Yours, Mine, and Ours (35 page)

Ah! There. There at the end of a seventy-mile-long hallway were the doors to the torture chamber/blood bank place. I was supposed to find someone there. I was supposed to tell them a sad story. I was supposed to make them feel worse about a situation they could never, ever change. And then I was supposed to go back to my life. Who had given me this terrible assignment? Someone with no heart. Someone who had been chewed out before.

I shoved against the doors; they remained stubbornly shut. Locked! No. Wait. I had the strength of a febrile grasshopper; I should make another attempt before being chewed out.

So, in my cleverness, I fell against the doors.

chapter seventy-five

I opened my
eyes and saw Dr. Gallo’s black ones staring at me from a distance of less than a foot. “Ha!” I crowed. “My plan worked.”

“You’re insane,” he informed me, trying to take my pulse through all sorts of bandages.

“And you are drunk.” He was. As I had collapsed through the swinging doors, I caught a glimpse of him sitting bleary-eyed at his desk, a half-empty bottle of rum at his left elbow. In one of those odd moments in time that seem to take hours but are only microseconds, I’d seen his eyes widen, seen him clutch the side of his desk with whitened fingers, seen him vault the desk like a leather-wearing gymnast, and race to me in just enough time to catch me as my knees went. If I had not been groggy and dizzy and sweaty and racked with blinding pain, I would have complimented the man on his fine reflexes. He did
that,
drunk? What could he do when sober?

“Adrienne, what the
fuck
? How did you even get off the ward?”

“That is not my name.”
Shhhh! That’s a secret!
Shut up, inner voices. “The ward, phagh! I could have left anytime.” This was a lie. “I am a trained federal agent and they are overworked, underpaid, taken-for-granted hospital employees who are forever six steps behind me.”

“Good point. Now stay put,” he added, easing me off his lap. I was sorry to go. “I’m gonna call the—”

I clutched his bony wrist and squeezed in the right spot; he whitened, but said nothing, and nothing changed in his face. In that moment, I admired him greatly. In that moment, I may have fallen in love. Later, I could never be sure. The entire encounter had the quality of a fever dream.

“Wait,” I begged in a voice I had never,
ever
used with anyone else. “Wait. I have to tell you. I have to tell you about George and Luann, and all the dead boys in between. I can only tell you right now. Later I’ll be very official again. Later won’t be now.”

His eyebrows arched and the corner of his mouth twitched. “You realize, hon, you’re half out of your head with blood loss, among other things?”

“Of course. That’s why I had to come now.”

Now he was smiling; he looked delighted and clearly did not care if I saw that. “Now? When you’re half-dead from blood loss and half-doped on morphine? And dripping from sweat and you’ve torn several stitches, and I’m drunk off my ass on Captain Morgan’s and wondering if this is some sort of booze-induced hallucination and thinking very inappropriate thoughts about the helpless hottie in my lap? Now?”

“I am never helpless.” Then I laughed up at him. I shouldn’t have felt at all comfortable, cradled in his lap like I was, but I did. “Yes, now.”

“Fine.” He rubbed his eyes, reached in his pocket for a Kleenex, offered it to me, and when I waved it away, put it back in his pocket. “The
quick
version. And the second you pass out, I’m calling the ward.”

“All right.” I closed my eyes. Thought for a moment. Said, without opening them, “I have not passed out; I am gathering my thoughts.” He grunted, but did not comment. His hands were everywhere, but it did not feel inappropriate. He was smoothing and examining and even absently patting. I was the inappropriate one; I was dizzy, in pain, weak, thirsty, had a crushing headache … and was now sexually aroused. If I could have spared the breath to groan at my self-indulgence, I would have.

“Once upon a time, there was a boy named George Stinney who was legally murdered by the state of South Carolina on June 16, 1944.” As beginnings went, it was not exceptional. I was fortunate, though: I had a captive audience. Even if he had been willing to risk dumping my gunshot self off his lap to find a phone or gauze, he was as captivated by George Stinney as I had been.

“Then Luann died smiling,” I finished several days later. (To be fair, my sense of time might have been skewed.) “And that is all. There is no more.”

“Sure there is,” Max said. He was still deathly pale, still had breath that smelled like rum and coconut, but a lone tear had tracked from one eye down the side of his face, and I think he was unaware. “Why’d you tell me this? You could have told me the government-sanitized version and I never would have known.”

“
I
would have known. Besides…” Things were getting dark around the edges. The blood bank was suffering a gradual blackout, or I was close to passing out. “Besides, you took me flying. Your Honda … it’s like a storm cloud on wheels.”

“Oh, my. A poetic FBI thug.” He smirked, but did so in a way that made it impossible to take offense. Then the smile fell from his face and he bent and brushed a quick kiss across my forehead. “I’m in your debt forever. Not just for telling me about George. For getting them. Both of them. You need a favor, you come and see me first.”

I could hear rapid footsteps down the corridor. “I sense my imminent rescue. I suppose they were eventually going to notice my absence.”

He laughed, and held up his left hand to show me his cell. “I kind of called them when you weren’t looking.”

“You … sneaky…” I couldn’t finish. I was too annoyed. And too filled with admiration. Max Gallo: a man who, in another life without MPD, could have been the love of my life. “Sneaky … treacherous … wonderful…”

Fortunately for my pride, I passed out. Who knows what other insanity might have escaped my lips?

chapter seventy-six

Patrick whistled when
he saw me in the hospital bed the next morning. “Oh, man! Cadence is gonna be pissed.”

“Do not,” I sighed, aware I felt more guilt than gladness to see him, “add to my troubles.”

He set the cake box down without looking and rushed over to my bed. “Jesus! What happened? You know what? Never mind. I know what happened. You took a bullet for somebody, didn’t you? Don’t answer that. Agghh!” He had plunged his hands into his thick red hair and they had locked into fists. “I can’t believe this! My God, is there gonna be permanent damage? You can’t go back to that apartment alone!”

“Calm down. Stop screaming. I will be fine. The prognosis is full recovery.” Gallo hadn’t fallen to pieces when I’d lurched through the blood bank doors like a blood-spattered Frankenstein.

Not fair, I told myself. Gallo was a doctor. He was used to mayhem.

“Full, painful recovery plagued by far too many visits from physical therapists. Oh, and there is nonsense about a medal. I won’t show up for it and that is all there is to it. How is Olive?”

“She’s with me,” he said absently. “After George told me you’d be laid up for a few days I went and got her. And there was a doctor in the hall who gave me this … he said he forgot to give it to you earlier. I think he was a doctor. He looked like a real hard-ass. Thin, dark?”

Gallo had come to visit me! “Oh, I must have missed him,” I politely told the man I no longer loved. Maybe … had never loved?

Patrick handed me a catalog of the latest Honda motorcycles. Ah! My reward for foiling evil and surviving the gunshot and then stumbling to him in the middle of the night to vomit up everything I knew about JBK. Fortunately I had a bank account Cadence did not know about. I opened the brochure and a small folded note fell out. I pretended to ignore it.

“They said that guy’s from the blood bank … you’ve been getting your own blood.”

“Yes, ironically, Cadence once again donated for me, though she did not know it at the time. I suppose her silly urge to donate platelets or what-have-you is good for something.” In fact, if not for her silly urge, I might never have …

Been in the mess I am now. It was
not
a blessing.

“And that doctor thinks your name is Adrienne.”

“Yes, that’s how Michaela set it up,” I replied absently. “Fret not, Patrick, I have thrown in my lot with you.” Truer words, as they say, have never been spoken.

“Well, good, because that skinny guy with the catalogue was kind of cute.” There was a dark glint of something in Patrick’s eyes—jealousy? Anxiety? “But like I said, I’ve got her, so don’t worry about Olive.”

“Got her where?” Patrick lived in a hotel when he was in town. It was one of the many reasons he wished to buy a home. And his own closing was still a day or two off.

“Cathie’s.”

Oh, dear. That was bad. Cathie, Patrick’s sister and Cadence’s best friend, had OCD. A shedding dog would likely drive her over the edge into the red rage of madness.

For the first time in my life, I was relieved to find I would be in a hospital for the next few days. I had zero interest in calming Cathie out of one of her volcanic OCD-fueled rages. And zero interest in changing my living situation.

Because it would change. I had not lied; I had thrown in my lot with the baker. I was selfish, and I loved driving the body, but I would not ruin Cadence’s chance at happiness, nor Adrienne’s chance at acceptance. Patrick was willing to take us all; I was willing to go along with all that entailed.

I would not turn my back on a good man because I was intrigued by one who was complex.

I would not cheat Cadence out of the family she had sought since before I was “born.”

And I would not break the baker’s heart because I sensed something deeply interesting in a man I hardly knew, a man who took me for a motorcycle ride on a whim and, though he would never know, snatched my love before I realized I was holding it out to him.

“You’re coming home with me,” the baker was insisting. “I close on the house next week. Shit! There’s no furniture. I’ll buy you a bed. I’ll buy you a hospital bed. I’ll hire a nurse to—”

“You will not.”

“Shiro, will you be reasonable for once? You can’t take care of yourself. A nurse will just—”

“Be shot on sight.”

“Agghh! Okay, okay, a fight for another time.”

Ha! That was what
he
thought. As my personal hero Stewie Gilligan Griffin would say, victory was mine. I would live with him and lay with him, but I would not tolerate a home nurse.

He collapsed into the chair beside my bed. Rested his head in his hands. Groaned into them. “I was so worried,” he said to his palms. “I was so afraid you were going to die.”

“As your lawyer, I can tell you it was foolish to fret. I was very far from dying.”

“I gotta get used to this stuff, I gotta get a handle on it, I get it. But I am never gonna like it. I guess you wouldn’t be you if you weren’t charging after gunmen. But you got him? The bad guy who killed all those kids?”

“Yes.” For I held it to be true that the evil old man had been as responsible as any Stinney through the decades for the deaths. They could have stopped at any time. They chose not to. It took one of their own to turn, to understand, for the killings to finally, mercifully come to an end. “The killings are over.”
Those
killings, I should have said. But why destroy the mood?

“That’s good. I just wish you could have stopped them without getting hurt.”

“It was a small enough price to pay.”

It was true. I had a wound from which I would recover. I still had my friends, my family. I was loved, though was no longer certain I could return that love. Comparably speaking, I had everything.

She
had nothing. Just a drawer in the morgue, poor thing.

I was no longer a child, so I would not waste my breath with “It’s not fair!”

Sometimes, though, the cost seemed too high. For all of us.

chapter seventy-seven

“Opus didn’t have
clearance,” George told me a day later, “but the guy was a fucking genius with a fucking psycho-genius brother and sister. He was able to hack our system, no problem. Because he’d never had clearance, after Michaela killed his ass we never thought to revoke something that had never existed.”

“Terrific,” I grumbled.

“Here’s the part you’ll really hate, Shiro. Right up until last week they had access to all our shit. All the files. HOAP, VI-CAP—everything we could electronically access, they could, too.”

“You were correct, George. I really hate this part.”

“Yep. Now we’ve got IT weenies crawling over everything in the office. Nobody can find shit. I’m tempted to ask Emma Jan to shoot me in the shoulder so I can have a nice relaxing week in a hospital.”

“I will oblige you whenever you wish.”