Page 37 of Wrong Door

“Good for now. Throat’s feeling a little raw.”

“Can you talk?”

“Yeah.”

"Did he say anything?" she asked.

"Yeah." Miles shifted his position slightly against the bed, a careful adjustment. "I don’t think Kane sent him to kill me. He was trying to kill me to impress Kane.”

“He named Kane specifically?”

“Yeah. And he said I was trying to shut down people returning things to the world.” He grunted and then added: “And then he spit in my face.”

She looked at Cord and saw him nodding. But he remained silent, which was par for the course for the majority of the disciples they had captured.

Slowly, Miles started to get to his feet. He used the wall to prop himself up. She reached out and put a hand on his shoulder. "Stay there," she said.

"I can stand."

"I know you can. Stay there anyway."

He stayed. And it was at that moment she heard the wail of approaching sirens. “Shit,” she said. “I should call Pruitt.”

“Go ahead,” he rasped, nodding toward the window where the strobing cherry lights of an ambulance now accompanied the siren noises. “Cavalry is here.”

She called Pruitt, and the detective answered on the second ring. She stood by the window, watching the ambulance park and the medics get out as she gave Pruitt the summary of the past ten minutes or so. Pruitt said she was on her way, that she would bring two officers for the transfer, that she would call ahead to have a room at the county facility prepared. But before she ended the call, Pruitt said something that haunted Vic.

“Damn, we got lucky, huh? If this maniac hadn’t come for Miles, there’s no telling how much longer we would have been looking for him.”

Vic did not respond and when she put her phone back in her pocket, she decided not to focus on that for the moment.

The medics arrived and she let them work. She put herself where she could see both Miles and Cord. It was unsettling that Cord seemed perfectly fine with the way this had happened. She knew that interrogations would be difficult because she doubted he’d tell them if there were others out there in the middle of dying because of his clever and time-consuming approach.

Quickly, the medics cleared Miles of a broken rib but speculated that Cord had at least two. They slipped an oxygen mask over Miles, and he seemed irritated when they insisted they carry him out on a gurney. Vic could hear him through the mask get out an “I’m fine” before he finally relented.

When the medics tended to Cord, he was cooperative and almost polite about it all. Vic couldn’t help but wonder if he was processing the fact that he had screwed up. He had stepped away from his initial mission to seek the praise of Kane only to have been arrested, bringing his spree to an end. Perhaps that stinging sense of failure was why he was staying so quiet and lethargic.

At the door, with the two officers on either side of his own gurney, Cord looked directly at her and smiled. She had to look away because she suddenly felt the need to give the bastard at least one more broken rib. And maybe a leg or arm to go with it.

She then took one last look around the room and followed the medics out.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

The breakfast was better than hospital food had any right to be and may have actually been the best food he’d had since coming to Savannah—which said nothing bad about Savannah, rather how hectic his schedule had been. He’d been given scrambled eggs, toast, coffee that was weak but hot, and a little tub of yogurt. His jaw had been x-rayed and pronounced unbroken a few hours ago. The aerosol exposure had been assessed as minor given the partial contact. His eyes had been flushed, and they’d given him a spray for his throat and sinuses. His skin irritation had been documented as superficial.

He was finishing the eggs when Vic came in. She had grabbed coffee from somewhere outside the hospital and, God bless her, she had two. She set one on the tray table beside his own cup without comment. She pulled the chair close and sat down, giving him a smile that was just tired enough to suggest she’d not slept last night. Miles had dozed on and off between three and six while he’d been waiting for results from all of his tests and was feeling surprisingly refreshed.

"You look much better than last night," she said.

"Thanks, but that’s a pretty low bar."

"Yeah, but it still counts." She settled back in the chair and sipped from her coffee. "Pruitt's team has been working Cord since seven."

"How's that going?"

"It isn't." She frowned and tilted her head severely, as if she was trying to get her neck to pop. "He hasn't said a word since they put him in the room. By the way, he’s here, in the building. Two broken ribs and one cracked. Anyway…he has said nothing. Not one word. He sits there and looks at the wall and doesn't answer anything. He’ll speak to the nurses and doctors, but not the cops." She sighed and said, "Well, except twice."

“And?”