Covert M.D. (15 page)

Nia wished she’d thought to substitute something stronger for the ibuprofen. Something that would’ve knocked him out and given his body a chance to recover. Otherwise, he’d keep going until he collapsed.

Which didn’t seem that far off.

“Tow truck’s here!” a voice called from the road, and the crowd of uniformed bodies shifted and shuffled to make way for the vehicle.

She found herself jostled between Rathe and Peters. She turned to the detective. “Is there anyone in the car?”

He shook his head, his attention fixed on the lake,
where two officers waded into the water dragging a hooked cable. “Seems empty. We’ll know more once we get it on land.”

The sedan was hauled up within ten minutes, and she pressed forward with the officers to see inside, half excited, half afraid. Excited to find a telling clue. Afraid to see something horrible.

She got neither. Aside from Rathe’s phone lying on the dashboard, the car was empty.

“That explains the signal.” Handling it by the very edges, Rathe flipped the waterproof unit open and glanced at the display. “Water must’ve distorted the signal. We’ll have to tell Wainwright that his DOC-JAK technology has a bug.”

“Hand it over.” Peters shot Rathe a dirty look for disturbing evidence, took the phone, and bagged it. “You can have it back after it’s processed.”

“Fine. Pop the trunk, will you? I want to have a look.” Rathe sauntered around to the back of the car, but Nia wasn’t fooled by his casual air. His shoulders were set, the lines of his body tense.

For the first time, she wondered what it had been like in that trunk, what he’d thought just before he hurled himself out onto the moving pavement.

She shuddered.

Peters opened the driver’s door with gloved hands, waited out the gush of water and hit the trunk release. Rathe eased a finger beneath the lid and pushed it up.

This time the gush of water was crimson.

“Whoa, we’ve got ourselves a DB!” At the young of
ficer’s excited shout, the cops closed in and pushed Rathe and Nia out of the way. But she’d seen enough—and she’d probably be seeing the image for a long time to come.

Pockmark’s huge body was curled in a near-fetal position, his knees shoved to his chin, and his hands curled around each other with childlike innocence. One forearm bore a gaping bullet wound, and he’d been shot through the eye.

For an instant Nia’s mind substituted Pockmark’s face with another, lean and elegant, with cropped silver-blond hair.
Rathe.
She spun around, staggered to the edge of the crowd, doubled over and threw up into a clump of brambles.

A bullet whistled directly over her. Gunfire crackled from the opposite side of the road. The young officer who’d been excited to find the dead body, spun, gurgled and went down.

“Gun!” Rathe knocked Nia to the ground with a flying tackle that wrung a groan out of him. “Stay down!”

She wasn’t going anywhere. For one, his good, strong weight was pressing her into the ground. For another, she was too damn scared to move.

Another shot. The cops scrambled for the cover of their vehicles and returned fire.

“Over there! The other side of the road!”

Nia hugged the earth and tasted bile and fear.

The lights flashed dizzying strobes of red, blue and white, picking out the cops’ movements, their attempts to flank the shooter.

The wounded officer writhed in pain, both hands clutched tightly to his side, grunting as he tried to bite back howls of pain.

“Come on.” Rathe shifted off her. “He needs help.”

Nia rolled over and saw Rathe crawling toward the wounded man. He looked back and shrugged. “It’s what we do.”

Surprise shimmered through her, and a strange joy.

Four days earlier he hadn’t wanted her down in the hospital basement alone. Now he was inviting her to belly crawl through a firefight. If she weren’t so terrified, she would’ve punched the air in victory. As it was, she had to force herself to move.

Don’t chicken out. Not now. Not when he’s finally ready to give you a chance.

She forced the fear into a deep, dark corner, along with the image of Rathe’s dead, bloated corpse curled in the trunk of a dark-blue sedan. She turned her head, spat out the nasty taste and began to crawl.

The gunfire grew more sporadic, the cops’ voices farther away. Still, she anticipated the sting of a bullet as she wormed her way toward the fallen man. Toward Rathe.

“He’s gone!” The shout from across the street was small consolation. The gunman had escaped. He could be fleeing the scene at any moment.

Or he could be working his way back around for another try. There was no doubt in Nia’s mind that the bullet had been meant for her. But why? What did she know that Cadaver Man—or his boss—feared?

“Help me take this off,” Rathe ordered the moment
she reached him. He held out his bandaged wrist. “We’ll use it for a pressure pad.”

“I’m not sewing you back up,” she argued. “The cruisers have first-aid kits.”

“Fine. Get one while I keep pressure on.”

Nia scrambled to the nearest cruiser and hunkered down, though there was no guarantee a low profile would save her from a bullet. A middle-aged officer crouched beside the rear tire, sweating profusely.

“I need your first-aid kit.” When he only stared at her, she snapped, “Now!” The command sent him into motion. A stream of curses bled between his lips and Nia felt a flare of pity. The local rural cops hadn’t been prepared for a shootout.

Neither had she.

“Here.” He jammed the kit into her hands, then took a deep breath and glanced at his fallen comrade. “What can I do to help?”

“Make sure there’s an ambulance on the way. And keep your head down.”

She did the same as she scrambled back to Rathe. He was bent over the officer, pressing his bare hands into the man’s side and keeping up a steady stream of low, calming conversation. Their eyes were locked.

Nia paused. Over the years she’d seen Rathe as an adventurer and a grieving friend. As a lover and as the man who’d turned her away. More recently she’d seen him as a reluctant mentor and as the HFH superior who had the power to deny her dreams.

But she’d never before seen him as a doctor.

His voice was calming, his actions precise. And his attention was wholly focused on the fallen policeman, willing the patient to fight, to live.

A fist squeezed Nia’s chest, the air backed up in her lungs, and her heart cracked in two, letting Rathe in a little farther than she’d intended.

Much farther than was wise.

“I need all the four-by-fours you have.” Rathe’s eyes snapped to hers. “Nia! Stay with me!”

“Four-by-fours. Right.” She pawed through the first-aid kit, then shouldered him aside. “Let me. You shouldn’t stress your stitches.”

They worked side by side for the next fifteen minutes, stabilizing the young officer as best they could, alternately soothing him and chivvying him to stay awake. The tension level around them decreased by the moment, as the cops trickled back in, all with negative reports.

“Your gunman got away.” Peters crouched down beside Rathe. “How is he?”

“Still breathing,” Nia replied, “and he’s not ‘our gunman.’ If you’d found him back when—”

“Here’s the ambulance.” Rathe’s voice interrupted, and she bit back the irritation. The lingering fear.

“I’m sorry,” she said to the detective, “I know you’re trying.”

“Not hard enough, apparently.” Peters strode away, leaving Nia feeling small and mean. And scared.

They handed the wounded officer over to the paramedics. He was stable enough that they didn’t need to
ride with him to the local hospital, so they were cleared to return to the apartment.

And do what?

In the back seat of the detective’s car, Nia let her head fall back and closed her eyes. They had two bodies. They had the scant information from Rathe’s abduction and a car that had been reported stolen two days earlier. And they had a few pieces of charred packaging. That was all.

Logan Hart claimed he was innocent. She almost believed him. He’d also claimed there was a tie to the nurse, Marissa. Nia wasn’t sure she believed that. But if not Logan or Marissa, then who was Cadaver Man’s inside contact?

“Let it go.” Rathe’s words seemed to come from faraway, and her sleepy brain acknowledged their worth. As she sagged toward unconsciousness, she barely felt her head nod in his direction. But when his bandaged arm curled around her shoulder and urged her against him, she knew she was safe.

For the moment.

THE FIRST THING that hit Rathe the next morning was the pain. The next was the realization that he wasn’t alone in bed. The first wasn’t all that unusual. The second was downright strange.

He lay still, tensing as it all came back in a rush. Being grabbed outside the hotel and stuffed in the trunk. Suffocating, straining, near panic when the zip ties proved stubborn. Convinced the car would stop any sec
ond and it would be over. Freeing himself and rolling from the moving vehicle, slamming into the road and skidding on his face.

Worrying about Nia the whole time.

I can’t do this.

“Do what?”

He hadn’t realized he’d spoken aloud. Now, knowing she was awake, as well, he forced his eyes open and turned, gingerly, on his side to face her.

Her hair was tousled, her eyes slumberous. The faint smell of soap and toothpaste still clung to her from hours before, when she’d let them into the apartment and headed straight for the bathroom. Twenty minutes of showering had left her rosy-cheeked and, hopefully, feeling a few degrees distant from the body in the trunk. The gunman on the hill.

“What can’t you do?”

“The police are involved all the way now,” he answered without answering. “We can leave it to them.”

Her eyes darkened; her full lips formed a thin line. “Darn it, Rathe—”

He reached across, sore muscles screaming with the motion, and touched a finger to her lips to stop the words. “This has nothing to do with you being a woman or me being a man.” It did, but not in the way she was thinking. “It’s about danger, and what HFH can reasonably expect their investigators to endure. We’re beyond that point now. I think we should pull back and let the cops sort this out.”

She pushed his finger aside, seemingly not caring
that they were lying nose to nose in a warm cocoon of blankets. The night before he’d been too sore and she’d been too tired to care, and together had seemed safer than alone.

Now he was still sore, but even injured, his body knew very well where he was. And who was lying opposite him.

Nia French. The woman who’d haunted his dreams for a long time after he’d sent her away, believing as her father did that she was better off taking another path. The woman whose memory had plagued him again when she’d called him to her father’s bedside and he’d refused.

And now? The woman he couldn’t imagine not wanting. Whose possible injury—or worse, death—terrified him so much he was willing to do the unthinkable.

Drop an assignment.

She frowned. “The detectives need our help, Rathe. They don’t know the hospital, don’t know medicine. We do.” She sat up, crossing her arms over her breasts when her oversize T-shirt drooped off her shoulder.

So she wasn’t unaware of their position, after all.

Emboldened, perhaps foolishly so, Rathe dragged himself up and leaned back against the wooden headboard, gritting his teeth against the stab of pain. The stitches in his wrist were a background complaint compared to the still oozing slices on his other arm and his ankles. The bruises on his torso throbbed with his heartbeat, his face was puffy and tender, and the road rash along his neck and shoulder flared quick insult at his slightest motion.

“I could’ve been killed last night.” He hadn’t meant to say it so baldly, but there it was. If he hadn’t escaped, he would’ve been sharing waterlogged space in the trunk with Pockmark—or worse. When Nia flinched, he pressed his advantage. “
You
could’ve been killed last night.”

The whine of the bullet and her doubling over had happened so quickly, for a moment he’d thought she’d been hit.

An echo of terror, of loss, pulsed through his veins. She was important to him. Too damn important to risk herself like that.

She held his eyes. “This is what HFH investigators do.”

“No, it’s not.” He grabbed her ankle, the only part of her he could reach without moving. “This is above and beyond. Jack would agree. He’ll pull us out if we both ask.” He took a breath. “What do you say, partner?”

Their eyes held for a heartbeat. Two. Then she slowly shook her head. “I can’t.”

“Please?” He tugged on her ankle, sliding her closer. “Nadia, if you ever—”

“Don’t.” This time it was her finger on his lips. “Just don’t, okay? You don’t understand. I have to see this one through.” Before he could ask again, before he had fully registered her soft touch, she slid away and stood by the side of the bed.

Her fingers touched the hem of her sleep shirt, and his breath caught. “Nia, I don’t think—”

“I’m not going to jump you. I want to show you something.” She slid the shirt up over one hip, then
higher. Her panties were smooth, soft cotton—the sort she could rinse in a bucket of camp water and wring dry. Above them stretched a neat scar the length of her hand.

She touched the scar. “This is why I can’t leave the case.”

He stared at the narrow white line for a long moment while his brain supplied the information his consciousness didn’t want to accept. Finally he looked up into her eyes, his libido strangled by the guilt. “You donated a kidney to him.”

It wasn’t a question. The hints all added up.

She nodded and slid the shirt back down, to where it dangled across the tops of her thighs. As though noting her state of undress for the first time, she made a small noise of distress and pulled on last night’s jeans before returning to sit cross-legged on the bed, far away from him. Her eyes were shadowed with wariness.

“Wainwright doesn’t know, does he?” It wasn’t the first of Rathe’s thoughts, nor the most important, but it was the least personal question—and therefore the easiest.