by Dale Mayer
He wished she could take a month or two off work, but, of course, she needed to earn a living too. He pondered the problem as they walked back into the ER. Tabi walked in ahead of Ryland and Cain, and the doctor looked at her and smiled, but his gaze faltered when he saw the two men, and his friendly demeanor immediately stiffened into something much more formal.
“Results are back,” he said. “Your friend will survive this. He’s in a coma, and he’ll wake up when he’s ready. He’s got significant bruising on the brain, and that’ll just take some time to heal. Obviously he has several other medical issues that have all been attended to, and a few more that we’ll keep an eye on, but we want to keep him here, under observation, rather than transferring him to another hospital.”
Cain looked at him and nodded. “We’re fine with that,” he said. “Providing he gets the best care possible.”
“That’s a given, and I believe he’ll recover,” the doctor said quietly. “Unless anything new comes up.”
At that, Ryland stepped forward and handed the doctor his card with a phone number on it. “Contact us with any change.”
The doctor took the business card and nodded. “Will you guys be in town?”
“Somebody will be,” Cain said, his voice hard. “It doesn’t matter if we’re right here or not. You can always contact us at that number.” He walked to Garret’s bedside and grabbed his buddy by the hand. Leaning over, he whispered something in his ear.
Ryland understood because his time would be next. He knew that the other two were watching Cain. When he straightened, looked down at his friend, his face getting harder with fury before he controlled every nuance on his face, he then turned and stepped back, facing Ryland.
Ryland walked up, gripped Garret’s hand, and, leaning over the other side, said, “Buddy, we’re here to look after you. You heal up while we go after the ones who did this. When I get back, I want to see you sitting up and laughing. No other outcome is acceptable.” He took a long look into the face of his friend, then turned and walked away. He looked at the doctor intently and said, “Any change.”
The doctor nodded.
Ryland slung an arm around Tabi’s shoulders. “Let’s go.”
“And if I don’t want to?” she muttered. Her voice was low, so nobody but him heard it.
“Sweetheart,” he replied, “we are well past being refused. That just won’t work.”
She looked at him, and he saw a change in her expression. An awareness of how her world had just shifted.
“Is this what happens when you do something nice for other people?” she asked, but no bitterness was in her voice, as if she were resigned to this ending.
“No,” he said. “Not normally. But I for one really appreciate the fact that you did.”
She shook her head. “I don’t want to end up dead over this.”
He squeezed her shoulders gently and tucked her closer to him. He rested his head against hers for a moment as they walked down the hallway behind Cain. “Listen. I will do my utmost best to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
Chapter 7
Outside, Tabi wasn’t surprised to find a huge black truck, with a canopy in back and a double cab in the front, waiting for them. She sighed and said, “Of course you need something like this, don’t you?”
“We do, yes,” Ryland said. He helped her up into the front of the truck, and she watched as he got in behind her, showing absolutely no sign of being impeded by his injuries.
“You’re not made of steel, you know?” she muttered.
“Nope, I’m not,” he said. “But, by the same token, I know my limits.”
She provided directions on how to get to her place and wasn’t surprised when it was already up in the GPS. “You really are those supersecret spy kind of people, aren’t you?” she said, with a resigned sigh.
“I don’t know about that,” Cain said quietly, “but what we do affects the security of millions of people.”
She nodded and stared out the front windshield. It was weird for her to think that, in an hour, they would be gone from her life, and she’d be trying to get back to the normality of what she had prior to sailing on the ocean not a week earlier. In a boat lost at sea, which she had not yet allowed herself to grieve over. Of course many people would laugh at her and say it was foolish. It was just a piece of property, after all.
Maybe she would eventually feel mad because she’d lost something valuable, but it was the intangible value of the boat that she would grieve the loss of—where she had spent many wonderful hours with her younger brother. Hours in which she had worked to gain solace over losing him, when he lost the battle with leukemia. It had been her way of healing, after she had railed against the medical system and the lack of medical assistance available to him.
The medical world wasn’t at fault; they just didn’t have the technology to handle his particular strain. Some diseases, well, they were just terminal. And, of course, the moment you were born, death was a guarantee. It was a matter of when and how it came about that people tried to keep messing with.
She certainly hoped that Garret had many long and happy years ahead of him. She’d seen many a coma patient come back out of one after the doctors had given up hope. She’d also seen perfectly healthy men who had just dropped dead on the street. It was like fate picked a number, and it was your day. And that just depressed her even more. When they pulled up in front of her apartment complex, she looked at it and groaned. “Not exactly the five days left of my holiday I had planned.”
“I’m sorry about that,” Ryland said. “You’re right. Being out sailing on that beautiful water is a whole different story, compared to sitting here.”
“But I don’t necessarily have to sit here either.” She waited until Ryland hopped out; then she slipped out beside him. She turned to look at him, then Cain, as he joined them, and said, “You don’t have to come up to my place. I’ll be fine.” Neither man listened to her, as they closed the doors and locked up the truck, then followed her to the front entrance of the apartment building. Knowing that it was futile to even argue, she headed up to her second-floor corner apartment, but his earlier words had stuck with her.
Even now, she looked at everybody and everything to see if anyone was watching her. She could almost feel a sense of being observed, but, for all she knew, it was because both men were with her, obviously watching out for her. As she got to her apartment, she quickly went to unlock the door and stopped in her tracks. Pushing open the already unlocked door, she froze.
Swearing softly, Ryland used his elbow to push the door forward. He stepped inside and turned to look back at her. “I presume you don’t leave your place unlocked like this.”
Her face blanched, and she shook her head, her hair flying wildly around her features. “Of course not,” she said. “I haven’t been here in what? Nine days? I think I flew out nine days ago.” She stepped carefully inside behind him, with Cain coming in after her. She stared at her living room, which had been completely trashed. “Why would somebody do this?” she asked, her arms outstretched.
“It appears they came here, looking for you,” Cain said.
“Well, I’m obviously not here,” she snapped. “Why rip open the cushions?”
“Normally I’d say they were looking for something, but I’m not sure just what anybody would be looking for in this case.”
“And why?” she said. “It’s not like I’ve been here to stash some theoretical thing here connected to the airplane crash. Even if I was on the naval ship with the guys, or even on my sailboat for a time with Ryland and Garret, it’s not like they gave me anything.” She turned to face Ryland. “Surely you guys weren’t looking for or carrying contraband of some sort, were you?” Then she immediately answered her own question. “And it doesn’t even matter if you were, since you were blasted into the water, without warning.”
“Exactly,” he said. “No, we weren’t carrying anything on board, and we didn’t have anything when
we got out of the water, as you well know.”
She nodded. “Your clothes were torn up and halfway off you as it was,” she said, as she walked a few steps forward and turned to look around. “I just don’t get it,” she said, as she surveyed the enormity of the mess the intruders had made. She walked into the kitchen and said, “Jesus! And this makes absolutely no sense either.” All the pickles, relish, various mustards, and other condiments from the fridge had been taken out, upended, and dumped everywhere. “This isn’t a normal robbery,” she said. “This isn’t somebody walking in and getting pissed off that I didn’t have something in particular they were looking for. This is just deliberately making a mess.” She looked at them. “But why?”
At that, Ryland frowned. “The only thing I can think of is, one, to make you leave. Two, to cause you all kinds of chaos and make you worried maybe. And three …” He looked back at Cain and said, “I don’t really have a three. Do you?”
“This is a deliberate act,” Cain said. “But, other than to chase you away, I don’t know why.”
“And, if I were to be chased away,” she said, looking at the two men, “where would I go anyway?”
Immediately both men spun around. “That is the question. Where would you go?”
She looked at them, puzzled, and said, “I don’t understand.”
“If this chased you away, where would you go?”
She frowned and thought about it. “I don’t know,” she said. “I have friends I could bunk with overnight, I guess. My friend’s boat may be here—the one I can use when I’ve got some free time. If I could contact her and make sure the boat is in her slip, and she doesn’t have other plans for it, I could go to the marina and sleep on it overnight. I’d probably just end up in a hotel, frustrated and angry, trying to get insurance to fix this up,” she said.
“Would you call the cops?”
“Sure, I would,” she said. “This is obviously breaking and entering, but it’s more vandalism than anything else.”
“Nuisance value.”
“Yes,” she said. “But there’s got to be a message behind it.” She walked to the master bedroom, and her heart sank. All her bedding, all the clothes from the closet and drawers were all dumped and tossed around. She walked into the bathroom and saw something on the mirror and stared. “Well, I found the message,” she called out. Both men followed her into the bathroom, and she pointed to the lipstick message on the glass.
Bitch, we’re on to you!
She looked at the men. “But on to me about what?”
Cain spoke first. “Is there any other reason, something completely unrelated to Ryland here, that would cause you to believe somebody was doing this on a personal level?”
“You mean, like some ex-boyfriend or a really upset girlfriend, coworker?” she asked.
“Anything,” Ryland said. “Personal relationships, work, family, neighbors.”
“No,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest. “And I really hate to think that you guys will start digging into my background.”
“Are you hiding anything?” Ryland asked bluntly. “This is really not the time or place to be trying to hide something from us.”
“I’m not hiding anything. My life has been fairly simple up until now. I don’t have anything to hide. My last relationship was about five months ago, and we broke it off peaceably.”
“Is there such a thing?” Cain asked her curiously.
“Well, let’s just say I suspected that he was screwing around on me, and I didn’t wait to find out for sure. I didn’t care to be with him anymore, so I just told him that we were done,” she said. “He agreed and said it wasn’t working out for him either, and we split. Easy,” she said.
“Why did you end up taking this holiday alone?” Cain asked.
She looked up at them in surprise. “Let me guess. Do you think that a woman can’t do anything without a man nearby?”
Ryland immediately held up his hand. “No, we’re not going there at all. What we’re getting at is why you chose this time and place for your holiday.”
“Because it commemorates the death of my brother, who my boat was named after,” she snapped in frustration and tears. “He died of leukemia six years ago. So, every year, I take time off from work, and I go sailing. All of the medical staff at the hospital know. It’s my way to get back in touch with what really matters in life.”
At that, a moment of silence came from the other two. “So pretty much anybody at the hospital would have known you were out there on the boat?” Cain asked.
“Yes.” She raised her hands in frustration. “Surely you don’t think your plane was blown up in that exact spot, at that exact time, all so I would find you?” she sneered. “Even the gods couldn’t have made that happen.”
“No,” he said, “but obviously they would have known your place was empty.”
She thought about it and nodded. “Yes, as well as several of my neighbors here and anybody I worked with. Not to mention others, like the newspaper boy, and probably a half-dozen more I’ve mentioned it to. I’ve lived here a long time, so I know people. I’m social with them to a certain extent, and I would expect a certain amount of social small talk at various times. So, yes, people would know, but we can hardly go blame everybody who would know.”
“No, but it just means that there was an opportunity and a motive, and somebody took it.”
“So, we’re back to thinking that this is related to Ryland and that they got here before I got back?”
“As soon as you were picked up by the naval ship, the bad guys knew that you would be home within a day or two, so they probably came in yesterday,” Cain said. “Listen. If you have insurance, they’ll cover this, but obviously you can’t stay here.”
“Well, I could,” she said, as she looked around. “It would take a long time to clean up this mess, but the bedroom is still serviceable. I could toss everything, go buy a quick change of sheets, and sit in my room, while I await the insurance adjuster, and then get this place cleaned up. But it wouldn’t be pleasant, right?” She looked back to see them staring at each other, their gazes hard. “What are you thinking?”
“You’re coming with us,” Ryland said.
“Like hell I am,” she said. “No way you’ll convince me that, if I’m not with you, I’ll be in more trouble, and, if I’m with you, I’ll be better off.”
“But you will be,” he said. “It’ll be obvious to anybody who’s watching you that you’re not alone and that you’re not helpless in this world.”
“Gosh, I can’t remember the last time I was helpless,” she said coolly, leaning against the now-closed refrigerator door. She looked around at her apartment and said, “You know what? I won’t cry out of frustration for something like this, but it does make me angry as hell.” She looked at them. “So, if you have all these superspy bullshit skills, can you check into the cameras for the apartment, and see who did this?”
Cain gave her a smile, while Ryland looked at her with a chuckle. “It’s already happening,” he said. “We should have an answer pretty quick.”
Just then Cain’s phone buzzed. He pulled it out, read the text, and said, “Single male, five-ten, with lighter skin and freckles, but his face was kept away from the cameras. He wore a hat down low and a sports jacket over jeans and sneakers.”
She snorted at that. “You got a photo already?”
He tapped away on the phone for a moment, and, when it buzzed again, he held it up. “Do you recognize this person?”
She looked at an image of what could have been nearly anybody. She sighed and said, “No. So how did he get in?”
“A key apparently. But busted up the door for good measure.”
“Great,” she said. “So one guy did all of this? He must have been here for what—an hour, two hours?”
“Two hours and twenty-two minutes,” Cain said, reading the text. “He left the same way. He was picked up on the outside of the parking lot on foot.”<
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“And I guess, if he’d parked nearby, we would have gotten a vehicle model and license plate.”
“Yeah, and we’d have tracked him into the city as well,” Ryland said.
“So what does this make him?”
The two men looked at each other, looked back at her, and Cain said, “A pro.”
*
That was a concern in itself. But it fell along the lines of somebody coming after him and Garrett. More likely Bullard, and any of his team that they could take out, these pros would take out.
Ryland looked back at Cain. “Was anybody on the Australian team attacked?”
Cain gave him a sharp glance and said, “Interesting you’d ask that. You know how we switch vehicles out of instinct? We did that on our way back. And the vehicle we’d been renting blew up on the highway.”
Ryland just stared at him. “So this attack isn’t just about going after Bullard. They’re after all of us.”
“That’s what I’m starting to think,” he said, with a wave of his arm toward Tabi. “Apparently casualties don’t matter.”
“Shit,” Ryland said. “Did we get any updates on all the suspects being run down?”
“Out of the nineteen that we narrowed it down as maybe possible, they’ve knocked six off the list.”
“I remember you talking about that,” Tabi said, stepping closer. “How do you know those six are off the list?”
“Five are dead, one’s in a coma,” he said.
“Okay,” she said, shoving her hands in her pockets. “I guess they’re off the list. And the others?”
“Nothing yet,” he said.
“What about family and friends of those six?” Tabi asked.
Cain nodded. “Checking those too.”
She looked around and said, “Okay. I’ll grab a bag of clothes and get out of here. Then I need to go sit at a coffee shop or somewhere and make some phone calls.”