CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Miles was on the floor with his back against the foot of the bed.
One cuff was on his left wrist and the other was on Russell Cord's right. Cord was sitting beside him on the carpet with his knees drawn up, perfectly still, looking at something across the room. The lamp was on the floor. The dresser mirror was cracked. The room smelled sharply of something metallic and chemical that she identified immediately because they’d already smelled it a few times over the past forty-eight hours or so.
She holstered her weapon and went to Miles with deep worry in her eyes.
"I'm fine," he said. His voice was hoarse and unsteady, and the statement was not persuasive.
With that done, she crouched in front of Miles and looked at his face.
There was a cut above his left brow, not deep but bleeding lightly.
His lower jaw was already bruising along the left side, the skin going dark and swollen under the line of his cheekbone, and his lower lip was split at the corner.
His left eye was red and streaming, the surrounding skin irritated.
Seeing that she was observing his eye, Miles pointed with his free hand. She followed his finger and saw an aerosol can on the floor. “That’s what I’m mostly worried about,” he said. “ Maybe some form of hexavalent chromium.”
“Jesus,” she said. Suddenly, the ragged nature of his voice made sense. "How much exposure did you take?"
"Partial facial. Mostly the forearm. It was a small blast…maybe two seconds." He lifted his left arm slightly, where the skin of his wrist and inner forearm was reddened and showing the early signs of chemical irritation. "I got my arm up in time."
She looked at the cuff connecting his left wrist to Cord's right. "Why are you cuffed to him?"
He took a careful breath before answering. "I thought I might pass out. Didn't want him mobile if I did."
Smart, she thought.
She looked at him for a moment, sizing up the situation.
"Okay," she said. She got her own cuffs out and put them on Cord's left wrist, looping them through the bed frame's lower bar, and then she took Miles's cuff key and freed his wrist. Cord didn’t resist any of this.
He sat where he was and accepted his fate.
His eyes had gone back to wherever they had been when she came in.
She followed his gaze across the room but there was nothing.
“Mr. Cord, can you hear me?” she asked.
He only smirked at her.
“How bad should I expected him to be?” she asked Miles.
“Maybe a few busted ribs at worst.
“And you?”
“I said I’m fine. Just worried about what I inhaled.”
She sat back on her heels. He looked worried but, to his credit, was doing a great job of trying to play it cool. The cut above his brow had already slowed to a seep. She found a box of tissues on the nightstand and pressed a folded wedge of them against the cut.
It made her feel almost guilty. Of course she hadn’t told him how close she had come, in the past two months or so, to going to Hayes.
She had drafted the conversation in her head more than once, had sat with her phone and thought about making the call, and had not made it each time for the same reason: it was not her call to make.
Miles was clearly struggling, but he was still doing the work.
And she knew that the line between a person who was struggling and a person who needed to be pulled was a line she was not willing to draw for someone else.
Especially not another agent. But she did worry about him…
not that he may not be able to get the job done, but that he might break in the process.
She supposed the fact that he had come out on top in this room did prove his strength and determination.
He had taken a chromium aerosol partial exposure, absorbed two solid punches to the head, sustained what was probably a cracked rib, and had still managed to drive Cord across the room and into a dresser hard enough to crack the mirror, get the cuffs on, and position himself as a failsafe against his own potential loss of consciousness.
The forensic analyst she had been partnered with about a year ago would not have done that.
He would have been smart and strategic about it, but the physical close-quarters competence of what had clearly happened in this room was something Miles had built over the course of the cases they had worked together.
She had watched it happen case by case without remarking on it, and now she was looking at the results of it in a cracked mirror and yet another restrained suspect.
She stood up and looked down to Miles. “How’s your breathing?”
“Good for now. Throat’s feeling a little raw.”
“Can you talk?”
“Yeah.”
"Did he say anything?" she asked.
"Yeah." Miles shifted his position slightly against the bed, a careful adjustment. "I don’t think Kane sent him to kill me. He was trying to kill me to impress Kane.”
“He named Kane specifically?”
“Yeah. And he said I was trying to shut down people returning things to the world.” He grunted and then added: “And then he spit in my face.”
She looked at Cord and saw him nodding. But he remained silent, which was par for the course for the majority of the disciples they had captured.
Slowly, Miles started to get to his feet. He used the wall to prop himself up. She reached out and put a hand on his shoulder. "Stay there," she said.
"I can stand."
"I know you can. Stay there anyway."
He stayed. And it was at that moment she heard the wail of approaching sirens. “Shit,” she said. “I should call Pruitt.”
“Go ahead,” he rasped, nodding toward the window where the strobing cherry lights of an ambulance now accompanied the siren noises. “Cavalry is here.”
She called Pruitt, and the detective answered on the second ring.
She stood by the window, watching the ambulance park and the medics get out as she gave Pruitt the summary of the past ten minutes or so.
Pruitt said she was on her way, that she would bring two officers for the transfer, that she would call ahead to have a room at the county facility prepared.
But before she ended the call, Pruitt said something that haunted Vic.
“Damn, we got lucky, huh? If this maniac hadn’t come for Miles, there’s no telling how much longer we would have been looking for him.”
Vic did not respond and when she put her phone back in her pocket, she decided not to focus on that for the moment.
The medics arrived and she let them work.
She put herself where she could see both Miles and Cord.
It was unsettling that Cord seemed perfectly fine with the way this had happened.
She knew that interrogations would be difficult because she doubted he’d tell them if there were others out there in the middle of dying because of his clever and time-consuming approach.
Quickly, the medics cleared Miles of a broken rib but speculated that Cord had at least two. They slipped an oxygen mask over Miles, and he seemed irritated when they insisted they carry him out on a gurney. Vic could hear him through the mask get out an “I’m fine” before he finally relented.
When the medics tended to Cord, he was cooperative and almost polite about it all.
Vic couldn’t help but wonder if he was processing the fact that he had screwed up.
He had stepped away from his initial mission to seek the praise of Kane only to have been arrested, bringing his spree to an end.
Perhaps that stinging sense of failure was why he was staying so quiet and lethargic.
At the door, with the two officers on either side of his own gurney, Cord looked directly at her and smiled. She had to look away because she suddenly felt the need to give the bastard at least one more broken rib. And maybe a leg or arm to go with it.
She then took one last look around the room and followed the medics out.