Head Games (24 page)

Read Head Games Online

Authors: Eileen Dreyer

“What about me?” Frank demanded from where he leaned against the wall, unsipped tea in hand. “Aren't you investigating me?”
“You're despicable, Frank,” Molly assured him. “Not malevolent.”
“Why, Molly,” he sighed. “I'm touched.”
“May I see the notes you've compiled?” Kathy asked. “While I'm looking at them, I'm sure Frank wants to be getting home.”
After a couple more cups of tea, Molly was going to have to ask Kathy how she could get quite so much unchallengeable command in such a soft statement. Frank didn't like Kathy's complacent smile, but he put down his mug anyway and slid into his coat.
“I have the most overwhelming suspicion that you don't trust me,” he protested with a grin.
“It's not that,” Kathy said, patting him like a grade-school teacher. “It's just that Molly has some things to tell me she doesn't want you to know.”
“You sure you're with the FBI?” Molly couldn't help but ask.
Kathy just smiled and walked along with Molly as she led Frank out the front door.
“You don't appreciate my help,” he objected on the front porch.
Molly laughed. “I do, Frank. I do. But Patrick's due home soon, and Kathy's here. And you only have three shopping days left till Christmas. Buy me something nice.”
“Only if you buy me something nicer.”
“After you sued me, I don't have the money for nicer.”
Frank's grin should have been a misdemeanor. “Then I'll just have to settle for naughtier.”
Molly ignored him. “Say hi to the kids for me.”
The night wasn't quite as cold as it had been. Up and down the block, Christmas lights flickered and shone, fireflies in the winter, the only thing Molly liked about Christmas. Challenging the dark and all. The city, for once, was quiet, and Molly found herself wanting to just stand out in the night.
Pulling his keys from his pocket, Frank walked off the porch. “You sure you don't want me to stay, St. Molly? I'd never forgive myself if something happened to you.”
“Nothing's going to happen to me, Frank,” Molly said, following him down the walk toward where his bright red Mercedes sports coupe upstaged her faded little Toyota in the driveway. “There are cops watching my house, and I have an FBI agent on my porch. Besides, my friend's never come two nights in a row. Excitement's over for a while.”
As if in punctuation, Frank lifted his hand and did that little wrist flip he did so that everybody knew that the car that was about to start was his. Then, with that shit-eating grin of his, he punched the little red button on his keychain.
The night disintegrated. There was a flat crack of noise, a shot of light, and Molly found herself airborne. She was still trying to figure out what the hell happened when her head hit something and all the noise and lights just stopped.
“Incoming!”
She wasn't going out there. She wasn't.
“Burke, come on! They're walking the rounds right toward the triage area!”
She shivered, sick, exhausted, scared. It didn't matter what was happening. She wasn't moving. She wasn't walking out into a shower of shrapnel for anybody. Not anymore.
Another round hit closer, tossing her cot a little and her stomach more. She was so hung over. She was blind with a headache, and the shells were thumping closer and closer. Louder, more deadly. And her best friend was standing there, waiting for her to do the right thing, just as she'd always done.
“I'm short, Sally,” she objected. “I'm so damn short we had my going-away party last night, or weren't you there? I'm not gonna ruin it by going back to the world in a body bag. Now go away!”
Shouts, now; screams. Pulling at her even harder than Sally's hands. Sally who had only been in Nam four months. Who had been such a good friend. Whom Molly was going to miss when she got home.
Home.
The mortars came, and she thought she should just crawl under her bunk. The mortars were thumping closer, walking right down the main street like shattering footsteps, and Molly shook, sick, curled into fetal position.
Four days. She had four fucking days left.
She found herself on her feet and running before she even knew she was going to do it. Helmet in one hand, boots in the other, running toward that hailstorm of misery, toward the screams and shouts, eyes closed, head bent, legs pumping.
It wasn't a shell that dropped her. She tripped. She just tripped, right there in the middle of the dirt, sprawling in the road with a mortar storm raging around her.
It was when she opened her eyes to go on that she saw what she'd tripped over. Round, rolling, no more than inches away, dirty with the impact of her fall.
“Sally!”
She picked it up. She picked her up, stunned to silence. Sally's eyes were wide, surprised, sad. Accusing. Bleeding all over Molly's hands and arms, mouth open as if to make one final plea for help. If only Molly had gotten up and run with her.
 
But how could a skull call for help? How could a face with no jaw, no teeth, beg Molly to run fast before it was too late?
“Molly, are you all right?”
“It's her head. It's Sally …”
Hands on her shoulders. Gentle hands. “Molly?”
Molly saw now. She wasn't in the dirt. She was on her lawn. On her back, in the dark, with the edges of the night flickering like a mortar attack. And she hurt. She hurt everywhere.
But her hands were empty. Sally had been gone a long time.
“Molly?”
Molly blinked to find that it wasn't day, it wasn't hot and thick and terrible. It was a cold winter night, where Christmas lights held off the dark, and Kathy was crouched over her, patting her cheek. “You got knocked out, Molly. You okay?”
“I know this is a cliché—” Molly began, struggling to sit up.
“Car bomb,” Kathy offered. “I need you to help me.”
Molly heard Magnum now. Maybe her ears were clearing, maybe just her brain.
Her eyes focused, and she saw the scene in her driveway.
Frank's car was a funeral pyre. Molly's car smoked with the debris from Frank's car that had pocked the ragtop. The night was washed in red and yellow, sirens already keening down the road. Molly blinked, saw what else she'd missed, and scrambled to her feet.
“Oh, shit,” she moaned. “Oh no.”
There was an untidy pile of winter coats crumpled on the ground not ten feet in front of her.
“Frank!” Molly yelled, crouching by his side, hands on him, focus on his ashen face, the rivulets of blood down his cheeks, the patches of burn on his cheek, on his gasping, uneven breaths. “Don't do this, Frank. I only have one lifesaving attempt in me per friend.” And she'd used it up this summer, which was still close enough to give her the big shakes.
If it hadn't been Frank, Molly would have been amazed at his aplomb. He opened those stunning eyes and grinned. “I live … for … moments like … this, Mol.”
He'd been thrown against one of the steps on her walk, and lay there, just a little bent by the impact. Molly unbuttoned his coat and checked his pupils, which were fairly sluggish.
“Give me the full scoop,” she commanded, ignoring the rising wails that approached, ignoring even Kathy, who stood thoughtfully to her side. “What hurts? What feels like it's not working?”
“I'm … afraid …” he said with a wry grin, his eyes fully open and still a little dazed, “I've breathed … better.”
“Left or right?”
“Left.”
Molly palpated his chest to a few surprised grunts of pain and grimaced herself. “You've crunched some ribs, you idiot. Why couldn't you start the car from the porch like you're supposed to?”
His grin was lopsided. “You … distracted me. You said there wouldn't … be any … excitement …”
Molly felt hot tears drip down her nose. “Shut up, Frank.”
Emergency equipment swept up and people tumbled out like clowns from Volkswagens. The paramedic team was one of the best, and they wasted no time on Frank's jokes. Hooking him up to monitor, oxygen, and IV, they ignored his pleas for his million-dollar Armani suit as they sliced through his clothes like pizza and laid him bare on the lawn. Molly helped, and then Molly stood back, and then Molly fought off fresh shakes and nausea.
Her car was being drenched by a high arc of water. Frank's was a hunk of eviscerated and charred modern art. At least one of Molly's house windows
had blown out, and the stink of oily smoke and gasoline congealed in the air.
“
This
is the kind of stuff you've been dealing with?” Kathy asked in her quiet way, hands tucked into her winter coat.
That was when Molly noticed that Kathy had somehow gotten a coat draped over Molly's shoulders. When she turned to answer, she saw Sam and Patrick standing poised at the other edge of her lawn, waiting for the moment they could step forward and assert their rights to the victims. Molly waved them over.
“Not exactly this,” Molly admitted to the FBI agent. “But it is one more weird thing to add to the tally.”
Kathy nodded, bemused. “Then I definitely think I'd like to hang around.”
“Who would do this?” Sam all but keened as he tottered closer. “
Gottenyu!
” And then, the situation obviously overwhelmed him, because he sank straight into Yiddish, his words coming so fast Molly wasn't sure whether he was praying or cursing, even as he held on to her, patting and clutching, to make sure she was whole.
Molly felt far from whole. Blood trickled down her neck, and bruises were rising in at least half a dozen places. Her ears still rang, and her stomach wasn't sure which way to heave. But Sam didn't need to get that whole story.
“I'm fine,
zeyde
,” she assured him, hugging him back. “Just a little shaken up.”
“How's Frank?” Patrick asked, the whites of his eyes showing.
Molly took a quick look back to where they were loading Frank onto a stretcher. “Frank's made it through worse than this,” she assured him with a pat to his arm. “Although I'm not sure if he'll survive the loss of both his Mercedes and Armani in the same night. Can you say Kaddish for inanimate objects, Sam?”
Sam's laugh was a bark. “Such a thing to say,
taibeleh
.” But he patted her cheek and panted, tears in his old, bright eyes.
“You're coming with us, aren't you, Molly?” one of the paramedics asked.
Molly looked around, trying to assess with only half a brain.
“Go,” Sam commanded. “You hurt your head. I'll watch Patrick and make sure the police don't
mutshe
your poor dog.”
Molly knew she had other things to think about, but she saw the first news truck pull up and made up her mind. “Patrick, go with Sam and keep the newspeople away from him. I'll call from the ED,” she said, then pointed to the approaching caravan. “And don't let one of those
momzers
in my house.”
 
 
Molly spent the rest of the night acquiring four staples on the side of her head, a salesman's sample of painkillers, and the acquaintance of the local bomb and arson guy who showed up with Rhett Butler. She held them off until she'd gotten in touch with Frank's mother-in-law to explain that Frank was going to do a little hospital time after having a chest tube stuck in him to reinflate his collapsed lung.
“It was a pipe bomb,” Rhett told her as he patted her hands. “Rigged to his automatic starter.”
Molly tried not to scowl. “I guessed that, Rhett. Right about the time he pressed the starter and his car blew up.”
“Actually, you were both lucky,” the arson guy said. “The explosion was rigged to go straight up. Nuts and knees kinda thing.”
Molly just stared at him, sure somebody in arson academy must have trained him better than to be so blunt.
“Any idea who it might have been?” Rhett asked.
Molly blinked at him, and then blinked at the bomb and arson guy, who stood alongside. “Like, have I been hanging around with anybody from the Lebanese Mafia lately? What's the matter, didn't Davidson finish his report on me yet?”
“Molly—”
But Molly had just about had it. “I'm going up to see that Frank isn't harassing the nurses, Rhett. And then I'm going the hell home. If anybody has anything of interest to say to me, you can just wait until I'm damn well ready, because you sure as hell haven't said it yet.”
And, much to everybody's surprise—especially Molly's—she did just that.
Fortunately for Frank, he was way too sedated to notice how agitated Molly was. She left him humming sleepily to himself. Unfortunately for Molly, she made it back down to the ED just in time to remember that she had no way home and it was three in the morning. Which was why
she didn't bite Rhett's head off when she saw him perched on one of the work lane stools waiting for her.
“You could have told me not to make an idiot of myself,” she groused as she neared.
His grin was sweet. “You could have told me the same thing. I'm sorry.”
That brought her to a dead halt. “Real cops never apologize, Rhett. Didn't somebody tell you that?”
“Homicide cops never let arson cops overrule them. For penance I thought I'd give you a name. Micklawski. Mean anything?”
“Polish sausage.”
“Only if it's delivered. It's Little Allen's name. Allen Walter Micklawski.”
Molly managed to get her eyes marginally bigger. “Find anything on him yet?”
“Nope, but there was another peeper call in tonight. They're checking real hard this time.”
Molly nodded, briefly distracted by the urge to sneak into Sasha's office and boot up the computer. “I don't suppose we have any news from the cops who were supposed to be watching my house.”
Rhett shrugged diplomatically. “I haven't been … uh, included in that particular discussion. You ready to go home?”
So much for urges. Molly took a look around an unusually quiet work lane and sighed. “I guess so. I imagine I still have a fair amount of charred metal and hand-sewn leather to move out of my driveway.”
Rhett held out his arm like a cotillion date. “That's what he gets for driving a status symbol.”
Molly slipped her arm through Rhett's and walked out the door. “I don't suppose my little Toyota escaped unscathed, did it?”
“Almost. Your backseat's a little wet, and your convertible top is airconditioned. You think this is related to your thing, or is somebody pissed off enough at Frank to follow him to your house just to blow him up?”
Molly had thought of little else, especially as she'd stood in the shadowy edges of Frank's ICU room watching the monitors blink.
“Well, if anybody could piss a person off that badly, it would definitely be Frank.”
“But you don't think so.”
She sighed. “Somebody who's mad at Frank has the rest of the city to blow him up in. Why would they pick a place that's suddenly in the news all the time?”
“To get their message home?”
“Go ahead and investigate him. I'll go talk to my FBI agent.”

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