Ill Will (45 page)

He went down, surprise and pain mixed on his face.

“You are involved with criminals who kill people,” I told him. Into my watch, I screamed, “Get in here now! The doctor knows who Cordelia is!”

I couldn’t wait for Rafe. Rushing past the moaning Vincent, I shoved through the inner door and sprinted up the stairs. This was a large building and I had less than no time. The split second he laid eyes on her, Brandon would recognize Cordelia and know that Lydia’s death hadn’t diverted me from the case. They had killed Lydia, they would kill her.

The glowing light on the third floor. If that wasn’t where they were, Cordelia was dead.

Second floor.

Third floor. As I shoved open the door on the landing, I pulled out my gun. The hall was dark, but at the far end, a dim light seeped under the door.

If I was lucky, Vincent didn’t have a way to contact them and they wouldn’t know I was almost outside their door. But I had little time to be quiet. I raced down the hallway, hoping that the rubber soles of my shoes would mask the sound.

Just as I got to the door it opened.

“Vincent, what’s—” the woman started. “You! You can’t be here.”

I grabbed her by the shoulders and spun her out of the door, shoving her down the hallway. “The police are on their way. Get out,” I told her.

I didn’t look to see if she was leaving or not. She had been in a small reception area. Behind it were several other closed doors. “Third floor, lighted office,” I said, holding my watch close enough that they had to hear. Rafe and his team couldn’t waste time searching the building.

It had windows to the outside. I dashed for the door closest to the back and nearest the outer wall.

I thrust open the door to a scene of horror, a room with only one light, focused on a heavy wooden chair in the center.

Grant Walters had Cordelia pinned in that chair, his knee against her chest, his hands wrapped around her wrists.

Brandon Kellogg had put an IV into the vein on the back of her hand and was about to attach it to a vial of fluid.

He was saying, “You’re going to die anyway. This will be easier.”

I couldn’t shoot; they were too close together.

Cordelia saw me first. She quickly looked away and started to struggle, to distract them.

“No!” I screamed, launching myself. I used my body as a weapon, flinging my torso at them, striking Grant’s chin with the butt of my gun as I tackled him, pushing him off Cordelia and onto Brandon.

“What the fuck?” he yelled as he went down.

“You said you came alone,” Brandon yelled over him. “What’s she doing here?” Then as if remembering his partner in crime, he shouted, “It’s the PI, the one I warned you about.”

I was a fury, heedless of any pain or danger. I backhanded Brandon in the nose, then turned to Cordelia and ripped the IV out of her hand.

Brandon fell back, making a whimpering sound.

“Look out!” she screamed.

Grant was behind me, grabbing my arm, going for the gun. I dug the fingernails of my free arm into his hand. He howled in pain, but didn’t let go.

Suddenly Brandon grabbed my other arm. “What do we do?” he asked. “What do we do now?” His nose was dribbling blood onto his expensive tie.

With Brandon on the other side of me, Grant again went for my gun. To keep it from him, I dropped it, then kicked it away. He couldn’t get it, but I couldn’t use it either.

Cordelia struggled up, gaining a hold on Brandon, using her weight to pull him away. But she didn’t have the strength and stamina for a long fight.

Where the hell were Rafe and his crew?

Maybe they were in this with Grant and I was the only person who could save myself. And Cordelia.

She managed to get Brandon away, freeing one arm. I swung at Grant, but with him holding the one arm from behind, I had to punch him over my shoulder. I couldn’t get a good angle and couldn’t land a decent blow.

“You fucking bitch,” he snarled. “I don’t know who you are, but you’re dead.”

Brandon punched Cordelia, then threw her down. I heard the sound of her hitting the floor, falling away into the shadows.

I kicked at Grant, slamming my heel down on his instep.

To retaliate, he yanked my hair, jerking my head back. I tried to duck away from him, going with the direction of his pull, then twisting away. But he was expecting it and moved with me. Then he kicked me hard at the back of the knee, forcing me to bend, then sag down on my knees.

I struggled and turned, but he was a strong man and knew what he was doing. He wrapped an arm around my throat in a choke hold. Then he grabbed my wrist and slapped it on the armrest of the chair.

“Put the needle in her arm. We’ll do them both,” Grant said.

He was making it hard for me to breathe.

Brandon started to get an alcohol swipe.

“Fuck that! Hurry!” Grant barked.

No need to worry about infection if you’re about to kill someone.

Brandon did as he was told, ripping a needle out of a pack. Just as he tried to stab me, I jerked my arm.

But it was no more than a pitifully small delay.

“Hold it steady,” Brandon said.

Grant shoved down with brutal force, placing his knee in my back so my face as forced into the seat of the chair, my arm bent up at a painful angle. Only then did he let go of my throat, using both hands to hold my arm down.

“I’m sorry,” Brandon said. “But this will be easier. You won’t feel the pain as you die.”

“I’m not about to die, you’re murdering me,” I growled at him.

He hesitated.

“Do it!” Grant yelled.

I felt a prick at the back of my hand.

Then a huge roar, as if the world was drowned out.

“What the hell!” Grant bellowed.

Something liquid dripped onto my arm.

Blood.

Brandon stumbled backward, his chest an oozing red mess.

I rolled away from Grant, turning the chair over. He tried to hold on, but I spun around just enough to grab him between the legs. I gripped tightly and twisted as hard as I could, yanking down as I turned my hand.

His yowl of pain was satisfying.

I rolled away from under him, kicking at his legs as I regained mine. He thudded heavily to the floor, still moaning in pain.

I jerked the needle out of my arm and plunged it into his, then pulled the clip off the line to the vial. It wasn’t likely I’d hit a vein, but that might hold him if he recovered from the ball torture.

I looked around for Rafe. But he wasn’t here.

Cordelia, just at the edge of the shadow, stood holding my gun.

She looked at Brandon, then at me, then down at her hand.

I rushed to her, taking the gun. I knew what I was doing; I hoped she wouldn’t. I fired, aiming as the side wall. My fingerprints were now on the gun and powder residue on my hands.

As if coming out of a trance, she said, “I have to try to save him.” She half walked, half stumbled to him, placing her hands on his chest, trying to stop the blood of the man who had tried to kill us both.

Rafe and his team ran in.

“Holy fuck,” he said, on seeing the scene.

“Nothing holy here,” I said and went to help Cordelia.

It had been a lifetime and only five minutes.

I got to that room on the third floor only five minutes before Rafe and his team arrived. Vincent had recovered enough to slow them down.

Dudley had been caught in Houston. Once Texas got finished with him, he’d be sent back here.

Fletcher and Donna got the result they wanted. Vincent spent a few days in jail, then got out on parole. They passed on the information from their aunt. He had told her he no longer believed in this stuff, a friend of his had died and he was now with his family’s insurance company.

Mr. Charles Williams did indeed make a big pot of gumbo—quite good—and I gave him, his nephew, and the McConkles an edited version of what had happened. A version that had my hand on the gun.

Rafe made his clients in Dallas very happy. They displayed their happiness by paying him very well. A nice chunk trickled down to me. Rafe told me if I ever moved to Texas, I’d have a job. I told him I’d never move to Texas.

Grant Walters was in jail. He was a master at manipulation, looking at everyone he met as to how they could be useful to him. Like his neighbors. He quickly picked Dudley as a rebellious meth head. Brandon was already chiseling a little away on insurance fraud, small enough time that he might have gotten away with it for a very long while. But Grant had talked him into expanding, opening several clinics that existed in name only and ramping up the amount he was taking from the practice. Grant had even talked him into putting up the bulk of the investment for the Nature’s Beautiful Gift franchise. Brandon was an amateur. Grant was a pro. Brandon was a busy doctor and didn’t keep up with the various ways the insurance fraud was trickling down to his patients. When Cordelia had first suggested asking me to locate the missing patients, he didn’t consider the possible consequences of having me around.

He diagnosed disease. I diagnosed crime.

Only after I’d found Reginald, involved the police and medical authorities, he panicked. He immediately called Grant, who arranged for Dudley to shut me down as quickly as possible. He had been lucky—and I had been unlucky—that Dudley was in need of a fix and was quickly on his way to my office.

He was there so soon after I’d found Reginald Banks I didn’t consider there could be a link. Instead I assumed Prejean had sent him.

Grant had carefully involved Brandon with Dudley, introducing him at a backyard cookout. At least in Dudley’s telling of the tale, Grant had been the leader, with Brandon willingly following along. Poor Dudley was just an addled meth addict trapped in their clutches.

Grant had picked Brandon as the one who would be left behind, with a pile of debt and a pile of bodies that couldn’t easily be explained away as a robbery.

But he hadn’t gotten away, and the police found everything they needed to tie him to fraud, extortion. And murder.

Brandon Kellogg was dead.

I told Cordelia that he had killed himself and she had nodded agreement. But I could tell she vehemently wished it hadn’t been her finger on the trigger.

I was sitting in another dull green room, waiting for her as they did a CT scan to see if the treatment was working this time. She had given up trying to work full-time; now her life was lived in the walls of doctors’ offices, medical tests, and drugs that left her exhausted, at times too weak to make it to the bathroom to vomit. She had good days, but they couldn’t be counted on to last. The next chemo treatment left her too sick to do much. The nausea wore off only to be replaced with fatigue.

Those five minutes had cost her a lot. She claimed not, but a haunted look had crept into her eyes as if she had seen too much and for too long how brutal the world can be—a place where the only choice is who will die. Maybe it made her want to fight less hard. Or maybe it was just fate and a disease.

Spring, as it often does in New Orleans, had fled, turning to a searing summer.

Maybe it was hard to want to live when the sun burned so brightly.

The first time she went into the hospital, Torbin had come over, didn’t even say anything, just held me. Far longer than five minutes.

Alex had come down from Baton Rouge. She and Joanne had officially broken up. Unofficially they were still enmeshed, still owned the house here together, in a limbo of which way to go. On the good days, I hoped they said they had broken up just to ease the expectations and avoid the explanations. On the bad days, it felt like everything was changing and changing more than I could bear.

Danny and Elly insisted on being there when I couldn’t be there. Joanne came by when I wasn’t there; we passed once in the halls. Alex came by as often as her schedule allowed, at times talking her way around the visiting hours rules when she came in late.

The medical practice had voted to keep Cordelia, but place her on leave. Brandon had been the one who voted against her; with him gone, the tie had been broken. That allowed her to retain her insurance. She had to pay for it, but at their group rate. Abrasive Ron turned out to be her champion. He told me, “I’m not a people person; I’m a lab guy and a numbers guy. But I’m a good doctor. She’s a good doctor. It could happen to any of us.”

Now she just needed to live.

“Michele Knight?” A nurse beckoned me.

I followed her down a long hallway. They all seemed long; they all seemed some pale shade of blue or green as if color was too much of a taunt to the sick and dying.

She ushered me into a doctor’s office.

Cordelia was already there, dressing in the clothes that now hung on her. Her hair was gone, only a few stark white tufts remaining. She had taken to wearing a baseball cap backward like the teenaged boys do, but now she was bareheaded. The people in this building had seen too much to need to avert their eyes.