Merciless (8 page)

There was a slow, deep chuckle. “Joceline, my love, I have two tame lions who live with me back home in South Africa. I'm not intimidated by big cats. However, if you'd like to rub me all over with bear grease,” he added in a deep, velvety tone, “I can be in your office in two minutes flat. I'll even run red lights!”

She slammed the receiver down, her lips making a thin line. She muttered under her breath.

A minute later, the phone rang again. She jerked it up and, without thinking, said, “If you call here one more time, Rourke, I'll have you up for harassment!”

There was a faint pause, as if she'd shocked the listener.
Then Kilraven's voice came over the line, deep and very somber.

“Joceline, I've got some bad news.”

“Winnie…?” she began worriedly, because she was fond of his wife. They often went shopping together.

He swallowed. “Not Winnie. My brother…”

“Jon? Something's happened to Jon?” She sounded almost hysterical and she didn't care. Harold Monroe's phone call came back to her in a flash of anguish. She gripped the phone, hard. “What happened?”

“He's been shot. Critically. He's at the Hal Marshall Memorial Medical Center… Hello? Joceline?”

He was talking to himself. Joceline had her purse over her shoulder. She ran to Betty's small office and told her what had happened.

“I'm on my way to the hospital. I'll call you the minute I know something!”

Betty started to mention that Jon's family was certainly gathered around him, and would relay any news. But the look on Joceline's face stopped the words in her mouth. She wondered if Joceline was even aware of her feelings for Jon Blackhawk, which were blatant on her drawn, worried face.

Kilraven was sitting in an uncomfortable chair in the emergency room waiting area, with Winnie beside him. He looked up when Joceline walked in. His expression, usually unreadable, was as concerned as hers.

“Have you heard anything new?” she asked, pausing to greet Winnie with a hug.

“They've taken him into surgery,” Kilraven replied grimly. “They said they'll know more when they operate. He was shot in the back. In the back!”

Joceline's face flamed. “I hope they find Harold Monroe and hang him.”

Kilraven nodded. “I can't prove it, but I'm sure he's the one who did it. And I'll find the proof, no matter how long it takes me!”

“I'll help,” Joceline agreed harshly.

“Want some coffee?” Winnie asked her husband, who nodded.

“I'll go get it,” he said, starting to rise.

She pushed him back down. “I need the exercise. The doctor says it's good for me to move around. But thanks, sweetheart.” She bent to kiss him. “Would you like a cup, Joceline?” she added.

“Yes, please.” Joceline dug for a dollar bill and handed it to her insistently. “You're not buying me coffee,” she said stubbornly. “I'm an employee of a federal agency and I won't be the subject of a bribery scandal,” she added with mock hauteur.

Winnie chuckled. “Have it your way, Elliott Ness.”

Kilraven frowned. “He headed up the FBI in Chicago during racketeering days. He was incorruptible.”

“The history professor,” Winnie teased, and kissed him again.

“I'm not up on American history unless it has Scots connections.” His area of expertise was seventeenth-century Scottish history.

“Was Elliott Ness a Scot?” Joceline wondered aloud.

“I'll look into it,” Kilraven promised.

Winnie went to get coffee. Kilraven and Joceline sat rigidly, watching the doors open and close as medical personnel in green scrubs went to and fro, occasionally flanked by white-coated physicians with stethoscopes draped around their necks.

“Busy place,” Kilraven ventured.

“Yes.” She turned over her purse. “Have you called your mother?”

“She's on her way here,” he said. “I made her promise not to drive.” He grimaced. “She's wrapped two cars around telephone poles in the past five years.”

“Oh. She drives like you, then,” Joceline said with a pleasant smile.

He glared at her. “I have never wrecked a car.”

“Sorry. I forgot. They were blown out from under you. Major difference.” She was nodding.

He shifted. “Everybody gets bomb threats.”

“Yours aren't threats, and how lucky that you weren't in the cars at the time they exploded.”

“Can I help it if I inspire passion in people?”

“People in black ops do that, I'm told.” She chuckled.

He shrugged. “I'm trying to walk the straight and narrow, especially now,” he said with a smile. “I'm doing the most boring job the company could find for me. Surveillance.”

“It's safer than what you used to do,” she said. She frowned. “Did you send Rourke after me?”

“Yes, I did,” he said, “and stop trying to run him off. Monroe is deadly serious, as you might have noticed today. Jon told me that Monroe said you're next. You have a small child and the two of you live in an apartment building with no security to speak of. Rourke will protect you.”

“Who's going to protect him from me?” she wondered aloud.

“That is a good question.”

They paused to stare at the door leading to the surgical wing. A surgeon in green scrubs came out it, looked toward Kilraven and motioned for him to join him. Joceline went, too, ignoring the surgeon's obvious surprise. Under other circumstances, Kilraven would have chuckled at her concern for a boss she constantly drove nuts.

Joceline could hear her own heart beating and hoped Kilraven wouldn't notice. She was scared to death. If Jon Blackhawk died, it would be like the sun going out forever. She refused to even entertain the possibility. But she knew that he could die. And might. She gripped her purse like a lifeline, hoping, praying…
let him live, please, I'll go to church more, I'll give to charity more, I'll be a better person, be kinder, more tolerant…
She closed her eyes.
You can't bargain with God,
she told herself.

“I'm cautiously optimistic,” the surgeon said, glancing at Joceline when her explosion of soft breath diverted him. “The bullet missed the major organs and lodged in the wall of his chest. It did some damage to a lung, and of course filled the pleural cavity with blood. We've removed the bullet and inserted a tube to drain the excess fluid and reinflate the lung. The damage to his lung is minimal. Apparently he was shot from a distance, and with a non-fragmenting bullet, thank God. The damage will heal. It helps that he's young and in great physical shape.”

“Can I see him?” Kilraven asked quietly.

He hesitated. But he was a kindly man, and these two people loved his patient. He wondered if the woman was a girlfriend. She was certainly concerned.

“In a few minutes,” he told them. “We'll move him into recovery temporarily, then he'll go to ICU for a day or two. Just as a precaution,” he emphasized when he noted his two listeners going pale. “We want to make sure complications don't develop that might retard his progress. We'll keep him for three or four days after that, again, to make sure he's progressing as we think he should. But I think he'll be fine,” he added gently.

“They'll come to get us, when we can see him?” Kilraven asked, glancing at Joceline as if it were a given that she'd go in, too.

“I'll send a nurse,” he promised. “He's an FBI agent, isn't he?”

“Yes,” Kilraven replied. “One of the best.”

“We do a big business in gunshot wounds in our emergency room,” the doctor said with a heavy sigh. “Sadly there are more guns than trauma surgeons in this area.”

“One day that will change,” Kilraven said.

The doctor only smiled. “Not in my lifetime, I'm afraid. I'll get back to work. They just brought in a child of seven, victim of a drive-by shooting.” He shook his head. “In my day, drugs were only whispered about. There was no wide-scale distribution, no gangs with guns, no…” He shrugged. “It was a less tolerant world, but far less violent.”

“They did this experiment,” Kilraven said quietly. “I read about it. They put rats in a confined area until they were so crowded that they could barely move. They
became aggressive and began attacking the others and even cannibalizing them.”

The doctor nodded. “We are too many, with too few resources, in too little space in cities on this planet. Nature has a way of thinning the population without any help from us.” He glanced toward the emergency room. “However, I must add that I prefer nature's approach. Guns and knives are messy.”

“I agree,” Kilraven said. “I've seen my share of the results.”

Nobody added that he'd helped a few criminals into emergency rooms.

The surgeon smiled reassuringly and went back to work.

Joceline was trying to avoid letting Kilraven see her tears.

“Hey, now,” he said in a teasing tone. “Don't do that. Never let them see you cry.”

She laughed with a hiccup and brushed at her eyes. “He's an awful boss,” she muttered. “Keeps me working late, throws things, insults me…”

“Jon insults you?” he asked, shocked.

“He asks me to make coffee,” she scoffed. She brushed away another tear. “Imagine that!”

“He's just tired of threatened lawsuits from visiting attorneys who have to drink the coffee the agents make,” Kilraven explained.

“Then they should stop letting Murdock make coffee,” she pointed out.

“That's been suggested,” he replied. “At the same time, they mentioned dirt and shovels…”

“There's a large potted plant in our office that could use a jolt of fertilizer,” she mused. “However, Agent Murdock is far too large to plant in it.”

“We could…” he began enthusiastically.

She held up a hand and glowered at him. “Please! This is a hospital!”

“Just a thought.” He sighed. “I bring my own coffee now when I visit Jon at his office, though.”

At the sound of her boss's name, she relaxed a little. “I'm glad he'll be all right.” She hesitated. “I guess I should get going.”

“You can see him first.”

She was uncertain. “You and Winnie should go in.”

“Winnie will say that you should,” he said with a gentle smile.

“Thanks,” she murmured huskily and wouldn't look up.

Kilraven didn't say what he was thinking. Joceline and Jon had been antagonistic toward each other for a long time. But there was one night when they'd actually gone to a party together, about four years ago. The Bureau had been providing protection for a young woman who was dating a foreign dignitary's son, and avoided a kidnapping. She'd insisted that Jon, the agent in charge of the case, come to her birthday party and bring a date. So Jon had made Joceline go with him. He hated parties. He hated socializing. So did Joceline. But she went.

Funny, Joceline had acted oddly afterward and tried to quit her job. Jon had talked her into staying. He hadn't said much about the incident, just that he'd had way too much to drink and Joceline had been forced to drive him to the hospital. It turned out that someone had spiked Jon's drink with a hallucinogenic drug, trying to be funny. The culprit, a foreign dignitary's son, had fled the country shortly thereafter and never returned.

He hadn't thought about that for a long time. His brother never drank as a rule. He was very straitlaced. Today, it had hurt terribly to see Jon lying on a gurney with blood seeping from the wound on his back. He loved his brother. Cammy was going to go ballistic. She'd lived in fear of this all during Jon's career in law enforcement. She kept rosaries everywhere, even in the glove compartment of her car, and she prayed constantly for his safety. At least she wasn't driving herself to the hospital or there might be two tragedies. Kilraven would have gone to get her, but he'd been afraid to leave Jon—as if by his own physical presence he could keep Jon alive.

The nurse beckoned to them a nerve-racking few minutes later. Neither Kilraven nor Joceline really believed that Jon wasn't going to die. They had to see him for themselves, to be sure.

He was in a hospital gown, but his chest was bare. He was white as a sheet. There was dried blood on his firm, chiseled mouth. He was laboring to breathe, even with the tube that ran out of his chest to drain off the fluid. There was a drip feeding from a tube on a pole into his
arm. There were oxygen tubes in his nostrils and he was hooked up to half a dozen monitors. His long, jet-black hair was tangled on the pillow. His eyes were closed.

Besides the beep of the monitors and the electronic sounds, there was only the sudden jerk of Joceline's breath, almost a sob, which she quickly smothered.

“He'd hate having his hair tangled,” she said quietly.

“Yes.”

He glanced at her, noting that she didn't have much more color in her face than Jon did in his. She was gripping her purse as if she feared it might escape.

“He's one tough customer,” Kilraven told her comfortingly. “And I do know something about gunshot wounds. I'm sure he's in a lot of pain, and it will take time for him to recover. But he's going to live, Joceline.”

She swallowed her fear and nodded slowly. “Yes,” she agreed.

“Tomorrow he'll be telling the nurses how to do the drip and threatening the doctor to try to get out of the hospital.”

She nodded again. It was so painful to see him like that. He was such a strong, vital man…

Kilraven was watching her covertly. It surprised him to see her at a loss for words, to see her so frightened. Perhaps she was thinking about the shadowy man in her life who went missing overseas. Markie's father.

Markie. He felt a sudden sinking worry. “Going to step out for just a sec,” he told her, and moved out of the ICU unit to make a quick phone call.

Joceline barely noticed. Her hand went out to smooth the thick, long, tangled black hair on the pillow. She recalled another time when she'd touched it, felt its cool silkiness, clung to it as feelings rose so high that she thought she might die of them. He didn't remember. It was a good thing. She didn't want him to remember.

“Don't touch my son!”

She froze, jerking her hand back, as Cammy Blackhawk came into the room. She glared at the younger woman as she moved to the bed, her back to Joceline.

“Jon,” she whispered. “My poor, poor boy!”

She bent to kiss his forehead, and fought tears. She smoothed back his hair and stared at him for a long moment. Then she turned to Joceline, all cold dignity and hostility.

“You have no right to be in here,” she snapped.

Joceline didn't argue. She looked one last time at Jon before she turned and left the cubicle.

“Where are you going?” Kilraven asked, surprised to meet her in the hall.

“I'm leaving,” Joceline said, very pale but composed. “Life goes on. Your mother is in there,” she added stiffly.

“Oh, God, now the real torment begins,” he groaned. “She'll stand the staff on its ear and they'll threaten to hang her from a window by a sheet!”

She laughed suddenly.

“Don't let her worry you,” Kilraven said in a low tone. “She's not what she seems. Honest.”

Joceline didn't reply. “I hope he does well.”

“He will. I'll call you myself if there's any change.”

She nodded. “Thanks, Kilraven.”

His eyes narrowed. “Joceline, I've had Rourke stake out your son's preschool.”

“What?” she exclaimed, going white.

“Monroe made threats,” he reminded her. “We can't prove it so we can't have him arrested. He's being watched, that's all I can say. But your son may be on the firing line. He has to have protection. So do you.”