Baby Heal the Pain: 1 Scene, 2 Takes

Samantha Bond, at approximately 7 pm

I stepped up to the crime scene wearing my new navy-blue cocktail dress and my favorite black Louboutin heels. My outfit wasn’t so out of place in the hotel itself, Chicago’s four-star Grand Plaza, but I did catch a skeptical look from the uniformed cop who blocked the entrance to the fourth floor room where a dead body had been discovered. Chad Waters, my old med school friend-with-benefits, who was supposed to have been my date for the night, waved to me from inside the room.

“She’s with me,” said Chad, a Chicago medical examiner, to the cop.

I held up my large purse that doubled as my medical bag, further proof that I belonged there.

“Sure thing, Dr. Waters,” the cop said.

He handed me a pair of plastic shoe covers, and I slipped them over my 4-inch heels. I pulled out a fresh pair of nitrile gloves from my bag and snapped them on, then crossed the threshold into room 419.

As I approached Chad, the assistant who had been standing beside him stepped away and joined another assistant on the other side of the room, where the lifeless body lay.

Chad peered at me over his reading glasses and smiled. How could he need readers already, given that he was only five years older than me? Doing the math, that put him at 40. Yes, old enough for age-related hyperopia, and I was right behind him.

As a team doctor for the covert spy agency Headquarters for the Elimination of Advanced Threats, known as HEAT to the few who were aware of its existence, I was surrounded by youth. Most of my colleagues were under thirty, extremely fit, and lethally proficient at hand-to-hand combat. I kept up with my own rigorous workout schedule, as required by the job, but I was by far the oddest woman out on my team, by virtue of both age and skill set.

“You look amazing,” Chad said quietly. He winked. “Hot date?”

“It was going to be.” I glanced at the body on the other side of the room. “Now it’s more of an unusual one. Which brings me to the question of the night…”

“Why you’re here,” Chad finished for me.

“Doesn’t look like my field surgery skills will do much good for this poor guy,” I said. “And you hardly need my help to do your job.”

“You’re here because you’re one of my oldest friends.” He pulled a small plastic baggie out of his pants pocket. Inside the bag was a business card. “I know better than to ask questions about your time as an army surgeon and whether you’re still involved in anything, say”—he shrugged—“surreptitious. I assume you don’t want my homicide detectives asking any uncomfortable questions, either. We found this clutched in our vic’s left hand.”

I slowly took the baggie from him and flipped it over to read the front of the card. It was mine, complete with my fake concierge physician’s practice contact information. I couldn’t deny Chad’s implied suspicions. He was too good a friend for that. But I couldn’t confirm any part of them, either. When you’re part of an off-the-books spy agency tracking down international drug smugglers, weapons dealers, and enemy espionage operatives on a daily basis, you can’t exactly talk about your real job, not even to the people closest to you. Chad wasn’t the only man I dated, which helped me keep my emotional distance, which in turn helped me keep my secrets. Whenever I could, with Chad and with the other men in my life, I stuck to the one kernel of truth in my story: that I was still a practicing doctor.

“I had a whole stack of these at the conference,” I said about the business card. The medical conference was the reason I’d been in town. Although, not the only reason. “I must have passed out dozens of business cards after my presentation on TBI triage.”

Chad nodded. “Of course. But we ran the dead kid’s ID. He not a doctor or a medic.”

My stomach knotted and I winced. “Who is he?”

“Patrick O’Dell. He’s an active-duty soldier, stationed at Fort Meade.”

The knot turned into a lead ball in my gut. Fort Meade in Maryland was right next door to an NSA facility. Given what I did for a living, the odds that a dead soldier clutching my business card had coincidentally worked in the vicinity of an intel agency were pretty much nil.

“I wanted you to get that out of here before I call this in as a homicide,” Chad said. “Which I have to do in the next two minutes if I want to keep my job.”

I looked at the soldier again. Gunshot wound to the right side of his head. Blood and tissue splatter consistent with a close-range shot. Pistol a couple of inches away from his outstretched right hand.

“Staged to look like a suicide?” That lead ball turned to molten lava and forced its way into my esophagus. I swallowed down the bile and my fear. “How can you tell?”

“For starters, he’s a lefty,” Chad said. “Which led us to take a closer look at the wound. The barrel didn’t make contact…”

He continued talking, but his voice faded as I stared at the young man, trying to place him, trying to remember if I’d ever seen him before.

“Can I look at the body?” I interrupted.

Chad furrowed his brow. “What? Listen, Samantha, I’ve gone as far out on a limb as I can, and I have to call this in pronto.”

I nodded. “Do it. I’ll just take a minute and I won’t touch anything. I’ll be out of here before the detectives arrive.”

He pressed his lips together and sighed. “Anything for you. But one minute, not a second more.” He motioned to his two assistants, who receded to the far wall to compare notes.

I walked carefully toward the body, taking note of every inch of the room as I did so. TJ, my boss at HEAT, would want a full accounting of everything I could remember. He and the rest of my team were staying at a HEAT facility a few miles outside of Chicago, preparing for a mission against the Carbonados Group, a counter-intelligence agency that was—along with its many other criminal pursuits—extorting some high-level government officials. The extortion operation had its base somewhere nearby, although we hadn’t yet pinpointed the location. It had seemed like fate when I’d received an invitation to sit on the panel at the medical conference in the city. Another coincidence and, as I was now realizing, also unlikely to be serendipity.

The soldier wore nice jeans and Doc Martins shoes, but he was shirtless. A white tee shirt and button-down, white-and-blue striped shirt were laid out on the neatly made bed like he was preparing for an evening out. His army-issue duffle bag was unzipped, but the contents were folded and stacked inside it. In other words, nothing was out of the ordinary except the dead body and the gun used to kill him.

I stood by the soldier’s feet, well out of the way of the blood and tissue evidence, and pondered his face. He wasn’t familiar, but that didn’t mean we’d never crossed paths. I scanned his throat, arms, torso, looking for signs of a struggle. Chad would do a thorough exam back at the morgue, but I wanted to know for myself. There were no defensive wounds, no indicators that he’d fought his assailant, so it had been either an ambush or a surprise attack by someone he knew.

I took a step back from the body, ready to turn away and make my exit from Chad’s crime scene, when a cluster of scars on the soldier’s rib cage caught my eye. I crouched down beside him. One of the M.E. assistants took a step toward me, but stopped when I was careful not to touch the body. I pulled out my phone and glanced at Chad. He frowned, but nodded. I snapped a picture of the scars, a ragged row of half-moon shaped pockmarks, souvenirs from an improvised explosive device, or IED. I knew because I’d seen such marks too often. Under the pockmarks, there were a series of straight lines. Healed incisions. I knew that because I’d made such cuts too many times when I was deployed in SWA, southwest Asia, to treat battlefield wounds.

I stood and pulled off my gloves with shaking hands. I nodded to Chad, who said he’d call me in the morning, and dropped my gloves and booties into the plastic bag beside the uniformed cop at the door. When I rounded the corner of the corridor and left the sight of the cop guarding the hotel room, I hit a button on my phone. I continued past the elevators and slipped into the stairwell.

The number I dialed rang only once before TJ answered. “Bond, I thought you were off the clock.”

I leaned out over the iron railing and glanced above and below me in the stairwell to ensure I was alone, then launched the bat signal. “I have a Code Scorpio.”

“Are you in imminent danger?”

“I…I don’t think so.” My fingers and toes were going numb. Shock was setting in. I took a few steadying breaths and shook out my limbs, staving off panic. “But something’s wrong.”

“Only Jensen and I are here at HQ,” TJ said, referring to our IT guru Jason Jensen. “He has your phone pinging at the Grand Plaza Hotel.”

“That’s right. I’m in a stairwell. I haven’t seen anyone suspicious, but I can’t be sure no one is here.”

I listened while TJ barked a series of orders at Jensen, then returned his attention to me. “Samantha, listen very carefully.” TJ using my first name was a sign he was very, very worried.

I repeated my series of deep breaths because TJ worrying was enough to send my parasympathetic nervous system back into panic mode, which could result in a fight, flight, or freeze response. Because I wasn’t a field operative, I’d been trained to flee, but I’d strode into this hotel without a backup team, an escape plan, or even an inkling that I could be walking into a trap.

“Fuck me,” I muttered. “I screwed up.”

“We’ll worry about that later,” TJ said. “Right now, I want you to proceed to the lobby of the hotel. Can you do that safely?”

“I think so.” I continued down the stairs, more relieved than I would have thought possible that I didn’t hear anyone’s footsteps or breathing except my own echoing off the walls.

“In the lobby, choose a spot where you can see everyone in the area, preferably without being seen.”

“Okay.” I exited through the door to the lobby, passed the bank of elevators, and arrived near the check-in desk. “I see a gold upholstered bench in the front corner, to the right of the revolving-door entrance but recessed enough to be discreet. I’ll wait for the team there.”

“Yes, wait there, but about the team.”

I tried to ignore the tension in TJ’s voice. I picked up my pace and slid onto the bench just as the first cop car with its blaring siren pulled up to the curb outside.

“Cops?” TJ said. “What’s going on?”

“You first,” I said. “The team.”

I heard him exhale. “Tactical Team doesn’t arrive in Chicago for a couple more days, and the others are doing recon on two potential Carbonados sites. The fastest I can round up and deploy a backup extraction team is close to an hour.”

I shook my head. Between potential bad guys and overzealous cops, it would be a toss-up who would find me first and what kind of shitshow would ensue. “That’s not going to work.”

“I know,” TJ said. “That’s why I have Jensen contacting an old army buddy of mine. He lives about ten minutes from where you are. He did covert ops. He’ll get you out of there.”

I blew out a long breath. I could probably last ten minutes.

“Your turn,” TJ said. “What’s up with the cops?”

“On their way to a homicide on the fourth floor,” I answered.

“You involved?”

Most people would be offended by that question, but in our line of work, it was totally fair.

“No, but I just came from there. The medical examiner is a friend of mine. He got called out to a suicide and found one of my fake business cards on the vic.”

“But it’s not a suicide.”

“No,” I said. “I have no idea what the hell is going on, but I’d surmise a murder victim clutching my business card wasn’t a coincidence.”

“Sounds like Carbonados could be involved,” he said, putting words to the fear that had been coalescing around me since I’d seen the soldier’s scars.

“Do you think this is a shot across the bow to tell us they know who we are and that we’re close to their Midwest operation?” I asked.

“That’s worst-case, so the one we have to assume. Who was the victim?”

“A soldier stationed at Fort Meade,” I answered, feeling calmed by TJ’s questions. Answering them gave me a distraction from the fact that I was alone and possibly in enemy territory. “Name of Patrick O’Dell.”

“Someone you knew?” he asked.

“I didn’t know him, but I’m convinced we met,” I answered. “I’m sure I’d recognize my own handiwork on any of the soldiers I patched up while I was deployed. TJ, that dead kid was one of mine.”

* * *

In the five minutes I’d been sitting in the lobby waiting for my rescuer and listening to TJ’s voice to keep me calm and anchored, the energy had shifted. The police presence on the street outside the hotel had swelled. A dozen cops, uniformed and plain clothes, had traipsed through the lobby on their way to the fourth-floor crime scene. No civilians were being allowed past the police barricade at the front door, and those who wanted to leave had to wait in a line, show ID, then move to another line where they waited to be questioned.

In other words, no one was getting in or out of the place without a police escort.

“Any chance your friend is a cop?” I asked TJ.

“Is the hotel already on lockdown?”

“Yes,” I said.

The line went quiet and I knew TJ had muted me. When he came back, he said, “Sit tight, Bond. I’ve put in a request to the FBI field office. After a long string of expletives, they agreed to send someone over. If that soldier was active duty and connected to NSA work, this should be their case anyway.”

“It should, shouldn’t it?” I watched the officers milling around outside. No Feds to my rather trained eye. That sent another wave of panic over me, which I fought back with calming breaths. “So why aren’t they here yet?”

“I don’t think their slow response is nefarious,” TJ assured me. “They’re just in no rush to work on a Friday night, and Chicago PD hasn’t given them the heads up through official channels yet. They’ll depend on the locals to secure the scene and do the leg work of canvassing and interviewing potential witnesses, so they just planned to take their sweet time getting there.”

“But they know he’s a dead soldier, right?”

“They do, and now that I’ve called them, they’re on their way to take over the scene and to find you,” TJ said. “I promise you, Bond, one way or another, we’ll get you out of there soon.”

As he spoke, a tall, thin, balding guy in a black suit disengaged from the clump of people milling around in the center of the lobby. He approached me and I waited for him to flash an FBI badge.

“TJ, is it possible a Fed is already here?” Even as I asked, I knew the answer, because the fake Fed had yet to flash a gold shield.

“No, they have no one on the ground. Why?”

I opened my mouth to answer, but Fake Fed did flash metal—the steel end of the pistol that he showed me by pushing aside his suit jacket.

“Hang up,” he mouthed.

“Scorpio,” I said into the phone to let TJ know I was in deep shit. “Scorpio!”

Fake Fed grabbed the phone out of my hand and clicked it off. I glanced at the nearby uniformed cop and opened my mouth to scream, but Fake Fed shook his head, then inclined it toward the front desk, where a woman with two little kids stood arguing with a hotel clerk. The man with her, or whom I’d thought was with her, had turned away from the family to face me. He wore the same kind of black suit as the man with my phone, and flashed the edge of the same kind of gun from under his suit jacket. But Fake Fed 2 kept his fingers inches from his pistol and glanced at the two little girls who were a few feet away from him.

There were a hundred reasons he wouldn’t dare shoot anyone, let alone a child, in the middle of a hotel lobby full of cops and witnesses. But if he was with Carbonados, there were a hundred and one reasons he would. I wasn’t about to play chicken with the lives of those children or their mother.

I turned back to Fake Fed 1, who had pulled out my phone’s SIM card and now dropped it on the floor. He crushed it under his heel, then dropped my phone and gave it the same treatment. He kicked it all under the bench and motioned for me to stand up.

I followed his silent order. I wasn’t too shaken because my phone wasn’t the only way Jensen could track me. The minute I’d said the words “Code Scorpio” to TJ, he would have told Jensen to activate the other tracker. I hoisted my medical bag/purse over my shoulder and awaited further instructions.

Fake Fed 1 scowled and held out his hand. I gave him the bag, which he rudely searched. He pulled out my syringes and shoved them into the nearby trashcan, ran his hand over the lining to make sure there were no hidden weapons or electronics, and started to hand my bag back to me like this might be a civilized operation after all. A surge of relief flooded through me. Then at the last second, he retracted the offer and made a close inspection of the decorative buttons covering the metal studs that attached the handles to the leather body. He pulled both of them off and ground them under his heel.

Fuck me.

One of those studs had been a tracker, but now that was gone, too. As the threats to HEAT agents had escalated over the past few months, TJ and his boss had discussed embedding trackers on our persons. I had argued vehemently against it because we’re human beings, not equipment, and because we needed our privacy and our self-respect, regardless of who employed us. At the moment, my vehemence seemed a bit short-sighted. If I got through this ordeal alive, I was sure I’d still come down on the side of personal autonomy, but at that moment, I would have submitted to a metal disc implanted in my ass if it had meant Jensen could still track me.

Fake Fed 1 handed me back my bag. We’d be taking it with us, I assumed because it was now covered in his fingerprints, which he wouldn’t want my team to find. He gripped my elbow and shoved me away from the front doors, past the front desk, and into the narrow hallway that led to the parking garage. In the chaos, no one noticed us. Except, of course, Fake Fed 2, who fell in a few feet behind us. My last hope was the uniformed cop guarding the glass doors to the parking garage. As we approached, my captor pressed his bony fingertips into my arm until it hurt and flashed something at the cop. The cop nodded at him, didn’t look at me, and let us pass.

My abductor must have some sort of badge, so the question that remained was whether it was a real one or a forgery good enough to fool the police themselves. Of the two choices, I was more worried about the first. If there had been legit agents at the hotel, TJ would have known. Which meant these guys might be double agents, moles, or just dirty Feds on the Carbonados payroll. In that case, this would likely be the last trip I ever took, and it wouldn’t be to a vacation destination.

That clinched it. I wasn’t going anywhere with these assholes.

I started with the usual. “You’ll never get away with this. It would be in your best interest to let me go back to the hotel lobby.”

“Thanks for caring,” Fake Fed 1 said, then winked at me. “But we’ll be fine.”

“Let me go!” I yelled.

My voice echoed off the walls, but no one responded. There was probably no one inside the structure, so I would have to be loud enough for the sound to penetrate thick concrete. As Fake Fed 1 pushed me toward an SUV, I took a deep breath, opened my mouth wide, and let out a blood-curdling scream.

That earned me a hard, open-handed slap from Fake Fed 2. My cheek stung and my eyes watered. While I panted to catch my breath from the shock of the pain, he looked poised to do more damage. Then he furrowed his brow and turned away from me. Something had caught his attention. Maybe my ploy had worked. Maybe someone had heard my scream and was coming to help me. If so, I needed to do my part to facilitate my own escape.

“Drop it,” I heard Fake Fed 2 say to someone.

My best hope seemed to have stopped in his or her tracks. But that didn’t mean I was done. I used the distraction to land a hard blow to Fake Fed 1’s throat and a hand chop to his wrist. My captor swayed on his feet, but he didn’t go down, and he didn’t drop his gun. Fuck me. At this rate, I’d get shot.

“Fuck this,” my would-be rescuer said. He kicked the gun out of Fake Fed 2’s hand, punched him in the gut, and slammed the butt of his own pistol against the guy’s forehead, rendering him unconscious.

I’d never been happier to see a stranger with a gun.

His distraction opened up another opportunity for me to escape. This time I followed new guy’s lead and kicked, stiletto heel first, into my captor’s groin. A scrotum attack is always a risky move that can enrage an attacker as often as incapacitate him, but despite my limited fighting skills, I had enough practice and plenty of anatomy knowledge to make it work. He howled with pain and collapsed in a heap on the pavement.

“Who are you?” I yelled, hoping his pain and fear of further attack on his manhood would make him chatty. “Are you with Carbonados? Do you work for them? Are you dirty cops?”

But my disabled captor wasn’t in a talkative mood after all, and his arms still worked fine. He leveled his gun at me.

“Hey!” my rescuer yelled, drawing Fake Fed 1’s attention.

My captor jumped to his feet and stared at my rescuer, who was dressed in an expensive, well-fitted gray suit with a white button-down shirt opened just enough at the collar for me to catch a glimpse of a tattoo. An army insignia. This had to be TJ’s buddy. I nearly wooted in relief but was stopped by a sharp blow to my temple. Pain burst behind my eyes and radiated down my neck and into my spine.

I couldn’t see anything but spots, but I heard grunts and flesh-on-flesh punches and the sound of a gun clattering across the cement floor. Whose gun I couldn’t say, but I knew damn well who I was rooting for.

“Are you okay?” a man asked me.

Strong but gentle arms encircled me and helped me remain upright. From the fresh scent of light aftershave, I knew it wasn’t one of my captors. My vision cleared and I stared into a pair of beautiful, golden-brown eyes.

I nodded. “I think so.” But I was still dizzy, my head ached, and I didn’t feel as steady on my feet as I would have liked.

“Shit.” He reached out his arms. “No, you’re not.”

“You must be TJ’s friend.” I smiled, but the effort increased the pain in my temple. “Thank God you’re here. We have to go. There are probably more of them crawling around the building.” I pointed to the neutralized fake feds.

“Best idea I’ve heard all night.” TJ’s friend picked up my medical bag, which I didn’t remember dropping, then held my elbow as he steered me toward an exit door.

I thought I should warn him to proceed carefully, but TJ had told me he was covert ops, and besides, he seemed to be moving cautiously and paying attention to his surroundings. And if I didn’t need to expend energy speaking, I could use it to keep pace with him. We stepped out of the parking garage and into the alley.

My stomach lurched and my vision swam. “Wait.”

He held my arm, keeping me balanced. “You have to trust me,” he said.

“It’s not that.” I turned away from him as spots blurred the edges of my vision. My stomach roiled. I bent over and vomited against the brick wall.

Probably a concussion. Fuck me.

“Come on, Red,” TJ’s friend said.

I wondered why he called me that. A reference to my hair, obviously. But why hadn’t TJ told him my name? I didn’t verbalize my curiosity because I was weak and unstable and didn’t have energy to waste on unimportant questions.

“Next stop is the hospital,” my rescuer said.

Shutting down that dangerous plan was important enough to exert some of my limited strength. “No hospital! There could be more of them there.”

He furrowed his brow. “Carbonados?”

So TJ had at least told him that much. I nodded, but the movement made my contusion throb.

“You need a doctor,” he said.

“I am a doctor.” If TJ had trusted his friend with information about Carbonados, I couldn’t fathom why he hadn’t told the man more about me. But I’d worry about that later. “Just get me to HEAT HQ and I’ll be fine.”

“HEAT? What the—” He stopped speaking.

I wobbled on my Louboutin stilettos. The earth shifted on its axis. I had a split second to anticipate what was happening. I aimed for my rescuer’s arms. He caught me and pulled me tightly to his hard chest. And then the world went black.

Evan Prescott, at approximately 7 pm

I downed the last drops of Rémy Martin in my glass and faced the inevitable: I was definitely going on this date. My younger sister meant well, but if she fixed me up with one more yoga instructor or triathlon enthusiast, I might lose my shit. Quietly, though. I did not raise my voice with my sister. She’d been through enough.

My phone—the one in the right breast pocket of my suit—buzzed against my chest. Dare I hope? I answered, maybe a little too enthusiastically. “What’s up, Bennet?” I asked my boss at Sentinel Security. Please let it be an emergency assignment.

“Sorry to call you on your night off, Prescott,” Bennet said. “But it’s an emergency assignment.”

Yes. I fist-pumped.

I pulled out my other phone, the civilian one, from my left pants pocket and started thumbing my regretful text message to Madison or Addison or… I didn’t know because I’d apparently labeled her as “Obli-date 5” in my phone.

“Former army infantry,” Bennet said, referring to the vet who needed my services. “Call came in on the hotline. He sounded scared. Maybe having a PTSD flashback.”

That clinched it. My sister’s fix-up number five was on her own for the evening. I added regretful emojis to my message and offered that she could keep our dinner reservation and put it on my tab.

“Text me the address,” I said. “And his number. I’ll talk to him while I drive.”

“That’s a problem.”

I stopped mid-text to my sister, who would have my ass on a spit for backing out of another date. “What does that mean?”

“He didn’t give a location, so we had to trace the call. Phone is registered to a Patrick O’Dell, signal indicates he’s at the Grand Plaza hotel.”

“Okay. Not hearing the problem.” I grabbed my keys, punched a series of codes to set the security system at the front door of my high-tech, downtown Chicago apartment, and headed for the elevator.

“He hung up,” Bennet continued. “We couldn’t get him back on the line.”

That could be bad. “Suicidal?” I asked.

Bennet sighed. “Possibly, but…”

“Give me a sec to get downstairs,” I said.

I stepped into the elevator and smiled at the elderly lady who lived on the twelfth floor, two floors above me. I didn’t make eye contact with the kid I didn’t recognize who stood in the back right corner, but I kept my attention focused on him. Skinny, early 20s, acne along his jawline, dark hair with bleached tips, black and red motorcycle helmet tucked under his right arm. I’d be able to pick him out of a lineup. Not that there would be a line-up or a need to ID him. Just part of situational awareness, which I’d been honing since I went active army 10 years ago. About the same age as the kid with acne, actually.

I shoved an earpiece into my ear. The second the elevator doors slid open at lobby level, I stepped out of it. “Go on,” I said to Bennet. “The problem?”

“9-1-1 call came in 15 minutes ago. Dead guy on the fourth floor of that very hotel. Age and description match what we pulled up on O’Dell.”

“Shit.” I said a little prayer for the troubled soldier. Not because I was religious, but because that’s what we did when one of our own fell. “But if O’Dell is gone, what do you need me to do?”

“From what we’re monitoring on police scanners, there’s a lot of blood but no obvious weapon.”

I entered the parking garage and picked up my pace as I approached my black Mercedes SUV. Comfortable enough to transport the VIPs I often protected. Big enough to haul around a vet in crisis and an intervention team when necessary. I followed Bennet’s clues to the obvious conclusion. The two sides of Sentinel Security. The paid work and the work of our hearts. “You don’t think it was a suicide.”

“We need to know for sure. Two things that pop. One, O’Dell had a TSI security clearance when he was deployed, and when he called the hotline, he said someone was after him. Two, he mentioned something about carbon.”

“What the hell does that mean?” I ran through possibilities. Carbon footprint, carbon caps, carbon copies. They made no fucking sense.

“I know it makes no fucking sense,” Bennet said, echoing my thoughts. Yeah, we’d known each other a lot of years. “We need someone on the ground to charm some information out of the local cops so the FBI field office can decide whether they need to swarm in and claim jurisdiction.”

“Goddamn, I hate doing their fucking dirty work,” I muttered. Especially when it was all for show, because we all knew damn well the FBI would take over in a case like this. “You need to tell the Feds that counting on my charm to get them information is a shitty plan A.”

“You’re telling me. But try to be on your best behavior. If you have to, remind the cops of some of the big-ass favors we’ve done for CPD over the past year.”

He wasn’t exaggerating. From protecting some hot-shot, pain-in-the-ass senator to talking down a well-armed Iraq vet having a psychotic break in the middle of Clark Street, to about a dozen other high-risk missions, our four-man team at Sentinel Security had become a trusted partner to the city force. Unfortunately, that support—and more importantly, high-value information—tended to flow only one way.

“I’ll do my best,” I said. “And I’ll be there in 15.”

* * *

I arrived in front of the hotel 11 minutes later. I like to over-deliver. I recognized the police captain from the nearby precinct. We went back a few years, but most recently, we’d created a joint task force to deal with the vet on Clark Street. I parked in a dark spot across the street and half a block down from the hotel and made my way to the captain.

“Hey, LaBeque,” I said as I approached her.

Without looking at me, she said, “Not buying what you’re selling, pretty boy.”

That pissed me off. Which, of course, was why she’d said it. “We know he’s a vet, and the FBI is going to swoop in and take jurisdiction if we can’t give them the information they want.” So much for my best behavior. But sometimes—a lot of times—being an asshole was so much more expedient than being a team player.

“You’re charming as fucking ever,” she muttered. She sighed and shook her head. “The medical examiner doesn’t know much yet, but he feels comfortable ruling it a homicide.”

“Shit,” I said. “Any likely perps?”

She shook her head. “Given the skill set Dr. Waters said was involved, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was one of you.”

I arched an eyebrow.

“Well-trained ops,” she clarified. She looked me up and down. “In fact, where were you an hour ago? Maybe we should take you to the station for questioning.”

“You’re not serious,” I said. I was 90% sure she wasn’t serious, but with the history between LeBeque and me, it never hurt to ask.

“Of course not. You’re an asshole, Prescott, but you’re one of the good guys.”

That was a stretch, but I let it slide. “What are the odds I can see the scene?”

“Slim to none,” she said. “But we’ve finished the sweep of the east side of the building and there’s no reason to have a uniform stationed outside that security door.”

“Good to know,” I said. “I owe you, LeBeque.”

“Don’t make me regret it.” She turned away to talk to one of the uniforms.

I strolled down the sidewalk, away from the hotel entrance, and slipped into the alley. A minute later, I was using a code descrambling app on my company phone to convince the hotel’s woefully insecure security system that I belonged in the building. The door led to the parking garage, whose front and back entrances were closed and guarded from the outside by uniforms. It was surprisingly quiet, and I stepped softly to avoid causing echoing footsteps.

Which is why a woman’s scream was so unexpected. I stopped in the shadow of a cement pillar and waited for cops to come running, but they didn’t. Not surprising, given the thickness of the walls. There were more noises, this time raised voices. One woman and at least two men. I didn’t know what I had interrupted and I had a job to do, but despite my carefully cultivated reputation as an asshole, I had no intention of letting a woman fend for herself with two or more men while half of CPD was outside and preoccupied with a murder investigation.

I pulled my side piece, a small revolver that I kept well maintained but tried to avoid using at all costs. I’d shot off enough weapons to last me three lifetimes when I’d been active duty, and had come too close to doing it once after I’d come home. I preferred my fights bare-knuckled and weaponless. But I wasn’t stupid, so I cocked the gun and crept closer to the west side of the garage, where the altercation was taking place.

I spotted the woman first. Tall with long, reddish-brown hair and wearing a tight blue dress and black high heels. Nice ass. She turned to the side. Great rack. Also, a red mark on her right cheek that was sure to be a bruise soon. Goddammit. I had a special hatred for men who hit women. I’d nearly put one in the ground and had only stopped because going to prison would have left my sister alone in the world. But this time, I had options. First, there was an exception for deadly force when used in defense of another’s life. Second, I wouldn’t have to shoot the fuckers who’d hurt this woman if I could sneak up silently and get the drop on them.

“Drop it,” a man’s voice said from behind me.

Shit.

I’d focused on the hot woman and the ugly bruise and had let one of the perps get the drop on me. I raised my arms slowly.

A few yards away from me, the hot woman kicked at the attacker who was pointing a gun at her. She had some moves. She didn’t disarm him, although she’d knocked him off balance. At this rate, she’d get herself shot.

“Fuck this,” I muttered. I turned on my heel and knocked the gun out of thug #2’s hand, then sank him with a punch to the gut and a pistol whip to the temple. If there was any justice in the world, that would hurt like a sonofabitch in the morning.

The kerfuffle caught thug #1’s attention. To her credit, Hot Woman used the distraction to land another hard kick—this one to his groin—with her stiletto heel. No doubt about that one. It was going to hurt like a sonofabitch for the next week. I felt a strange sort of pride in her. But she was still going to get herself shot, because goddammit, she was standing over thug #1 instead of running.

“Are you with Carbonados?” she yelled at her attacker.

Carbonados. Carbon. This wasn’t a random hot woman. It was a hot woman with a connection to my murdered soldier. And once I rescued her ass, I was going to grill her for every bit of information she had about O’Dell and Carbonados and whatever was going on that had inspired this attack on her.

Thug #1 straightened and lifted his gun in her direction.

“Hey!” I yelled as I launched myself at him.

He’d been clocking me, though. He jumped to his feet and struck Hot Woman’s temple with the butt of his gun, then swung the barrel in my direction. I mimicked her earlier kick but aimed for his hand and sent his Glock flying. I followed up with a roundhouse punch to his face and a spin kick to his diaphragm, knocking him backwards and to the ground. He was unconscious and gasping for breath. That might keep him occupied long enough for the woman to escape.

I turned to her. “Are you okay?”

She nodded. “I think so.” But she was pale. A purple knot was forming on her forehead. And her eyes weren’t focused.

“Shit.” I reached out my arms. “No, you’re not.”

“TJ’s friend.” She smiled, but she looked worse, not better. “Thank God you’re here. We have to get out of here. There are probably more of them crawling around the building,” she said, referring to thug #1 and #2.

More of them? This simple information-gathering exercise was becoming a clusterfuck. I didn’t know or care who TJ was, but Hot Woman was finally making some sense. “Best idea I’ve heard all night.” I grabbed her large, black leather purse, which was on the cement floor beside her, then held her elbow and steered her toward the unguarded exit.

Yes, I probably should have left her in LeBeque’s protection, but until I knew how she was connected to O’Dell and found out who or what the hell Carbonados was, the beautiful woman on my arm wasn’t leaving my sight. We stepped out of the parking garage and into the alley.

“Wait.” She stopped short.

This was not the time for her to realize she was following a stranger into a dark alley. “You have to trust me,” I said.

“It’s not that.” She turned away from me, bent at the waist, and vomited beside the brick wall.

Probably a concussion. Questions would have to wait. “Come on, Red. Next stop is the hospital.”

She pulled away from me and her eyes went round. “No hospital! There could be more of them there!”

I furrowed my brow and took a guess. “Carbonados?”

She nodded, then winced.

“You need a doctor,” I said.

“I am a doctor,” she said. “Didn’t TJ tell you? Just get me to HEAT HQ and I’ll be fine.”

“HEAT? What the—” I didn’t finish my question.

Red’s eyes were unfocused. Her skin was gray. She wobbled on her high heels. She fell forward and I caught her. My arms were full of a soft, warm, sexy woman. A brave, beautiful, and unresponsive woman. She had passed out cold.

I bent and draped her over my shoulder in a fireman’s carry, looping her bag over my free arm. I headed to the back of the alley and crossed behind several buildings to avoid looky-loos on the sidewalk, cut through another alley a couple of blocks away, crossed the street, and strolled down the sidewalk to my SUV. I glanced at Hot Woman and got a full view of her backside. My cock instantly responded to her firm curves. Reluctantly, I relinquished my hold on her and laid her on the back seat while I silently apologized for thinking she had a nice ass. It was, in fact, spectacular.

I climbed into the back and squatted on the floor beside her. I pulled out my civilian cell phone and switched on the flashlight. Pulling up each eyelid in turn, I checked her pupils, then her pulse and her breathing. I was pretty sure she wasn’t in imminent danger, but my medic training was only incidental to my work in special ops, which had involved a lot of creeping around behind enemy lines and negotiating to secure the release of wounded soldiers. In this case, I would have liked a second opinion from a doctor. A doctor who wasn’t now unconscious on my back seat.

The lady had said no hospitals. Under the circumstances, I was inclined to agree with her. I’d take her to my apartment, call in a real doctor, and deal with the fallout with Bennet after that. I could do that and stay focused on my mission, because if my instincts were right, we would learn more about O’Dell’s death from my unexpected patient than from the tight-lipped M.E. and cops on the scene. If Red turned out to be one of the bad guys, I’d have to tie her to the bed until we could turn her over to the FBI. If she turned out to be one of the good guys, maybe I could talk her into tying me to the bed and…

Yeah, that was my cock taking over. It didn’t give a damn about the mission. I sighed as I climbed into the driver’s seat and adjusted myself to some lesser degree of discomfort. In the interest of doing my job, I’d have to stop being so picky about dating and just get laid. But when I glanced in the rearview mirror and my cock went rock hard, I knew I wouldn’t be satisfied with a random hook-up. I wanted the hot woman who claimed she was a doctor, thought I knew someone named TJ, and didn’t have the sense to run from danger to save her spectacular ass.

“Shit,” I muttered, because that particular lack of sense was something we shared.