Lawman’s Lookout (Alden Security #6)
1. Casimir “Cas” Hallie
1
Casimir “Cas” Hallie
“ I made it, Officer Hallie,” Elena Fernandez said. “Ms. Adama and Ms. Raquel met me at the airport like you said, and we’re at their house.”
“Good,” I said, blinking at the clock on the bedside table. It was 2 a.m., which meant it was 4 a.m. in the suburb of the Twin Cities where Elena was going to be living. Woodbury, Minnesota, was nice, not too crowded but still enough of the city to keep her from feeling like she was in the middle of nowhere. Raquel and Adama Nelson were willing to take Elena in for as long as necessary, even though I had been very transparent about the potential danger. I had a plan in place to try to keep her father from finding out where she was, but nothing was foolproof.
“Ms. Adama wants to talk to you,” Elena said, and a moment later there was a warm, rich voice on the other end of the line in place of Elena’s quiet, slightly accented one.
“Officer Hallie, I’m sorry that we’re calling you so late, but she was so adamant that I had to give in.”
“I asked her to promise to let me know as soon as she was settled in and safe. It’s been a long road,” I said. I readjusted myself a little in bed. I had been dozing off and on since eleven, but I had been determined not to truly fall asleep until Elena’s call. “Thank you again for agreeing to give her a safe home. You have my friend’s number at the SPPD in case anything comes up, right? And, of course, you can always call me.”
“Correct. I have all the information that you sent saved in both hard and digital copies. Elena already showed me her phone and made sure that I have her number, and she has her GPS turned on so I can see where she is. We’ll enroll her in an online charter school for now, so she doesn’t have to try fitting into a new school quite yet. We also have an appointment scheduled with a therapist. I want to make sure she gets all the support that she needs.”
“That’s great, thank you. Saint Durand sent the transcripts for the work she was doing when she was staying at True Colors, correct?”
Adama hummed. “That he did, and I’m very impressed.” I could hear the smile in her voice, and I wondered if she was smiling at Elena while she said that.
“I’m glad. I’ll let you go so you can try to get some sleep for the night. I’m sorry for the late arrival time — or early, I suppose, considering it’s very early morning there — but in order for everything to work out—”
“Don’t you apologize. I know just what you mean, and it’s a delicate situation. I’ve been awake at this time for far worse reasons,” Adama scolded gently. “I know it’s even earlier for you, so I’ll say good night, and I hope to speak to you again soon.”
“Good night, ma’am.”
When the call ended, I laid the phone on the nightstand and sighed, letting every bit of breath out of my body. I had facilitated Elena’s move to the Midwest, using several contacts both here in LA and in St. Paul, Minnesota. I did it to protect Elena from her gang-leader father, Julio Fernandez, and to get his focus off the shelter where Elena had been staying. My friend “Saint” Michael Durand ran the shelter, and he had recently had a rough time of it when Fernandez and another parent — and I use that word from solely a biological standpoint — did their damndest to kill Saint in order to stop the work he does to protect kids who have been rejected for their sexual and gender identities. The other parent, Douglas Green, was shot by Saint’s nutcase of a sister, but Fernandez was still alive and well and determined to get Elena back and make sure she does exactly what he wants her to do.
From the snatches of conversations I’ve had with Elena, he didn’t just want her to do her homework. I suspected he was planning to marry her off as soon as she was sixteen, à la Isabella and Ferdinand. Julio was trying to expand; he had been working on more connections and more territory for the past twenty years. If he could secure allegiance with one of the other bigger fish by connecting their families, I believed he would one hundred percent use Elena for that purpose.
With Elena two thousand miles away, Julio would have a lot harder time with that. I smiled to myself. Foiling him felt good, though I knew it wasn’t really over. He wouldn’t give up looking for her, but she would be safe there for a while, at least. One of the reasons that Elena had gotten into MSP International Airport at such a godawful time was a layover in Houston, Texas. She had turned her phone’s location services on, taken a few selfies that showed the coordinates, and carefully backed them up in the cloud. Then, at my instruction, she had taken the phone, put it into a plastic bag inside a reusable grocery bag, and smashed it into as many pieces as an iPhone could break into when repeatedly swung against a Jersey barrier.
I didn’t know for sure that Fernandez had someone who would be trying to track Elena’s location through her mobile activity, but I had thought it wouldn’t hurt. Elena hadn’t been unhappy about the new Android device I had purchased her either. It had no connection to Elena Fernandez, and we had talked about the importance of internet privacy. I only hoped that she would remember.
In addition, I had a friend of mine who was an undercover narcotics officer primed to offer a little tip in a day or so, leading Fernandez’s eye to Texas versus Minnesota.
All things considered, I thought it was a pretty devious and cunning plan. Mostly I just prayed that it would keep Elena safe.
I sighed as I realized that I needed to use the bathroom. I glanced over at the jug, then the call light button. Either was a viable option, but I was restless and could use a few minutes out of bed, so I pushed the call button and raised the bed a bit as I waited.
My favorite night nurse, Kyle, gave the door two feather-light taps — enough to hear if I was awake and waiting, but soft enough that it wouldn’t wake me if the light had been turned on accidentally — and let himself in.
“Need to go do a little horse trading?” he asked quietly, his eyes assessing everything about my position before he smiled at me.
I sighed and nodded. “And I need to reposition a little. Figured that I’d go, and then I could get extra comfortable.”
“Fantastic plan, Cas. Come on, let’s get you up.”
Together, we maneuvered me into a wheelchair, and I rolled myself into the bathroom, where Kyle stood by as I used the grab bars to transfer to the toilet. I was getting stronger by the day, and I was hopeful that I could go home soon. The general weakness that remained from trauma and blood loss meant that I wasn’t a candidate for crutches yet. I was looking forward to the increased mobility. I needed Kyle to get into the chair, but he was only there to make sure I didn’t screw up and go down once we were in the bathroom. He grinned at me, plainly pleased with how well I was doing, and that took some of the sting out of having to ask for help in the first place. Kyle turned around so I could do what I needed to do without eyes on me, and I was grateful for the sensitivity. Not all the nurses were good at remembering that I was a person as well as a patient.
When I was back in bed, I got as comfortable as I could. Kyle brought me ice water because he knew I loved fresh ice, and I sighed and laid back. I had been working on the plan to get Elena to safety for a while, along with the work I was doing with my in-patient rehab. Now that Elena was taken care of, I could let that go and focus. I was almost ready to be released, and I was looking forward to it. I hadn’t seen my little apartment in more than a month. I was glad that my only houseplant was a cactus, and I just wanted to go home.
***
Two days after Elena landed in Minnesota, I had an appointment with a resource coordinator. In a bright and bubbly voice, she told me that I had the rest of my life ahead of me, and that she was there to help in any way she could.
I knew precisely how accurate that was, but I smiled and nodded anyway because that’s what I was supposed to do.
I would be going home at the beginning of the week, and I was advised that I would need help with most tasks for at least a few more weeks. I promised that I had someone to help me and consented to a visiting nurse twice a week. I planned to cancel it as soon as possible, though. Once I was home, I would figure it all out. I had a meeting with the prosthetics specialists again in a few weeks, and I was pretty sure I would be able to get my first limb not too long after that. I kept getting a time range rather than any kind of concrete answer, and it was annoying, but it did depend on how well I healed.
The incision looked as good as it could, all things considered. Scars and wounds don’t bother me, so I’d been looking at it since I could, and it had healed well. I had no infection or complications, and according to my doctor, I was progressing “well.”
At this point, I was kind of tired of the word “well,” but it was better than “okay” or “poor,” so I didn’t say anything.
After the appointment, I returned to my room and picked up a book. I had an hour until my PT appointment and time to kill. I was rereading The Writers Idea Book. I picked it up in a fit of nostalgia, and it was as interesting as I remembered it being when I was a teenager checking it out of the library. It was nearly time for my appointment when my phone buzzed. I checked the number but didn’t recognize it. I almost declined since I wasn’t working, but habit had me swiping to answer the call.
“Officer Cas Hallie?”
“This is he, who is this?” I asked.
“This is Nurse Amanda at MLK Community Healthcare. There is a patient here who wishes to speak with you, and gave me this phone number. Are you willing to accept a call from an Antonio Morales?”
Antonio. Fuck. “Yes, of course. Is he okay?”
She hesitated. “He will be,” she said in a tone of voice that had me on guard immediately.
“Yes, I’ll speak to him,” I said. “Please, put him on the phone.”
“I’m afraid that I’ll have to hold the telephone to his ear, and he is a bit hard to hear at this moment, so please bear with me.”
Yeah, my initial assessment was correct; fuck.
I heard some shuffling over the line, then the nurse’s voice in the background, and then I heard Antonio. “Hey, man,” he rasped.
“Tony, what happened?” As if I couldn’t guess.
“Eh, bad day at work, you know how it can be,” Antonio said, the message loud and clear. He had dropped the “Elena is in Texas” hint, and Julio had taken an issue with it. I thought I heard the nurse strangle a snort in the background, and Antonio gave a pained-sounding huff of laughter in return. “Just need this pretty thing to put a couple of band-aids and an ice pack on me, and I’m outta here.”
I harrumphed. “She told me she’s holding the phone for you. I’m guessing your fingers are out of commission. How are you planning on holding that ice pack?”
“Man, why do you have to be like that? Don’t you know you’re supposed to be encouraging?” He clicked his tongue. “I gave JF the info, and he was concerned that I was leaving something out.”
Antonio didn’t actually know where Elena was for precisely this reason. If you don’t know the answer to a question, you can’t give it away.
“Did you leave anything out?” I asked.
He hesitated and blew out a breath that ended with a hiss, and I heard the nurse scold him softly. “I know,” he said to her, the sound of his voice a bit further away from the phone. “Well…” Antonio said slowly, “not as much as I should have.”
“So…” I said leadingly.
Antonio sighed, his breath catching again. “So I’m alive only so I could tell you that you’ll tell him exactly where Elena is; your only choice in the matter is how quickly you die after.”