Fallen (21 page)

Michael steps around him, stooping and collecting up one of the unconscious cops by the ankles. He begins to drag him away, smiling grimly as he does so. “What did I say?
Every
fucking time.”

In my defense, fuck those bastards. They weren’t gonna let us in, and with this pain in my gut, eating away at me, I’m not exactly in the most patient of fucking moods. We move both cops out of sight, propping them up into sitting positions against the low-lying wall of a small building, that, from the whirring sound emanating from inside it, houses one of the hospital’s power generators. We cuff the cops together, smash their radios, and leave them there in the rain, but not before I lift a key card off them that will allow us entrance into the hospital.

The key card works. Inside the hospital, the four of us peer at the ward signs, trying to figure out the best way to find Sloane. Splitting up is generally a bad idea, but St. Peter’s is fucking huge. We need to cover a lot of ground and quickly. That’s the whole reason I called Michael in the first place; the more eyes, the better. After arranging to meet back at the side exit in thirty minutes and being expressly told to stay the hell away from Charlie, Cade and Michael head off to search the emergency room—this is the most likely place we’ll find Sloane, but it’s also the place where there are the most people who might recognize me and Lace. Those fucking mug shots the cops posted of me are a major pain in the ass, and so is the fact that Lacey absconded from a treatment room not twelve hours after waking up from a pretty intense suicide attempt. That means the two of us need to stick to the quieter areas—the canteen, the locker rooms, the admin levels upstairs, and the recovery wards.

The canteen is full of people. Mostly patients and their family members, obviously wanting to stay away from any area where they think they might get infected with some nasty super bug. I send Lacey out onto the canteen floor to scan the area a little more thoroughly than I can from the entranceway; she comes up with nothing. Thankfully no Charlie. No Sloane, either. No doctors at all, apart from one guy, an Indian guy, who enters the room as we’re leaving. I recognize him straight away—he’s the doctor that helped Sloane with Lacey when I brought her in and collapsed with her in a heap, bleeding all over the lobby floor of the emergency room. It’s not Lacey who’s bleeding all over the hospital floor this time, though. It’s me. Thankfully the guy doesn’t notice the bright crimson droplets
pat, pat, patt
ing onto the ground as we hurry away.

We search the recovery wards, slipping from room to room as silently as we can. Lacey takes the right-hand side of the corridor; I take the left. No Sloane, but I do come across something that makes my head fucking spin. Or rather, I find
someone
.

“Nothing over here, Zeth. Maybe we have to go up a floor. Come on,” Lacey says, but her voice is muffled by the roaring inside my head. I feel her small hand on my shoulder, and sense her peering around me to see what’s holding me up. She won’t know the woman lying in the bed, hooked up to a thousand machines, but I sure as hell do. “Who is it?” Lacey asks, her voice suddenly crystal clear and razor sharp as the roaring abruptly stops.

“It’s Charlie’s girlfriend,” I tell her, although girlfriend is a poor word to describe the Duchess. In a very old-school way, she is the epitome of a gangster’s mistress. Bella Mafia. Except Charlie’s English, not Italian. She looks like she might be dying, but then that’s not what’s surprising. What’s surprising is the fact that she’s even still alive. And also that my ex-employer isn’t here.

“She stabbed you,” Lacey says simply. Her little hand tightens on the doorframe, her knuckles going white.

“Yeah. She did.” I walk into the room, holding my breath. If the person in this bed were anyone else, a different person who had decided to take a knife to my stomach, my reaction right now would be decidedly more violent. But Sophie has been lied to for a very long time. I’m not angry with her. I’m angry that I got stabbed, sure, but I can hardly blame her. I don’t know how, but she found out everything that Charlie’s been up to the last thirty or so years, and she found out about me. She said so herself. Her voice, choked with rage, plays out in my head—
And I know about
you
, too!
I guess I betrayed her in the same way Charlie did. I practically grew up with her playing the part of a half-hearted and extremely unreliable surrogate mother, and I hid who I really was from her. She’s maybe the only person on earth I ever bothered to shield from that. She was always just so…oblivious to the world.

I watch as her chest rises and falls, accompanied by the low hiss of the machine that’s filling her lungs with oxygen. She’s in a seriously bad way. Lacey creeps closer to the Duchess’s bedside, peering cautiously at the empty shell of a body lying in the bed. She looks fascinated, morbidly intrigued by what she sees. She looks her slowly up and down, and then ever so carefully reaches out and takes the Duchess’s hand.

On the bedside table, a battered bible has been left out. It’s one I’ve seen a thousand times before—not a Gideon’s bible that most hospital bedside tables come equipped with, but the Duchess’s own bible; the same one she’s had for years. The leather cover is peeling and curled under at the corners, and the gold print on the front has all but worn away. Lacey sees it too and absently lifts the cover. A small rectangle of paper flutters out and drifts to the floor, slipping beneath the bed. I duck down to retrieve it, and as soon as my eyes catch on the image on its front, my hand fights to form a fist. It’s not paper, but a photograph. A fucking photograph of the Duchess and another woman I would recognize absolutely anywhere.

It’s a picture of her and my mother.

They’re grinning, arms thrown around each other’s shoulders, staring straight into the camera. They look so young and so carefree, like they haven’t got a fucking problem in the world. This is an early picture of my mother, back before she died her hair to the dark color I always remember. She can’t be much more than nineteen. I had no idea she knew the Duchess. I had no idea she was even faintly connected to any of these people. Fucking hell. My mind is suddenly racing a million miles an hour.

“What is it?” Lacey asks, holding out her hand. I swallow, my tongue feeling far too thick in my mouth. I stare at the image hard, committing it to memory, and then I pass it over to Lacey.

“It’s nothing; just a picture. Put it back. Come on, we have to find Sloane.” I walk out of the room feeling sick to the bottom of my stomach. How well did the Duchess know my mother? And how the fuck did she manage to lie to me all those years?

******

My phone rings as we’re waiting for the elevator up to the third floor. On the other end of the line, Michael’s hushed voice sounds far too loud in the quiet of the abandoned hallway. “No sign of Charlie. And Sloane’s not down here,” he tells me. “Some nurse said she was paged to the Chief of Medicine’s office about twenty minutes ago. You should go up there.”

“Already headed in that direction.”

“Perfect. We’ll head there, too?”

“Yeah. Hurry.”

I hang up just as the elevator arrives. Lacey and I ride it up two floors and exit just as a woman in a dark pantsuit storms passed, talking on her phone. She doesn’t notice me and Lace, but I sure as hell notice her. The woman has FBI written all over her. Even Lacey can smell it on her.

“She’s probably someone we need to avoid?” she asks, shrinking back into the elevator.

“Someone
you
need to avoid,” I tell her. “Go and find Sloane. I’ll be right there, I promise.” Lace bounces on the balls of her feet, shaking her head.

“No, come on. Let’s just get Sloane and go, Zeth. Please!”

I place my hands on her shoulders, hunkering down to look her in the eyes. “I won’t be long. And I’m not gonna hurt her. It’s okay. Go. And. Find. Sloane.” I feel like I’m giving a command to Lassie, unsure whether she entirely understands what I’m telling her to do, but Lace gives me a slight nod of her head and shuttles out of the elevator just as the doors are about to close. She turns right…and I turn left, following after that FBI agent.

She hasn’t gotten far. I halt at the first bend in the corridor, peering around the corner to scout her location. She’s a mere three feet away, smashing her index finger into the buttons of a coffee vending machine, still on her phone. Her voice rises as she talks to someone, who clearly isn’t as smart as she would like them to be.

“I don’t care how long it takes, Jarvis, just do it! We can only legitimately keep her for twenty-four hours, and I want everything tapped. Her cell phone; her house; her car.
Everything
. That means you have an hour to find Judge Thomas and get him to sign off on it. This woman’s got no record. No priors. She’s a fucking doctor, for crying out loud. He won’t want to green-light a full observation, but it’s your job to convince him, okay?” She slaps her palm against the coffee machine, hissing under her breath. I’m pretty sure in those few sentences I’ve heard enough. She’s talking about Sloane; she has to be. If they’re planning on tapping her place, then there’s no two ways about it. Charlie or no Charlie, I
have
to get Sloane the hell out of here.

The woman hangs up her phone, and I get the briefest of glances at her name badge as she slips her cell into her pocket. I’m nowhere near close enough to read the name printed on the front, but I’m sure as hell close enough to catch the big DEA badge.
What the fuck?
What the hell are the DEA doing here? I was
not
expecting that. I don’t know if it’s better or worse that this chick’s not with the feds, but I’m not hanging around to find out. I’m turning, about to go locate Sloane, when I hear something that stops me in my tracks.

“Denise, there you are. I’ve got the—man, what the hell are you doing? Here, get out of the way.” I chance another quick glimpse around the corner and a second agent has appeared—dark suit; shiny Italian leather shoes; greased-back hair. He looks like the government version of a motherfucking Ken doll. He fiddles with the vending machine, and then it
chunk
s and starts vending the coffee. This Denise woman scratches her head, blowing out a deep breath.

Denise
. Denise was the name of Rick’s DEA handler. Agent Denise Lowell. A coincidence? A mind-blowingly huge, no-fucking-way, off-the-charts level of a coincidence? Yeah, I don’t believe in those. This has to be the same woman. It feels like a pretty big fucking jigsaw puzzle piece has just fallen into place, but I still can’t figure out what the whole picture is. I shake my head, growling under my breath.

“Thanks,” the woman says.

“No problem.” The guy hands her the little plastic cup and then leans against the wall, folding his arms over his chest. “You’re letting this get to you, y’know?” he says.

“So would you if you’d been working on the case for this long. I’m so fucking close I can taste it, and this woman is the key to shutting this thing down for good.”

The male agent shakes his head, smiling softly. “Babe, it’s all good. You’ve done as much as you can. This is a done deal.” He shoves away from the wall and plants a kiss on the top of her head.

So Agent Denise Lowell is fucking her workmate. And she’s been working on this case for a long time? That pretty much confirms my suspicions—she has to be the same woman that bribed Rick into feeding information to the Wreckers. But what the hell does she want with Sloane?

I’m not gonna stick around to ask personally. I make my way as silently as I can back down the corridor. Three turns later and I figure it’s safe to run. I’m about to get moving when I turn another corner and walk straight into the man I’ve been trying to avoid since I broke into St. Peter’s.

The grey-haired devil breaks into a glorious smile. “Ah! Zeth Mayfair! As I live and fuckin’ breathe.”

Ten seconds after Agent Lowell leaves, the door to Chief Allison’s office cracks open, and a small, blonde woman inches her way inside.

“Lacey! What the—”

She holds up a hand, placing her index finger over her mouth. “Shhh. Come on, we’re leaving.”

“Leaving? Lacey, I’m pretty sure I’m being arrested.”

She frowns at this. “Have they read you your Miranda Rights?”

I have to think for a second. Did I get read my rights? Lowell just told me to sit my ass down and then left. “No. No, I wasn’t read my rights.”

“Then we’re leaving,” Lacey repeats, as though the whole thing is obvious and totally above board. “Charlie’s here, and we need to be gone before he sees any of us. Zeth’s coming in a second. We have to get downstairs without heading back through the west wing of this floor; that’s where the cops are. Is there a way?”

There is a way. An elevator down the eastern corridor, out past accounting. I nod, getting to my feet. If Charlie’s here, then I definitely want to hightail it. A small part of me resists, though. I was told to wait here by a member of the police force. And not just the police force—by a member of the DEA. If I go against what I’ve been told, I’m crossing a line. A line I’ve never crossed before. I won’t be able to come back to work, that’s for sure.