Reunion (11 page)

For now.

I
t’s day t
hree
, and Mark had to go to D.C. for a briefing. He had no choice. I vaguely remember him whispering in my ear and telling me how much he loves me.
He left the staff with strict instructions not to let anyone in here. Flashed them his DEA badge.
 

A
nd a look that makes them all comply.

That must have been this morning. It’s night time now. I can tell because it’s dark outside.

T
he flashes in the hallways make the darkness even starker.

A man in a suit squeezes through, flanked by two guys who also wear suits, though a different color. Both have guns. They look like bodyguards.

“Carrie,” says the first man. He’s familiar. Young, like me. Somewhere between me and Mark in age. Short hair. Direct speaking style. He talks like he expects to be respected.

The clipped tones of a man in charge.

He walks to the side of the bed and sits in Mark’s usual seat. “I’m Drew
Foster
. We met
two days ago
under very unfortunate circumstances.”

“
I’d call them fortunate,” I say. I lost my voice, maybe from screaming in the storage room. I sound like an eighty-year-old chain smoker. “I’m here now, aren’t I?”
 

He gives me a half-grin. “Fair enough. I’m here because Mark sent my firm.”

“
He sent mercenaries to my hospital room to protect me? What are you going to do? Defend me against bad hospital food?”
 

I swear one of the guys’ mouth
s
twitches.

“They’re here to guard you,” Drew explains.

“Guard me? Guard me from
who
? El Brujo is dead.”

He thumbs toward the door. “The media.”

I laugh. It hurts. I stop laughing. “The media? I don’t care about the media.”

“
They
care about
you
, though.” He won’t stop staring at me. His eyes bore into me. The other two men stand at attention, eyes roving over the room.

“So what? They suck. Nothing I say will get quoted properly. I know the drill from when my dad was imprisoned. No comment and all that.”

“You weren’t healing from being physically and psychologically tortured by El Brujo and his men back then, Carrie.” He isn’t compassionate. Drew is all no-nonsense. This is business for him.

“No. But I was tormented by their lies and destruction of my entire life back then. And I thought the man I loved had betrayed me.” I look down at my bandaged body. “This?
This
is nothing in comparison to thinking that the only person I’d ever given my heart to had double-crossed me and left me to hang out to dry.”

Drew flinches. It’s like watching a wall wince.

I’ve hit a nerve of some kind.

He stands. Walks over to the two men and whispers something to them. They nod in unison.

Drew walks to the door, puts his hand on the doorknob, and turns around.

“
I
t’s day two of the investigation. We don’t know who might still be out to get you in El Brujo’s organization, Carrie. We’re mostly certain you made a lot of people very, very happy by killing him—”

“I didn’t kill him! Allie did. She should get the credit.”

“—by
facilitating
his death.” He narrows his eyes.
I
f I weren’t broken and bandaged in bed with a raging case of narcotics hangover, I’d think he was hot as heck.

“Who’s happy? Aside from the DEA,” I ask, genuinely intrigued.

“Dealers oppressed by El Brujo. People under his control.”

I frown. It hurts. “What about Claudia?” I sit up with a jolt of memory. “And Eric? Eric Horner?”

Drew frowns. “Mark hasn’t told you?”

“Mark’s in D.C. getting yelled at by his f-bomb screaming boss.”

Now all three men stifle smiles.

“I assure you she’s not yelling at him,” Drew finally says. “In fact, Mark’s probably getting a promotion right now.”

“A promotion? No! He wants out.”

Three sets of eyes all catch each other in an unspoken exchange of thoughts.

Drew opens the door an inch, then turns to me.

“You’re being guarded. It’s for your own good. And don’t judge Mark too harshly. There’s always more to any story that doesn’t make sense on the surface.”

And with that, he leaves.
A woman squeezes past him, her body small and soft. He moves aside just enough to let her in. A nurse?
 

No. A familiar face.
A familiar scratched-up slightly red, ragged face with big, brown, worried eyes.
 

“Allie,” I rasp. “
Oh, Allie.”
 

The tears come again as she sits carefully on the edge of my bed and gives me a tender, light hug.

“Hey, you,” she murmurs in my ear, against the giant bandage that is my head.

“Hey, you, hero,” I whisper back.

We just hold each other.

It’s all we can do.

There really aren’t enough words for what we’ve been through.

A hug has to be enough.

She holds me while I weep. It feels like hours go by.

“You did it,” I say through sniffles and waterworks,
finally breaking the calm truth of just being held and understood
.

“
We
did it.”

“How’s Amy?”

Allie pulls back. Her big, brown eyes are framed by black hair. She must have dyed it back to her normal color. She’s strikingly beautiful,
scratches, scars and all
.

“She’s recovering. Her mom’s with her.
She’s in a different hospital.
They got antibiotics in her right away, but her kidneys aren’t doing so good. It’s touch and go but she wouldn’t even have a fighting chance if it weren’t for you, Carrie.”

“
And you.”
 

We squeeze hands. Well, my good one, anyhow.

“
How
are
you. Really?” she asks, eyes darting around the room. “I know that it took a long, long time for me to recover from what happened to me.”
 

I don’t have to lie to her. I don’t have to shine her on. Even with Mark, I pretend. I did earlier today, when he told me he had to leave.

I lied.

I told him it was okay.

It wasn’t.

“
I’m a mess. Look at me. Whatever I look like on the outside isn’t as bad as how I feel on the inside. And I’m different from you. Mark’s here. Mark didn’t do to me what Chase did to you. I never had a moment where I thought Mark double-crossed me and left me to the mercy of El Brujo like you did.”
 

She nods. “It’ll be easier for you. But never easy.” Stroking the scarred skin on her forearm, her eyes glaze over. “It never really goes away.”

“It’s only been a year for you, Allie. Two days for me. I’m mostly drugged up, anyhow,” I say with a giggle.

“Right. But he’s gone, Carrie. Dead. I shot him. I
killed
him. I killed a man,” she says, her voice going lower and lower into a whisper of utter horror.

“You didn’t kill a man.”

“What? You saw it happen.”

“You killed a
monster
. You killed evil in human form.”

She sighs. “That’s what Chase says.”

“Then listen to Chase.”

“You sound like Mark.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

We hug again.

And then, in the stillness of my sterile hospital room, we weep like children until we’re boneless.

Two days pass. Two days without Mark. Drew’s firm sends new men in eight-hour shifts. I become super bored by day three and make them play card games with me. We play three-handed Euchre.

It’s not the same as playing with Elaine, Mikey and Brian.

No one will give me all the details.

“C’mon,” I ask Silas, one of the guards, as he shuffles. “Tell me what’s going on.”

“Mark’s the one who will debrief you.”

“I’m not talking about
taking off my panties for
Mark.”

He reddens. Aha.

“
No, ma’am, debrief means—”
 

Tom, the other guard, interrupts him. “She knows what it means, Gentian. She’s needling you.”

Silas looks at me, puzzled. “That true, ma’am?”

“I’ll tell you the truth if you tell me what happened.”

They exchange a resigned look and say nothing.

The media circus hasn’t calmed down. Not one bit. Chief Cummings has interviewed me.
T
he DEA interviewed me. Anyone but Mark, he explained by text. It would be a conflict of interest if he were the interviewer.

I get that. I do. But I’m tired of information flowing only one way.

I have so many questions.

Tom and Silas both read their phones at the same time. That means they got a text from Drew. Their heads draw together and they murmur, the words impossible to decipher.

Except for one phrase.

“...on the mend...”

Am I?

That would be nice.

* * *

Mark’s texts come and go, but no phone calls. Secured lines and taps and all that are his excuses. I know he’s also unwinding his own circus out on the other coast.

That doesn’t mean I don’t need him desperately.

Got your stuff out of Elaine and Brian’s trailer
, one text reads.
In storage
.

Abandoning most of my stuff in their cottage
, reads another.

Securing a safe post-hospital location
, reads the final text he sent an hour ago.

It’s three a.m. Both guards are wide awake, just staring out the window. My sleep cycle is screwed up by the narcotics, which I’m weaning off of.
The nurses said it was a good thing I never took much, because this isn’t going to be easy, but easier than if I’d taken a larger dose.

I don’t like feeling loopy. I’ll take pain over disorientation, no matter how nice the warm fuzzies of opiates can be.

I close my eyes and conjure Mark’s face.
I
n the rush of news channels and newspapers and police interrogations and DEA meetings on top of medical care and doctors trying to shield me from the worst of it all, I really haven’t talked to Mark.

We’ve had no real reunion.

I know he’s out there in D.C., managing the victory of killing El Brujo. Allie begged him to keep her out of the mess. Made him promise to
lie and tell people she wasn’t the one who killed El Brujo. Galt had reached for her hand, taken the gun out of it, and given her his assurances that he would do his best.
 

That moment still befuddles me.

Why did Galt kill Frenchie? Why was Loogie there? Who, exactly, are they?

My guards won’t answer questions. My shoulder is starting to just ache these days. No joint damage aside from the shoulder, according to the orthopedic surgeon. My broken arm itches. The nurse says that’s the feeling of the bones knitting together.

Itchiness is a sign I’m getting better.

The tap tap tap on my door is so faint I almost don’t hear it. My two bodyguards jump like an assassin is at the door, guns drawn and faces tight.

“Who is it?” one of them barks. I don’t even know him. The midnight shift comes in while I’m sleeping.

“Minnie.
I’m Amy’s mother
,” says a trembling voice.

The guard looks at me. I nod. He opens the door and lets poor, freaked out Minnie in.

“You,” she whispers, her eyes filling with shining tears as she takes in my appearance. She walks on unsteady legs, nearly collapsing at my bedside. “Oh, Carrie, you saved her. My God, you did it.”

She’s weeping openly, tears making splotches on her shirt, her face twisted with
a kind of strangled gratitude that makes me cry.
 

Minnie’s long face is so drawn and pale. “I’m sorry I couldn’t help her more,” I say. My own tears fill my throat, the ache so different from my pain-filled body. I haven’t seen Amy since we shoved her in the pipe to escape. I know she’s at a different hospital. The guards finally told me I’m in Los Angeles, med-flighted out of San Diego because Mark considered the area t
o
o unsafe.

El Brujo’s henchmen might still be out for me.

Now I understand better why he called Drew in.

Minnie’s arms wrap carefully around me. A pang, deep and sharp, hits me as her warmth envelops my upper body. Elaine. I miss Elaine. She hasn’t come to see me—not once—and Minnie’s motherly hug makes me yearn for the closest person I have to a mother.

“Oh, honey, thank you. I can never, ever thank you enough. Amy’s still sedated.
T
he infection nearly killed her. They’re lowering the sedation and hoping she doesn’t have permanent damage,” Minnie explains. “She’s alive, and that’s what matters. All because of you.”

I want to protest.
I want to argue. I want to say that I didn’t do enough. I want to point out that Amy has no arm. El Brujo took it. He took so much from so many people.
 

He took my dad.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper through thick regret.

“Sorry for what?” Minnie’s voice is filled with a layered indignation. “For saving my daughter? For cracking the biggest drug case in American history? For helping rid the world of a piece of evil? You have nothing to be sorry for, Carrie. Don’t you dare let me hear you say that again!”

I’m stunned into silence. I stop crying and the hiccups start. They hurt. You try hiccuping with a dislocated shoulder and three broken ribs.

“
You’re right,” I say with a sniff. Hiccup. “I just wish I could have gotten there before they took her arm.”
 

“Thank goodness you got there when you did. You and Allie and Chase and Mark and the man no one will talk about all saved the most precious person on earth to me. I am in your debt forever. Ask me to do anything. Anything in the world.”

I laugh, then hiccup. Ouch.

A thought hits me. “What about Wizard? How is poor Wizard?”

She grins and shakes her head. She’s so solemn. “We’ve got poor Wizard taken care of. Animal Control released him back to that...that...that bastard.” Minnie doesn’t curse, so I know she means the dean. El Brujo. “But Marny and Cindy couldn’t stand knowing they were training him to be an attack dog. So they snuck over to the Landau house and stole him in the dead of night.” She frowns, her face going thinner. “Must have been when you and Amy were...you know. Trapped.”