Not Home Yet #4
He nodded grimly. “Okay. So besides my brothers making my life absolutely miserable, what I learned from that phone call was there are bad guys still looking for the kids I’m with, and good guys—like Mounties, possibly, and border patrol, and a whole cavalry—are on their way here.
I have no idea who’s going to get here first. I’m going to go stay with the kids, but if you want to send security our way to stay with us? That would be great.”
She opened her mouth in surprise, and Reg strode down the hall to where Anthony had disappeared into the exam rooms and hoped for the best.
“HEY, ANTHONY,” Ilia whispered, the “Mr. McCauley” burned away by the last five intense days. “Did you see that guy?”
Anthony, who had been holding Reynaldo’s hand as the boy slept, a decongestant and a febrifuge leaking into his arm with antibiotics and a sedative and fluids in general, glanced up.
“What guy?” he asked, alerted by the panic in the boy’s voice.
“There was a guy—a guy in a white coat. Like a doctor, but not.”
“How do you know he was not?” Anthony asked, his respect for the boy’s common sense high enough to take him very seriously.
“He looked very much like my uncle Lem,” Ilia said, and Anthony watched as the boy swallowed.
“But younger. Thinner. A cousin I never met, perhaps. I… he is blond and blue eyed, like me, but his face is like a knife blade.” The boy wiped his eyes, like the rest of them too tired and worried and scared to be brave.
“Like he had no mother to make the world softer, you know?”
“I know,” Anthony murmured. “Here. I want you to do me a favor and go to the bathroom.” The room—for all the smallness of the hospital—had an adjacent bathroom with a tiny shower. “Take a shower. You have an extra set of clothes, right?”
Ilia glared at him. “So I can be naked when they kill me?” he asked indignantly.
“Did he look in here?”
Ilia shook his head. “No,” he admitted.
“Then they don’t know you’re here yet. If they come for Reynaldo, I’ll call for security or… you know.”
“Fight them off?” Ilia asked skeptically.
“Oh ye of little faith,” Anthony chided, although for the thousandth time, he cursed the weapon he’d left locked in the Subaru in Tillamook. “But either way, I’ll protect you as long as I can, and you can feel like you didn’t sleep in the bottom of a fish barrel.”
The doctor—a perfectly nice Indian man who had been as kind to Reynaldo as could be—had given a delicate little sniff and tried not to grimace as he’d taken in the three of them.
Anthony had stopped smelling the dankness of fish and sweat and metal and salt water, but he’d guessed then that maybe the rest of the world wasn’t so lucky.
“I can wait to not smell like fish,” Ilia told him obstinately, and then his chin wobbled again. “Please? I feel as though all of this is my fault. Let me… I don’t know. Leverage myself? Is that how you’d say it? If I have to?”
“No!” Anthony protested. “They were after Reynaldo, Ilia. You just made things more interesting. And for the record, so did my government. If they hadn’t been fascist fuckheads, we could have gone to them for help instead of running away from them because they want to put you in death camps.
This wasn’t your fault. You and Reynaldo…
.” He smiled bitterly. “You just wanted what I wanted from Reg that night. A kiss. Only a kiss.”
Ilia surprised him by taking his hand in comfort. “I got my kiss—it was wonderful. How was yours?”
Anthony grinned. “Perfect.”
“Okay,” the young man said, obviously pulling his courage out of his socks. “It is not my fault. But I still will not let you sit here alone and watch for my terrible family. Please.”
Anthony nodded, giving in. “Fair,” he said. “But as soon as Reg gets here, I’m alerting security. They shouldn’t be allowed to—”
No sooner had he finished speaking than the door flew open and a younger man—blond and blue eyed, and with a face, as Ilia had said, like a knife blade—shouldered his way in with a weapon in one hand and a cell phone in the other.
“Lem!” he said excitedly. “I’ve found them. It’s Slovka, in Sooke Harbor. You said to watch the hospitals—”
Young, Anthony thought, his brain detaching from the rest of his body.
Young and inexperienced. Somebody had given this person a semiautomatic pistol and said, “Here’s the safety, don’t shoot yourself,” with no other instructions.
Anthony shoved Ilia behind and under Reynaldo’s bed and was in the process of throwing himself on top of him when their attacker went suddenly flying into the room, Reg flailing on his back.
The assailant went sprawling, gun and phone clattering on the floor, while Reg shoved a knee in his back and pinned his shoulders to the linoleum.
Anthony scrambled for the gun, snagged it from Slovka’s reaching fingertips, and rolled to a crouch, holding the pistol on their young enemy while slowly pushing to his feet.
“Reg?” he squeaked in the sudden silence, and then two men in security uniforms burst in, practically trampling Reg and Slovka in their effort to get into the small room.
Anthony immediately released his grip on the gun, holding his hands forward and holding the thing from the trigger guard so the security officers could more easily claim it.
“This guy,” Reg gasped, thrusting his knee into their assailant’s lower back again. “This guy’s the one I had the nurse call you about. That guy is fine. I swear. Please. This guy. Put this guy in cuffs.”
And then things got chaotic for a while.
In the middle of the hubbub, Anthony turned toward the boys and realized Reynaldo was awake and watching everything with big eyes, and Ilia was still crouched behind the bed, regarding Anthony and Reg like they were superheroes.
Anthony draped his arm around Reg—who was babbling about border patrol and his brothers and his brother’s contact and how they would get there and explain everything, and it would be all right—and had a sudden, violent wish for it to be simply the two of them, in a quiet place.
He didn’t want to be a superhero. He wanted to be Reg’s lover. He felt like there should have been an easier way, but at this point? He was just happy it was in the cards.