Military Man

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This time Emmett did look at him. And nearly jeered. “Yeah, right. The only way you could have looked any harder at that woman back there was to have taken out one of your eyeballs and handed it to her.”

“Now there’s a gross picture.”

The bell announcing the elevator car’s descent sounded. It arrived a half beat later, opening its doors. There was no one in the car.

“So is watching you become all slack-jawed over a woman in a white lab coat,” Emmett countered as they walked into the elevator.

“Still don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Emmett ignored the denial. Instead he looked at Collin, a light dawning. “Is it my imagination, or did she look a little like Paula?”

Collin felt himself stiffening the way he did just before a battle, just before the adrenaline went pumping through his veins. “Paula?”

If that was meant to be an innocent tone, it had failed miserably. They’d been friends far too long for him to be fooled by his cousin. Emmett knew, perhaps better than anyone, what Paula’s walking out on him had done to Collin. Nothing messed with a man’s mind more than a woman did.

“Yeah, Paula. You remember, six-years-engaged-to-you Paula,” he said sarcastically, knowing that nothing more was needed than that. But just in case, he added, “The one who married someone you called your best friend.”

“He was my best friend,” Collin confirmed quietly as they stepped out of the elevator again and began to walk toward the front entrance. “He took care of Paula every time I was away on assignments. Couldn’t expect her to sit home four, five weeks at a time while I was taking care of business.”

Taking care of business. It was a euphemistic way of describing what he’d done for a living. What he still did. Infiltrating drug cultures in South America, crossing borders in European countries that were so close together they could have been opposite walls of a medium-size closet, all while tracking down a fugitive who was increasingly becoming desperate.

Not unlike what he was setting out to do now, he thought.

“Paula was young.” He continued his defense of the woman he figured he was always destined to remain in love with. “She wanted a good time.”

Emmett laughed shortly. There was no sign of humor on his mouth and his eyes were flat. In this case, he took umbrage for his cousin even if Collin wouldn’t take it for himself. “And good old William certainly gave it to her, didn’t he?”

Collin refused to think about that. Going there served no purpose. She was married and that was that. “Bottom line, he made her happy. I didn’t.”

Emmett’s frown became deep enough to bury pirate treasure in. “Don’t act like it doesn’t bother you, Collin.”

“It did,” he admitted, then shrugged good-naturedly, wanting the subject to be dropped, “but it’s over and I learned a lesson from it.”

Emmett spared him a side glance as they walked to the car. “Which was?”

“That I’m not cut out to maintain something that needs constant care, constant watching. Constant nurturing.” And that was what marriage was, something that needed continuous work. He was never around long enough to put in the hours.

The denial sounded too pat to Emmett. “Is that what was going through your head while you were looking at Ms. Med Student and drooling?”

The image of himself as a lovesick puppy was enough to almost make him laugh out loud. “No drooling was involved. I was just surprised that there could be two women who looked so much alike.”

“Looks, yeah,” Emmett conceded, “but once she opened her mouth, that woman was no Paula. This one’s got a head on her shoulders.”

They went down another row of cars. “It’d be better if it was on her neck.”

Emmett shook his head, a smile peeling back his lips. “You always were the only one who could ever make me laugh.”

“I was the only one who ever tried,” Collin pointed out. He stopped to look around and finally spotted Emmett’s car two aisles over. He motioned the man to follow him as he lengthened his stride. “Let’s go to the hospital and see if the other driver is back among the living yet.”

Emmett nodded. He’d already decided on that course of action himself. “That’s why we work so well together, Collin. We think alike.”

“No, we don’t,” Collin denied, reaching the vehicle first. He waited for Emmett to unlock it. “You just like to take the credit for my ideas.”

Putting his key in the lock, Emmett laughed. It was good being around Collin again. He’d forgotten what it felt like to interact with his cousin. Forgotten what it was like to feel human again.

Or as close to human as he could manage, under the circumstances.

The policeman whose job it was to guard the comatose prison transport driver looked as if he’d sent his brain out for the afternoon so as not to succumb to the mind-numbing task. He sat on a chair, tilting the rear legs so that the front ones were off the floor, his chair balanced against the wall. An unread magazine was spread over his lap and the officer was staring off into oblivion when they came on the floor.

The sound of footsteps had him turning around and nearly pitching off his chair. He recovered himself at the last moment, rising to his feet.

“You can’t go in there,” he announced, his voice a great deal deeper than would have been expected, given his shallow physique. Collin suspected that the man was lowering it for effect and didn’t normally speak in that timbre.

Emmett gave the policeman a dark look and then flashed his credentials. He glanced toward Collin, who followed suit. The policeman read both with great interest. Collin could almost hear him saying, “Wow.”

The officer’s Adam’s apple, rather prominent, danced a little as it went up and down. He nodded his head at both IDs almost as if he was paying homage to them.

“I’m sorry, no one told me you were coming to see the driver.”

Emmett awarded him with one of his frostier looks. “Why should they?”

“Um, that is…” The officer’s voice trailed off as he looked completely at a loss for words or any sort of an adequate reply.

“Taking no prisoners today?” Collin asked his cousin as they walked into the room.

“Not today,” Emmett confirmed. There was nothing he detested more than incompetence, even if it worked in his favor.

Collin eased the door closed behind them.

The small, single-bed room looked not unlike a mini-intensive care unit with machines surrounding the comatose transporter’s bed. There was a constant hum in the room so that no one entering it would, even for a moment, forget the existence of the various machines and how much they were needed to keep the man hooked up to them alive. For now.

Collin approached the bed, studying the face of the man he’d hoped had regained consciousness by now. The transporter, a man for whom the term “average” might have been coined if describing his hair, height and appearance, now sported a pasty complexion. He looked like a man who’d been on the brink of death and was even now still very much tottering on the edge. His fate, despite the noble efforts of a team of surgeons who’d kept him under for five hours, working feverishly in hopes of negating the damage that had been done by the stab wounds, had not yet been decided.

They could lose him at any minute.

Collin willed the victim’s eyes to open.

They didn’t.

Feeling unusually frustrated, he looked at the machine that monitored the patient’s vital signs. His pulse, blood pressure and respiration gauges were all making the appropriate, comforting beeping noises. Across the screen colorful wavy lines snaked their way from one end to the other, sometimes uniformly, sometimes jaggedly, with a regularity that provided the information that the man was still hanging on. Still fighting.

He should have been dead. Like his partner. And yet, he wasn’t.

Collin picked up the chart that was already full and glanced over it. He knew enough medical terminology to get by as long as it didn’t get too involved.

“Human spirit’s an incredible thing,” he commented, flipping the pages back again. “According to this—” he indicated the chart that he replaced at the foot of the driver’s bed “—this man should have been dead. The knife obviously had a long blade. It went through his back and was inches shy of his lungs. If it had been just a little over, he would have already been six feet in the ground.”

Emmett studied the man in silence for a moment, looking beyond the inert figure. Visualizing the scene that might have taken place in the transport vehicle. Had they hit a ditch, causing the driver to lose control of the bus? There’d been no blowout, so that wasn’t the cause of the change of fortune within the vehicle.

What had happened inside the van to turn the prisoner into the jailer?

Without fully realizing it, he voiced his thoughts out loud. “Wonder if he turned and made a run for it at the last second, not like the guy in the coroner’s office who was caught by surprise.”

Collin hadn’t made up his mind yet; there wasn’t enough evidence to spin a theory. “Well, something’s different about him, or else he’d be in a steel drawer, right next to his buddy.” He rolled the last word around in his mouth. “Think they were friends?” He raised his eyes to Emmett, answering his own question when his cousin made no response. “I guess that depends on if they worked together on a regular basis. Most people usually develop some kind of relationship if they work together.” Unless they were in his line of work, he added silently. In the field, there was never enough time to do anything except think about staying alive.

“I don’t,” Emmett retorted crisply.

“I said ‘most.’” He laughed shortly. “You’re not like most people, Emmett. Most people, if they get fed up with their job, take a vacation. They don’t take a powder and retreat from the world the way you did.”

As Collin spoke, his tone deceptively light, he continued studying the unconscious man in the bed. Trying to see himself in his skin. Had he felt panic at the last moment? Had he looked down the blade of the knife as it had gone in? Seen his partner die? He wondered if there was a way he could get inside the transport vehicle and look around. “You were that type that Thoreau used to write about, the one who marches to a different drummer.”