
“You don’t want to play sex games. I get it,” she said. “But man, you’re really missing out. I give the best—”
“Zip it, Maya,” Alex barked, as though she were speaking to a petulant child.
Kind of fit the bill.
Alex removed her phone from her pocket, glanced at the screen, and then turned her eyes to me. Had she received a message from Stan? From Jerry? From Brad? What was it?
She started moving toward the door, but stopped to address Maya with some parting words. “I’ll tell you what, Maya. That deal I gave you? I’ll extend it twenty-four hours. If you want to ensure that you won’t be put to death, then tell the guards you’re ready to talk, and we’ll come back and hear what you have to say. Okay?”
The words hung in the air for a moment. Then, Maya’s eyes went wide as she spoke in a haunting tone: “I wonder how many people had nails stuck in their eyeballs or in their necks? How many lost an ear or a finger? How many deaths? I bet there was a lot of blood, enough blood to turn the Boston Harbor red.”
She was trying to freak us out. But we didn’t even flinch. I mean, I wanted to a little bit, but more than that, I wanted to stay cool and focused, so I could do whatever it took to make sure she slithered her way straight to prison for the rest of her days.
I finally understood why Alex had been relatively quiet during our visit with Maya. There was no point in a word war. Maya was evil to the bone, morbid to the core, and would only respond to survival tactics at this point, if at all.
We reached the doorway, and Alex rapped her knuckles on the doorframe as she passed through. She didn’t even turn around when she said, “Twenty-four hours, Maya. That’s all you get.”
11
Alex
Once we turned the corner and were a good distance from the room, Ozzie grabbed my arm. “Did you hear anything about Nick?”
I shook my head, frustrated as hell. “I wish.”
Another second later, I heard, “Do you have any idea how much trouble you’re in, Troutt?”
We turned to see a guy striding in our direction. Sunglasses, combat boots, and a pet mustache, which he was stroking as he approached us. Following him were four others, mimicking his look or demeanor, or both.
“What is…I mean, who’s that?” Ozzie asked.
I almost laughed. “It’s Randy,” I muttered.
“Who?”
Randy stuck a finger six inches from my mouth. “You are hindering an investigation into the worst crime that has ever hit Boston. Do you understand how much trouble you’re in, woman?”
Ozzie stepped up, looking ready to rumble. I put my hand against his chest but kept my eyes on Randy.
“Hey, I’m on the task force. I was only taking the next logical step of the investigation.”
He nodded and crossed his arms. “Logical, my ass.”
His gestures didn’t match the words coming out of his mouth, but this was Randy. So, I wasn’t surprised. “When you and your lieutenants were meeting, I tried telling you what should happen next. When you didn’t listen to me, I told you that I was headed up here to talk to Maya myself. The next logical step.”
He stopped nodding and looked to the men flanking him. They all shrugged. He turned back to me. “We don’t believe you.”
“Is that what they just said? I was waiting for two grunts and a fart. Isn’t that how all ogres talk to each other?”
One of the ogres actually spit out a laugh. Randy lifted his sunglasses and gave him the eye.
“Randy, I didn’t kidnap her. You’re welcome to conduct another interview. In fact, I bet you, if anyone, can probably break her.”
“You think?”
Hell no, I don’t think so. “Sure do.”
He dropped his attitude and began asking relevant questions about our interview with Maya. I gave him the rundown, including the deal I’d given her. He ripped his glasses off his face, which was now glowing red. “Alex, you’re not authorized to offer deals, not on my investigation.”
“It sounded like the right move to make. She was pretty smug in there, but we gave her something to think about. Given how we worded it, if she knows anything about the real bombing, and if she gives a crap about her own life, she’ll talk. I told her she has twenty-four hours.”
“What the fuck?” he yelled.
Two women in white medical coats walked by and gave Randy disgusted looks—as in “what a douchebag.” I was right there with them, although he probably thought they wanted his phone number.
“I know this is a prison, but it’s also a medical facility. You might want to keep that in mind,” I said.
“Yeah, whatever.” He put his hands at his waist and contorted his face. I wondered if his mustache might get up and walk away.
I was just about to give him a salute and go my merry way, when he leaned in closer to me. “You and I both know why you’re on this task force…right?”
I assumed he was talking about Jerry’s “deal”—Randy got Brad and Gretchen, and I was allowed to be a part of the task force. I was like the player to be named later in a baseball trade. An afterthought. Fine by me, in this instance.
“What’s your point, Randy?”
“Do you value your FBI career?”
Boy howdy. What I wouldn’t give for five minutes to wallop him with the many zingers I had in my arsenal. But now wasn’t the time. I inhaled and exhaled twice, trying to keep myself from taking a step I might regret later. “I value what we can do for the public. That’s why I work for the FBI.”
He nodded, a smile playing at the edge of his lips. “Good answer. Did you rehearse that?”
I could feel the tension emanating from Ozzie. He, somehow, was staying quiet. Wise choice.
I motioned with my hand, letting Randy know I was ready for his next comment.
“So, you do what I want you to do on this investigation. Nothing more. Understood?”
Jerry had said that if Randy wasn’t going to let me be part of the decision-making processes on the task force, I had his blessing to break ranks and go in the direction I believed would catch the bastards who’d bombed our city. But I knew I couldn’t go scorched earth.
I chose not to acknowledge Randy’s belligerent directive and took a different approach. “I want to help out, Randy. How about the casualty list? I know you probably have some folks working on that. How about you let me review it, do some digging. Never know what we’ll find.”
He blew hot air on his glasses and cleaned them with the sleeve of his shirt. “Yeah, that’ll work. That’ll keep you busy for a good long while.”
He turned and gave one of his sheep instructions to send me the data on those who had been killed or wounded.
“Thanks,” I said as he started to walk off.
He held up a hand without turning around. He was blowing me off. Just what I wanted. Back under the radar.
I grabbed Ozzie, and we headed for the car.
12
Alex
When I first reached the hospital, I ran into Antonio walking out of the ICU area. We hugged and shed a few tears. Stan had run back to their place to shower and clean up and would be back shortly. I’d dropped off Ozzie at the house and told him we could start digging into the backgrounds of the bombing victims once I got home. For now, that was the only thing we could do until either Maya admitted her involvement in this act or Brad and Gretchen discovered some evidence that would lead us to the perpetrators. Currently, Brad was working with the ATF, searching for a unique identifier in the cluster of metal from the bombs, something that would tell them the origin of the shrapnel. Gretchen, not surprisingly, was tasked with reviewing video footage.
After I pulled out a tissue and dabbed my eyes, I asked Antonio to give me an update on Nick’s condition.
“He’s ha
nging on, Alex.”
“Just hanging on? No improvement?”
“The doctors have several concerns. Infection, for one. That they might have missed a small piece of metal still in his body somewhere—”
“They don’t even know if they got it all out?” I could feel my temperature on the rise.
“Alex, I’ve spoken to Dr. Thai. He’s actually working overnight in case there are any complications that would require additional surgery.”
“More surgery? That might—” I didn’t want to say it.
Antonio put his hand to my elbow. He’d always had this calming presence about him. Even now, with Nick clinging to life, he seemed unshakeable. He was tall, with chestnut hair pulled back into a ponytail. He had a few wrinkles around his eyes. Ezzy would call those “marks of wisdom”—that was how she always described her wrinkles, which never failed to make us laugh.
Ezzy. Her health issues hadn’t magically gone away. We’d have to deal with them. I could feel a bit of a wobble in my knees. I hadn’t eaten anything since my morning coffee, which was more than fourteen hours earlier. But it was more than that. The people who’d always been there for me all seemed so…human.
Nick, I thought, would live until he was a hundred twenty, especially with his big health kick the last couple of years. And that made this twist of fate all the more difficult. Nick had everything to give the world. He wasn’t just my rock; he was the most reliable, loyal person in the FBI.
Ezzy had her heart problem.
And then there was Brad. The man who’d made my own heart flutter countless times. He was great with the kids—had even picked up on the fact that he needed to take a step back during the last year or so as they devolved into full-on teenage shitheads. But something was off with our relationship. Was I sensing him growing tired of me and the kids? Maybe. And then there was the fact that I was a cougar—I’d been called that a hundred times, all of it in fun, and many times coming from Nick himself. Maybe Brad and I were just in different places in our lives. We probably needed to talk about it—not my strength. In fact, the whole notion scared me. I didn’t want to have to admit that the last two years had just been some silly crush. But at the same time, I didn’t want to change who I was or try to pretend I was anything other than a forty-something mom of two teenage kids whose idea of a fun night was sitting on the couch in a pair of old sweats, watching smut TV and drinking wine. To Brad, to anyone who was twenty-nine, that might be considered very boring.
“Antonio, I want to see Nick. Can I do that?”
He turned back to the window near the locked doors of the ICU unit. “Supposedly, they only let in family, but you could probably use your FBI badge to get in there.”
I looked over his shoulder.
“Alex, don’t be alarmed when you see him. He looks…different.”
I tilted my head, my brow furrowed.
“Frail and older, as if he’s aged ten, fifteen years in just a few hours. It kind of threw me off when I first went in there.”
I thanked him for the input, walked up to the ICU nurse, and made my case. She must have seen something in my eyes. I signed a form, and she led me to his room. I stopped just inside the doorway and stared at him. Antonio was right. This wasn’t Nick; this was an older uncle. Oh, how I wished.
“Has he regained consciousness yet?” I asked the nurse.
She checked the fluid in a bag that hung on a metal pole next to his bed. “Not yet. But we’re hopeful.” She gave me a tight-lipped smile and walked out.
I sat in the chair next to the bed and stared at Nick. His skin was pale, and his face had a few cuts on it. But what crushed me was that he looked like a shell of his former self. All I saw were bones—in his cheeks and jawline, his elbows, even the top of one of his shoulders. My heart ached for my friend.
“Nick, can you hear me?”
As expected, he didn’t respond. Machines beeped intermittently. I started to focus on all the different noises in the room, all electronic. Nothing human about it. A surge of emotion made its way into the back of my throat.
I swallowed it back. Crying wasn’t the answer. What if he could hear me but just didn’t have the strength to wake up? Crying would be a selfish move. He needed inspiration, not gloom and doom.
“So, Nick, I need to run a few things by you.” I paused, staring at his closed eyes for a second. “Ozzie and I interviewed Maya Sherman earlier. She was brazen, carried a lot of attitude. Hell, you should have seen her hit on Ozzie.”
I giggled, recalling Ozzie’s response—he’d moved closer to me when she patted the mattress. “Oh, Nick. It was crazy. Hell, she’s crazy. But I’m just not sure if she’s behind these bombings, this attack.”
The machines stole my attention for a brief moment. I turned my eyes back to Nick. “I gave her a twenty-four-hour ultimatum. We’ll see if she caves and starts talking. But other than that, we really don’t have much to work with. Oh, in case you didn’t know—and I guess how would you?—Jerry got me on the task force. But it’s really in name only. Randy only wanted Brad and Gretchen. They were part of the deal.”
I crossed my legs and put a hand under my chin. “Can you believe that douchebag is leading this damn investigation? I mean, does he have dirt on everyone in the FBI food chain or what?” I shook my head and then looked back at him. “Hey, remember when we were stuck on that island with him on that one case a couple years back? He got one glimpse of that victim in the body bag and barfed all over himself. Such a wimp with his two-year-old gag reflex.”
I snorted out a chuckle. “I know you’re laughing right now, Nick. I can feel it.”
I talked for another ten minutes, giving him updates on the kids and Ezzy, how much we’ve enjoyed having Ozzie and Mackenzie at the house. I didn’t share my fears about Brad, however. For some reason, it felt like sacred ground. Or maybe I was just a chicken-shit. When I finally stopped talking, I stood up and looked back to the door. No one was walking in. I reached over and gently rested my fingers against his and held the position for a good minute.
Another swell of emotion, but I bit the inside of my cheek until I regained control.
“When you wake up, can you get off your ass and help us find these bastards? Better yet, you don’t even have to get out of bed. You can just sit here and recuperate, and I’ll listen to you for a change.”
I walked to the door, gave him another glance, and then left the hospital.
13
Ozzie
The screen froze, and for a moment, I did too. If this old laptop crashed, then I would lose all my notes on the background of the victims I’d researched.
I leaned back on the couch and kept my eyes glued to the screen. “Come on, baby. You can do it.” The laptop used to be Erin’s, but Alex had given her a new one for Christmas, so this one was up for grabs. I knew Mackenzie was eyeballing it, but I wasn’t sure if I was ready for that just yet.
The only lights in the living room came from the laptop and the TV screen. I had tuned in to one of the twenty-four-hour news stations for their coverage of what they called, “Boston Under Siege, Part Two: The Cradle of Terrorism.”
Every time they went in and out of a commercial break, that title was pasted across the screen in a “horror” type of font. They were giving the coverage a thriller-movie vibe instead of focusing on the facts. Typical.
Back to the laptop. I ran my finger along the track pad, but the pointer didn’t budge. It was still frozen. “Piece of shit computer,” I said, lifting it off my lap for a second.
“Dad, did you say a cuss word?” It was my daughter, lumbering into the living room, holding something large and orange.
“Sweet pea, what are you doing up so late? And why are you holding the cat?”
She dropped the cat on the couch—of course, the portly thing landed on his feet. He yawned and curled up next to a pillow. Mackenzie plopped down next to me with a loud sigh. “Pumpkin won’t leave me alone. He keeps coming into our room and
rubbing his paws on my head.”
Now, that is hilarious. I held back a chuckle. “It’s late, so why don’t you give it another shot? Pumpkin will stay down here next to me.”
She pushed a handful of curls and frizzy hair out of her face. “Why are you upset?” she asked, looking at me.
“It’s just this computer. It’s been a little slow.”
“You tell me I have to be patient, right?” She patted my leg.
“You’re right, Mackenzie. Maybe I should just go get some water, and by the time I come back, the screen won’t be frozen.”
“Can I go with you and get some ice cream?”
I tickled her ribs. “Nice try.”
She smiled. “Dad, I miss Baxter and Rainbow. When are we going home?”
I wondered if that was the real reason for her not falling asleep. “I don’t know for sure. Soon, I hope.”
She frowned, smacking her hands on her legs. “How soon is soon?”
“I wish I knew, sweet pea. Sometimes, even adults don’t have all the answers. So, we have to be patient.” I grinned.
She crossed her arms. “Not funny.”
“Look, I know you miss the dogs.”
“And I miss Ariel too. She’s my best friend.”
“You’ve been FaceTiming her, though, right?”
“Yeah, at first that was fun. But it’s not the same.” Her eyes moved to the TV, and my heart skipped a beat. I didn’t want her to see any carnage—ever, but definitely not before bed. Thankfully, the station was showing nothing gory at the moment, just two reporters talking to each other on a street corner.
“Is Miss Alex’s friend okay?”
“Nick is still at the hospital, and he’s getting the best care possible.”
She lifted an eyebrow. “That didn’t really answer my question, Dad. I’m not a little kid, you know. Is he going to be okay?”
Couldn’t get anything past her. “I hope so. We all hope so. He got through surgery, so things are looking better.”
AT Stake (An Alex Troutt Thriller, Book 7) (Redemption Thriller Series 19) Page 6