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Joceline nodded. “Jay Copper is going to do some very hard time, if he manages to avoid the needle,” she added meaningfully. “Imagine ordering the death of a woman and a small child!”
“And I’m sure that he did order it, despite all his denials,” Betty said grimly. “Dan Jones may have done the actual killing, but Jay Copper was behind it. If they can just convict him, is the thing. I hope they do.”
“Mr. Blackhawk is supposed to meet an informant tonight at seven,” Joceline said heavily. “He refuses to have a bodyguard. He doesn’t think Monroe is a threat.”
“That’s foolhardy,” Betty said. “Look what happened to Detective Marquez when he went to meet some shadowy informant.”
Marquez had been blindsided and hospitalized. Joceline was uneasy about the meeting tonight. “Mr. Blackhawk takes chances.”
“Oh, I’m sure he’ll be all right,” Phyllis said airily. She glanced at her watch—a very expensive one. “Gosh, I have to get back to work. Thanks for the coffee.”
She left without putting change in the kitty that helped pay for renewing the canteen supplies. Without a word, Betty took a bill out of her pocket and placed it in the container.
“Young people.” She sighed.
Joceline smiled. “You’re nice.”
“Thanks. So are you.”
“I do hope they can convict Jay Copper of little Melly Kilraven’s murder,” Joceline said quietly. “Kilraven still isn’t over it,” she added gently, “although he and his wife, Winnie, are expecting around the new year.” She smiled. “What a Christmas present they’re going to have this year if she goes into labor early!”
“Christmas!” Betty exclaimed. “I haven’t even started shopping!”
“It isn’t even Thanksgiving yet,” she was reminded.
“Yes, but I usually have everything bought by August.” She laughed. “I’m efficient on the job. I wish I could be that efficient off it.”
Joceline laughed, too. “Well, we all do what we can.”
The phone rang. Joceline got to her feet. “Back to work. Thanks for the heads-up,” she added in a soft tone. “At least if I get the ax, I’ll be somewhat prepared. Perhaps I should start working up a résumé.”
“Wait,” Betty advised. “A lot of this is all talk. I don’t think the office can operate with just me taking a workload from the squad, and only a part-timer for Mr. Blackhawk all at once. I’d have a nervous breakdown. And I can’t persuade people to talk to me like you can. You’re marvelous at digging out information.”
Joceline pursed her lips. “I can do that,” she agreed. “Maybe there’s work for a skip tracer,” she added, indicating a line of work that involved digging out information for detectives. “I might look good in a trench coat.”
Betty laughed again.
JUST BEFORE quitting time, the phone rang as Joceline was gathering things into her bag to take home, including the long file on Bart Hancock.
Joceline picked up the phone. “Hello?”
“My love! It’s been so long!”
She knew that voice. Its South African accent was unmistakable. She pictured a rugged, tanned face with an eye patch and blond hair in a long ponytail. “Rourke,” she muttered.
“You know you’re happy to have me around again,” he drawled. “Guess what? I’m going to be your shadow for a few weeks. Until the would-be perp stops making threats, at least.”
“I can’t wait,” she replied. “Do you have body armor?”
He hesitated. “Excuse me?”
“Body armor,” she emphasized. “Riot gear.”
“No. But I can borrow some. Why will I need it?”
“If you attempt to shadow me, I’ll rub bear grease all over you and open the lion cage at the zoo,” she said sweetly.
There was a slow, deep chuckle. “Joceline, my love, I have two tame lions who live with me back home in South Africa. I’m not intimidated by big cats. However, if you’d like to rub me all over with bear grease,” he added in a deep, velvety tone, “I can be in your office in two minutes flat. I’ll even run red lights!”
She slammed the receiver down, her lips making a thin line. She muttered under her breath.
A minute later, the phone rang again. She jerked it up and, without thinking, said, “If you call here one more time, Rourke, I’ll have you up for harassment!”
There was a faint pause, as if she’d shocked the listener. Then Kilraven’s voice came over the line, deep and very somber.
“Joceline, I’ve got some bad news.”
“Winnie …?” she began worriedly, because she was fond of his wife. They often went shopping together.
He swallowed. “Not Winnie. My brother …”
“Jon? Something’s happened to Jon?” She sounded almost hysterical and she didn’t care. Harold Monroe’s phone call came back to her in a flash of anguish. She gripped the phone, hard. “What happened?”
“He’s been shot. Critically. He’s at the Hal Marshall Memorial Medical Center … Hello? Joceline?”
He was talking to himself. Joceline had her purse over her shoulder. She ran to Betty’s small office and told her what had happened.
“I’m on my way to the hospital. I’ll call you the minute I know something!”
Betty started to mention that Jon’s family was certainly gathered around him, and would relay any news. But the look on Joceline’s face stopped the words in her mouth. She wondered if Joceline was even aware of her feelings for Jon Blackhawk, which were blatant on her drawn, worried face.
CHAPTER SIX
KILRAVEN WAS SITTING in an uncomfortable chair in the emergency room waiting area, with Winnie beside him. He looked up when Joceline walked in. His expression, usually unreadable, was as concerned as hers.
“Have you heard anything new?” she asked, pausing to greet Winnie with a hug.
“They’ve taken him into surgery,” Kilraven replied grimly. “They said they’ll know more when they operate. He was shot in the back. In the back!”
Joceline’s face flamed. “I hope they find Harold Monroe and hang him.”
Kilraven nodded. “I can’t prove it, but I’m sure he’s the one who did it. And I’ll find the proof, no matter how long it takes me!”
“I’ll help,” Joceline agreed harshly.
“Want some coffee?” Winnie asked her husband, who nodded.
“I’ll go get it,” he said, starting to rise.
She pushed him back down. “I need the exercise. The doctor says it’s good for me to move around. But thanks, sweetheart.” She bent to kiss him. “Would you like a cup, Joceline?” she added.
“Yes, please.” Joceline dug for a dollar bill and handed it to her insistently. “You’re not buying me coffee,” she said stubbornly. “I’m an employee of a federal agency and I won’t be the subject of a bribery scandal,” she added with mock hauteur.
Winnie chuckled. “Have it your way, Elliott Ness.”
Kilraven frowned. “He headed up the FBI in Chicago during racketeering days. He was incorruptible.”
“The history professor,” Winnie teased, and kissed him again.
“I’m not up on American history unless it has Scots connections.” His area of expertise was seventeenth-century Scottish history.
“Was Elliott Ness a Scot?” Joceline wondered aloud.
“I’ll look into it,” Kilraven promised.
Winnie went to get coffee. Kilraven and Joceline sat rigidly, watching the doors open and close as medical personnel in green scrubs went to and fro, occasionally flanked by white-coated physicians with stethoscopes draped around their necks.
“Busy place,” Kilraven ventured.
“Yes.” She turned over her purse. “Have you called your mother?”
“She’s on her way here,” he said. “I made her promise not to drive.” He grimaced. “She’s wrapped two cars around telephone poles in the past five years.”
“Oh. She drives like you, then,” Joceline said with a pleasant smile.
He glared at her. “I have never wrecked a car.”
“Sorry. I forgot. They were blown out from under you. Major difference.” She was nodding.
He shifted. “Everybody gets bomb threats.”
“Yours aren’t threats, and how lucky that you weren’t in the cars at the time they exploded.”
“Can I help it if I inspire passion in people?”
“People in black ops do that, I’m told.” She chuckled.
He shrugged. “I’m trying to walk the straight and narrow, especially now,” he said with a smile. “I’m doing the most boring job the company could find for me. Surveillance.”
“It’s safer than what you used to do,” she said. She frowned. “Did you send Rourke after me?”
“Yes, I did,” he said, “and stop trying to run him off. Monroe is deadly serious, as you might have noticed today. Jon told me that Monroe said you’re next. You have a small child and the two of you live in an apartment building with no security to speak of. Rourke will protect you.”
“Who’s going to protect him from me?” she wondered aloud.
“That is a good question.”
They paused to stare at the door leading to the surgical wing. A surgeon in green scrubs came out it, looked toward Kilraven and motioned for him to join him. Joceline went, too, ignoring the surgeon’s obvious surprise. Under other circumstances, Kilraven would have chuckled at her concern for a boss she constantly drove nuts.
Joceline could hear her own heart beating and hoped Kilraven wouldn’t notice. She was scared to death. If Jon Blackhawk died, it would be like the sun going out forever. She refused to even entertain the possibility. But she knew that he could die. And might. She gripped her purse like a lifeline, hoping, praying … let him live, please, I’ll go to church more, I’ll give to charity more, I’ll be a better person, be kinder, more tolerant … She closed her eyes. You can’t bargain with God, she told herself.
“I’m cautiously optimistic,” the surgeon said, glancing at Joceline when her explosion of soft breath diverted him. “The bullet missed the major organs and lodged in the wall of his chest. It did some damage to a lung, and of course filled the pleural cavity with blood. We’ve removed the bullet and inserted a tube to drain the excess fluid and reinflate the lung. The damage to his lung is minimal. Apparently he was shot from a distance, and with a nonfragmenting bullet, thank God. The damage will heal. It helps that he’s young and in great physical shape.”
“Can I see him?” Kilraven asked quietly.
He hesitated. But he was a kindly man, and these two people loved his patient. He wondered if the woman was a girlfriend. She was certainly concerned.
“In a few minutes,” he told them. “We’ll move him into recovery temporarily, then he’ll go to ICU for a day or two. Just as a precaution,” he emphasized when he noted his two listeners going pale. “We want to make sure complications don’t develop that might retard his progress. We’ll keep him for three or four days after that, again, to make sure he’s progressing as we think he should. But I think he’ll be fine,” he added gently.
“They’ll come to get us, when we can see him?” Kilraven asked, glancing at Joceline as if it were a given that she’d go in, too.
“I’ll send a nurse,” he promised. “He’s an FBI agent, isn’t he?”
“Yes,” Kilraven replied. “One of the best.”
“We do a big business in gunshot wounds in our emergency room,” the doctor said with a heavy sigh. “Sadly there are more guns than trauma surgeons in this area.”
“One day that will change,” Kilraven said.
The doctor only smiled. “Not in my lifetime, I’m afraid. I’ll get back to work. They just brought in a child of seven, victim of a drive-by shooting.” He shook his head. “In my day, drugs were only whispered about. There was no wide-scale distribution, no gangs with guns, no …” He shrugged. “It was a less tolerant world, but far less violent.”
“They did this experiment,” Kilraven said quietly. “I read about it. They put rats in a confined area until they were so crowded that they could barely move. They became aggressive and began attacking the others and even cannibalizing them.”
The doctor nodded. “We are too many, with too few resources, in too little space in cities on this planet. Nature has a way of thinning the population without any help from us.” He glanced toward the emergency room. “However, I must add that I prefer nature’s approach. Guns and knives are messy.”
“I agree,” Kilraven said. “I’ve seen my share of the results.”
Nobody added that he’d helped a few criminals into emergency rooms.
The surgeon smiled reassuringly and went back to work.
Joceline was trying to avoid letting Kilraven see her tears.
“Hey, now,” he said in a teasing tone. “Don’t do that. Never let them see you cry.”
She laughed with a hiccup and brushed at her eyes. “He’s an awful boss,” she muttered. “Keeps me working late, throws things, insults me …”
“Jon insults you?” he asked, shocked.
“He asks me to make coffee,” she scoffed. She brushed away another tear. “Imagine that!”
“He’s just tired of threatened lawsuits from visiting attorneys who have to drink the coffee the agents make,” Kilraven explained.
“Then they should stop letting Murdock make coffee,” she pointed out.
“That’s been suggested,” he replied. “At the same time, they mentioned dirt and shovels …”
“There’s a large potted plant in our office that could use a jolt of fertilizer,” she mused. “However, Agent Murdock is far too large to plant in it.”
