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“I need Factor VIII.” Aubree speaks loud enough to draw our attention around.
My stomach whooshes as I turn and meet her eyes, but she faces us bravely and wrings her bloody hands together. “I need to infuse tonight, or I may not make it till the morning.”
“What’s…” Slade looks to me for help. “What is that for?”
“Hemophilia. It’s a bleeding disorder,” I sigh. “For an infusion, the medication is administered through a needle.”
“Can you do it? Can you give it to her?”
I nod.Of course.Not because I’m a doctor. Not because I have medical experience. But because a child with hemophilia knows how to infuse by their fifth birthday. “Yes,” I rasp. I look to Aubree and shake my head. “I know how to do it.”
“Good.” He taps the end of his gun to my paper. “Write it down. We’ll give the list to the police—and we’ll order food, too. Then we’re settling in till my baby is all better.”
ARCHER
“Detective Malone!”
Captain Bower is a rotund man of fifty-five, with a cleanly shaved head, but a thick mustache he brought with him out of the seventies. He wears black slacks and button-down shirt, the bars of his rank on his shoulders, and a hat tucked between his ribs and arm.
The second his eyes latch onto mine through the pulsing crowd of cops, he charges around the command center truck and pins me with a vicious glare that promises I’m about to be knocked down to beat cop.
“I said you are not to be here.” He stops three feet away and singes me with a stare. “I gave you a direct order, Detective.”
“My wife is inside.” Ignoring my boss’ boss, I spin to Tim and study the building schematics he somehow procured in the last hour.
That’s how long Minka’s been at the mercy of a desperate man wielding a loaded gun.
Too long.
“The fact she’s in there is precisely why you were ordered away.” Frustrated, Bower steps around to face us and slaps his hand to the map Tim and I hold between us. “Youcannotwork this scene, Detective. You put yourself, your colleagues, and the hostages at risk.”
As a helicopter flitters above us, and cops suit up near us, as media vans cast a spotlight across the front of the bank, and Fifi makes phone calls thirty feet away—so many fucking phone calls—anger courses potently through my blood.
Meeting my captain’s eyes, I peel my lips back in a feral sneer that makes him step back in surprise. “My wife is a hostage, Captain. I assure you, I’m doing what needs to be done to get her out. Safely.”
“We have specialist teams to take care of this!”
“And I trust not a single one of them.” Turning my back to him again, I point toward the roof of the building and murmur for Tim, “If we get to the top, there’s an old emergency staircase that will bring us down the other side.”
“The building butts up to the one behind it.”
“Yeah, but the stairs were installed during construction. And if you look,” I shuffle papers and tug a report from the bottom of my stack, “they attempted to install sprinklers back in two thousand and ten.”
“Attempted?”
“Detective!”
“Attempted,” I confirm… and ignore. “The historical society squashed the project when it was learned the sprinklers would eat into the original architecture. The pipes were never put in.”
“But the emergency stairs were reinforced in the process?”
“Yeah. If we go—”
“Detective Malone!” Bower grabs my arm and spins me with a potent rage that brings me up short. “I said you are dismissed.”
“Captain!”
“If I see you within a six-block radius of this building between now and extraction, not only will you not sit your lieutenant’s exam for the rest of my career, but you’ll lose your position as detective, too.”
