Honor (2 page)

“Nothing.”

Deke didn’t seem to believe that reply. “Wait a minute—there was someone. Her name was—it’s coming back to me—Karen, right?”

“Who?”

For a second, Linc drew a blank. Then he remembered. Months ago Kenzie had used that name when she’d showed up at Bannon’s door with a guard dog to loan him as a favor to Linc.

“Karen,” Deke said impatiently. “You know who I mean.”

Linc smiled. “Oh, yeah. Her. Ah, we’re just friends.”

Deke shot him a knowing look.

“If it changes, I’ll let you know,” Linc said calmly.

His brother lost interest when the brunette seized her chance and swept across the dance floor as the band paused. “I do believe she really is interested.” Deke ran a hand over his brown locks and asked, “How’s the hair?”

“Looks great. Very natural,” Linc teased, echoing the photographer’s comment.

“Shut up.” Deke straightened his lapels.

The two brothers rose at the same time, but Linc turned to go before the brunette arrived.

A group of younger guests, including Deke and date, decided to keep the celebration going when the reception formally ended, paying the limo drivers to take them to a nearby hotel for an impromptu after-party.

Linc took the red pickup he’d had since forever. He was sentimental about it, though his brother had nixed the old truck for the procession from the church. The car he drove every day was sleek, black, and not particularly noticeable.

Everyone except him headed straight for the noisy lounge to dance into the wee hours. He wandered away down a carpeted corridor, feeling a little lonely. Without intending to, he ended up in the hotel’s bar. It was mostly empty. There was only one other customer, an older man having a beer, but no bartender. The pounding music in the lounge was barely audible in the dim, luxuriously furnished room.

He slid onto a stool, folding his arms on the counter and looking around idly while he waited to be served. The liquor bottles arrayed in ranks behind the bar reflected blue light coming from an unseen source. The bar was dark otherwise, but he didn’t mind.

The bartender appeared from a door at the end of the polished counter and took his order, exchanging a few words with Linc as he put the drink on a napkin. Then he turned away to set up, setting clean glasses of various types on trays and filling up a compartmented container with slices of lemon and lime and bright red cherries.

Linc barely noticed. He took one sip and set the drink down, intending to make it last. He had nothing to do and nowhere to go except back to the lounge.

Later for that. He was truly tired, and it was catching up with him. Being the best man was serious work. Linc had rolled out of bed at six
A.M.
and barely had a chance to catch his breath since.

Zoning out over a cold drink felt fine. The TV over the bar offered the usual ten thousand stations via cable. Right now it was tuned to local news, on low. Good. He didn’t really want to listen. The weatherman was saying something about clouds rolling in.

So be it. The perfect day was over.

Linc undid his black silk bow tie, taking a deep breath or two as he eased the collar button open next. He wasn’t made to wear a monkey suit.

He half heard the reporter going on and on about an accident just outside of a town with a name he wasn’t going to remember. Not a pile-up, not a jackknifed semi, just a solitary car.

Filler. News shows made a huge deal out of a fender bender when there wasn’t anything else to yap about.

Then the live feed crackled and filled the screen behind the guy and Linc winced. The accident wasn’t minor. It looked like a rollover. Smashed frame, crumpled black chassis scraped to the gray undercoat in a lot of places, back wheels high in the air.

Linc could just make out an ambulance, a red and white blotch in the background, and activity around it, a stretcher being loaded. He got a glimpse of what looked like a head-and-neck stabilizer frame attached to the stretcher.

Fatalities got a body bag, not that rig. He automatically wished the injured person well—he or she was lucky to be alive.

He scowled when the cameraman evaded the highway patrol officer’s gaze and moved around for a close-up of the nearly totaled vehicle. The reporter on the scene dogged him, trying to stay in the frame and not always succeeding. They both knew what would get on TV: a dramatic shot, preferably with blood.

Good thing there were a few seconds of lag time before any broadcast, Linc thought. Imagine the shock of recognizing a victim of a bad accident or seeing some identifying detail—

He pushed away his barely touched drink. Apparently that rule didn’t apply to the film crew of this two-bit TV station. Linc knew that license plate. There was only one word on it.

KENZYZ.

Jesus. The realization that he was looking at Kenzie’s crashed sports car hit him like a hammer blow. He’d parked next to it at her apartment more than once. The yellow racing stripes on the damaged black paint were half-hidden by wisps of smoke, but he could just make them out now. His glimpse of the license plate clinched it.

That had to have been her on the stretcher. Right now she must be inside the ambulance. He heard the siren kick up to a wail as the reporter kept on talking, one hand placed awkwardly on a back wheel, spinning it until a highway patrolman yelled at him to stop and got in front of the lens. A dark blue uniform filled the frame and someone at the TV station cut to a commercial.

Linc swore under his breath. He yanked a ten out of his wallet and tossed it on the polished wood of the bar, running out of the hotel to the parking lot.

Trying to think.

He’d only seen one stretcher—she must have been alone in the car. How bad were her injuries? He had to find her, and more importantly, help the cops and hospital personnel get info they might need.

Where the hell had he parked? He stopped, looked around wildly, and finally saw his truck, half-hidden by a catering van. He raced to it, unlocked the door, slid behind the wheel, and started the engine, shifting rapidly into reverse, backing out a little too fast. Somebody honked.

He didn’t care. He had to do something. Talk to the cops, find out who’d been notified. Her folks, of course—they’d make that call first. He could get the word out to others. After he was sure she was in a hospital with a top-notch trauma team.

His thoughts were spinning faster than his wheels. It came back to him that Kenzie’s parents were in Germany, her dad’s last posting before retirement; they’d just moved into base housing. The new phone number might not be in her emergency contacts. She had no brothers or sisters. He only knew a few of her friends. By name. Not well.

Linc found his smartphone and jammed one end of a charger into the cigarette lighter and the other end into the phone so it wouldn’t die on him.

The name of the town—the reporter had said it. He cursed himself for not remembering. Summerton. Summerville. Something like that. It hadn’t rung a bell.

Then it came back to him. Summer River. Yeah, that was it. It sounded small. He hoped it wasn’t too far away.

Once he was west of the bay and back on roads he knew, he pulled over for a few seconds to get a locator app on his phone and tagged the nearest big hospitals to Summer River that qualified as trauma centers. With mangled wreckage like that, she could be critically injured.

Setting the phone to GPS mode, he gunned the truck out onto the road again. Navigating the turns at top speed took concentration, but it still gave him too much time to think. He and Kenzie had barely gotten to know each other in all the months since they’d met. The universe wasn’t fair.

He drove faster, keeping an eye on the rearview mirror for following cops. The federal ID he carried would get him waved on about an instant after it was requested, but he didn’t want to waste even that much time with John Law.

Where had she been going?

She never was home much, out of town on training gigs more often than not while he’d been cooped up in a featureless building near Langley. His CO had him tracking a worm inside a secret government blacknet. Some hacker five thousand miles away didn’t like democracy.

He’d gotten rid of it. Damage repaired and bait left for the perpetrator. The free world would never know, but a couple of four-stars had come over from the Pentagon to personally shake his hand.

All that time. Gone. He shouldn’t have been so patient. He shouldn’t have waited for her to make the first real moves.

A few drops of rain hit the curved glass of the windshield by the time he raced down the bay road that would take him to I-95. Five minutes later, it was pouring. The glass was obscured by thick, spattering drops that made everything blurry.

An eighteen-wheeler overtook him on the left, throwing blinding spray back against his windshield. Linc swerved to the right, wondering if a rig that size had done in Kenzie’s car. Could be. But she’d been driving under clear skies.

Just let her be all right. That didn’t seem like too much to ask.

Merged into six fast-moving lanes, he headed straight for the largest hospital of the four he’d tagged, a few miles from the highway. The emergency room entrance was brightly lit, marked by a red sign. He screeched the truck into a parking spot and jumped out, barely noticing the pounding rain.

The ER didn’t seem busy. Talking into a slotted metal circle set into wire-mesh glass, he gave the intake clerk a basic explanation and got the runaround.

“The paramedics had her on a spine board before they lifted her into the ambulance. B. MacKenzie. Anyone by that name brought in?” He knew his voice was agitated, but he couldn’t control it.

“I just started my shift, sir.” She pursed her lips and looked at him disapprovingly, safe in her cubicle.

“But you have to have the admit list for today and tonight.” Linc pushed his wet hair back with one hand, aware that he looked like he’d been rolling around in an overflowing gutter. No doubt that was what she was thinking. He didn’t give a damn. But he had to be nice.

“I’ll look.” She began to shuffle through papers on her desktop. Very slowly.

“Maybe she went straight into surgery. How about the ICU? Help me out here.”

The intake clerk shook her head. “We don’t give patient information to anyone who asks. As a general rule, family members are allowed to visit patients, but you said you weren’t family.”

Next time he would lie. The clerk hadn’t said in so many words that Kenzie wasn’t there, so maybe she was. Right now he was ready to slam through the swinging doors that said Staff Only and find out for himself.

A clipboard landed on the counter next to Linc’s elbow and he turned to see a youngish woman wearing glasses. The tag pinned to her jacket said her name and under that,
ER Supervisor
.

“What seems to be the problem here?”

The intake clerk slid a disdainful look at Linc to indicate that he was. The ER manager peered at him through lenses that made her eyes wide and owlish.

“Can I help you?” she asked him crisply.

“Sorry to bother you. I’m looking for someone who may have been in an accident—”

“And you are?” she interrupted him.

“Her, um, friend.” He couldn’t suddenly turn into Kenzie’s brother in front of the unhelpful clerk. “My name is Linc Bannon—”

She interrupted him again. “And your friend’s name is?”

“Her last name is MacKenzie.”

“You don’t know her first name?”

“She goes by—never mind. Tell me something. How many MacKenzies do you get on an average night? Ten? Fifteen? Is she here or not?”

The supervisor kept her cool. “I’m trying to help you.”

She was. Linc collected himself. “Sorry. Look, I know I saw her crashed car on the news. Live on the scene—ambulance, highway patrol, the works. I couldn’t see her on the stretcher but they showed a close-up of the plates. It was a rollover. Maybe on 1-95 or a connecting highway.”

“Can you narrow that down a little? You’re talking about a lot of road.”

“Somewhere around here, I think. The reporter said Summer River.”

The ER supervisor nodded. “That’s not far from us. Let me check the admit list.” Linc noticed that the clerk ducked her head down when she heard that and got busy with the papers again. “Sorry. No one by that name has come in.”

“Oh,
here’s
my copy,” the clerk muttered behind the glass. “The day person keeps moving my files.”

The supervisor frowned at her and turned to speak to him. Linc was getting the feeling that she was on his side.

“So—you said you recognized the car and the plates, but you didn’t see her. Is it possible that she wasn’t driving?”

Her remark startled him. “What?”

“A teenager could have swiped her car for a joyride. Unfortunately, they often wreck what they steal. So do car thieves, though they’re a little more careful. Anyway, we get both now and then.”

Linc blew out the breath he’d been holding.

“Try calling your friend first, just in case. Then try the Summer River police department. They wouldn’t necessarily have been the first responders, but they can run her name through a statewide database, and also connect you to the highway patrol.”

The voice of sanity. It worked. Linc got a grip. “That makes sense. Okay. I’ll do that. Thanks.”

She nodded to him as her pager went off. “I’m sure you’ll find her.” She walked quickly away without a backward look.

Linc caught a glimpse of himself in the wire-mesh glass around the clerk’s cubicle. His hair had turned into a scruffy mess and dark stubble was putting in an unwanted appearance. The damp, wrinkled tuxedo jacket and the dangling ends of his silk bowtie didn’t help.

The intake clerk had her head down again, ignoring him. He jammed his hands in his pants pockets and walked quickly toward the wide double doors. The steel-framed glass panels opened with a hiss and out he went into the sluicing rain.

Chilled to the bone, he got back into his truck and slumped in his seat, reaching wearily for the smartphone, not seeing any messages on the little glowing screen.

Apparently his absence hadn’t been noted. No one who knew him had seen him enter the bar or leave it. No texts, no e-mails. He found Kenzie’s number and tapped the screen.