Chapter 8
EIGHT
Gabriel
“Is there much else to even get here?” Liam asks when we arrive at the hospital.
“I don’t know. I just… I know we have the report from the doctor. But I want to go over things again. I know she hasn’t woken up, but if there’s something… hell, Liam, I’ve seen you deduce an entire murder just by glancing at the way someone’s hair looked.”
He laughs as we get out of the vehicle. “I’m pretty sure it was something more than that.”
“I’m not so sure it was! I’m still convinced you looked at that guy’s hair and just figured it all out.”
“You seem to think I’m spectacular no matter what I do. How sweet of you,” he says with a wink.
“You are pretty spectacular,” I agree as we pass a security officer fumbling with his radio. I nod at him while Liam pretends he doesn’t exist because no one exists in his eyes but me.
He beams at me. “But I will never be as phenomenal as you.”
“Where do you think ass-kissing is going to get you?”
“Somewhere good, hopefully. Maybe somewhere with your clothes off?” Liam suggests.
“What if we wait until we’re not walking through the front doors of a hospital to wish for that?”
“I’ve been good this year, and Santa won’t even give me this,” Liam says.
“Have you been good?” I consider this and think about everything Liam has done this year.
While I absolutely love the man, I feel like on a scale of naughty to nice…
I’m pretty sure that naughty scale would be overflowing.
I just have to look at the calculating expression he’s currently wearing to confirm this.
“I have been so good, Gabriel. Honestly. Think of how much better I am than everyone else at work besides you. Every life I save should be one life I get to destroy with my snark and sarcasm. It should even out.”
“Uh… huh. So when Matthew walked in the other day and you shouted ‘Jesus Christ!’ and threw your body back when you saw him, that was excused because… you saved someone… at some point this year.”
“Nah, being mean to Matthew is just payback for me saving his life. That was a given the day I saved his life,” he assures me.
“You’ve saved my life multiple times… I’m still unsure how I should pay you back.”
“By getting naked. We should play doctor.”
I ignore my one true love who seems to somehow have both the best ideas and the worst ideas. It’s fascinating, really.
Instead, we get into the elevator and press the button for the third floor.
“We have two floors to get freaky,” he says.
“Two floors? How fast do you think we are?” I tease.
He grins at me and it’s such a sexy look on him. So there I am slipping one button on my shirt free and pulling each side of the shirt open, baring my naked flesh for him in a Superman pose.
“How tantalizing,” Liam says while I laugh and quickly redo the single button.
“Thank you. I knew that’d just make your whole day.”
“Clearly I’ve been nice this year,” he says as the door opens and we walk down the hallway.
When we step up to the front desk, I smile at the nurse, explain who we are, and tell her we have an appointment to talk to Nadine’s doctor.
She takes us back and we head into the room where the doctor is happy to go over things with us.
“Sadly, not much has changed. The trauma that was dealt to her head was severe enough to have caused swelling on her brain. While the swelling has been managed, it was quite severe.”
“And you believe it was a blunt object?” I ask.
He pulls up a picture on the computer and grabs a pen to point out the specifics of the wound. “The left side here is blunt trauma, but we have a laceration here. Knowing that she was placed into the trunk of a car, I wonder if her head hit the trunk itself.”
“It’s possible since we found no traces of blood outside of the vehicle,” Liam replies as he tilts the monitor toward him and gets a good look at the pictures. We’ve already seen them, but maybe he’s off thinking about something else he hadn’t thought of before.
“If you’d like to see her, she’s in room 3021. Her brother might be in there already. I feel like I saw him floating around earlier today,” the doctor says.
“Thank you.”
“Of course. We are monitoring her closely and hoping that she pulls through.”
We head to her room but she has no visitors, so I move over to her bed.
“Why do you feel so guilty over it?” Liam asks as he scrutinizes Nadine.
I think about it for a moment, trying to come up with a good way to explain this to Liam. I know he doesn’t always feel things the way I do. “I don’t feel… guilty. It’s more of a… if we’d found her sooner, could we have done something kind of thing.”
“Gabriel—”
I shake my head. “I’m not being too weak or letting this job get to me. I know we’re not superheroes.”
Liam sits down on the bench near her bed and leans back. “I’m not judging you for having emotions just because I don’t understand them.”
“I know, but I also know that as detectives, we can’t save everyone no matter how hard we try. It’s impossible to do. We just have to do our best to protect those we can,” I say.
“She might not pull through this, we might not have saved her, but remember that Zach will never be able to hurt anyone like her again.”
“I know. I promise I do.”
The door opens and I look up as a man enters. He hesitates when he sees us.
“Are you Nadine’s brother?” I ask.
“I am. Jared. Are you friends?”
I shake my head as I step over to greet him and shake his hand. “We’re actually detectives. We were here talking to the doctor and thought we’d stop in and see her.”
“She’s…” He watches her for a moment. “I’m just not sure she’s going to wake up, you know?
I feel pretty shitty about it. I haven’t seen her in months…
since I moved to Utah. I kept meaning to come back since I knew she didn’t have the money to toss toward a plane ticket, but I just…
got caught up in my life and now here we are.
Finally bought that plane ticket but a week too late. ”
“I’m so sorry,” I say.
Jared gives me a soft smile as he slumps into the remaining chair. “Thanks. Were you the ones who found her?”
“We were,” I confirm.
“Thank you. I just… I really want to thank you. And if she wakes up… please stop by because she’ll want to thank you too.”
“Of course,” I say.
“And I promise if she wakes up, I’m never going to push off our visits ever again.”
“I really hope she does,” I tell him before I nudge Liam and head for the door.