Chapter Thirty-Two
“Cai?” Riley tried to sit up before his eyes adjusted to the light. The wounds along his ribcage gave a sharp warning to stay put. He sank back into something soft stashed under his head. He could only take short shallow breaths as he examined his surroundings.
The windows, though blurry, were definitely smaller than before he’d passed out. A faint musky smell under a layer of disinfectant said hospital, but the room was too big for that.
Where am I?
“Mom!” Cecelia yelled off to his left somewhere. “Mom! He’s awake again!”
Riley followed her voice to a doorway that haloed a fuzzy outline. Had she said ‘again’? He felt along the bandages at his hips until his arm protested movement. The stiffness on his legs was likely bandaging, as well. Judging by the morning sun, he’d passed out at least fifteen hours ago. Enough time for surgery and recovery. He’d remember more in time, but he wanted answers now.
Graciela and his mother ran through the doorway past Cecelia. His father quickly wheeled in behind them.
“Cai? Kelly?” he rasped.
“She’s here, mijo. Waiting outside.” His mother kissed his brow and cheeks, her face wet with tears as she murmured prayers against his skin. More sisters arrived, all clasping their hands in prayer. “Everyone is here.” More kisses, to his temple this time. “?Gracias, Dios! Mi cielo!”
“Hey, Mom. I’m okay.” Riley said. She cried harder. “I’m okay. Just sore and groggy.” Cecelia took his hand and started crying. His other sisters grabbed his arm and fingers like he was a sacred stone. Were they comforting him before bad news? She’d said everyone was here, but God himself couldn’t have kept Cai out of this room. “Cai?” An entire chorus of wails went up in volume. “How bad?” Riley asked. He tried to get up again, this time the pain wouldn’t stop him, but three Cordova women would.
“No! Mijo. No.” His mother pushed at his shoulder.
“Are you crazy?” Graciela followed up her question with, “?Idiota estúpido!” and a slap to the back of his head.
“?Estás loco, pinche pendejo?” Cecelia shoved him down with one hand on his forehead.
Had she just called him a fucking asshole in front of their mother? Now he was terrified. “Where is Cai?” Sobs fired off around him. Even his father’s lips trembled. If they’d heard the heart monitor, they’d have answered his question. “Pops is…?” Riley couldn’t finish that question. He made another move to get out of bed.
“No, no, hijo, he’s on the fourth floor,” his dad said, a thick rasp to his voice. “Alive.”
Riley’s relief was short-lived. All his sisters gathered in close, holding hands in prayer. They were obviously still raw from whatever happened. The only people his family would be this distraught over were family and Cai. Or the Pope. He counted all sisters, his mother, his father—everyone was accounted for except— “Jeremy?” His heart monitor accelerated further.
“No.” Jeremy spoke up from a chair on Riley’s right. “No. I’m here.”
Thank you, God.
Riley waited for anyone to clue him in. His looks were met with more tears. Finally, too exasperated to hold in his frustration, Riley asked, “Who died?”
The answer came to him a split second before Jeremy answered, “You did, jackass.”
Like a mourners at the Wailing Wall, all eight Cordova women dissolved into a crescendo of sobs and Hail Marys. His mother took his hand and kissed it.
Damn. “Perdóname, Mamá.” Riley cupped his mother’s cheek, then reached for his father’s hand. “Perdóname, Papá.”
Riley let them dote and fuss for as long as he could stand and then exaggerated a yawn. Even after that, it took another half an hour and a nurse requesting them to leave to get them out the door. He snapped his fingers to get Jeremy’s attention before he could follow his family out. “Wait,” he mouthed, lest his mother hear.
The nurse stopped working on his IV line and glared for a full five seconds before continuing to push in medication. After she left, Jeremy closed the door like he was on a secret mission and shrugged off his jacket, making a show of how difficult it was to get off with his arm in a sling.
“Fill me in,” Riley said. His parents would only tell him about Fuzz, Begone, the motel, and his car. Things unlikely to ‘upset him’. “What did I miss?”
“Oh yeah, that reminds me,” Jeremy removed a pen and business card from the back pocket of his jeans and returned to the chair by the bed. There was a brittleness about him that Riley had never seen before. In his smile, in the slight shake of his hands as he wrote on the card. “Ten Hail Marys for making your mother and your sisters cry. Confession every day—”
“I fucking died and you’re giving me penance?” Well, that didn’t lighten the mood . “Too soon?”
“Ten more for…” Jeremy appeared unable to finish whatever penance he’d planned to assign. He put both pen and paper on the bedside table, and then dragged the armchair closer. “I know you need something less heavy right now, but this can’t wait.” He grasped Riley’s hand and exhaled a shaky breath. “You coded in the ambulance on the way over. Blood loss, as I understand it. Your dad told me when he called to let me know you were on your way to the hospital. By the time I got here, you’d been revived, then pushed to surgery. Your mom was sobbing. We all were.
“When you came out of surgery, all doped up, you were talking about cucumbers or something. We were laughing with relief and saying prayers of thanks. Cece pulled out her phone to record it. Something we’d laugh about with you, later. I don’t even remember what you were saying because then you coded again. Two times, and I never thought to say the important things.” For all his attempts, Jeremy could not stem his tears. “If you died without me saying this, I’d never forgive myself.” He pressed his forehead against Riley’s knuckles. “I love you, Riley Cordova. You are my best friend. My life would be bleak without you in it. I love you.”
“Jeremy, I know that.” Riley clasped their hands together tighter. “We don’t have to say that aloud to—”
“Yes, we do. We need to say it. Every day.”
Riley squeezed his hand. His voice had turned thick with affection. “I love you.”
“You need to hear this, too.” Jeremy held on tighter. “I forgive you, Riley. Your mother and father forgive you. Your sisters forgive you.”
Heat moved up Riley’s chest to his face. He couldn’t say more than, “Stop.” And that was more directed to the flood of emotions swamping him. He shook from the effort to silence himself.
Jeremy forged ahead. “God loves you. And God forgives you.” He refused Riley’s attempt to pull away. “Forgive yourself.”
Tears betrayed Riley, and his injuries wouldn’t allow him to cover his eyes. He turned away, unable to speak. But words could never express what the liberation of his soul felt like. He could only cling to Jeremy’s hand until he’d wrung out the last of his guilt and relief. For those minutes, he heard only the staccato of his suppressed cries.
Jeremy waited until Riley could face him to put a tissue box on his chest. “You look worse than when you bawled at the ending of The Titanic.”
“That was you!” Riley barely managed to laugh. “Ow.”
“If you think whining will get you out of visitor duty, think again. I need to drop by the church for a bit, so you have time to let others say their piece. People have been waiting all day. Some of them longer.”
“What day is it?” Riley asked.
“Saturday.”
Three days since he’d ridden up that elevator.
“Kelly, Dan, Peter, and Austin are outside.” Jeremy got up, leaving his jacket on the chair as a signal he’d be returning soon. “Also a Dr. Kate”—he flipped over the business card he’d written on earlier—“Sherman dropped by. She needs to speak to you about Cai’s treatment.” He put the card back down on the table. “Your cell phone is in the top drawer. I turned it off.” Riley took the card and finally glanced around the room.
Sofa. Armchairs. Giant flat screen. Big windows with a mountain view. He swept his hand at the opulence and asked, “Austin?”
“I believe so. He spoke to your mother while you were in the ICU. You were pushed in here early this morning.”
Huh. One of Cai’s family might accept him.
Why would Cai’s psychiatrist want to speak about his treatment with him? Was that also Austin’s doing? “Did the doctor say why she needed to speak with me?”
“No, but Peter did not look pleased. Which is why he is not one of the visitors you’ll be receiving, much as he’d like to be. Now, who should I send in first? Keeping in mind, your mother is in charge of visitation. You won’t have much time with anyone.”
“Hmm. Do I hear my career is over before I say goodbye to my partner?”
Jeremy pretended to weigh them in his hands. “Get the bad news over first.” He looked a little too happy, though he tried to hide it. No doubt his entire family would be elated, except his father.
“Send Dan in.”
He was strangely okay with the end of his career. Not happy, but not devastated either. Emotion and regret would hit him later. His family would help get him through it, along with Cai.
He’d skipped depression and gone straight to the fifth stage.
Final stage of grief: Acceptance.
* * *
Kelly passed Dan on his way out. “Sir.” She nodded to him and then closed the door. “He looked confused.”
“Relieved,” Riley answered. “I turned in my resignation.”
“I thought you believed in the system. You came through at the end. No crazy.” She shrugged out of her coat and hung it on the rack. “Going to resign before things are settled?”
“The system only works when agents follow the law. Dan allowed me to resign with the possibility to work in law enforcement again.” The hat had been submitted into evidence by Dan with chain of custody broken. No mention of it being deliberately withheld. Hopefully, she interpreted his vague response as what it was—that he couldn’t tell her about the whole story without risking Dan’s career. “It was more lenient than I could hope for. Come sit.”
She took Jeremy’s vacant seat and leaned in, elbows on her knees. The sun and the bedside light revealed multiple injuries where bits from the explosions had embedded in her skin. “Do you have a job lined up?” she asked.
“I need to be free for a while. Cai’s been committed. He’ll need a lot of extra care.”
“And to pay the mortgage?” She sat back, arms crossed, her face just outside the bubble of lamplight.
Did her expression mean disapproval? Sadness? Certainly, he felt those things, especially with her badge shining at him from her belt.
“When things settle, my dad can get me a job in the DPD,” Riley said. “Eventually, I’ll try for their SWAT. And, if that plan fails, I have an accounting degree.” His mom would be happy about that. “How’s Lena and Dev?”
“Lena had her tonsils removed yesterday. Dev took one look at my face in the hospital and asked to give things another go. At least one positive in all this shit.”
Riley could read one thing about that clipped answer—she was done talking about it. “Tell me about Cole and the drive.”
She seemed eager at the subject change. “Nikolaj told us the answer when he confessed to you about his little coded message site. He wrote it all there for Thompson. The numbers on the disk drive label were not serial numbers, they were an encryption key that led us to opening the drive. On it were thousands of numbered accounts spread out across eastern Europe totaling almost a billion in cash belonging to the Somalian government. Without the physical drive that had all the account numbers, the money was inaccessible.”
Riley whistled. “A billion good reasons not to kill Cai when they had several chances,” Riley said. “How did Rivers get into that bathroom?”
“Through the drywall in the office next door,” she said. “Speaking of the Coles.”
“Were we?” Riley asked.
“No, but it’s as good a segue as any. Thomas Cole was found two hours ago hanging from a light post outside Julian and Nikolaj’s warehouse condo. Like a message.”
Like a gift , Riley corrected silently. Thank God Cai had an airtight alibi. “Suspects?”
“It’s a fucked crime scene. No DNA evidence. Or should I say DNA is everywhere. Witnesses saw a thin woman, blond hair, pink hoodie, and a large man with a Hell’s Angel’s vest riding a Harley Davidson. If they saw a face or a plate, they weren’t telling us. It was dark, they were gone in less than a minute. Threw a rope up over the post and used the bike to hoist him by the neck. Coroner said he was dead before that. OD’d on heroin. Coincidentally, the same thing happened to Rachel’s mother.”
“Huh,” Riley said, noncommittally. Good riddance. He added some more penance for that disgusting thought.
“Funny thing is,” Kelly added. “I don’t remember anything in Cole’s file about heroin. I do remember they released the older brother the night this all went to shit.” She waited a couple of beats. “Anything you could tell me about Darryl?”
“Like Peter, he’s devoted to Cai. Knows martial arts. Lots of anger issues. He runs a website called leather… something. You can trace payments through that.” Cai was the only thing he could care about right now. But that didn’t change the queasy feeling in his stomach. Murder was wrong, and thinking Cole deserved it was a sign he needed to go to church. “Not sure how else I can help. I only know Darryl peripherally.”
“Any ideas where he might be?”
He assumed she meant other than the most obvious places. “He’ll show up here eventually to be near Cai. I guarantee it.”
“Yeah,” she sighed. “In the meantime, he might have a list of those who have hurt his brother. Think they’ll tell you anything?”
“I’m a cop to them. Scum. They tread carefully around me. But I’ll keep my ears open. And Austin will do what he can for the investigation. Tell me about Xander Rocha.” Discussion ended. This time by him. “Why was he underground so long?”
“We don’t know for sure, but there are old injuries on his body that indicate he’d been shot in the back. Coroner said it might have paralyzed him for a while. Maybe he was recovering all these years.” She wagged her finger. “Or maybe he was busy planning the murder of a senator and his son while infiltrating the most sophisticated black ops corporation in the US. That could take a few years.”
“Clever. And funny. Your husband is a lucky man.”
“You’re going to miss this.” She crossed her arms. Anger and frustration. He could read that pretty clearly.
“I’ll miss it,” he agreed.
“Then fight.”
“Kelly, I can’t.”
“You’re a good agent.” He didn’t answer because she didn’t have the facts. Her eyes narrowed a bit and her arms relaxed. “Not just your relationship with the demon spawn then?”
“If it was, I’d definitely fight it.” I'd lose, because the FBI isn't going to stand for an agent cohabiting with a criminal, but I'd fight.
“Damn.” She stood up, stopped like she had more to say, and then offered a handshake. “Take care, Riles.”
Before she walked out, he called to her. “Thanks, Kelly. For everything.” Kelly had left enough details out of her report to muddy the waters around Cai’s assault on Thomas Cole.
“Pft. What do I need thanks for? Haven’t you watched the news?” She pretended to create a headline in the air. “Hero FBI agent selflessly saves four citizens from armed gunmen while pulling her partner to safety. Little do they know that she’d be dead if her partner hadn’t tackled her into an elevator.” She winked and gave him a casual salute before leaving.