“Well, maybe I am, and maybe I’m not, but my boss, the captain, seems to think that the source of your woman’s problem doesn’t lie in our town, and it would not be a lot of fun for me to try to get him to think otherwise.”
Which was a nice a way of saying that the local police force had its marching orders, and she’d have to deal with someone a lot closer to city hall if she wanted to get this stampede to judgment turned in any other direction.
A word by Princess Kris Longknife might do that, but at last report, she was unconscious and bleeding. Maybe dying.
No, if anyone was going to do something about this mess, it would not be Kris Longknife.
More than a few times, the thought of Kris getting out of Penny’s hair and letting her do things the way she wanted would have elicited a shout of glee. Unfortunately, today wasn’t one of them.
Penny turned to her team of technicians. “Tell me something that these people don’t know about these bombs.
With “Yes, ma’am,” and “Aye, aye, ma’am,” the Marines and Chief Beni went to work.
Willy Stone watched the Navy officer lead the Marines into the DuVale Building. He glanced at his reader and its bootlegged report from the police department. They had found nothing special about the bomb, certainly nothing that would lead them back to its source.
That was to be expected.
The decision to take Texarkana out of the Society of Humanity standards for marking explosives had been taken years ago . . . to save money. It had caused no one any problems.
Until now.
It amazed Stone how people who didn’t have a problem assumed they’d never have a problem. He couldn’t complain; it was things like this that made his job easy.
He turned away and walked around the block. A car was waiting for him. He said nothing as the driver took him where he needed to go.
He’d done enough damage here; it was time to raise the stakes.
33
Kris came awake in a mental fog.
Where was she?
What had just happened?
The answers to all those questions didn’t seem to matter all that much to her.
Pain pulsated all around her, danced like the flames of a wood fire lighting up the night sky at the beach. She felt the mesmerizing urge to stare at it, but it was distant, out of reach, unable to affect her.
Slowly, it dawned on Kris that she’d been like this before.
Nelly, AM I Drunk? DID I fall off The WAGON?
Nelly didn’t answer.
Jack? Jack? Are you there? You’re always there. You love me.
With an effort, Kris heaved her eyelids open.
The room was white on white on white with white and black instruments and tubes and . . .
She was in a hospital. No, you didn’t get tubed up like this in just any hospital.
She was in an intensive-care room.
She tried to scream, but there was something stuck down her throat. She struggled to reach for it, but her arms didn’t move.
Suddenly, there were people in the room, rushing to her bedside, checking the instruments.
And quickly she slipped back down into blessed, numb unconsciousness.
When everyone ran for Kris’s room, Jack followed them, hanging back and keeping his mouth shut.
That wasn’t easy once he got a good look at her.
Still, years of hard discipline kept his mouth shut and his back against the wall as doctors and nurses went hurriedly about their business, correcting whatever it was that had allowed Kris to surface when they wanted to keep her asleep.
When things had returned to the silence of a well-equipped tomb, Dr. Diem came over to join Jack watching the machine breathe for her.
“Now you know why we said you did not need to see her.”
“She isn’t a pretty sight,” Jack agreed.
“And there is nothing either you or I can do but let her sleep.”
“Can I ask what just happened?”
“We cut too fine a line and crossed it the wrong way. Did she ever have a drug addiction problem?”
“She spent a year or two drinking after her little brother died. I understand that she was also heavily drugged to help her be a ‘good little girl.’ ”
“Was she a good little girl?”
“Never while I’ve known her, but then, I’ve never seen her take a drink. Last time she was hurt, she refused most of her pain meds. She preferred to take our heads off instead. Conscious, she’s not a well-behaved patient.”
The doctor shook his head. “There’s nothing about that in her permanent medical record, but that is not unusual with people of a certain social level. If it is not on the paper trail, it never happened. Makes it hard for an honest workingman to do what I need to do when there are real problems.”
“A problem I run into regularly,” Jack admitted.
“I’ve adjusted her drug regime. If you ask me, she does not show any of the built-up requirement I’d expect to find in a former abuser. She’s behaving very much like a normal person who’s just been overdosed too many times.”
“Maybe I’ll tell her that the next time I think she really needs to get drunk.”
“I’ll leave that to you, soldier.”
“Ah, Doc, this wake-up. Does it say anything about her? Is she okay?”
“All it says is that I failed to properly program her drug dispenser and let her surface to a consciousness that I didn’t want her to experience. You saw the mess we had in here. I don’t know what her brain was doing. I had no time for any tests. Sorry, trooper, but you’ll just have to keep sweating out her situation the same as I am.”
With a final glance at Kris, a glance that told him she was back deep in a . . . hopefully . . . healing coma, Jack turned his back on her.
Penny joined Jack at the hospital. She’d left her techs to search the explosive rubble to their hearts’ content. If anyone disturbed them or tried to stop their hearts from being content, she’d be back there in ten minutes.
The Marine was just coming out from Kris’s room. He told her all he knew about Kris’s condition in simple, monosyllabic words.
“So we don’t really know anything,” she summed up.
“No. What about those bombs? What can you tell me about them?”
“Less than you just told me about Kris.”
“That’s not good,” Jack said, taking a seat in the waiting room.
Penny sat next to him. “Local cops think this is some kind of cowboy vendetta.”
“Could it be?”
“I checked the list of planes that landed in Denver during the last twenty-four hours. None of them were from Duke Austin’s territory. In fact, none of them were from cowboy country. This place doesn’t have scheduled flights from anywhere other than the two industrial cities, and not many from them.”
“That was what Kris had just found out. She was arranging with the young man whose life she saved to set up a bank and shake up the local way of doing things.”
“Could that be reason enough for the bombing?” Penny asked.
“Doesn’t seem like there would be time enough to arrange it. Besides, the fellow Kris was working with is the son of Louis DuVale, the big man hereabouts. Would anyone want to put that man’s kid at risk, or not expect Kris to do her level best to save him?”
Penny chuckled. “You and I would expect her to do that. Can’t see anyone local knowing our girl well enough to count on her for anything.”
Penny stood and began pacing. “Jack, there’s something fishy about all this.”
“It doesn’t feel right to me, either.”