“The next day,” I said, throwing my hands into the air, “before we could follow up—”
Claire finished my sentence: “The crash of WW 888.”
I said, “That night when I got home, Mrs. Rose said I had just missed Joe. He’d been home to change his clothes. He left me a message saying he’d been pulled into the plane crash nightmare, and, like, don’t wait up.”
“So he’s definitely alive,” said Yuki. “He’s not hurt. He’s working.”
“That’s what he said.”
I believed what I was saying, but damn it, it was weird that Joe couldn’t get in touch at all. Actually, it was inexplicable. When our lunch was over and the last of my friends were gone, I bathed Julie, gave her some applesauce, and called Joe.
“I’m sorry,” said the mechanical voice, “but the subscriber’s mailbox is full. Good-bye.”
Honestly? This was killing me.
CHAPTER 39
I SPENT THE rest of the day doing laundry, and by dinnertime I was hungry and bored. I took Julie across the hall to Mrs. Rose, saying, “I’ll be right back,” and headed out to our local Asian grocery store.
It was dark when I got down to the street. I was considering what kind of veg I wanted to go with last night’s pot roast when something happened—a shock or a blow.
All I knew for sure was that my face was on the pavement so fast that I never got my hands down to break my fall. Had I tripped? Had I had a stroke?
My head throbbed and my vision was distorted, but I made out the shapes around me as shoes.
Lights flashed, headlights zooming past. Nothing made sense. I wanted to throw up. I had struggled up to my hands and knees when I took a blow to my side and was down again. I rolled into a ball and covered my eyes, and heard two voices, maybe more, speaking to me in heavily accented English.
I looked through my fingers and saw four blurry Asian faces looking down at me. I thought I recognized the one who had confronted me in front of the ME’s office. Same guy who slammed into me after the NTSB press conference.
He was wearing black, and he had a wide face, and he was shouting at me, something like “You know Chan?”
Was I making that up?
“Back off,” I said. “I’m a cop.”
I reached for my gun at my hip, but it wasn’t there. There was another shout—“Who you work for?”
“What? Get away from me.”
I took another blow to the back of my head, and when I woke up, I was in an ambulance moving at high speed. The EMT at my side was saying, “Welcome back. What’s your name?”
I called Conklin from the ambulance and, shouting painfully over the sirens, I asked him to call Mrs. Rose.
Right after that, I was wheeled into the ER. My clothes were removed and stuffed into a plastic bag. A nurse took my blood pressure and temperature and layered on two blankets. Eventually a Dr. DiDonato appeared.
He checked me out.
“On a scale of one to ten, with ten being excruciating, how do you feel?”
“I feel like someone beat me up.”
“You remember that?”
“Vividly.”
“Have you ever had a CT scan before?”
“No.”
“Well, get ready for a new experience. I’ll let you know how your head looks, and then we’re going to keep you here overnight for observation.”
“I left my one-year-old with a neighbor. Someone needs to look for witnesses.”
“I’m on duty until eleven,” DiDonato said. “Dr. Santos will take over after that. Maybe he’ll release you in the morning.”
Conklin arrived while I was waiting for my CT scan. He looked both scared and mad.
“What happened? You were mugged? You?”
“I was beaten up by four Asian guys, but I’m alive. I wasn’t robbed,” I said, waggling the ring finger of my left hand with its sparkling array of diamonds.
“So why were you beaten? What did they want?”
“Something about Chan, I think. I can’t swear, Richie. It happened too fast. Why me? I’ve got no idea,” I said.
CHAPTER 40
AT AROUND EIGHT the next morning, Rich wheeled me out of the hospital, helped me into his Bronco, and strapped me in.
Then he let me have it.
“You’re overtired. You could have been killed. You have nothing on the guys who beat you—nothing. No names, vague descriptions, and you didn’t get a lick in. You know what that tells me, Linds? That you’re off your game. It’s Sunday. Day of rest and you should take it. Go to bed and stay there. I can handle this by myself.”
I wasn’t having it.
“What am I going to do at home, Rich? Watch the plane crash over and over again on TV?”
“That. And sleep.”
“Look. I admit I was stupid, OK? I should have had my piece with me. I should have had my head on straight. But I repeat. I was just going to the store for a minute. And, by the way, I outrank you. You don’t get to bench me.”
“You want Brady to put you on medical? Because I have him on speed dial,” said my partner, my brother, my backup, my comrade, my friend. When I didn’t answer immediately, he said, “You need to listen to me. Stay home.”
“No way.”
I held on to his arm as he helped me into my apartment building’s creaky elevator. Mrs. Rose opened the front door and told us to hush. “Julie is sleeping.”
“Can you stay? I have to go to work,” I said.
Rich gave me a scalding look, but Mrs. Rose didn’t catch it. She stepped up once again, saying, “Of course, Lindsay. At this rate I’ll be able to retire to the South of France pretty soon.”
“Before you retire, I’m promoting you to captain of the Emergency Baby Care Squad.”
“Fine. I’d like a salute,” she said. “No one’s ever saluted me before.”
I did it and she laughed so hard that I laughed, too.
Which really hurt.
While she made coffee, I hit the rain box. I examined myself as I stood under the spray. I was bruised from armpit to knee, from midriff to halfway around my back. But I had no internal injuries and my brain was OK, too. Thank God. I concluded that the four Asian hoods hadn’t tried to kill me. If it was a warning, they might work me over again.
I dressed, hiding the scrape along my jaw and cheek with makeup, and strapped on my gun. Locked and loaded, I went back out to the living room. Julie was awake, wearing a sunflower-yellow onesie and bobbing up and down in her bouncy chair.
She looked adorable and like she’d grown an inch or two since yesterday. My little girl. She stretched out her arms to me and howled. My heart just lurched.
What if I had been killed last night?
What then?
I picked her up and hugged her, cooing a little bit, before handing her off to Mrs. Rose.
I had work to do, and at the same time, I was leaving my heart, my precious little girl, with the nice lady from across the hall.
“You coming or not?” Rich said.
I followed him out the front door.
CHAPTER 41
MY PARTNER OPENED the passenger-side door and helped me into the Bronco with the care one might give to a baby chick.
I buckled up, plugged in my phone charger, and knocked back a couple of Advil, already thinking about Alison Muller.
We were days late to be following up on our only suspect in the Four Seasons killings. But the airplane crash had bumped all other cases, even this quadruple homicide, to the back of the line.