“Are you okay? Ms. Davidson?”
“Here,” a female said, “drink this, sweetheart. You had quite a fall.”
I sipped on cold water and opened my eyes to see the corrections officer and the RN standing over me. The officer held a wet towel at my head while the nurse tried to coax me into drinking more water. They’d dragged me to a chair outside the room and were trying to keep me in it despite my limp body’s insistence on eating floor tile.
“Oops,” the nurse said. “Got her?”
“I had her the first time. She just keeps slipping out of my grip. She’s like really heavy spaghetti.”
“What?” I shrieked, jerking to my senses. “How heavy? What happened?”
Glancing up into the grinning eyes of the officer, I took another sip as he explained.
“You either fainted or you wanted a much closer look at the cracks in the tile. Either way, you hit hard.”
“Seriously?”
He nodded. “Maybe you shouldn’t have been trying to make out with him,” he suggested.
How did he know that? “I was kissing him good-bye.”
He snorted and exchanged glances with the nurse. “That’s not what it looked like to me.”
Probably not. But what happened? Could Reyes Farrow take control over me even from a freaking coma? I was doomed.
“Oh my gosh!” I said, jumping out of the chair. After a woozy moment that reminded me way too much of the night I celebrated my high school graduation — in a pool of my own vomit — I stumbled back into Reyes’s room, marveled at his beauty a few seconds more, gave him a quick kiss good-bye — on the cheek — then hurried out of the hospital with a thank-you and a wave to the officer and the nurse. I had to find Reyes’s sister, and time was running out.
“You fainted?”
I sighed into the phone and waited for Cookie to get over her surprise. Why anything should surprise her at this point was beyond me. “Did you get a hit on Reyes’s high school transcripts?”
“Not yet. You passed out? Kissing him?”
“Is there anything else I should know?”
“Well, I’ve scoured these flash drives. They’re all Mr. Barber’s. There’s nothing on them but his case files.”
“Damn. I’ll have to talk to Barber about that.” Where were my lawyers, anyway? “And I’ll have to get those flash drives back before the secretary finds out they’re missing.”
Before we hung up, I asked Cookie to find out if the lawyers’ secretary, Nora, went into the office that day. Hopefully not. She wouldn’t have missed the flash drives if she hadn’t been there.
Just as I pulled Misery into the parking lot of the Causeway, aka home sweet home, Beethoven’s Fifth rang out on my cell. Uncle Bob told me they had an ID and an address on our shooter. Or the guy they believed was our shooter. I just wished at least one of the lawyers had seen the assailant so we could be sure we had the right guy. Apparently he worked for Noni Bachicha, a local body shop owner. I knew Noni personally, and he’d never be involved in something like this, so there had to be another angle. But we wouldn’t know anything until we brought in the alleged shooter. Uncle Bob was on his way to do that very thing. With half the force acting as backup.
Naturally, I couldn’t miss out on all the fun. I would be able to tell if the guy was guilty or not in a heartbeat. Part of my being a grim reaper, I figured. The problem came when whomever I was assessing was guilty of a myriad of other crimes. Guilt was guilt. Sometimes it was hard to distinguish between two crimes. Still, I had to try.
I got the address, pulled a U-ey, and flew to an apartment complex in the middle of the Southern War Zone, where one Mr. Julio Ontiveros resided.
The teams were still a block away, prepping for the extraction. Apparently they had fairly solid intel that Julio was asleep inside his apartment. He must have had a late night. I pulled in between Uncle Bob’s SUV and a patrol car, put my phone on silent — because there’s nothing worse than a cell phone going off in the middle of an extraction; everyone glares at you really mean — then went in search of Ubie.
Ninety-nine percent of the time I don’t carry a sidearm — hence the motivation to perfect my death stare. But today all the cool kids were packing. I felt like the girl who showed up at a formal dinner party in jeans and a Pink Floyd T-shirt. Probably ’cause I did that once.
Spotting Ubie beside another patrol car also brought me within screaming distance of Garrett Swopes. I tamped down the angry hornetlike sting of jealousy when I realized Ubie must have called him first. I’d been solving cases for the man since I was five, and he calls Swopes first? Aggravation coursed through me, ruffled my feathers, got my hackles up, whatever hackles were. Was a little appreciation too much to ask? A little nepotistic favoritism?
Uncle Bob was on the phone as usual when Garrett looked up at me from behind the patrol car’s open trunk, concern flashing in his eyes. With a curse, I realized the ache in my ribs and hip had me limping. I gritted my teeth, straightened my spine, and walked as normally as possible. Then I had to force myself to relax a little, fearing my walk resembled the robot dance from the eighties.
“I can’t believe you don’t have twenty-seven broken ribs,” Garrett said as I robot-walked forward.
“I don’t have twenty-seven ribs.”
“Are you sure?” he asked, eyeing my rib cage. “Maybe I should count them.”
Ridiculously ticklish, I wrapped my arms protectively around my stomach in reflex. “Only if you want to lose a hand,” I warned, though he did look rather hot in jeans and a white T-shirt with a dark blue bulletproof vest strapped around his torso. Very machismo. “But don’t worry,” I continued. “Surely that whole learning-to-count thing will pay off someday.”
He grinned, unscathed, as he checked his clip. “Surely.”
“ ’Kay, I’m going around back.”
“Why?”
“ ’Cause I can. And you’re not there.”
“Oh. Don’t get shot.”
I snorted—
“And don’t fall off anything,” he half whispered, half yelled.
He was funny.
I had scarcely taken up a position behind the complex with a cute cop named Rupert when we heard what sounded like a gunshot coming from inside. Rupert sprang into action. He scaled six feet of chain-link and rushed toward the back entrance, crashing to a halt against the redbrick building with gun at the ready. Rupert was young.
Being older and wiser, I chose to enter through the opening where a gate once stood several feet back. Taking Garrett’s warning about not getting shot to heart … considering … I scrunched down and eased inside the yard. Twelve seconds later, I lay sprawled in the dirt, gasping for air. Apparently, the suspect had spotted the opening in the fence as well. And for some reason, when surrounded by cops with nickel-slick badges and chambered rounds, the path of least resistance is most often through the unarmed chick, despite her attitude. I had just enough time to check out Rupert’s nicely shaped ass before a large hoodie-clad gangbanger determined to make a hole in the universe tore through me.
We hit the ground hard, and the pain in my ribs had me seeing white-hot stars … and fear. His fear. And his innocence. He didn’t shoot anyone. Damn.
Well-behaved women rarely make history.
My PI techniques would never be the stuff of legend. They would never make it into criminology textbooks or university lecture halls. But I did feel that, with some focus, I could have a strong presence in chat rooms.
If I couldn’t be a good example, I’d just have to be a horrible warning.
Cookie’s attempts to get her hands on the transcripts and class rosters from Reyes’s high school failed. It was rare, but it happened. Something about laws and confidentiality. With this in mind, I strode into the police station, a singular objective guiding me. Carrying what was perhaps too big a chip on my bruised and swollen
