I push as fast as I can, feeling my new prosthetic threatening to come unglued. Thankfully, it remains attached, allowing me to cover the final stretch of around seven hundred feet in an impressive three minutes.
Pathetic. I know.
Pushing one of the doors out of the way, I limp into a round lobby that’s pretty much deserted because everyone not confined to a bed or on duty, like the pair of guards shooting me a bored look, is in the cafeteria sharing a little Christmas cheer.
But I’m pretty fucking far from cheery.
I’ve just caught the mother of all Grinches and one of his fiends doing who knows what upstairs. Unfortunately, I’m too damn slow, and by the time I reach the front doors there’s no trace of them.
I peer into the quiet and snowy parking lot, but all that’s left of them are their footsteps ending by a fresh set of tire tracks in the snow leading to the exit.
Silently cursing my complete and utter physical shortcomings, I limp back inside and approach the two guards, who are actually MPs. But it becomes very evident very quickly that they’ll be very useless.
Behind the counter is a flat screen TV playing a football game. The Broncos are taking on the Giants. It’s a noon game on the East Coast, but we’re several hours ahead.
“Hey, you saw those two guys dressed like doctors leave just now?”
One of them manages to lift his eyes from the screen, narrows them, and says, “It’s a hospital, Pal. Doctors and nurses come and go all the damn time.”
Yep.
Useless.
I limp back to the hallway and catch an elevator up to the third floor.
First things first: I need to make sure those assholes didn’t do anything to Dix.
But when the doors open, I realize that my biggest challenge of the evening might be to get past no other than Nurse Olga, who looks up from her station.
But she looks different tonight. Her ash-blonde hair is down below her narrow shoulders, framing her triangular face, and she’s wearing makeup. I’m guessing she’s going somewhere after her shift. But she still offers me her very best Christmas scowl.
And who can blame her, really? Three days ago, Murph and I behaved like dickheads. Though in our defense, our buddy had just returned from the dead.
“This floor is off limits to you at this hour, Commander. Yes?” she warns. After our conundrum the other night, Murph and I had a heart-to-heart with the chief resident and were able to talk our way into visiting privileges but only during the day.
“Look,” I say, walking up to the counter. “I just want to make sure my friend is alright. Did you see two men dressed as doctors take this elevator down a moment ago?”
Now her forehead crinkles a bit as her fine eyebrows drop over a pair of concerned light-blue eyes. “Yes, why?”
“Because they were not doctors.”
That gets her to blink, before gazing at her computer screen. She types a few commands and proclaims, “Doctor Jones and Doctor Smith from Army Medical Corps.”
Jones and Smith?
Are you kidding me?
My vision is starting to tunnel on her confident stare still focused on her screen. “They’re new psychiatrists, just making rounds and—”
“No, Olga. They’re not psychiatrists. They’re CIA,” I say with far more control than what I feel, before starting for Dix’s room.
She looks up from the screen, and I can tell she’s now worried at the thought of someone having invaded her domain.
“But… how?” she finally asks, her voice cracking a little. “It says here that—”
“It says exactly what they want you to believe. That’s how they operate,” I explain over my shoulder as I limp as fast as I can, and I hear her coming after me. She’s wearing heels because they’re clicking hollowly and hastily across the long corridor.
Of course, she catches up to me in no time, but to her credit and my surprise, she does not attempt to stop me. Maybe the spirit of Christmas is in the air after all, or perhaps I just scared her into thinking one of the patients under her care has been compromised.
“His vitals are fine, yes?” she says, reading from her tablet, before tilting it in my direction. With the heels, Olga is almost as tall as me, and she also smells nice.
I glance at the screen and see his heart rate, blood pressure, oxygen saturation, respiration, and temperature all in the green. The tablet basically mirrors the vitals on the screen above Dix’s bed. You know, the ones that Murph and I flat-lined the other night?
And I do find it suddenly quite ironic that I’m scared of what those assholes might have done, when three nights ago Murph and I attempted to kill the man.
That and a dozen other annoying thoughts wash over me for the minute it takes me to reach the door. Interestingly enough, the thing my altered state of mind finds most annoying is that Olga has to slow her stride to keep from overtaking the Navy SEAL, who’s starting to break a sweat.
Pathetic.
She even opens the door to his room for me, but at this point I don’t really care. I just need to see with my own two eyes that those two bastards did not—
“Hey, Boss.”
I stand in the doorway staring at the Jersey boy sitting up in bed wearing a Christmas hat with the TV remote in the fingers of his surviving arm, which is no longer elevated. But it’s still covered in a cast full of stainless steel rods and pins. Apparently, the staff positioned it such that the hand rests on a small table secured to the side of his bed so he can use his swollen purple fingers to work the remote. The staff has also replaced his oxygen mask with cannulas.
The flat screen hanging from the wall has a scene of actor Bruce Willis running down a corridor holding an Uzi submachine gun.
He’s watching fucking Die Hard.
At my continued silence, he works the remote to pause the movie. Bruce Willis freezes on the screen. He’s marred with sweat, dirt, and blood, plus he’s looking into the camera with a pair of crazy eyes that remind me of the nimble Talis in Compound 35.
“You okay there, Boss? You look like you just saw a ghost.”
No shit. Make that two ghosts.
Olga walks past me and steps up to the bed to double check all his probes while I just stand there. She also adjusts the hat on his head.
“Isn’t she a sweetheart?”
They both now stare at me. Dix grins and winks with his one good eye. Olga smiles at me without humor.
“You really need to start being nicer to her, Boss, because she—”
“What the hell you think you’re doing?” I finally ask.
“Uh… watching my fav Christmas movie? Olga got it for me.”
“Don’t screw around with me, man. They were here, weren’t they?”
“Who, Boss?”
“Jones and his bald-headed sidekick, whatever his name is.”
Dix stares at me. “What are you talking about?”
“I saw them Dix. Wearing lab coats and pretending to be Army psychologists.”
“Psychiatrists,” corrects Olga.
I shoot her a glance before returning to Dix, who exhales and says, “You need to leave it the fuck alone, Boss.”
There’s that damn line again.
“Did you know that the agency was in control of that gunship? That your friends on the ground were talking on the radio directly with the pilots when they unleashed on us?”
“And you know this how?”
“I just had a little heart-to-heart with one of the Marines who hauled our sorry asses down that mountain,” I say, before spending a minute relating what Adanna had just told me.
Dix looks away and slowly shakes his head, then tells Olga, who is still checking his vitals, “I’m not sure how to talk to this man anymore. He just won’t listen.”
Olga just looks at me briefly,
frowns, and goes back to tinkering with the machine monitoring Dix’s state of wellbeing.
“Leave if the fuck alone, Boss.”
“You keep saying that.”
“And you keep ignoring it. Like they say where I’m from, fuhgeddaboudit.”
Olga giggles, but there’s absolutely nothing funny about that.
“You’re telling me to forget about Cope and Chappy? About what they did to us? To you?”
“Yeah,” he says without an ounce of hesitation. “That’s exactly what I’m telling you. You’re playing a zero-sum game, Boss. Now, walk away and let me watch my goddamned movie in peace.”
Dix presses a button on the remote, and Bruce Willis comes alive again, running down the hall and up a flight of stairs. His feet are also bleeding. I think he’d just stepped on broken glass.
And I feel just as he looks. Ragged. Tired. And still sweating. My heart is beating so hard that I can feel it in my damned temples, and my vision is tunneling again.
That’s when I sense someone tugging me on the sleeve.
It’s Olga.
She has walked around to my side of the bed and is nudging me toward the door.
“Fuck this, Dix. And fuck you.”
“Copy that, Boss,” he says without looking in my direction.
And I storm out, but don’t get far. The hallway is starting to spin. Olga grabs me and guides me into an empty room, where she sits me on the edge of the bed, and sets my cane aside.
She takes my left hand and presses the tips of her index and middle fingers against the bottom of my wrist while checking her watch. Frowning, she then grabs a blood pressure sleeve and works it up my left arm.
“I’m fine,” I tell her even though I know she knows better, especially if she just checked my pulse, which, if the pounding against my temples is any indication I’m sure is shooting to the moon by now.
“Of course, you are,” she replies, half smiling while shaking her head as the unit starts to squeeze my bicep. “Big muscles. Big tough guy, yes?”
“Don’t you have some place to be?”
“One eighty over one ten,” she says, ignoring me. “You need to lay back and breathe.”
Before I can protest, she forces me on my back and props a pillow behind my head. She unstraps my prosthetic, produces a tube of something from one of her pockets, squirts an inch of the paste onto her hands, and proceeds to massage the stump below my shin.
Damn. The woman has magic fingers.
“That feels great,” I confess.
“Good for circulation, yes? Need to do it twice each day.”
“Then you’re hired,” I say.
Olga blinks, apparently not getting the joke, and then produces two white pills, a plastic cup of water, and presents them to me. “Take this now.”
“What’s that?”
“Aspirin. Now, Commander.”
I sit up and obey.
“Good boy. Now lean back again.”
I do, and she walks to the small sink in the room and wets a white rag, which she proceeds to apply to my forehead and cheeks.
And I let her play nurse.
Screw it. It actually feels pretty damn good. Olga might be a stickler for rules, but her bedside manners are top notch. Plus, she’s easy on the eyes, it’s Christmas Eve, and I’m damn lonely. Murph has Adanna and Dix has Die Hard.
So, I’ll take what I can get.
I breathe deeply as she works my face and neck, before rewetting the towel and doing it again.
“Better, yes?”
“Oh, yeah,” I confess.
“Are you going to be good boy for me?” she asks in her thick accent that, in my current altered state of mind, evokes images of actor Arnold Schwarzenegger.
“Promise,” I say.
She wets the towel a third time, wringing it, folding it, and placing it over my forehead.
Sitting on the edge of the bed, she places a hand on my right cheek and says, “Stay here for a little while, yes? I need to check on other patients, then I’ll be back.”
Oh, boy. Now she makes me think of the movie The Terminator.
Before I can think of something to say, she adds, “And I will stay with you, yes?”
Well, I’ll be damned. Does she mean she’ll be back, as in stay with me tonight and keep me company? Or as in, I’m the floor nurse, and I’ll be back to check on you?
Man. Am I that lonesome that I’m starting to imagine things? And with Nurse Olga of all people?
But, the way she’s staring at me…and for the first time I notice she doesn’t wear a wedding ring…
However, since I really suck at reading women, I decide to play it safe and keep such thoughts to myself, though I have to admit that my vote’s for that first possibility.
Hey, one can only hope, right?
Kate dumped me. Dix stole Franky, and Murph is now with Adanna. So, screw it. If Olga wants to give me her German version of a little Christmas cheer, I’m all in. Besides, her hand on my face feels damn nice and warm at the moment. And if that’s any indication of what the rest of her would be like…
But I just slowly nod.
“Good,” she says, tapping my cheek before standing and giving me her very first smile.
Yep. She’ll definitely do, and then some.
I watch her slim figure vanish in the doorway, before she closes the door.
It doesn’t take me long to fall asleep for what seems like just a few minutes. But when I sit back up and check my G-shock, I realize it’s four-thirty in the morning. I’ve crashed for over six hours.
What the hell did that woman give me? I literally died. No nightmares. Not even a dream. Just complete deep sleep.
Aspirin my ass.
She must have slipped me a roofie.
I get up, stretch, and go to strap on my prosthesis, when I notice that not only is my stump soft and moisturized, but also the rest of my thigh all the way to my groin.
Did she do that when I was out?
And if so, what else did she do? I do a quick check and notice everything else seems to be in order down there, at least as far as I can remember.
Grabbing my cane, I venture into the hallway, my mouth feeling dry and pasty, plus I have a weird hung-over-like feeling. But when I get to the nurse’s station, there’s another woman now. Olga must have gone home.
She drugged me and left me, and as far as I can tell, she did not have her way with me—at least not in the way I had hoped for.
Merry Christmas to me.
“Hey, look who is back from the dead, yes?” says the new shift nurse in an accent as heavy as Olga’s. I’ve seen her before but can’t remember her name until I get close enough to read it on her green scrubs. GLORIA.
She’s a perky little thing with auburn hair and blue eyes that remind me of Franky. But that’s where the similarities end. The woman is at least twice my age and has a face that suggests a hard life. But she seems nice.
“I fell asleep,” I say, reaching for the elevator button.
“Really?” she grins, then says, “You missed all the fun, Commander.”
I stand there not certain how to respond to that.
“But Merry Christmas, anyway, yes?”
“Yeah,” I say, as the dual dings from the elevator precedes the doors sliding open. “Same to you.”
I head one floor down and slowly make my way to my room, inching the door open slowly to avoid waking up Murph.
That’s when I notice two sets of leg prosthetics lined up like little soldiers by the foot of his bed along with two matching sets of Army-issued aluminum crutches. Plus, there’s a larger and wider bulk under the covers than normal. And as my eyes adjust to the darkness, I spot two dark heads.
Seriously, Murph?
I also notice the trai
l of clothes flanking the prosthetics, including Murph’s uniform and the black T-shirt I saw Adanna wearing last night.
Well, I can’t say I blame my buddy, and to be completely honest, I’m jealous. At least the man had someone to warm his bed on this cold and snowy Christmas Eve.
I had a wet rag, some moisturizer, and a sedative.
Slowly and quietly, I pull back into the hallway and close the door to give them some privacy. Of course, now it means I’m homeless until she clears out, so I head down to the cafeteria hoping that the coffee machine is operational.
But when I walk into the place, for the second time in the past seven hours, I freeze.
Sitting at a table near the front of the deserted cafeteria is no other than my father’s baby brother.
Dan Pacheco.
He’s wearing a pair of black jeans, black army boots, a tight navy-blue T-shirt with the letters NCIS stenciled across the front, and a matching hat over his dark-brown hair. There’s a black winter jacket on the table, next to a cup of steaming coffee.
“Hey, Kid,” he says. “How’re you holding up?”
I stare at him before blinking once, to make sure I’m awake. But it’s him alright. His face is relaxed but also focused as he regards me with dark amusement.
“What the hell, Uncle D.?” I finally mumble as the initial surprise abates. “What are you doing here? And since when are you with NCIS?”
“Who says I’m NCIS?”
“Really?”
He shrugs while reaching for his coffee and taking a sip. “Ever been to an Army-Navy surplus store, Kid? Great deals.” He taps the brim of his hat.
Lowering my voice, even though there’s no one around, I ask, “Are you… working?”
“I’m always working, Kid. You know the drill. I’m someone who was never here, following orders that were never given. Isn’t that what you do in the teams?”
I just keep staring at him. Uncle D. has been an enigma from as far back as I can remember. The man is a vault, a body of secrets, never really sharing what’s truly on his mind. But that is the nature of the beast that is the world of Special Access Programs, the ultimate world of smoke and mirrors.
“Are you with those two assholes?”
He drops his brows at me. “What assholes?”
Highest Law: A Gripping Psychological Thriller Page 11