Parachute
ALL THOSE years of being a working student, all those years of taking a hooker bath after forty-eight hours on his feet, and Bailey could still get hypnotized by warm water, even thirty seconds of it, sluicing over his body as he tried to get rid of the blood that had seeped through his scrubs to his skin.
“Sarree says hi.”
The masculine voice, spoken casually, made him shriek, and he had to scramble not to drop the soap.
“Dean!” he squeaked. “What are you doing here?”
“Getting you out of here,” Dean replied, his voice crisping up. “You about done?”
“Let me wash my hair,” Bailey said, although he knew he’d washed his hair at least twice. It wasn’t his hair—shaggy as it might be—that was the problem here.
And Dean, damn him, knew that. “Love,” he said gently, “you’ll never get the blood out of your memory. If it’s off your skin, you’re done.”
Bailey swallowed and realized that for the first time since he’d made eye contact with the two men striding through the hospital as he fled for the shower, his hands had stopped shaking.
“Okay, then,” he said, recognizing shock now that it was passing, “hand me a—”
The hand with the towel shot through the curtained cubicle quickly enough to let Bailey know Dean had come prepared.
“Thanks,” he mumbled as he turned off the water, grabbed the towel, and began the wipe-down in the same motions.
He’d gotten his hair toweled when the curtain was ripped open and Dean was there, wrapping his arms around Bailey’s shoulders and bringing him in so hard, so close, Bailey was forced to shiver out the last of the shock.
“I’ve gotcha,” Dean said softly in his ear. “I’ve gotcha. We gotta hurry in a minute, but just remember that. I’ve gotcha.”
When was the last time anybody had said that to Bailey? Held him and told him it was all right? Unbidden his thoughts flew to Emmett’s death and how nobody was supposed to hold anybody, and he’d had to call his dad and tell him not to even try to make the funeral.
“Thanks,” he whispered gruffly. “Thank you.”
With a quick kiss to his still-wet hair, Dean stepped back and held Bailey’s elbow as Bailey stepped out of the tiny shower cubicle, and then walked him to a small satchel sitting right next to Bailey’s other scrubs.
“What’s this?” Bailey asked, completely confused.
“You’re walking out of here as a civilian,” Dean said, digging into the satchel and wincing as a white bandage wound around his wrist and forearm caught.
“I’m what? And what did you do to yourself? Who bandaged that? Where am I going?”
“I did nothing to myself,” Dean said, pulling out some of Bailey’s casual clothes.
“Your cat, knowing I was in a hurry and desperate, gave me the perfect excuse to talk to your charge nurse and explain to her that I was getting you the hell out of here.” With that he produced khaki shorts and a T-shirt that featured bigfoot and read National Hide and Seek Champion on the front.
Bailey grimaced, wishing he had something classier in the way of casual wear, and then the full import of what Dean said sunk in.
“Wait a minute—what the hell did you do to my cat?” Forgetting that he was naked for a moment, he held his shirt up to his chest in a delayed attack of maidenly modesty.
“I gave him a sedative and put him in his carrier,” Dean said, staring at Bailey like it was a stupid question. “I wasn’t going to put you in hiding without letting you have Mr. Bumble.”
Dean was the one who called him Mr. Bumble—he apparently didn’t get the joke about the Abominable Snowman, and he said he and Mr. Bumble were on much too formal a footing for Dean to forget the honorific.
And Dean, in the middle of an emergency situation, had cared enough about Bailey’s feelings to remember his cat.
In the middle of everything else, Bailey was now struck with absolute remorse for his halfhearted attempt to end the relationship that morning, but this was obviously not the time to discuss it.
“That’s really nice,” Bailey mumbled. He took the briefs Dean held out and slipped them on, and then the shorts, following up with the T-shirt, the short socks, and the basic tennis shoes.
When he was all dressed, he was surprised yet again when Dean produced a comb, which was the one item from his toiletry kit in his locker that he always forgot to bring.
He sheepishly combed his hair and took a breath.
“Better?” Dean asked as he disposed of Bailey’s towels in the laundry bag where Bailey’d thrown his scrubs and lab coat before he’d jumped in the shower.
“Infinitely,” he replied. “Now, are you going to tell me the plan?”
Dean nodded, throwing the satchel over his shoulder. “Before you freak out, I talked to Sarree, your friend, while she was stitching up my arm—”
“ Stitching !”
Dean sighed and cupped his cheek. “Please, Bailey, you can’t afford to freak out about a cat scratch, okay? I’m trying to keep things practical, but, well, I think you stumbled on something dire, so let me finish.”
Bailey swallowed and nodded—and recalled that Dean said they hadn’t much time.
“Go ahead.”
“She’s got you on leave—and because she said you never clock in, it’s leave that started yesterday .
She’s got plausible deniability that you were ever here, and since she was frightened too, I told her to stick with that story.
You were never here, she was never in the crib looking for you. Do you understand?”
“Good,” Bailey said through a roughened throat. “I-I would have worried about her.”
“Me too,” Dean said, his expression—had he known it—tender. “She’s your best friend here, Bailey. I’m not stupid. I wouldn’t let her twist in the wind.”
Bailey gave him a small smile. “Thank you,” he said again.
“Don’t thank me yet. It’s going to be a long hard day, and it’s going to start with getting the hell out of here without being spotted. We’re going to assume they’re still here—”
“They are,” Bailey said in a rush. “I saw them as I was coming back to shower. I made eye contact—”
“Did they recognize you?” Dean’s voice pitched, and Bailey knew then— really knew—how much trouble he must be in, because Dean sounded panicked now, and Dean, to Bailey’s recollection, had never even sounded ruffled .
“No,” Bailey said, shaking his head. “At least I don’t think so. I just kept walking and they kept walking, talking together—”
“What did their voices sound like?” Dean asked quickly.
“Very Russian,” Bailey told him, frowning. “And they were dressed very… East Coast sharp, if you know what I mean. Texas oilman, but cheaper suits, made out of wool, and shoes that were way too shiny. Wing tips.”
“Wow, you do have a good memory. Anything else?”
“There was a big guy—like, gorilla big—and he must have been the one who stabbed Vlade, because he left his coin.”
“His what ?” Dean asked, grabbing Bailey with almost uncomfortable force.
“His coin—Ouch, Dean, that’s some grip!”
Dean released him promptly. “Oh God. I’m sorry, Bailey, but this is really important. Did you see the coin?”
“Well, yeah. In fact, here.” He grabbed the comb and went to his locker, because matching the comb to the toiletry kit suddenly seemed like the thing he’d been needing to do all his life.
That done, he reached into the toiletry kit where he’d put the coin, neatly placed in a specimen bag, now smeared on the inside with dried blood from the coin.
Dean’s eyes almost bulged. “Perfect. Oh my God— perfect . Okay, I need you to keep that until we can give it to Marcus and have him sign off on it. But first, leave everything here—”
“But toothbrush !” Bailey protested.
“I’ve got your home kit packed,” Dean said, and Bailey stared at him.
“I barely had time to take a shower!”
“Your text arrived at a fortuitous time,” he said. “Now let’s go!”
“Fortuitous time?” Bailey asked, but he was following Dean out the door, thinking if Dean had missed anything—razor, toothbrush, comb—it could probably be picked up at the nearest 7-Eleven or Walgreens.
“There was a fortuitous time for me to find a dead body and have to hide under the bed in the crib?”
Dean shuddered. “Good thing you showered,” he said, and if Bailey hadn’t seen his lips quirking with irony, he would have lost it right there. “God knows what’s on the floor in there.”
“I hate you,” Bailey muttered. “What was so fortuitous about that timing?”
“Easy.” Dean—steering Bailey like he’d been born and raised in the damned building—shrugged. “I was already packing. Just had to grab your suitcase.”
Bailey made a little squawk of protest, and Dean took him on another left.
“And your cat.”
Oh God. “Why my cat?” Bailey asked suspiciously. “I mean, why―”
Dean took him down a corridor that Bailey suddenly recognized.
They were heading for the small maternity-ward entrance, which because in Texas irony was never big enough, was also where smokers used to go to indulge in their filthy habits.
In a way it made sense. They got six to eight deliveries a day because usually pregnant women went to some of the bigger maternity hospitals in Austin.
Given those odds, someone could sneak a five-minute cig and probably not see anybody waddling in to be checked, and if they did get busted, as long as they weren’t working in L and D, nobody would ever know.
And most women in labor did not really give a rat’s ass if their doctors or nurses smelled like nicotine after they scrubbed up as long as the medical professionals were free with the painkillers and didn’t make the women stay on their backs.
“How did you even know about this corridor?” Bailey asked, his voice rising a bit in panic. This seemed very well thought out for an emergency rescue.
“Hello,” Dean said, “FBI!”
“Wait, is this how you knew where my apartment was?” Bailey asked, feeling stupid. Hadn’t that happened, like, three months ago?
“It was either that or stalking,” Dean replied absently. “Bailey, how often do people sneak out here for a smoke?”