Fly With Fire (41 page)

“What’s this, oh, elevator.”
Zack gathered from its position on to the roof on the edge of the presidential
suite. It was a small geodesic dome of steel plates riveted with large steel
bolts. No entry. Not without a pneumatic wrench. There were two other domes as
well. The three west wing elevators, but only the one he gazed at serviced Mo’s
suite.

 “Someone was up on this
roof and they’re a slippery mother,” McGovern stated what was obvious to the
rest of them.

Al Simpson and Harve Graver
stepped out onto the roof. “Can’t sleep Burnham, gotta keep everybody up at
night?” Al asked with a crabby tone. Harve looked over the edge of the roof.

“We’re going room to room. I
swear to God I’m gonna get this jerk. We got some uniforms coming from
Shaumberg to assist. Every inch of this hotel is going to be searched by
morning.” Al stood and glared at Zack, surveying the bandages Zack’s open shirt
did not conceal. “You need to go back to your sweetie and get the hell outta
the way. Harve get a doctor here before Burnham bleeds to death on us.”

Zack looked down and saw
blood saturating his shirt.

He listened to them with
glee. Idiots! It was a good thing he had been able to seal off his entry to the
elevator shaft while leaving the plate he had gotten loose looking untouched.
This was like clandestine war. He against them all. What fools! They could
check out the hatch in the elevator if it occurred to them and find everything
in the shaft normal. He had been busy over his break. The bolts holding the
steel plates on the dome over the elevator had taken time and strength to
remove. The time spent more than worthwhile. He had done it while everyone was
off on their little vacation. He had made a mistake getting caught up in
watching her. Witch. He had been spellbound at the sight of her rising from her
bath. Didn’t she know he hated to be teased like that?

Okay, maybe it hadn’t been
the smartest thing he’d ever done going to Burnham’s apartment. But he had to
know where things stood. He had hoped to settle things in Montreal. But Mo
hadn’t gotten on the plane. She could be derailed with a few choice words,
evidently. He had flown up to Montreal and using one of his fake identities,
boarded another plane and flown to the town where he had a car stashed. It had
been a pleasant ride back occupied with making plans. He thought about Mo and
Claude and Roddy. They weren’t the only ones who could put on a production as
they would soon find out. He’d had such plans with Mo in Montreal. But she’d
run to him, that abysmally goodie two shoes cop. The joy he’d felt when he
heard about Burnham’s injuries. The disappointment when he’d lived. He’d kept
an eye on them the whole time. He’d even seen Zack being picked up by that big
cop the day he was shot. He just couldn’t get into the building. Especially
once the press had shown up.

And Simpson, what a joke. He
thought he’d had him on the run. We’ll see about that. While they’re all going
bananas at the hotel he was already well into planning his grand finally at the
coliseum. His schuloss as they say in the world of clowns. This time the show
ended the way he wanted it to. If he couldn’t have Mo…

Back in the room Zack paced
in fury. Mo eyed him afraid to say a word. He’d heard. Gary had left with Les.
Al had questioned her and she told him what little she could about the person
she’d seen. Now it was just she and Zack and she could feel the livid freeze.

He was having a hard time
even looking at her for fear of what he might say or do. He held a towel
against his side. He’d blown off a paramedic who wanted to put him in an
ambulance and was waiting on the doctor who had seen Mo. Whitney’s doctor who
the man himself had insisted on calling. Exhausting himself, he sat down on a
chair across from her. “All about trust. Gotta trust Claude. Gotta trust Misha.
Gotta trust everybody in the whole damn world except the man who’s inside you
at night.”

“Zack, let, me explain, you
were in the…”

“Shut up! When were you going
to tell me? Didn’t have time? Everyone knew but me! What did you think I was
going to do? Yank out my IV and start kicking in doors?”

His sharp command startled,
then angered her. She tried to level her tone and be reasonable. “That’s
exactly what I thought you’d do.” Mo jumped up and paced. She thought she’d
made the right decision. There was nothing he could have done. “Look at you
now. Standing there bleeding when there was a paramedic right here! What do you
think you would have done?” She got more worked up as she spoke. She couldn’t
help it.

The question hung in the air
as the elevator doors opened and the doctor stepped in. “My but La Cirque du
Celestial is the gift that keeps on giving.” Zack and Mo both looked at him in
astonishment. “Give me some more light,” he ordered Mo, getting down to
business. Mo snapped on more lamps and turned up the overhead. She wanted to
snap something more. The angry snapping of light switches didn’t help. The
doctor unwound the blood soaked bandage until a long track of metal staples
were revealed. Starting just above the waist on the side traveling upward
toward the front where it bloomed out into a wider wound with several short
lines of stitching like a stick drawing of a flower.  The skin was still
black and blue turning to yellow around the edges of the long path the bullet
had traveled. Miraculously the bullet had ricocheted off his highest rib. It
had traveled along his flesh burning the line deeply enough to require
stitching. Mo saw how close he’d come and had to sit down. A wave of nausea
rolled over her.

Luckily, only a few staples
had been pulled enough to create the bloody mess. “Looks worse than it is, but
we’ll need to go to the hospital.”

“You got some catgut? I’m not
going anywhere.” Zack’s lips pressed tight and narrowed his eyes in a way the
doctor understood as implacable determination.

“I’ll do what I can, but you
need to get this checked out as soon as possible.” The doctor went to work.
Zack gritted his teeth but when Mo tried to take his hand he pushed it away.
“How’s the shoulder?”

“Hurts. It’s not bleeding. I
don’t think.” Zack winced as the doctor inspected the bandaged shoulder.

“Call me tomorrow. And rest.
Don’t miss the antibiotics. Didn’t anyone tell you you’ve been severely
injured? I think you would have figured it out on your own by now. Keep him
down, Ms. Whitman. For God’s sake!” The doctor briskly snapped his bag shut.

Zack lay back nestled into
the back of the sofa dazed with pain. He felt the stupidity of climbing sixteen
stories worth of steps. He was weak, without even the energy to sustain his
anger. “Zack?”

Mo leaned over him, terrified
of and for him. But look at what he’d done. Didn’t that in itself justify the
decision she had made?” She didn’t care about being right. Not after what she’d
just seen. “Drink this water. He said you needed to drink some water. You’re
dehydrated.”

Zack heaved a sigh and
groaned as the pain shot up his side as if he was on that ladder all over again.
He reached up for the water but his arm fell limply. Mo carefully held the
glass to his lips. He vaguely remembered the doctor plunging the hypodermic
needle into him. What was in that? Did he give him something? It felt so nice
to lean back with his eyes closed. The pain lessened and Zack didn’t even
notice when he stopped feeling his body.

He had refused to go into the
bedroom. Mo put the throw on him and lifted his legs onto the coffee table. She
had seen what she hadn’t seen before. He had a temper bolstered by a savage
stubbornness. It made her realize how little she knew him. Was that suppressed
part of him what made him such a stunningly animalistic lover? Had that been
running beneath the surface the whole time? Was it the drugs? She breathed a
shuddered breath at the fury that had been directed towards her. If the doctor
hadn’t come in…”

Zack slept hard and Mo
slipped out to go for a run. Meese signaled Hagman and they settled into their
Lincoln Town Car and cruised slowly along. Her sleep had not gone well. She’d
been afraid to sleep in the bedroom alone and had settled in a chair. Not
surprisingly it had been a wakeful night of discomfort and worry about Zack.
Moore had spent the night discreetly in the second bedroom and Smith had people
all over the hotel, including the roof. On top of that, Al and the police had
conducted a room to room search. Yet she’d felt vulnerable at the same time her
mind raced with the fight with Zack. She’d felt the need to keep checking him.
She feared he might waken and need her. She feared for them both when he came
out of his stupor and they picked up where they’d left off.  She ran
toward the coliseum recalling seeing a brief glimpse of that anger the night
she crawled onto his lap in her hotel room and he’d accused her of needing
another notch on her bedpost.

People usually put their best
sides forward with other people. It could take a long time to really know
someone. Al Simpson was one of the few people she’d ever met that didn’t
bother. But then his disposition had been formed by years of homicide work and
an inherent lack of interest in what people thought of him. But Zack hadn’t
tried to manipulate her with a Mr. Niceguy approach. He wouldn’t even have been
here if she had not gone to him. Could he have manipulated that and she just
hadn’t seen it? He seemed like a ‘what you see is what you get’ kind of guy.
Except in bed where he had completely demolished any expectations she might
have had and supplanted them with the keen knowledge of a tender sensuality
combined with primal rawness.  Had she fallen in love with a man because
he had challenged her? In every way? Because he had taken her body to extremes
of pleasure she had never guessed existed.

She had felt a wall of anger
slam into her the night before. She knew he wouldn’t have hit her but she felt
as if the strength of his fury could have pounded her without him ever raising
a hand. Now indignation gleaned the sharp stalks of fear. How dare he make her
feel guilty? How dare he be so presumptuous to second guess a decision she had
made under duress. Especially when there was nothing he could have done. As if
he had any room to talk after running up sixteen flights of stairs until he
almost bled to death. Did he think he was going to take control of her
decisions? Did he believe she would surrender her judgment to him? She was
going to see exactly what Zack Burnham did when things didn’t go his way. That
was the best way to see what a person was really made of.

To the frustration of the
boys she did an abrupt turn. They had to turn around avoiding service trucks
that had blocked the way. She was ahead by the time they got turned around.
Meese twisted his mouth with annoyance and hit the pedal. He showed the other
guy some fancy maneuvers driving as if land mines were planted in the massive
coliseum parking lot.

Mo was braced for battle. She
practically jumped into the room. It was empty. She looked in all the rooms but
he was nowhere to be found. She saw his packed bag sitting to the side of the
elevator and she felt her heart do a triple. Scanning the room again she dashed
onto the elevator.

“Have you seen Zack?” She
asked Meese who she had asked to wait in the lobby. Then she saw Marvin Bedlow,
Vince Smith’s assistant director of security. She ran into Janet Ben-Ghury who
was apparently pulling a double armed with coffee and an annoyed countenance.
Who did that remind her of she said to herself thinking of Al Simpson.
Ben-Ghury hadn’t seen Zack. Mr. Coleman the desk manager gave her a strained
smile. He’d had a lot of angry people complaining about being rousted in the
middle of the night and questioned yet again about events connected to their
most important and troublesome guest.

Mo sucked it up and was about
to dial Al Simpson when he came through the door. “Have you heard from Zack? I
can’t find him anywhere.”

 “The roof.” He pressed
the elevator button. “Go back to your room. You’ve caused enough trouble for
one day. Meese! You just letting her run around the hotel for Chrissake? She’s
going to the room. Clear the elevator and stay on her. “I’ll put you into
protective custody if you leave your room until I say.” The doors closed on
him. Mo angrily pressed the button on the next elevator and stepped inside
without waiting for Meese to follow orders. He just made the elevator in time
scanning the small compartment as if it had numerous nooks and crannies where
the enemy might conceal themselves.

“Of all the gall!” She huffed
under her breath, eyes blazing at Meese. He crossed his arms, an arrogant little
grin fixed on his face as he stared at the service trap in the ceiling of the
elevator. Men. Were they all jerks? Even the best one she’d ever met was acting
like a lunatic. What was he doing on the roof? Idiot. What did she care? Oh,
she was just really getting to know him and she wasn’t sure he was all that
after all. And Al Simpson! Enough said. And look at this guy looking as if he
just swallowed the canary. They were all asses. Every one. Except Roddy who was
like a father. But all the rest. “All of you!” she screeched at Meese before
stepping off the elevator. She slammed the door to her room as Meese shrugged
with a chuckle. Women.

She fumed in her room for a
few minutes. Then she heard a door close. She peeked out then slipped out
closing the bedroom door. Not seeing Meese but seeing the other bedroom door
closed, she tiptoed over to confirm he was in the other bathroom. She heard him
singing ‘Somewhere Out There’ and raised her brows in wonder. She went to the
elevator hoping it was still on her floor. The door opened. She stepped onto it
with a sigh and pushed the button.