Out of Time (Fall of the Morelli Crime Family #3)

21. Chapter 21

twenty-one

Mark

T he emergency department was hectic. Even with a private room, all the people storming in and out to check my eyes and chest and freaking earlobes were driving me batshit crazy.

Finally someone stopped moving long enough for me to grab his arm and ask about Bee. “When the other ambulance gets here can we bring that patient in here, too? She’s an important witness and we’d like to keep her close.”

The nurse gave me a confused look, but nodded his head. “Sure. I’ll ask for an ETA.”

“Thanks, man.”

Time seemed to fly from there. I was poked, jabbed, sprayed, and wrapped until I felt exhausted as shit. The medical personnel were slowing down and dispersing, so I figured it was a good time to try again. “Does anyone know where the woman in the other ambulance is? Can we get her in this room?”

One nurse shrugged, another ignored me. Great. I turned to Lucas.

“Can you go out and find her, please?”

“Sure thing, brother,” he said, giving my shoulder a squeeze before heading out after the shrugging nurse. “Ma’am, is there a way to look up a patient in your system for us? We need to find…”

I leaned back on my gurney, taking a moment to feel all my aches and pains before I needed to focus on Bee. Everything fucking hurt , but not as bad as it did before they administered the pain medicine. My left wrist was bandaged up, the plaster drying quickly. I had an intern cleaning out the wound on my foot with more fervor than strictly necessary, but I bit back the groan of pain.

I didn’t care about being a manly-man who could withstand any pain, but I didn’t want this guy to move slower if he thought he was hurting me. I wanted to be done with this shit. We needed to take care of our injuries so we could go somewhere safe and listen to the recordings to confirm we had everything we needed. If not, Bee would want to sacrifice herself and try to go undercover again, the stupid brave girl.

“All done,” announced the person poking at my foot. “Now we just need to bandage you up.”

“Awesome. You did great,” I told him reassuringly. This was a teaching hospital. He just needed more practice. “Very thorough.”

He beamed up at me in response. Thankfully, he was much more gentle when actually wrapping the injured leg in gauze, then left to find me a pair of crutches to take home.

Momentarily alone in my room, I let out a deep sigh. I tapped my fingers against my knee. I blew out a long breath, letting my lips flutter in a rude approximation of a fart noise. Then I looked at the clock.

We’d been stuck here for almost an hour. Where the hell were Bee and Athena and Dr. Alex?

Lucas came back, and I looked at him expectantly. Where were our girls?

“I’ve got some good news and some bad news,” he said. His mouth was set in a straight line but he didn’t look worried.

“Okay.” He was supposed to be bringing Bee in here, and she wasn’t with him. Something definitely went wrong, but I wouldn’t panic until I knew everything.

“The good news is that Bee has been taken care of. She was taken to a hospital, seen right away, and is in ship-shape.” Okay. Where was the bad? “The bad news is that her ambulance took her to a different hospital. She’s not here.”

“Where the hell is she then?” Do not panic. Do not panic.

“She’s at St. Charles in the north. Not far. Athena and Alex are with her.”

“And Athena will kick anyone’s ass who tries to hurt her until I get there?” I demanded.

“Yes. She’s right there with her. I promise.”

“How the hell did Bee get sent to a hospital across town?”

“No idea. The paramedics wouldn’t let the girls ride in their bus with Bianca, but they followed behind in Athena’s Audi. Good thing, too, or they wouldn’t have known where she was. But she’s in good hands, Mark. We can grab her after you’re discharged.”

“Eh, I’m on my way out the door anyway. Let’s go meet our lady-loves.”

“And Alex.”

I snorted. “Our lady-loves and Alex, whoever’s lady-love she is. An intern was just going to get me some crutches so they must be done with me anyway. Let’s get a doc to rush my discharge paperwork, yeah?”

The nighttime traffic would get us to the hospital in fifteen minutes. I knew Bee was safe in my head, but my gut and my heart didn’t want to listen to my stupid brain. I needed to see her with my own eyes.

“Do you think we got it?” I asked, hands tense on my lap. I needed a distraction so I didn’t explode waiting to see my girl again.

“It?” Lucas asked, glancing quickly at me before returning his eyes to the road.

“You heard more of the audio than I did. I feel like we got enough from Carlo, and Angelo, clearly, for assault and battery, right? Do you think we got enough for warrants all around?”

“And more,” he nodded. “Before you got yourself stuck in a free-falling elevator I called to get some uni’s over to Bianca’s place to see if they could snatch up Theo Gates, too.”

Right. I’d somehow completely forgotten that some strange man was waiting for Bee in her apartment.

“I’ll call over after we get to the hospital and see if they got him in custody or not.”

I nodded. If I had my way, they’d take the fucker’s balls for thinking he could have my girl just because her father allowed it. This wasn’t the fucking medieval times. Women weren’t just given away without their consent.

And rich men couldn’t beat a woman into the floor and get away with it. Carlo might have to wait for a more thorough review of the tapes to put together specific charges, but Angelo fucking Morelli would be in jail tonight for assault and battery.

“Maybe we could get a full SWAT unit to bring Angelo in tonight.”

Lucas chuckled. “I think we could do with just a standard unit. There’s not much of an army at his disposal anymore.”

It was true. We took out his enforcer, arrested his protégé, turned his junior enforcer, and had people on the way to take out his mole and heir apparent. There weren’t many people left in the operation.

“Maybe, but I’d like to see him scared shitless. I want him scared stupid enough to resist so someone else could beat the shit out of him.” The way he did to Bee.

“Might be overkill.”

“Might be worth it. I’m already in talks with that SWAT sergeant for the raid at Theo’s poker game this weekend. I could give him a call and get his team in on the action a few days sooner.” I gave him a crooked grin, hiding that I was mostly serious.

“Nah, those SWAT guys are crazy. Adrenaline junkies. I don’t want them anywhere near this case. We need some finesse, not beefed up dudes with ‘roid rage.”

My laugh was a bit more genuine. “True ‘dat.” The guy I knew wasn’t an Arnold-level of body-builder, but definitely had more muscle than sense from what I’d seen. “Fair assessment.”

We were just pulling up to the hospital when Lucas’s phone rang again. I could see Athena’s name on the display and felt a little pang. I wished it was Bee calling me with updates, but I had no idea where my phone ended up in the last hour, so I could hardly expect her to have hers handy. I understood, but it still stung.

Lucas pressed the button to connect the call to the car’s bluetooth. “Hey baby, we’ll be in soon. We’re just finding a parking spot right now.”

“I see you. I’m out front.” I jerked my head toward the entrance, and sure enough, there she was. “Get your ass over here. I’ve got some bad news.”

My breath caught. I threw my car door open, not waiting for the car to come to a complete stop.

“Mark!” Lucas shouted, stomping on his brake pedal.

Not that it really mattered because I was a fucking idiot who couldn’t do a damn thing right, and it took me a couple seconds to realize I wasn’t going anywhere until I unbuckled my seatbelt. Why couldn’t I ever do anything right?

I popped the seatbelt off and practically fell out of the car. I didn’t think about waiting to hear what else Athena said, about my injuries, or to reach into the backseat for my crutches. I just stood up and ran for the entrance.

Athena held her hands up to stop me when I tried to barrel past her. “Don’t Mark, she’s not dead or anything.”

“If that’s true then why do you look so guilty? Where is she?”

“I don’t know. She’s gone.”

“Gone?!” I hadn’t screamed like that since I was on the football team in high school and I fumbled the ball. I quit not long after, knowing that my shit playing lost us the game and the season. “What do you mean gone?”

“She’s gone?” Lucas asked, catching the tail end of the conversation as he shoved my crutches at me. “Use the damn things if you want to heal right.”

I ignored him, keeping my glare on Athena.

“I mean she was in the bathroom for a long time, and wouldn’t answer when I knocked on the door to check on her. We finally got someone to unlock the door and she wasn’t there. She disappeared.”

“Where the hell could she have gone? She’s fucking injured!”

“I don’t know. But she was probably trying to get away from the start now that I think about it. She got a separate ambulance from you. She whispered to an EMT and suddenly we weren’t allowed to ride with her. Someone directed the ambulance across town. And then she disappears on us. She was trying to shake me and Alex.” Athena sounded hurt, and that sucked because they probably would have been good friends, but her hurt feelings weren’t important right now.

Bee wasn’t safe. I needed to find her.

“Where would she have gone?” Lucas asked, running a stressed hand through his hair.

But I knew. I was just worrying about it moments ago.

She went back into the viper’s nest. No one there knew about her wire, and she didn’t know that we already had enough to lock them up. She wanted to finish the job on her own because she knew I’d never let her go back in if she told me her intentions. Not after what she already went through.

But it wasn’t just about putting her father or uncle in jail, not for her. She wanted to save her cousin, who was forced into a gross and abusive relationship with someone who should have been protecting her. She wanted to protect me, knowing that they’d keep going after me as long as they were free.

She was willing to do anything to protect the people she loved. I reached into my pocket, but the wire and its matching receiver and transmitter were gone.

I was going to have to call in my SWAT guy after all, god dammit.