Chapter Twenty
Anja saw it happen in the mirror before fully processing what her eyes were showing her. Brad’s arm snapped forward, steel flashed, and then Remi’s sharp, involuntary grunt of pain cut through her torso as though the blade had found her too.
She fought the wheel and her own instincts simultaneously, every part of her screaming to pull over and get to him.
The rational, trained half of her brain shouted louder that stopping on a dark highway with a stabbed man and an armed suspect in the back seat would get someone else killed.
Her eyes kept snapping to the mirror, unable to look away from Remi’s hand locked around Brad’s wrist, the two of them grappling in a space too tight for either man to gain an advantage.
Leo twisted out of his seat belt.
Anja glanced over in horror. “Leo, no!”
He ignored her and threw himself over the console into the back seat with a move that had to be agony on his injured arm and clearly didn’t matter to him at all.
Brad’s knife swung again, wild and undisciplined, more animal panic than skill.
Leo caught his forearm before the blade could find purchase a second time.
The three of them tangled together in the cramped space, Remi’s free hand fighting for control of Brad’s wrist while blood soaked through his shirt and pooled dark against the leather seat.
“Get off him!” Leo’s voice cracked with fury as he wrenched Brad’s arm sideways. The knife clattered free, skittering into the footwell.
Brad didn’t stop fighting. Something had broken loose in him, some final tether to reason snapped by the alcohol, the confession, and the knowledge that there was no version of tonight that ended with him walking away clean.
He thrashed against them with a strength that had no business coming from a man that drunk.
Anja reacted, wrenching the wheel hard to the right and stamping on the brakes.
The men tangled into a heap as the Escalade fishtailed across two lanes in a scream of rubber that drowned out every other sound in the cabin.
The vehicle shuddered onto the shoulder and lurched to a stop, gravel spraying beneath the tires.
For one frozen second, everyone in the cabin went still from the violence of it.
Brad moved first.
He yanked the rear door open, stumbling out onto the shoulder as Leo made an unsuccessful swipe at him. Brad was wild and uncoordinated, running on pure, unadulterated panic. He bolted straight across the highway without a single glance at the traffic bearing down from the other direction.
“Brad!” Leo’s shout tore out of him, half warning, half horror, as he scrambled out the same door.
The semi’s horn blared a fraction of a second before the impact, a long, deafening blast Anja felt in her veins. Then came a sound she knew she would hear for the rest of her life, whether she wanted to or not.
She didn’t watch. She couldn’t. Her hands found the gearshift and threw the Escalade into park. She was out the driver’s door and around to the back seat before her body had finished processing the horror of what had just happened on the road beside them.
“Remi!” She yanked the door open, and the sight of him nearly buckled her knees. Blood soaked through his shirt, and his face had gone pale and slick with sweat, one hand pressed hard against his side. “Remi, look at me. Stay with me.”
“I’m here.” His voice came out thin, but his eyes found hers, focused despite the pain. “I’m fine. Hurts like hell, but it didn’t hit anything vital.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know enough.” He managed a ragged-around-the-edges smile. “Not my first knife wound. Won’t be my last, God willing.”
Leo appeared at the open door, his face bloodless, his hands shaking as he pressed his jacket against Remi’s wound to slow the bleeding. “The semi driver pulled over. He’s calling it in.” His voice cracked. “Brad’s gone. There’s nothing left to call an ambulance for.”
Anja closed her eyes. Three deaths solved and a fourth added to the list in the space of a single confession. Then she opened them again because there was no room left for anything but moving forward.
“Keep pressure on that,” she told Leo as she reached for her phone. “We do need an ambulance for Remi.”
Remi’s hand found hers before she could dial, his grip weaker than she’d ever felt it but strong all the same. “Hey.”
“What?” Her voice broke on the single word, and she hated that it did.
“We got him. We solved the case.” He winced, his breath hitching. “Just maybe don’t tell BeBe I bled all over the leather.”
Despite the blood soaking warm through her jeans where she knelt beside him and the body parts strewn across the highway behind them, Anja felt something crack inside her that was almost, impossibly, a laugh.
“I’ll tell her you did it on purpose.”
#
Barnes-Jewish at three in the morning looked nothing like it had two days ago, when Anja had walked these same halls trailing Lydia’s mascara-streaked panic and the continuous beep of Curtis’s monitor.
Tonight the emergency wing carried its own version of chaos, with tired parents slumped in the waiting room chairs, a nurse arguing gently with a man who didn’t want to wait his turn, and the low hum of machines and ringing phones that never fully stopped.
Anja kept close to Leo as they pushed through the sliding doors, both still wearing the night on their skin. The exhaust from the highway mingled with the acrid smell of blood that never quite washed out, no matter how many times they scrubbed their hands.
They found Remi in a curtained bay off the main trauma unit, propped up with pillows and a nurse hovering near his IV line.
His color was better than it had any right to be given the amount of blood he’d lost. A bandage the size of a dinner plate wrapped his ribs, and someone had cut his shirt away, leaving him in a hospital gown that did nothing to disguise the collection of scars peppering his torso from whatever he’d done before CObrA Securities.
The nurse didn’t seem to mind as she fretted over him.
He should’ve been wearing his Kevlar vest. He’d taken it off to go inside the bar and spy on Brad. If he’d been wearing it, he might not have been hurt as badly.
“There they are.” Remi’s grin came out lopsided, the drugs clearly working on him even as he fought them. “Tell this nice lady I don’t need to stay overnight.”
“He needs to stay overnight.” The nurse didn’t look up from the monitor she was adjusting. “The wound’s deep enough that I’d feel better with eyes on him for the next twelve hours, minimum.”
“I had worse than this from an IED in Kandahar and walked it off in six.” Remi’s chin jutted. “I appreciate the concern. I do. But I’m not spending the night in a bed with a call button watching a television bolted to the wall while whatever’s left of this case gets handled without me.”
“You lost a significant amount of blood,” the nurse reminded him.
“I’ve got a pulse and a working brain. That’s all I need.” Remi looked past her to Anja. “Tell her, Anja. I’m not staying.”
Anja was torn. Though she wished he would spend the night in the hospital to get proper care, if their roles were reversed, she’d want him to have her back. He’d been stitched up and prescribed medication, so she didn’t argue.
“He’s not staying,” Anja confirmed. The nurse shot her a look that suggested she’d expected the two of them to gang up on her from the instant Anja had walked in.
“But he’ll follow every discharge instruction to the letter, and somebody will be with him around the clock until the wound’s fully closed. I’ll see to that personally.”
The nurse exhaled through her nose, clearly recognizing a losing battle when she saw one. “If he leaves against medical advice, I’ll need a doctor to clear the discharge, and then I’ll need a signature.”
“Where do I sign?” Remi reached for the clipboard with his good hand, wincing at the pull it cost him.
The curtain shifted, and two men in plain suits stepped into the bay, badges displayed. The older of the two had a receding hairline and green eyes that logged the room in a single sweep.
“Special Agent in Charge Davis.” He nodded to each of them in turn.
“This is Special Agent Weaver. We won’t take much of your time tonight.
The detective at the highway scene flagged this as connected to the incident at the funeral home the other day, and we need statements from all three of you while the details are fresh.
We can do it here, or we can do it at the field office. Your choice.”
“Here’s fine,” Remi answered before anyone else could.
“We’ll need to speak to each of you separately,” Davis explained, not unkindly. “Standard procedure. Won’t take more than fifteen minutes each. Twenty tops.”
Leo’s eyes flicked to Anja, and she nodded, conveying: Go ahead and tell them everything. Let them do their job. Weaver produced a recorder and a notepad and gestured Leo toward the hallway. He looked as if he’d already had a long night and expected several more hours of it before dawn. “Name?”
“Leonardo De Luca.”
“Mr. De Luca, if you’ll come with us.”
Leo went, throwing one last glance over his shoulder before the curtain fell closed behind him.
Anja dropped into the chair beside Remi’s bed to wait her turn, listening to the distant hum of the hospital carrying on around them.
She was surprisingly indifferent to how thoroughly their night had just been rearranged.
“They’re not going to make this quick, are they?” Remi murmured.
“No,” Anja confirmed. “That was a lie. But it means this is officially bigger than us now. It’s a federal case whether we love the timeline or not.”
“How bad’s it going to get?”
“Super bad. Athletes throwing games, money running through at least three agencies, and a body count trailing behind it. Once this breaks, it’s going to rock more than one professional league. Reporters will be camped outside Pinnacle by lunchtime.”