Promises to Keep (9 page)

Twenty-Five

The name
Dr. T.
Patterson
was embroidered on the lapel of his white lab coat, but Sabrina would be willing to guess the real Dr. Patterson was dead in a janitor's closet somewhere. She couldn't pinpoint one exact reason she saw him for what he really was. Maybe it was the way his eyes slid around the room as if looking for potential threats. Maybe it was the way he stood, feet shoulder width apart in a defensive stance that spoke of years of combat training. Maybe. But she was pretty sure it had everything to do
with the fact that the slight bulge on his hip told her he was strapped under that stolen coat.

Standing at the foot of the boy's bed, he pretended to read the chart, nodding his dark head as if he knew what he was looking at. He flipped the page and flashed her a glimpse of the back of his hand. A tattoo, some sort of gang tag. That clinched it.

The muscle in his jaw jerked and he gave her a quick glance. He knew he was made.

Shit.

The guy dropped his shoulders and reached for his waist, the chart clattering to the floor.

Sabrina stood, lunging over the bed to grab onto the tray of food, and flung it like a Frisbee. It flew the short distance, cracking him in the chin. He stumbled back, stunned. But it wouldn't last. Fisting her hand in the boy's hospital Johnny, she yanked, intent on pulling him out of bed and dragging him to safety before the bullets started flying.

The leather cuffs strapping him to the bed had other ideas.

Pulling her SIG off her hip, she took aim while her free hand flew to a set of straps and started to work. The boy was no longer pretending to sleep. His eyes were yanked wide, the blank stare replaced by one of stark terror. Twisting his wrist inside the cuff, he struggled against it. Something buzzed the back of her head, burning a path in her scalp seconds before she heard the
ssk
of the silenced round. No time.

Diving, she angled her body across the boy and returned fire. Blood burst across the white lab coat at his shoulder and side. Staggering back, the guy took aim again.
“No estoy solo, puta.”

She fired again, this time hitting center mass. His body jerked, the gun clattering to the floor. He fell back into the wall, leaving a trail of blood as he slid downward.

Wasting no time, Sabrina turned to free the boy. He'd managed to work himself loose and was jerking on the second set of restraints. As soon as the cuff was loose, she pulled him out of bed, shoving him into the space between the wall and the nightstand. “Stay,” she said, hoping her tone would keep him in place.

Footsteps and shouts echoed down the hall.

No estoy solo, puta.
I'm not alone, bitch.

People were coming. Among them would be someone looking to finish what his partner started. She reached across the bed and used the control panel to kill the florescent overheads. The only light now came through the window in the door. She looked down at the boy. He sat much as he had at the house after they found him. Knees pulled up to his chest, face no longer terrified. He looked blank—resigned to the violence he'd been plunged into.

Something warm and thick squirmed down her spine. She swiped at it with her free hand and brought up fingers that were sticky and dark—darker even than the gloom that surrounded them.

Blood. She'd been shot

“It's gonna be okay,” she said, more to herself than him. There was a Pip in the waiting room. He'd have heard the shots, would secure the floor. Whoever was out there wouldn't get past him, but if he did …

She held her gun steady on the door and waited.

Twenty-Six

The elevator opened onto
chaos. Nurses and doctors running in every direction. Patients shouting. Alarms going off. Instinct pushed Michael's hand to his hip, had him lifting the Kimber .45 out of its holster. He stepped into the hall, gun held tight against his thigh. Something was wrong, but until he knew what, waving a gun around wasn't a good idea.

A nurse was cowering under the charge desk a few feet away. “What's going on?” he said, flashing her the borrowed badge on his hip to speed things along.

“Gunshots. Four of them.”

Shit. Where was Sabrina? The boy—what was his name?
“Alex. Alex Kotko. What room?”

The nurse pointed a shaky fingering. “Five-nineteen.”

Turning in the direction she'd indicated, he brought the gun up. “Call the police.” He walked swiftly, the barrel of his gun trained in front of him. The hallways had emptied and patients' doors were closed, some of them barricaded. He passed the waiting room. The flat screen on the wall showed the midday news to a deserted room.

Five-nineteen. He took a quick look through the small observation window in the door. The room was dark.

“Sabrina,” he said loudly. No response.

He pulled the door open, light fell across the bed. It was empty. “Sabrina.” He said it again as he stepped into the room. Finding the light switch, he flipped it on. She was standing on the other side of the bed, steady-handed, SIG aimed at his face.

She held the gun on him a second longer than necessary before dropping it to her side. “What took you so long, O'Shea?” Her voice trembled just a bit. The sound of if, the fact that she sounded glad to see him slammed his throat closed.

“Traffic,” he said, letting his gaze slide to the man on the floor. The blood-soaked scrubs and lab coat said he was a doctor. The 9mm outfitted with a silencer on the floor next to him said he was something else entirely. Blank eyes, lids at half-mast, looked at the door as if he'd died while waiting for someone.

Michael nudged him roughly with the toe of his shoe before looking up at Sabrina. She was still watching the door. Before he could ask, she said, “He told me he's not alone. There's another one out there—”

“There's no one. I did a sweep.”

Jamming her gun into the holster strapped to her hip, she turned and reached down to haul up the boy. “Then he's on his way.” Blood matted the back of her hair.

Without thinking, he grabbed her, started running his hands over her arms and back. She tried to push him away, but he ignored her, kept probing. Lifting her hair off her neck, he revealed a thick trail of blood originating from her scalp. The deep furrow at the base of her skull wept red, the edges of it singed black by the heat of the bullet. He stalled out, felt his lungs go tight in his chest. Another half an inch would've killed her.

She pushed his hand away with a hissed, “I'm okay.” She looked at the boy. “You have to take him. Get him out of here before more of them show up.”

He almost laughed. “I'm not leaving you here.”

“I can handle it, you have to go—we only have a couple of minutes. The Pip Ben left—”

“What? There's no one here.” Alarm bells started clanging around in his head.

“Yeah, there is. Crew cut, dark suit, big as a house. I know a Pip when I see one.” She angled her head to look out the window. “He was in the waiting room. I saw him when I got here.”

The fact that she'd just described one of Shaw's rent-a-thugs to a T disturbed him on about a hundred different levels. “Sabrina, there's no one here,” he said. Something was wrong. Very wrong. But he didn't have time to sort through what she was telling him—not right now.

Crouching, he turned toward the boy and spoke to him in Russian. The boy nodded. Michael reached for him and pulled him forward, led him over to the man slumped against the wall. He spoke again. Ben was right—his Russian was a bit rusty, but he got his point across just fine. The boy studied the dead man for a few seconds before he nodded, his answer carried on quavering tones.

“What are you saying?” Sabrina said.

“I'm asking him if he recognizes him.”

“And?”

Dropping a hand on the boy's shoulder, he spoke to him quietly. The boy looked up at him and nodded again, his face a pale mask, tight with fear.

“He says this piece of shit is one of the men who sold him.” He looked at her before continuing. “The only problem is that our dead friend here doesn't work for Reyes.”

He expected her to ask him who Reyes was. She didn't. Further proof of just how deep she'd waded into this whole mess. “Then who does he work for?” she said, her eyes bouncing from the body on the floor between them to find him.

It was commonplace for those within cartels and other criminal organizations to brand themselves. Tattoos were used to tell others who you were: who you worked for, the rank you held. How many people you'd killed.

Michael studied the tattoo that covered the back of the man's hand. A Fleur-de-lis. He'd killed plenty of men with that same tattoo, and recently. Those alarm bells in his head got a little louder. “A man I killed thirty-six hours ago.”

Twenty-Seven

Within minutes, the place
was swarming with cops—uniforms and suits—and Mathews had wasted no time in crawling up Sabrina's ass. Michael could hear him barking at her through her cell. Never mind that she'd defended a witness and taken out a cartel assassin. What Mathews was worried about was his own ass and how one of his inspectors turning a hospital into the O.K. Corral was going to make him look to the top brass.

He looked at the kid and wondered what the hell he was going to do with him. How he was going to keep him safe. Under normal circumstances, he'd take a witness to an FSS safe house and await instructions, but the last forty-five minutes had proved that this situation was anything but normal. Following protocol, Ben had left a Pip here to guard the Kotko boy, but Shaw's muscle was nowhere to be found once the bullets started flying. Either he'd abandoned his post … or he'd been following other orders.

He thought about the man Sabrina killed. One of Cordova's, which meant someone else was calling the shots, and the turf war that'd been brewing was far from over. And how did the Maddox boy figure in? By all accounts he'd been kidnapped on Reyes's orders. So why was it Cordova's man in a body bag and not—

“A bell. I'm putting a fucking bell around your neck, Vaughn.”

Michael looked up to see Strickland standing in the doorway, a hard expression on his usually relaxed face. Sabrina mumbled something into the phone before dropping it into her pocket. “Hey, partner,” she said.

Strickland ignored her, aiming a glare his way. “Surprised
you're still here. Don't you usually take off after she gets shot?”

Gut clenched tight, Michael shifted his jaw around a few choice words but he kept them to himself. Strickland was right, and getting into a pissing contest with him wouldn't change that.

“Jesus Christ, it's a graze. I'm
fine
,” Sabrina said in a heated rush, wrapping a hand around the back her neck. Looking up at him, she said, “We need to figure out our next move and we need to do it fast.”

He nodded. Out in the open, the kid had a shelf-life of about five minutes. “I'll call Ben, have him meet me somewhere. I'll hand the kid off to him and then we'll meet up—”

“As usual, when he's around, I'm left wondering what the hell is going on,” Strickland said, glaring over to his partner. “Explain.”

Sabrina dropped her hand and looked down at the boy curled up on the floor next to the waiting room sofa. “I will, but not here.” She reached down and held her hand out to the boy; he took it without hesitation. She helped him stand, pulled him to her, positioning her body between him and the door. “The FBI is placing our witness under protective custody and transporting him to the Russian Embassy for safe keeping. Mathews's orders,” she said to her partner before finally looking at Michael. “Strickland and I are going to follow up on a lead. I'll call Ben if I find anything.”

“You can't leave,” Strickland said. “You just shot a guy, remember? You're gonna be stuck here for the next few hours. I'll call in surveillance on this Elm guy until we get everything sorted out. We can pick him up for questioning first thing tomorrow morning.”

“No.” Sabrina shook her head. “After what just happened, he needs to be picked up now.”

Strickland looked confused. “Okay. Then I'll go—”

“Not without me you won't,” she said and walked out the door.

Michael had no idea where he was going. He'd been driving around aimlessly for over an hour now, one eye on the rearview to ensure they weren't being followed.

They weren't. But that could change at any moment. Any number of people were gunning for him and the boy. Which meant he couldn't keep driving around forever, wasting time he didn't have. He was going to have to take a chance and reach out.

Using a clean prepaid cell, he dialed Ben's number.

“Is this Murphy's Pub?” he said as soon as the kid answered. It was a code they'd established a long time ago. One they'd never had to use until now.

Ben was quiet for a second. “Nope. Wrong number,” he said before hanging up. Michael dropped the cell in the center console and waited. The wrong number was a signal that he was in trouble. Ben was supposed to ditch his phone and call him from a fresh one as soon as he could.

He took a look in the rearview, this time letting his gaze fall onto the kid. He sat in the back seat of the SUV, staring into middle space. He'd given no protest at being hustled out of the hospital by a total stranger. Seeing Sabrina shoot one of the men who abducted him must've done what hours of talking and persuading couldn't: he trusted them.

Which would more than likely end up getting him killed.

Michael shifted his gaze to the road behind them. Still no tail. But, then again, why bother with a tail? He was outfitted with a state-of-the-art tracking device. There was no need to put a physical tail on him when it was possible to track him via satellite. No need to send a platoon of Pips to gank his ass when all Shaw had to do was let his fingers do the walking.

He kept going over what had happened at the hospital. The disappearing Pip. Cordova's triggerman. What he'd said to Sabrina, that he wasn't alone. Something was going on. Michael's gut told him that whatever it was, Livingston Shaw was involved up to his chin.

No one at FSS could be trusted. Not even his partner.