Wanted (29 page)

“It’s just a scratch. Promise.”

I sat next to him and began preparing myself. “Leave lying for the liars.”

His smile looked more like a grimace, but I pulled the hand away as gingerly as I could, careful not to aggravate the injury further. It was startling how the blood gushed freely without the barrier of his hand, and how it now began to seep into his shirt at a horrific speed.

“What in the hell were you thinking?” I whispered.

He reached for a lock of my hair and smiled. “I was thinking ‘bout you.”

I reached for his hand, but it went limp, the multicolor of lights in his eyes flushing shut when he closed them.

I became frantic. “Charlie? Charlie?”

His lack of movement stopped my breath, yet if he would just speak, or move, even for a moment, then I knew that I could breathe again.

Reid began cursing into the headset and kicking the co-pilot chairs. I hardly heard all of the noise over my own silent panic. He would be okay, right? This bleeding would stop and he would wake up and be fine? I took his wrist and clutched it to me desperately, brushing his fingers against my cheek and keeping my thumb and forefinger against his pulse.

“You’re not allowed to die, Charlie Hays. It’s simply not acceptable.” I bit my lip to keep my tears from spilling. “Who else is going to keep me out of trouble?”

Despite the orchestrated alarm, Ben Walden was at ease. It was eerie the way he walked around the cabin with his shirt sleeve drenched in the blood of the man I loved. Unlike Reid and Yuri, he was completely composed, almost indifferent to the possibility of his friend bleeding to death. Somehow they had managed to hide Charlie’s wound from me during the bedlam of Singapore and grabbing the nearest taxi. The realization angered me. I had been so eager to get off the ship and back on land, or perhaps eager to ignore the blood, assume it didn’t belong to anyone I cared about.

“Damn it!”

“What is it, Reid?” Ben confirmed Charlie’s pulse and sat in the seat adjacent to him. “Why haven’t we taken off yet?”

“I can’t get confirmation that we’re clear. Wallace was the only one who could speak Mandarin. Most of the air traffic controllers speak English, but I can’t get a goddamn one to clear me.”

“Just go!” Yuri yelled

“And crash into something else coming in?”

I hated it with every inch of me, but I let go of Charlie as gently as I could manage. The idea of leaving him even just to walk a few yards ahead was putting splinters in my heart, but at the same time I also had the feeling we weren’t going any place at this rate, which meant he wouldn’t get the medical care he desperately needed.

So I whispered in his ear, “I’ll be right back, promise,” and made my way to the cockpit, practically jumping over Polo.

“What do you have to say to them?” I sounded much braver than I felt.

Reid whirled around and glared at me; I had done nothing but cause him trouble. “Get the hell out of here.”

While it may have been late in coming, the adrenaline was coming down on me hard. I didn’t have time for Reid and his pettiness; Charlie was hurt and needed help. If Reid was going to get in the way of that, then I would figure out a way to remove him from this current equation.

I yanked the headset from him before he had time to respond. The only advantage I genuinely had was his underestimation of me. Furiously, he lunged for it, but was already buckled in his seat, so I just took a step back, completely stoic and waiting.

I spoke the words into the small microphone and wrote down a series of numbers on a pad of notebook paper. A woman on the other end laughed at me, but spoke patiently enough that I sensed she sympathized with me.

“Thank you.” I spoke into the headset. If nothing else, I knew my basics well enough and there seemed to be plenty of individuals at air traffic who spoke Mandarin and well as Chinese.

The other end beeped four times as she had directed and I pulled it from my head and pushed it back in Reid’s face.

“You’re good to go.” I was positively seething.

He gawked at me.

Before we took off, I reclined Charlie back in his seat to elevate him. From an overhead deck, Ben pulled out a large tackle box and dropped it in the aisle.

He cleared his throat. “He’s had worse.”

Nervously, Ben laughed and surveyed the menagerie of supplies that lay in the box. In actuality, it was a first aid kit stemmed together from what looked like all kinds of sets and various household items.

I undid my seatbelt and slid back into the aisle. I could remember first aid and CPR training from summer camp. The anatomy I had learned from textbooks I could only hope would be useful to me now.

“It’s okay.” I tried to reassure both of us.

Whatever fears I had looming in my mind disappeared with the effort of the task in front of me. The scissors were easy to operate, and with them I removed Charlie’s shirt. If the situation were different, I might have enjoyed that very much, but I couldn’t give myself the luxury of thinking on those things now. Having an assignment gave me the ability to be unbiased and focused. I ran through the first aid safety checklist in my head and put on a pair of dusty latex gloves after I scrubbed my hands with scorching hot water in the restroom. It seemed like such a stupid thing at this point, but it made me feel sturdy and professional, so much unlike myself that I was even borderline confident.

Small strips of loose fabric from his t-shirt had somehow managed to get caught in the smallest fragment of the wound. With the most careful precision I think I’ve ever maintained, I removed those loose threads. Ben flicked on the single passenger light above us and sat back down. With the newfound light, I could see his injury appeared to be fairly orderly in terms of its shape. I didn’t know much, but I did know that anything jagged wouldn’t allow the wound to close properly.

Ben went back to talking with Yuri and I went back to work. I cleaned the area with a mild disinfectant, also checking the expiration date, and being careful not to aggravate the injury further. Every so often I would glance up at Charlie’s face. I didn’t want to think about why he was still unconscious and why every so often the core of the abrasion would gush with fresh blood. I taped down sterile gauze pads with an equal amount of pressure on both sides to try and keep the bleeding down. From there, I enclosed the wound in a tight bandage. It wasn’t great, but it would have to do for now.

“Wherever we’re going does have a doctor, right?” I said to no one in particular.

Ben nodded seriously. “Everything will be taken care of.”

I stood up and wandered into the aisle. “Is there any water around here?”

Eager to be active, Polo unbuckled himself and headed to the back of the jet where he made a ruckus of noise.

“Water? Water? Anybody water?” He frantically started tossing the bottles to everyone. I was lucky enough to catch one just before it landed on Charlie’s head.

Yuri caught one of the wild throws. “Polo, you’re the ugliest flight attendant I’ve ever seen.”

We all smiled, but it wasn’t very heartfelt. Charlie was still unmoving, and as pale as anything I had ever seen.

I sat back down beside him and unclasped the water, forcing some into his mouth. Even though he coughed reflexively, it was good to hear some kind of response from him. Every few moments I made him drink a little more.

I rested my hand against his chest and continued to periodically feed him water. His eyes were sunken in and dark against the white of his normally tan complexion. But that wasn’t what bothered me. What truly disturbed me was his lack of response to my touch. I brushed my hand against his cheek, his forehead, and silently prayed for the flutter of an eyelash or the twitch of a lip. But the only movement came when I forced him to drink.

I began whispering in his ear. “Did you know that tigers have striped skin, not just striped fur? Did you know that the average person blinks about twenty-five times per minute?” I brushed the hair from the side of his face and leaned against his shoulder. “Did you know the human heart beats 100,000 times a day?” I choked on my own words. “You still have lots and lots to go today.”

“How long until we get there?” I asked Ben.

He looked to Reid for an answer. “You’ll have to ask that one.”

“We finally caught a break,” Reid answered. “No reports of bad weather, going as fast as we can. Should be there in about fourteen hours.”

Fourteen hours? And that was a short amount of time? I tried not to seem disappointed, but I couldn’t help it. Who knew how Charlie’s condition could be by then?

“It’s usually like eighteen hours,” Polo said. “It’s the worst. A couple of hours less is a lot better, right, guys?”

Ben’s focus seemed to be on a point on the floor. “Hmm? Oh sure, Polo. Absolutely.”

He stood up then and walked to the back of the cabin. When he returned, it was with a small humidor. Yuri and Polo declined the offer of a cigar, but Ben lit one up almost immediately.

I checked Charlie’s pulse again. It was weak but steady. It was really his shallow breath that began to concern me.

“Put that out, please?” I nodded to the cigar.

The glare he gave me was almost threatening, daring me to ask again. Still, he produced a crystal ashtray from a side compartment and put out the butt without complaint. As I watched his strangely graceful movements, I realized the unique opportunity I had at that moment, as it was very possible Charlie would never allow me to know any more about his past than I could read in a newspaper. But Ben Walden had known him for years, and Charlie was hardly in any position to object to a friendly interrogation.

“You and Charlie met in prison, right?”

Yuri craned his head from the window. At last the conversation seemed to interest him.

“That’s correct.” Ben seemed unsurprised by the question, almost as if he expected it, even.

I remembered what the articles had said about their sentences and what they had done. I figured if Ben wasn’t going to volunteer any information, then I was going to have to choose my questions wisely enough to gain as much data as possible.

“W-were you doing this kind of stuff before then?”

He smiled. “I was doing work along these lines, yes. But Charlie Boy was still doing that mettling child’s play.” He waved the phrase away as though it disgusted him.

I shifted uncomfortably in my seat and tried to prepare myself. “I take it you aren’t referring to hopscotch?”

“I like hopscotch!” Polo jumped up and started jumping from one foot to the other in the aisle.

“As a young man he acted as a bit of a motivator for some of the less refined groups of the south.” Ben scoffed at what seemed to be a fond memory. “I could see the potential here—” He kicked Charlie’s leg fondly. “So I took him under my wing.”

What was I supposed to say to this? I knew Charlie was capable of hurting people. I had seen and felt his anger inflicted on others. It was only too easy to picture him as a brooding teenager, working as a leg-breaker (or whatever it was) because he thought it was his place. And while I only had a vague idea about jail from Hollywood and the media, I understood that gang life was something of a necessity. Still, the idea of some twisted Aryan ideals and Charlie looking toward them made me sad.

Maybe he was young and stupid, I told myself.

I looked at him and smiled. Was that what he had meant when he said I wouldn’t love him after awhile?

“I’m going to prove you so wrong,” I whispered to him.

“You need to stop taking people under your wing,” Yuri mocked. “You took Wallace under your wing, and ‘cause of him, we got two dead people, a kidnapped girl, and Charlie got a hole in his gut.”

“True, true.” He weighed his hands out in mock balance. “However, we also have one less share to split, Charlie
has
a girl, and we have rid ourselves of a troublemaker.”

Yuri began counting off the items. “Life sentences for everybody, and all kinds of unnecessary heat.”

Ben groaned into his fist. “Hmm, well, we’ll take care of all of that when the time comes.”

I didn’t know whether or not it would be appropriate to apologize, but I had a compulsive desire to do so. I hated to be an inconvenience to people. Heck, I even hated asking the librarian for help finding something at the reference desk. But on the other hand, I hadn’t asked to be kidnapped, either. And there wasn’t any chance I would apologize for the way I felt about Charlie.

Polo poured a handful of colorful candies in his mouth. “The police won’t be a problem, will they?”

“No, Polo.” The words came out of my mouth before I could stop them “Not because of me, anyway.”

I pulled my knees to my chest and created a veil with my hair, though it was impossible not to see the glare Reid gave me.

I looked Charlie over and reached for the pulse at his neck. Though he was still abnormally pale, his pulse seemed stronger. I counted the beats there and remembered to breathe. The serpent bounced beneath my finger: one, two, three, four…

“Does anyone have a phone I can borrow?”

Yuri eyed me suspiciously.

“The internet.” I hoped my stare would shatter him.

Ben rolled his eyes at us. “You kids play nice now.” He then tossed a sleek-looking device in my direction, naturally I dropped it. My blush increased dramatically.

“Sorry,” I muttered.

I squished up into a tiny version of myself and concealed myself beside the shield of Charlie’s arm. He was feeling warm but not abnormally so; I hoped a fever wasn’t threatening to settle in.

It was peculiar to see myself right away when I tapped on the browser. The homepage was linked to a popular news site and there I was on a string list with a half a dozen of the day’s headlines.

No New Leads on Missing Honors Student

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is actively pursuing the possible abduction of Adeline Battes, 17, missing since last Tuesday after she was last seen speaking with convicted felon Charles Hays, 29. Although no ransom demands have been made, Battes’ destroyed cellular phone was found several yards within a crime scene involving the death of truck driver Spenser Hanson, 46, and the theft of an unidentified number of computer staging equipment.