Page 36 of Wrong Door

And for just a moment, he allowed it.

He hit him once, hard, in the stomach.

Cord folded and went to the ground. From there, Miles kicked him in the ribs twice. And then, when Cord was laying on the ground and gasping for breath, Miles grabbed his cuffs off of the bedside table. He closed one around Cord's right wrist and the other around his own left. Then he sat down on the floor beside the man who had just tried to kill him, who was now cuffed to his wrist and crying. It was quiet crying, the restrained weeping of someone for whom something load bearing had just given way.

Miles sat on the floor and breathed. His lungs felt raw and his left eye felt like it was on fire. Hexavalent chromium, he supposed. His jaw was registering the full accounting of the two punches and would have more to say about it in the morning, he was sure. But for now, he was fine.

He’d need to be checked out for inhaling whatever was in that can, but he was pretty sure he’d live.

Slowly, he reached back over to the bedside table. He grabbed his phone and, suddenly finding it even harder to breathe, he pulled up Vic’s number.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

The door to room 214 was standing open three inches when Vic came down the hall. She’s pretty much expected to see something like tis based on Miles’s call. She had her weapon out before she reached it and pushed it open with her foot. She pivoted into the room and took it all in over a course of two seconds.

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.

“Doubtful.” She took out her phone and called 9-1-1. She gave her name and badge number to the woman on the other line. Within thirty seconds, she got confirmation from dispatch that an ambulance was on the way—it should be there within seven minutes.

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?”