Page 72 of Booked for Kidnapping

“It’s tough having a caring father-in-law.”

“Seriously. At least we managed to get rid of him for a while, although Bradley crashed out early. I’ve been up all night,” I admitted. “My sleep schedule is screwed.”

“To be expected. You don’t use phones without a good reason, so what do you have for me?”

“Beyond a burning need to start some fires?”

“You can’t burn the government, Janette.”

I grumbled curses at her edict. “I wanted to get a basic rundown of where we’re at investigating.”

“Ah. You mean how we’ve been spinning our wheels because we very quickly came to the conclusion we have no idea what we’re doing, and once you got kidnapped, the brains of our operation was gone? Or more accurately, the focus of our operation was gone. It wasn’t until you disappeared we realized you were the glue making sure we all got work done.”

Crap. “Really?”

“We aren’t that bad. I mean, we are librarians for the most part. We’ve been information gathering, but we’re learning how to put the information together. Investigating seemed like a really good idea out of the gate, especially with our skills, but it turns out the real gig is not what we expected. So, we’ve been learning. That’s good. We can start fresh now that we have a better idea of what we’re doing. But I’ve learned my lesson. No, investigating something like a murder is not easy, no, not everyone can do it, and for fuck’s sake, not everyone is suited for it. Meridian likes questioning people, but unless we tell her what we need, she won’t go off on tangents much, so we need to send someone with her to ask additional questions. Mr. Tawnlen is good at that, so we’re teaming them up—and he’s aces on the forensics. That’s where we shine. Apparently, he was damned good at his first job before becoming a librarian.”

I could believe that. My boss tried to do his best at every task he set his hand to, no matter how small or trivial it seemed to be. “I’ve made a mess of things.”

“Hardly. We would have figured out we needed help even without your disappearance. It just would have had a lot more screaming, resentment, and fights. And we had a lot of that even before your kidnapping. I mean, you weren’t even talking to us right before you were taken.”

I winced. “Well, I was talking to you, I just wasn’t agreeing with you, and I was doing what I wanted.”

“Yes, you did do what you wanted. We’re still a bit pissed off you got kidnapped. But then your kidnappers turned out to be otherwise great people. Only great people fix our favorite bitch’s foot. Without the bill. We know how much it would have cost now.”

I winced. “How much?”

“About thirty million dollars.”

I dropped my phone, and it landed on the towels we’d sacrificed to serve as a bathmat. I cursed, snatched the thing up, and checked the display, relieved it had survived. “Can you repeat that?”

“Dropped your phone?”

“Yep.”

“Thirty million dollars. That’s how much the rehab, the operation prep, and the cost of the operation would have been if a hospital had done the work at their typical rates before insurance.”

“I saw a watch today that cost thirty million dollars,” I said, my voice emerging as a breathless whisper. “My foot cost the same as that watch?”

“Yep. Mickey, with some help from some researchers, did a full tally of what your medical bill would be. We wanted to evaluate how to get you back on your feet. Investigating when you’re barely able to walk is tough, and it gave us something to do, as we weren’t able or capable of investigating your disappearance. Honestly, that’s when we really figured out we just don’t know what we’re doing and why there’s so much involved with becoming a detective or an FBI agent. Anyway, give me a second. I’ll tell you the breakdown. I just have to open the file.”

I waited, grateful I hadn’t known the total bill for my foot’s recovery. I would have accepted what I had as the best I was going to get had I known the truth about the costs. “I feel like I just cost a bunch of doctors a lot of profit.”

“Yep,” Beatrice agreed. “And your stubborn ass won’t accept charity without a fight.”

“Do I want to know how much Senator Maybelle’s campaign had spent on their portion of the operation?”

“Two and a half million dollars. The medical supplies and machinery alone started the bill at two-hundred thousand, you needed several MRIs, which they billed at fifty thousand each, you were in the ICU for the first day of it, which came in at twenty-five thousand—the cheap end. Then they had to call in doctors from all over the fucking place, which meant compensating their hospitals, making sure replacement staff could come in, paying for the travel and stay, paying for rush care. The military doctor cost the campaign a solid three hundred thousand. They flew him in via military jet from Europe, and they had to skip him across the ocean using an aircraft carrier as a fueling station. Moving the aircraft carrier resulted in some rather large expenses. The military didn’t even charge for the fuel. President Castillo gave the marching orders on that, because he didn’t want his administration to look cheap, but Senator Maybelle’s campaign covered the costs. She didn’t need it anymore, and a lot of the donors flagged their contributions for recovery.”

Holy shit. “Dare I ask how much the fuel cost for the fighter jet?”

“I think they dished out twenty thousand on fuel? Something like that. Considering the rest of the expenses, the jet’s fueling costs were negligible. Paying the entire staff of an aircraft carrier, fueling fees, and delays on the carrier’s mission cost a lot more. The doctor only asked for his typically hourly wage for the work, honestly. And he asked that of the government, not the campaign.”

“I like that doctor.”

“He said exsanguinators have to stick together, and you’re the reason he’s a doctor right now, so he owes you a lot. Your ER volunteering got him fast tracked. He’d been taking medical courses on his own dime when off duty, but the rules would have barred him from practicing. Once the military realized he was spending his leaves getting medical training, they tested him in the field. He shook out, and so that’s how you paved the way for exsanguinators being welcomed in the medical field. He would have done the whole op and his share for free if he’d been able to. It just got him there earlier, since the military is the only source for people skilled at neutralizing that drug you’d been contaminated with. It wouldn’t have hurt you for the operation, but it needed to be removed. It just hadn’t needed to be removed in the span it took them to get him in from Europe.”

“Huh. Nobody had told me that. Just that I’d needed a military exsanguinator to purge that medication out of my blood.”