Archer
“O w, ow, ow, ow, ow!”
“Oh, for God’s sake!” Minka snaps impatiently. “Stop being a baby.”
“It hurts!” Jen wrinkles her face and scowls, kind of exactly how Mayor Lawrence looks every time he tries to parent Minka, but she doesn’t allow it. “You’re not even being careful.”
“Be careful!” Corey growls.
Unfazed, Minka slides a needle through Jen’s skin and tugs a suture through to the other side.
“I’m not saying I’m gonna kill you, Doctor Mayet. But I’m saying I might have a case for temporary insanity. You keep hurting her like that, and I may not be able to control myself.”
“Ouch!” Jen slaps my arm, digging her nails into my biceps as stinging pain reverberates up through the limb and into my shoulder.
And all the while, Kane hovers.
“You found an old rope tied to an even older tree,” Minka rumbles, “and instead of assessing the situation, you grabbed on and decided to see how things turned out.” She pinches the gash in Jen’s leg together and pokes another suture through.
“You’re lucky I’m a medical examiner working on a live body, and not a dead one. ”
“It looked safe!” She grits her teeth and digs those fucking claws tighter into my arm. “And how was I supposed to know there would be a broken beer bottle exactly where I landed? That’s unforeseen circumstances.”
“Mmhm. And you had the option to go to the hospital and have the wound treated there. You chose me.”
“Those are tight as hell, Chief.” Kane crouches beside Jen’s thigh and stares entirely too closely. “I never could get them like that.”
“Yeah.” Jess drags her shirt up and shows off a bumpy scar on her ribs. “He put me back together that one time, but it’s messy. I don’t mind, really. These are my battle scars. But still…”
“I never quite understood how some surgeons can suture a wound and make it so there’s no scar at all.”
“Practice.” Minka wears sterile gloves and maneuvers the needle with expert precision. And she does so in the shade of Fletch’s tree.
Is there dust in Jen’s wound? Who knows. Probably!
Will the mayor kill us when his daughter turns up with an infection? No doubt .
“A plastic surgeon will practice a million times more than I ever have, and there are techniques of folding the skin inward to create that smooth seam. But I never learned that.”
“Scars don’t matter so much when the person is already dead,” Kane nods. “But they don’t squirm and move around, either.”
“I’m being still!” Jen snarls. “Popeye? Babe?” She swings her head around and looks for him. “Save me. She’s hurting me on purpose.”
Minka rolls her eyes. “The wound has been numbed, you drama llama. If anything, all you feel is a little pressure. You’re not in pain.”
“I am!”
“But seeing as how your father is an insufferable whiner, I hardly expected more of you.”
“He can be kind of intense, huh?” Like magic, she stops complaining and starts grinning. “He had two daughters, and he only has sisters, so besides himself, I’m not sure he knows a normal male response to the things he isn’t pleased about. If Tabby and I got mad about something, we got loud.”
Behind her, Corey purses his lips. “Yep.”
“If we were sad, we were loud. Hungry: loud. Frustrated: loud. We were not a home of silent martyrs, Doctor Mayet. We were vocal and made sure our plights were heard.”
“Sounds like the seventh circle of hell.” She pulls the third suture through and ties a perfect, neat knot. “My home was blissfully quiet. Exactly how I prefer it.”
“And you’re a perfectly normal, emotionally regulated adult because of it,” Aubree quips, wandering past with a can of Coke and a smug smirk, though it falters in the face of Minka’s hard glare. “What? I was complimenting you!”
“Mmhm.” Minka drops her gaze to Jen’s thigh and continues her work. “Don’t tell your father I stitched you. Don’t even tell him you saw me this weekend.”
“He’s not a bad person, you know?” She rests on her elbows, shaking her hair back and smiling up at Corey’s watchful gaze.
“Justin is passionate. He’s empathetic and kind, and God knows, he loathes subtlety.
He spent entirely too long working within the justice system, and he saw way too much cruelty inflicted upon people due to greed or intolerance.
Boredom, even. Radicalization. He raised two girls—not entirely alone, but alone after my mom died—and as we’ve already established, those girls were rarely quiet in their suffering. ”
“Anyone would think he’s busy with all that parenting and law and work to bother a medical examiner he hardly knows.”
“But he does know you.” She drags her plump bottom lip between her teeth.
“He likes you. He likes what you stand for and respects the hell out of you and everything you’ve achieved.
Besides,” she snorts. “Word spread pretty quickly that his appointment in Copeland came on the back of the former mayor’s death…
” She stops and smirks. “Death by your hands.”
My heart gives a heavy kick, slamming against my diaphragm and stealing my breath. “Does he know about…” I frown. “Does he know what she does… outside of work?”
Minka glowers. But my eyes are on Jen. On the woman who knows Minka has killed more than one.
“Does he know?”
“No.”
“You sound certain.”
“He’s fond of her, Detective. Exceptionally fond, and if he could, he would sweep her into every Thanksgiving, Christmas, and birthday party he could. Ouch!” Jen hisses. “Dude! Gentle.”
Minka merely smiles, fake and unflattering. “Sorry.”
Not.
Collecting herself, Jen straightens her expression and brings her eyes back to mine.
“Justin is a pillar of justice. The legal way, that is. His entire career, and political platform, is built on the law. I adore my father, and I know if Tabby or I stepped a little into the gray area, he would find a way to excuse it. His loyalty is to family first and foremost. But a little into the gray area is not the same as…” She waves her hand up and down.
“Vigilantism is not staying too long in a parking spot and getting a ticket. It’s not driving five miles over the limit. ”
My stomach clenches with dread. “But Sophia?—”
“Yeah. I know what Sophia is, and I know she’s beyond parking fines and speeding tickets, too.
But my father is privy only to the things I tell him, and only to the records Soph allows to be published publicly.
He understands Sophia’s entrepreneurial spirit, and he’s impressed by her portfolio.
She’s a very successful woman, according to publicly available financial records.
But he doesn’t know everything she does.
Which means he doesn’t know everything I do.
Or what Corey does. And though I can’t say with complete certainty that he’s clueless to your extracurricular activities, Doctor Mayet, I think it’s safe to assume he remains oblivious. ”
“Because if he knew…?”
“She’d feel the full wrath of Justin Lawrence, attorney at law. Ouch!” She slaps Minka’s wrist and hisses in pain. “You’re hurting me on purpose!”
“Slap me again and I’ll stitch your lips closed.
” She sits back and arches her spine, crackling the bones and tilting her head side to side.
“I haven’t had to stitch a live person since my first year of residency.
If you keep testing me, I’ll start cutting instead of closing.
Ya know,” she hunches again and goes back to work, “muscle memory and all that.”
* * *
“I t’s time to pack up camp.”
We have a three o’clock flight, according to Sophia, so Tim crosses from the circle of chairs in the dirt and passes the Bishop brothers hovering by the grill.
He’s not like Felix, dressed in black and ready for a boardroom.
Instead, he walks in jeans and a tank, already sweaty from the filthy heat, and when he passes Aubree, he snags her hand and keeps going.
“We’ve gotta get to that dinky ass airport and back onto a plane.”
“You can fly with us,” Micah rumbles. He, too, is ready to leave and get back to Tiia. “We’ll get you home faster than anything commercial anyway, then Felix, Christabelle, and I will head east.”
“You’re always rushing.” Rolling her eyes, Soph snatches a hot chicken leg straight off the grill, hissing when it burns her fingers. And yet, she goes back for more. “We have plenty of time, no matter which plane you use, and I’m still eating. Sit down and stop bitching.”
“Why’d you bring crates of weapons?” Felix folds the cuffs of his shirt along his forearm, sweltering under the heat of the midday sun. “If we were coming toward danger, like you said we were, I can understand. But it was all a load of bullshit, so why the firepower?”
“No one said we were packing. You assumed.” Kane pulls the latch on the side of the bus and tugs the wide door open.
Revealing a crate made of what appears to be military titanium, he hits a button just inside the door, steps back, and beams as an automated system has the crate rolling forward.
“In fact, I recall some pretty wild accusations about how we used you to transport illegal items halfway across the country. Something about bombs or drugs or…” Smirking, he releases the button and cracks the seal on the crate, icy fog floating into the air, only for it to be decimated by the heat.
Digging his hand into the crate’s depths, he comes back again with a fist full of candy bars and random sugary things.
“We gotta eat.” He tosses a sucker that slaps my chest and falls into my hands. “We gotta be prepared.”
“Are you freakin’ kidding me?” Minka shoves up from her camp chair and folds it with an aggressive snap of metal against metal. “Food? And not even good food. You brought candy?”’
“We have three crates,” Sophia counters. “We have enough food to keep us going for weeks if we have to. Protein is important. Candy is important-er.”
Behind her, Jay nods.