Jazz, propped up on two pillows, squinted at the morning sunlight and pulled her hospital gown away from her neck to take a look at the spectacular bruising. It looked better than it had yesterday, the blacks turning a sickly dark blue-green, the reds fading. But still.
Colorful.
“Manny for a roommate,” she said sadly. “My life is really not turning out the way I’d hoped, Counselor. I think I might have been better off drinking my future away at Sol’s.”
He didn’t smile at that one. He leaned forward and captured her hand in his, rubbed a thumb over the scraped and bruised knuckles, and said, “If you’d done that, at least three more people would be dead right now. Including me and Marla.” Marla had dropped by earlier with her mother, a very pregnant, very scared lady who’d still been prone to dissolve into tears over the near tragedy.
The cops who’d been by had been, if not tearfully grateful, at least cautiously pleased by the whole thing, and more than willing to accept the explanation she’d come up with as to how she, Manny and Lucia had come to intercept the killer. She figured there would be more questions, but nobody seemed too unhappy with her just now.
Not even Laskins, who’d called to gruffly inform her that the Society would be picking up the medical bills. Again.
“Hey,” Borden said, and leaned forward. “Rest. You look wiped out.” He pressed a warm kiss to her forehead, moved to her lips and brushed them very lightly with his own, and she felt a surge of lightning heat that had nothing to do with the painkillers pumping through her system. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Hey. Counselor.”
He paused in the act of retrieving his jacket from the chair. He looked nearly back to normal. The cut on his forehead had been sutured, and his color was good. There’d be plastic surgery coming, for the skinned part of his arm, but he seemed to be dealing pretty well with that.
Better than she was, with the memory of his scream on the phone.
“You never told me how they got you.”
“I went outside,” he said. “I was going to get us coffee.”
“There’s coffee in the break room. You know that.”
He shrugged slightly. With his good arm. “I wanted to get you Starbucks. Kind of a joke.”
The smile melted her like butter. She watched him go, smiling, and shut her eyes to savor the warmth of the sunlight slanting over her face.
Naturally, the room didn’t stay quiet long. She heard the door swing open again, and cracked an eyelid. Lucia was moving slowly, but she was moving on her own, and dressed in street clothes instead of backless gowns. A distinct improvement, though it was, Jazz thought, the very first time she’d ever seen Lucia without full battle-dress makeup.
She looked young and very, very vulnerable. There was a livid purple bruise on her cheek where she’d hit the concrete in the shed after taking a bullet in her flak vest.
“Hey,” she said, and leaned against the wall as if she was either too cool or too exhausted to make it across the room to the visitor’s chair Borden had last occupied. “How are you feeling?”
“Like I took a double-barreled shotgun blast to the chest,” Jazz said. “By the way, remind me to send thank you notes to the Kevlar people.”
“You’re taking it easy, right? Cardiac bruising’s nothing to take lightly.”
“I’m fine,” Jazz assured her. “No exertion for me for at least two weeks before they let me out of here. And then I’m on light duty for a month, they say.”
Lucia nodded and tucked her glossy straight hair back behind an ear, then walked over and seated herself. “They said you could have died. Commotio cordis. Sudden noninvasive impact to the chest, disrupting the heart rhythm.”
“Yeah, well, I didn’t die,” Jazz said. She didn’t really want to talk about it, or about that moment when she’d felt her heart stop, or the light and the visions.
“You heard about the envelope they found at his house, right? The one postmarked yesterday morning?”
The killer—his name had been, prosaically, Dave Jennings—had never opened it. The police had, in their forensic analysis. It was a red envelope. It had said, on clean white paper that carried no logo or watermark of any kind, three words. Use head shots.
“Good thing he doesn’t check his mail,” Jazz said somberly.
“I think all this happened at the last minute,” Lucia said. “There was a voice mail on your cell phone telling you to check FedEx as soon as you got in, but it came while you were in the air.”
“Yeah, and I was a little busy panicking over the plane hurtling toward the ground,” Jazz said. “I’m guessing the people sending us the messages? Not Actors. At least, not Leads.”
“You think?” Lucia smiled slightly. “Presuming we buy any of this crap.”
“Presuming.”
Not that either of them would admit to it.
Jazz shook her head and let herself sink down on the pillows again. The world seemed soft-edged. Gentle. Quiet. Trees rustled outside of the hospital window and blended with the sound of turning pages as Lucia settled in with a book.
“Sleep,” she heard Lucia whisper, as her eyes drifted shut. “I’ll be here.”
Two weeks later, on the day she was scheduled to leave the hospital, Jazz had a new visitor. Lucia was gone to get the car; Borden had disappeared for a meeting with some attorney or other to go over paperwork. Even Manny was MIA, although he’d dropped by to furtively provide her with the password to get into the loft. After some persuasion, she’d also gotten him to give her the new address rather than send it to the dead drop.
She supposed that meant he was improving. That, and the love bite on his neck that without a doubt must have come from the lips of Pansy Taylor. Who didn’t hate him.
She was getting her clothes together, heartily ready to get the hell out of the hospital, when the door opened behind her.
It was Kenneth Stewart.
The KCPD detective leaned against the closed door for a couple of seconds, staring at her, and crossed his arms. “You don’t look so bad,” he said. “Heard you took one in the chest.”
She tapped her breastbone lightly. “Flak vest.”
“Heard you damn near shot the face off a baby-raper.”
She didn’t answer that one. She wasn’t happy with that memory, even knowing who the man had been, what he’d done. Even knowing that firing that shot had allowed a beautiful little girl to return safe to her mother.
There was no way to avoid seeing it, over and over again, in her nightmares.
“Bet you think you’re the golden girl, don’t you?” Stewart asked, raising his eyebrows. He looked pale and doughy and unpleasantly shiny, as if he’d been jogging. His eyes were open wide, his pupils too small. She’d always wondered if he took drugs. He never quite looked right in the head to her.
“Is there a point you’re going to get to, or are you just here to kiss my ass?” she asked. She wished she had a gun, because Stewart made her feel the lack, but of course that wasn’t possible in the hospital. Though she strongly suspected Lucia was always packing.
Stewart pushed away from the door and came toward her. “What’s the crap I’m hearing about photos that show McCarthy across town at the time of the murders?”
“It’s not crap,” she said, and folded up a black hoodie before stuffing it in her canvas bag. “They’ve passed every test. My partner also found one of the guys in the pictures. He’s willing to testify to their authenticity.”
“It’s crap,” Stewart repeated. He was closer now. She could smell a sharp, metallic scent coming off him, like gun oil and sweat. “I know exactly where he was. Pumping rounds into the backs of the heads of three people.”
“Pictures say different.”
He was way too close. In her space, trying to get her to react, and boy, she wanted to. She wanted to slam her fist into his face, but she knew better, knew he was waiting for it and besides, she’d promised the doctor she’d be good.
“The pictures are fakes,” he said softly. “I’m going to prove it. McCarthy’s not getting off on this one. Not ever.”