Without Malice (The Without Series Book 1) (15 page)

Chapter 42

In Frankie Jones’ garage, sleeping on the makeshift cot, Cole Hansen dreamed of his childhood.

He was five and had crawled up onto the dining room table to reach the shiny, sparkling object perched on the top of his mother’s antique cabinet. He wasn’t supposed to play with anything inside or beside the armoire – which was a fancy way of saying old cabinet with fancy glass doors.

But nobody said anything about on
top
of, which Cole figured was sort of okay. The object that had caught his eye looked like a toy, a little boy’s toy, red and gleaming and shaped like a fire truck.

It had to be meant for him, didn’t it? Although he’d never gotten such a magnificent present before, little boys’ wishes were powerful.

Everything else in the cabinet was dishes or crystal glasses or delicate-looking statues of girls and birds. This object was new, and definitely something made for a little boy, something designed for him to play with.

It was a no-brainer, he thought.
No-brainer
was something he’d heard his dad say once, the last time Cole had seen him. Cole liked the sound of
no-brainer
and smiled in his sleep, turning onto his side on the narrow cot in Dr. Jones’ garage.

He didn’t hear the click of the side door to the garage, nor the soft, steady tread of Rebok CrossFits on the concrete floor. The figure crossed to the back door of the house and fiddled with the knob.

Candy from a baby.

Hidden in his slumber corner, wrapped inside a sleeping bag piled with several blankets against the chilly October night, Cole was a lumpy shadow beside the Toyota parked in the wide garage. Another soft click and the man entered the laundry room of the house in Rosedale.

Candy from a baby.

Upstairs Frankie Jones slept lightly. She was too far away from Cole and the figure downstairs to hear anything like Cole’s faint snoring – or clicks.

In his dream, five-year-old Cole placed a stool on the table and stretched on tippy-toes as far as he could, grabbing for the toy fire engine on top of the cabinet. Suddenly he overreached, teetered precariously, and plunged to the floor, his small feet smashing through the delicately etched design of the armoire’s glass doors.

The crash was like the clap of doom.

Cole jerked awake.
A dream, just a dream.
No one coming to punish him, although the grown man felt the urgent need to empty his bladder in much the same way that the five-year-old Cole had wet his pants. Listening to the calm, dead silence of the garage, eyes adjusting to the gloom, Cole stood and padded on sock feet to the laundry room door.

It stood ajar.

That wasn’t right. He distinctly remembered Cruz pushing hard to shut it. And the solid click of the lock turning. Wary, he crept into the laundry room and through the kitchen. Everything was gray shades and odd shapes. At the foot of the stairs, he waited a long moment before climbing slowly upward.

He hesitated on the third step, legs shaking unsteadily. Doc wouldn’t be happy if he woke her up.

The crash and tinkle of broken glass woke Frankie immediately. She rolled off the double bed, and after adjusting the covers and pillow, crouched on the opposite side from the bedroom door. Reached under the bed for the baseball bat –
thanks, Dad, for the safety tip
– and gripped it in her right hand, hunkering low and hidden from sight.

The man entered the room with a swift kick to the bedroom door.
Damn, why ruin a perfectly good, unlocked door?
Frankie tightened her grip on the bat.

The figure scanned the room for long moments, adjusting his eyes to the darkness, examining the bed where she’d just lain a few moments ago. From her position on the floor, Frankie watched the feet of the intruder tread toward the bed, heard the soft pop-pop-pop of a silenced gun killing her pillow.

Cautious steps approached the bed. Through a thin veneer of calm, she thought of the age-old question: what do you bring to a fist fight?
A knife.
What do you bring to a knife fight?
A gun.

Shit.
Her intruder had brought a gun and all she had was a lousy baseball bat. Somebody really wanted her – or maybe Cole? – dead.

Suddenly from the doorway, she saw a bulky shadow fling itself on the man with the gun. A loud grunt, a groan, and the discharge of a weapon. She stood cautiously, bat raised, and watched the two figures grappling on the floor, a tumbling of arms and legs and desperate wrestling for the gun now wedged between them.

Getting as close to the fighting men as she dared, she poised to slam the bat into the man’s head – God help her if she hit the wrong one.

While she hesitated, the gun discharged with another quiet pop and one figure went lax.

The other person snatched up the weapon and ran out the door. She heard him tromping noisily down the stairs.

Frankie dropped the bat by her side and reached for the inert figure.

“Cole! Oh my God!” The ex-con lay unmoving on the bedroom floor, a red circle blooming steadily on his chest and dripping onto the hardwood floor.

Chapter 43

Frankie had never gotten sick at the sight and smell of surgery, the spurt and mangle of bloodied flesh, but she felt light-headed as she turned to grab a small blanket from the chair in the corner. She took a deep breath and forced herself not to panic. One hand staunching the wound, she called Cruz’s cell phone.

She knew she couldn’t do this alone.

What felt like ages later, she heard the thunder of feet from the stairs and down the hall to her bedroom, accompanied by Cruz shouting and cursing. She reached for the baseball bat.

“Why’s the fucking front door open? What’s hap – ” Cruz stopped in the doorway, taking in the bloody scene, the evidence of a struggle, the unconscious – or dead – body lying on the floor.

“Thank God, thank God,” Frankie mumbled, kicking the baseball bat aside and pressing on Cole’s chest with both fists.

For a split second, Cruz’s heart had stopped, his mind frozen with fear.
Thank God, it wasn’t Frankie’s blood.

“Get my medical bag downstairs by the entry door,” she snapped, not looking up as she applied more pressure to the wound high on the left side of Cole Hansen’s chest.

Cruz blinked once, spun around, and returned seconds later with the bag.

“Take my place,” she ordered, her pale, normally mobile face cool as ice, hard as a slab of granite. She hurriedly washed her hands in the bathroom while he, woozy with relief, maintained pressure on the already blood-sodden blanket.

Kneeling beside him, she opened the medical kit and snapped on latex gloves. She pushed him back and lifted the blanket. The wound oozed steadily. “Good, no spurting. I don’t think he hit an artery. Maybe, if we’re lucky, no major organs were damaged either.” She frowned, thinking. “Although I don’t like how close the bullet is to the heart.”

With medical scissors she ripped off Hansen’s shirt.

Cruz couldn’t help it. He exploded. “What the hell is going on? Why haven’t you called 911?” He knew the emergency responders would’ve already been on scene if she’d called them first.

But she hadn’t.

She’d called him, and all she’d said when he picked up his cell phone was, “Emergency. My house STAT!”

When he began to ask questions, she’d simply yelled, “Effing get here,” and dropped her phone. He could hear her muffled words through the connection while he dressed and raced across town – a fifteen-minute drive because he floored it. No freeway traffic this hour of the morning, thank God.

Sometimes Frankie’s words were soft and pleading – “Come on, hang in there” – often shrewish – “Wake up, you mother-effing idiot!”

Even in a crisis she censored her swearing. The discovery was a paradox that almost made him smile. The proper Dr. Jones cursing like a sailor while simultaneously curbing her coarse language. Wryly, he reminded himself there was nothing to smile about.

“Why didn’t you call 911?” he repeated as she poured an orange liquid over Cole Hansen’s shoulder and probed the wound with her gloved fingers as delicately and gentle as a mother testing a child’s splintered palm.

Her eyes were closed as if, Helen-Keller-like, she could learn more by touch than sight. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she replied after a moment. “If I’d called 911, we’d have at least four to six emergency technicians here, fussing around Cole.” She opened one eye, squinting the other. “I’m an MD. Don’t you know I can handle this?”

He sat back on his heels, then narrowed his eyes, taking in her still one-opened and very steely eye. She lifted her brows, giving her face an almost comical look.

He gestured toward the patient, who groaned softly.
Good, the jackass wasn’t dead.
“And I suppose the bullet wound – if he should live, mind you – will go unreported?”

Frankie sighed deeply as she reached for a scalpel. “See that bottle on the dresser? Grab it for me.”

Cruz grabbed the bottle.
Vodka? In her bedroom?
But he wasn’t going to question her when she was wielded a surgery knife.

She doused her instruments and the wound with the vodka and cut an X-incision around the entry point, which caused a spurt of bleeding. “Staunch that,” she ordered.

While he daubed the wound with sterile gauze from the kit, she deftly probed with forceps in the open, bloody wound until she pulled something out with a cry of triumph. “Ha, got you, you little bugger!”

Twenty harrowing minutes later she’d stitched the opening, bandaged it carefully, and stripped off her gloves. Cruz watched her closely, marveling at the look of calm satisfaction in her expression. She was amazing. “You do this often?”

She smiled at last. “He’s not out of danger yet. Let’s get him on the bed.”

Cruz frowned. “He’s a bloody, filthy mess.”

She arched one brow this time. “You think I care about my bed linen right now?”

Annoyed, he stood and walked into the hall. He’d noticed the narrow closet on his way in, one of those abstract facts you store unaware in your mind. A linen closet. He opened the door and reached for the most worn-looking sheets and ragged blankets he saw.

“This’ll do,” he said, spreading a blanket and a torn, but clean sheet over the light lavender comforter.

She’d already begun cutting off Cole’s clothing with scissors, stripping him naked. Cole’s body was white and dingy and aromatic. Together they worked to get him on the bed, and Frankie wrapped him closely in the other sheet and blanket, leaving the left part of his chest exposed.

“Now what?” Cruz asked.

“Now we wait to see if he lives,” Frankie answered.

They stared at the homeless man for long moments.

“Why do you keep a bottle of vodka in your bedroom?” Cruz asked in a rare moment of
non-sequitur.

Chapter 44

Cruz never made it to breakfast with Slater the next – or rather, this – morning. After tending to Cole’s wounds, he and Frankie had tanked on volumes of coffee to keep their minds sharp enough to figure out what the hell they’d gotten themselves into.

Slater would have to wait.

Cruz turned off his cell phone after the first several voice mails and text messages that started with the same annoying question, “Where the hell are you, Chago?”

Frankie stared at Cruz across the kitchen table, holding a coffee cup to her lips. “You should call him back,” she suggested, nodding toward the cell phone. “It might be important. I’m going to check on Cole.”

As she went upstairs, Cruz swiped a weary hand across his damp forehead, thinking they should take precautions against another attack.
That was the important issue.

But Frankie was right.
He had to check in with Slater.

A cloudy, moody pallor shadowed the view through the living room windows as Cruz looked out onto the calm residential street while he powered up his phone. Another several voice-mail messages from Slater.

“We’ve got deep, crazy shit going on.” Slater’s voice was rushed and tremulous. “Patch finished Dickey’s autopsy. Dr. Foster’s report was correct. He died from blunt force trauma to the head, but hell, it’s strange. The internal exam was different from the Hightower girl’s autopsy. Although Patch found Valerie didn’t have an – ”

The voice message exceed the time limit and ended abruptly. Cruz called Slater’s cell. Direct to voice mail. This revolving machine crap was wearing on Cruz’s nerves. He walked back into the kitchen, finding Frankie there, puzzling over the note.

“We’re going to work on this now?” He tried unsuccessfully to control the sharp tone in his voice.

“If not the note, then let’s talk about tonight,” she retorted. “Like who attacked us? In fact, who was the man after? Me – or Cole? How did he find out I was here? That enough for you to chew on?”

Frankie lips thinned and remained silent after the brief outburst. She sat down heavily , her fingers wrapped around her coffee cup. Resigned, Cruz refilled his coffee and joined her at the kitchen table. “You’re right,” he agreed. “The answer to all those questions is – I don’t know. Maybe you were followed from the station house earlier?”

She’d already begun shaking her head. “Pretty sure I wasn’t.”

“So neither of us knows.”

Frankie shrugged, her face colorless and wan. “Let’s look at the note.”

Both stared at the scribbled, incomprehensible letters. “I got nothing,” Cruz said after a few moments. “But I’ve been wanting to ask you a question.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. You admitted to keeping secret medical records on the inmates that passed through your clinic.”

He cocked his head to examine her. Deep shadows lay under her eyes. He imagined he looked just as haggard. “What made you suspicious in the first place?”

She shrugged uncomfortably, her face flushed with momentary color. “I just thought that something illegal – or at least ethically wrong – was going on in the prison.”

“Is that why you specifically targeted Pelican Bay?”

She shook her head negligently. “That was sheer accident. An opening came up and I applied. I just – you know – wanted to stay close to Rosedale, where I’d been raised. And my friend Walt Steiner transferred there. He – he knew my father.”

She wouldn’t go further. She would
not
tell him the truth about her father unless it was absolutely necessary, she vowed. That was private, personal business, and anyway, she didn’t want her father’s situation to color Cruz’s view of the facts.

He gazed at her shrewdly and took another sip of his coffee.

Was she so transparent that Cruz could guess at her personal history?

“There’s other prisons,” he pointed out. “Vacaville – it’s less than an hour from Rosedale. Or Folsom, almost around the corner.” He tried to keep his voice casual, tried not to probe even though he suspected the story she was telling him was not the whole truth.

She’d been toying with a napkin and now snapped her eyes up to meet his. “Does it matter? Why the interrogation? Crescent City had an immediate opening.”

Frankie Jones was definitely holding back. “Why did the Sheriff call you Chago?”

An attempt to distract him, but Cruz squelched his suspicions for the time being. His gaze wandered back to the cell phone’s cryptic message. “Sometimes my friends call me Chago – for Santiago,” he explained, adding “Slater’s gotten jazzed up about Dickey’s autopsy.”

“Anything unusual?”

Cruz shook his head and after a moment asked, “What did you find at Pelican Bay?”

Frankie had been suspicious from the first week of work, she explained at last. An underlying system of graft was lining the pockets of some correctional officers at PBSP. She’d seen the lax protocol of dispensing drugs to patients, and suspected some of the nurses who worked the clinic were pilfering from the medicine cabinet. Bartering with the stolen drugs.

The cabinet, with her the only possessor of the key.

“Obviously, someone had access to the controlled medications,” Cruz said.

Frankie had gotten a new lock and made a duplicate key the first month on the job. Now as the prescribing physician she had the only key to the Schedule III and IV drugs needed for her terminally ill patients.

After ten months working at the prison, she’d documented enough proof to nail the guilty officers and inmates.

“That’s it? Stealing and selling drugs?” he asked.

Her gaze shifted away from his. “Yeah,” she answered after a moment.

Cruz knew she was lying. He prickled at the idea. She’d found something else going on at Pelican Bay. But if it didn’t relate to the murders in Rosedale, he didn’t care.