The Bride Wore Red Boots (6 page)

Her unusual contemplation unnerved her slightly. It had to be the headache, and the silence after the insanity of this day—surrounded by children and parents and all their current worries not so much different from the ones she'd grown up with. Now more concerns about Joely back home made being alone throb like an old, aching wound.

She rubbed her temples, broke open the crackers, and dunked one resolutely in the steaming mug of cocoa. She bit into the softened graham-y heaven and closed her eyes. This had been her favorite snack since childhood. Another slice of her headache slipped away.

After three crackers, she opened her computer and brought up her work schedule for the next month. What had Gabriel said? The fourteenth. That was Joely's appointment. Wait, Gabriel?

“Please, call me Gabriel. I'm a civilian.” He'd been making that request since the day they'd met. She mimicked him out loud in a ridiculous voice that didn't do him justice—or fairness. But he was an arrogant know-it-all. Well, sometimes.

A movie-star handsome, arrogant know-it-all.

Oh, for crying out loud
.

She pushed him out of her thoughts and studied her appointments and scheduled surgeries. Every day through the tenth was filled. And she had two routine tonsillectomies scheduled for, crap, Tuesday morning the fourteenth. That was going to make it pretty much impossible to get to Wyoming during the day.

Disappointment rose bitterly, although she didn't know why. Joely's situation was something she could discuss perfectly easily over Skype. Her schedule was always filled.

She really was exhausted.

She closed her laptop and set it aside, pulling the afghan close around her chin and fluffing a throw pillow behind her. With little care as to what appeared in front of her, she turned on the television set. Six o'clock evening news. Perfect.

Gabriel Harrison appeared on the screen. A large Garfield-colored cat lay draped in his arms, and he stroked it slowly, with pinky raised, like Dr. Evil in an old Austin Powers movie.

“Dr. Crockett, I'm sorry but you cannot speak to this cat. He's my client, and he does not want to go into foster care.”

“He has no place else to go. It's not safe to wander the streets.”

“You'll have to take it up with the Supreme Court. I'm only doing my job.”

“I know my rights, Lieutenant. I demand to know where you intend to put him.” She stomped her foot to make her point.

“He's going to a group home for indigent cats. He has no way to pay for a nice foster mother.”

“The veterans' administration can't just kick him out. He has eight more lives, but they'll be wasted overnight if he goes to a group home.”

“I'm just doing my job.” Somewhere next to him a phone began to ring. “Excuse me,” he said. “This is the director of the home now.”

“You have the same phone ring I do,” she said, confused.

Her eyes flew open. Beside her on the coffee table, her phone buzzed, and her ring tone blared through the empty room. The news was just ending. Bolting upright, she pressed four fingers of her right hand against one temple, but the headache had lessened substantially. Afraid she'd miss the call, she answered without looking at the caller ID.

“Hello, Amelia Crockett.”

“Dr. Crockett? Hello. This is Aaron Sanderson. You might have heard my name as Buster. I think you're the answer to a prayer.”

G
ABRIEL
H
ARRISON RAN
a hand over his eyes and stared at the mayhem spread out before him like a buffet of frat-boy pranks. He hadn't believed over the phone that the aftermath of this practical joke was so widespread. Now he knew he was probably flirting with losing his job by laughing.

His men didn't do things by half.

The Honda Civic belonging to the head of Wyoming VA's Department of Veterans' Benefits stood at the front of a line of three cars right outside the veteran's service building. It was plastered bumper to sunroof to trunk with colorful sticky notes. Not a sliver of paint showed, not a glint of window could be seen. One door was pink, another green, and the windows were all like checkerboards, with blue and white squares. Spelled out along one side in purple notes was the phrase “Send a memo, Dick.” A reference to the car's owner, Dick Granville.

The third car in the lineup, a green Ford Escape, belonged to the deputy director of the whole medical center, and it was swaddled front to back in who-knew-how-many layers of clear plastic cling wrap. Gabriel winced and rubbed his eyes.

The real mess, however, came at the expense of the middle car, a brand-new black Lexus owned by the executive director, Frank Simms. Someone had rigged a mini-bomb with a payload of whipped cream to trigger by opening the car door. A partially demolished box about eighteen inches square sat on the ground beside a back tire, and every spot in its wrecked vicinity was covered in dripping white goo. This included the car's interior, the bases of three flag poles in a center island of the driveway, and six people, one of whom was Frank Simms himself.

Gabriel knew exactly who'd done the deeds, as well as why. No matter. He and the eight men participating in his experimental PTSD project were in serious effing doo-doo here. But, damn, this was a seriously skilled prank job by his guys, who'd clearly paid way too much detailed attention to his stories about the college hacks he'd taken part in back in the day. An unconscionable flare of pride in his group got tamped down quickly. What Gabriel saw as a nonviolent outlet for serious frustration by a group of angry-but-healing, mentally wounded men, who could just as easily have taken a far more dangerous tack, would be viewed as vandalism by the higher-ups.

“Harrison!”

He swallowed the last urge to burst into laughter and faced Pete Oswald. For all intents and purposes he and Pete did the same job, but because he'd been at the job six months longer, Pete was de facto leader of their patient advocacy staff. A humorless man at the best of times, he now wore the crazed mask of someone looking for live bodies to hang.

“Pete. This is . . . ” The traitorous urge to laugh assailed him again, and he coughed into his hand. “This is a mess. I'm sorry.”

“You have every reason to be. Your band of crazies has been racking up confrontations with the director and the benefits office for three months now. I think it's fairly obvious they targeted the top three people at this facility on the exact day they had an all-hands meeting.” He shook a limp piece of paper in front of Gabriel. “Besides, they left this.”

The paper had clearly been a victim of the cream, but the writing was still legible.

“To the leaders of our esteemed Veterans Administration. Over the past several months, many attempts to get the attention of anyone who can help us have failed. We're forced to conclude that you haven't received our e-mails, letters, or phone calls. We hope that once you've received these messages, you'll finally consider our requests. We are in need of help with the following servicemen's records. Once our requests have been acknowledged, we'll appear in person and discuss discipline for our actions.”

There followed the names, service identification numbers, and case numbers from all eight of the men Gabriel was working with.

“Well, this seems pretty straightforward to me,” Gabe said.

“It's straightforward, all right. You get these guys into my office by eight hundred hours tomorrow, or I'll have them up on charges.” He started to turn away.

“C'mon, Pete.” Gabriel touched the man's upper arm to stop him. “You don't have the power to do that.”

“They are under our auspices, and you're the one who put them there. The nail goes into our coffin, so in this fight they're our dogs. Your dogs.”

“Look. They all live in the same building and they talk. They're frustrated, and they don't have faith I can help anymore because the benefits jokers don't listen to me, either.”

“Beside the point. If they act like a gang of street thugs, talking each other into shit they'd never think of on their own, somebody has to act like a parent.” Pete grinned humorlessly. “Hello, Daddy.”

“They won't come. Unless it's for us to listen to them.”

“Oh, I think they will.” Pete's voice was threatening, like a rattlesnake emerging from under a rock.

“Or what? You can't court martial them. Are you going to threaten to halt their benefits? Half of them are already waiting for decisions on money or services they should have received months ago. Have you ever considered helping me side with them?”

“The United States doesn't negotiate with terrorists.”

Gabriel had to laugh. “Right. Terrorists should all be this benign. Look. Help me get them heard. We'll make them pay for damages, and if the director wants to press charges, so be it.”

Pete deflated slightly. Gabe looked over his shoulder at the whipped cream-covered director who was speaking with several police officers. To Gabriel's surprise and relief, Director Simms was wiping his shirt with a towel and smiling.

“Why these guys, Gabe?” Pete sighed. “Eight of the most cracked men in the West, and you put them together.”

“Because we're the ones who cracked them. We sent them to hell, and now we expect them to come back and behave like nothing's different in their worlds. I know from personal experience that isn't close to true. And this ‘shit' they pulled tonight is nothing remotely like the shit they were asked to pull in that Sandbox. So cut 'em some slack, give them some time. Let me explain to—” Gabe was cut off by the electronic warble of his cell phone.

He pulled it out and saw the private number for one of his favorite clients, a severely injured auto accident victim named Joely Crockett. It was nearly seven thirty—awfully late to be calling him. His brows drew together.

“I have to take this, Pete.”

Pete waved him away. “I'll deal with this now. I'd rather be the one to do it anyhow.”

Gabriel nodded and answered his phone. “Joely?”

“Gabe?” Her voice shook with tightly coiled anxiety. “I'm so, so sorry to call you this late.”

“Hey, it's perfectly all right. Is something wrong?”

“The doctor came up tonight and said they'd taken a more thorough look at the MRI from this afternoon. They found something they want to double check—a . . . a cyst that's formed unexpectedly. They want to do another MRI right now because, if it's where and what they think it is, they want to do surgery first thing in the morning. But, it's risky; they'd be working right on the spinal cord. I don't know much else.”

“I'm sorry, Joely. What can I do?”

She was a fragile patient physically, recovering more slowly than anyone liked. She'd lost the use of one leg, and nobody seemed to know if the injury could or would be reversed. Joely normally didn't panic but tended to turn somber and fatalistic. She did suffer from depression, however, so the fear in her voice worried him.

“I know it's probably ridiculous, but I really want to talk to Mia, and I can't reach her.”

Mia. His pulse hiccupped and then sped forward like a Ferrari hitting a speed bump. Dr. Amelia Crockett, Joely's sister, was a general and pediatric surgeon in New York. The woman was pretty much everything Joely was not: demanding, abrasive, pushy. She didn't take no for an answer ever, and when she'd been here in Wyoming the first two weeks after Joely's accident, she'd gone over his head to Pete multiple times, and over Pete's head at least once. And yet, Amelia was brilliant, devoted to her sister and, at age thirty-two, a prodigy of a surgeon from what he'd been able to research about her—not that he'd admit Googling her to anyone. She was also stunning—a satisfyingly sexist observation—and the rich, warm, musical laugh that had accompanied her rare smiles came to mind every time he heard her name.

“And you need me to call her again,” he said.

“Everyone at home is still out somewhere. I've left all of them messages but . . . ” Her voice cracked and halted.

“I'm sure everything is fine,” Gabriel said.

To his surprise, she laughed weakly. “I'm so sorry. This is what self-absorbed panic sounds like. I wasn't worried about them, isn't that awful?”

“Of course not. I'm glad you weren't. You should be thinking about yourself.”

“You're a nice person,” she said. “So it's your own fault you got this call. It's just that I'd feel so much better if Mia could talk to the doctors here—even on the phone. I know she would ask the questions none of us here know to ask. They're so grave about everything. I don't know what to be worried about most.”

“I will call your sister. And I'll be at the hospital in five minutes. I'm just across the campus at the administration building.”

“I left her a message, but they're coming to get me any moment and I won't be able to take my phone.”

“I'll find her. And I'll find you. Okay? We have all night to figure this out.”

He heard a slight sniff. “You rock. I did get the best patient advocate. This isn't in your job description.”

“For you, Miss Joely, there's no job description. Happy to make it up as we go along. I'll see you in a few minutes.”

“Thank you, Gabe. So much.”

He hung up and sighed. He'd already talked to Amelia once today. It hadn't gone that badly. She'd only called him Buster, vain, and a user of smug semantics.

Whatever. He could handle a battle of nouns and adjectives with a
girl
. He smiled and checked his watch. It would be nine thirty in New York. She could be dealing with her own emergency patient. He found her in his address book and hit call. He'd leave her a message now and figure out later why his nerves vibrated with anticipation as he waited for her voice mail.

S
HE WAS CERTIFIABLE
. Nobody would disagree with her.

Mia had felt safe enough in the subway, but once she surfaced she knew she never should have agreed to Buster's request no matter how heartfelt it had been. He'd promised to meet her at the top of the subway exit stairs and walk her the two blocks to St. Sebastian's, and she'd confirmed with Gwen, the shelter director, that Buster/Aaron was legit. Despite her precautions, she looked around the dark, grimy street after emerging from the station and saw nobody who looked like he was waiting for a foolish doctor far from her comfort zone.

Not that she was alone. Although the nicest term she could use to describe this neighborhood was sleazy, a couple walked the sidewalk across the street from where she stood; one wiry black man leaned in a doorway, eyeing her blandly while he exhaled cigarette smoke; and at least two pairs of feet in tattered shoes stuck out from a dilapidated storefront three doors down.

Mia had lived in New York for eight years, and she'd spent plenty of time volunteering in mobile and free clinics. She wasn't put off by poverty, nor was she squeamish about bodies sleeping outdoors—sorrowful, yes, but not shocked. She'd never, however, made a habit of walking tough neighborhood streets alone. And this was one of the toughest.

She drew a breath and nodded to the man in the doorway. Just past the subway surround, she nearly stumbled into another body, seated against the upright iron posts of the green fencing. He held out a small plastic container containing a measly few coins and a couple of crumpled bills.

“Spare a dollar, Mother?” he asked.

She stopped and stared down at him. She knew handing out money to a panhandler was usually counterproductive. This man might want a fast food meal or sandwich at a local grocer, or he might head for the nearest cheap bottle of wine. She had no way of knowing which. “I'm heading two blocks to St. Sebastian's. Will you walk with me? There's warm food and a bed there.”

“I don't need no place to stay.” He stared at her, affronted. “I'm lookin' to he'p my little child. No more than that.”

“Now, Arthur, just because you don't recognize this lady as being from around here, that doesn't mean it's all right to tell her your old fake little child story.”

Mia sagged with relief and looked into the kind face of the woman whose voice she recognized from two phone calls. She was maybe in her fifties, more mature than her voice had given away. Behind her stood a thin, bearded, white man of medium height wearing a green army jacket, brown knit cap, and tweed gray fingerless gloves. He carried a large cardboard box, covered in animal designs, by a handle.

“Gwen? Buster?”

“I'm so sorry we're late,” she answered. “We had a rush at the shelter all of a sudden. I think the weather forecast changed slightly, so everyone came in. We're headed for a cold rain tonight.”

Mia couldn't help but turn in her spot and peer down the street at the worn shoes sticking onto the sidewalk.

Gwen nodded. “We'll get to them and try to convince them to join us. But there are a few who have such fear of crowds that they'll huddle under trash before coming inside.” She waved to the man in the door. “Francis,” she said.

“Miss Gwendolyn,” he replied.

“I'm sorry.” She turned back to Mia. “I'm Gwen Robertson. Dr. Crockett, it's so good of you to come. This is Aaron.”