The Devil Makes Three (21 page)

But she didn't have to act like such a wench. She didn't have to push the bag off the table. She could have left the coffee shop without saying a word. Obviously, judging by her vehement response, she was just as upset, if not more so, than I was.

The laptop and other woman had taken a backseat to the other issue though. I needed Corbin’s advice. I needed to tell him the situation with Richard the Shark’s accusations, and have him come up with a quick answer. What that answer might be I didn't know, but I had gotten a text from Collin soon after he left. He would call me the next day, before my classes, and we would talk over the situation again.

Crawling into bed the next morning I lay between the sheets, wondering what to do. I didn't want to become one of those weird girls who kept calling and calling. I didn't want to worry. But I did. Corbin had said he would come by, and I couldn't imagine him missing an appointment.

I drifted to sleep only to be awoken soon after. The drapes were barley lit by the rising sun, indicating that I had only been out for about an hour, but something sat on the edge of my bed, nudging my foot.

“Get up.”

It was Corbin and he sounded funny.

“What are you doing? You said you'd come to the funeral home.”

“Do you have a sewing kit?”

Red flags waved in front of my eyes and I reached for the bedside lamp. Flipping it on I found Corbin sitting on the corner of my comforter, holding a dish towel to his arm. It was soaked in blood.

My speed couldn't be measured by the human eye. I was out of bed so fast my cat went flying across the room in a fit of flailing fur and fangs. “Don't bleed on anything in here! Into the bathroom!”

“Sewing kit.” He repeated himself for emphasis. “And tweezers.”

“Yes, yes. Go. I have to look for it.”

He got up and went into the bathroom as I riffled through my dresser, looking for the odd needle and thread. Finding them shoved in a drawer of my jewelry box, I ran into the bathroom and slipped on the bloody floor. The towel he held to his arm had been discarded for a new one and he stood at the mirror, examining a wound to his upper left arm.

“Why the hell are you here instead of an emergency room?” I said, pulling the thread from the spool and ripping it with my teeth.

He grimaced at the mirror and covered the wound, applying pressure. “I had to talk with you.”

“It can wait. Go to the emergency room.” Despite my protestations, I had already begun to thread the needle, certain my insistence would fall on deaf ears.

“Gunshot wounds tend to be followed by police investigations. Don't worry. It's not as bad as it looks. We'll give it another minute or two of pressure then you can dig out the slug and start sewing.”

“Me?” I straightened up and took a step back. “I can't sew that up. It'll make me sick.”

“Well I'm left-handed.”

“Why me?” I moaned, stepping forward. “And a few minutes isn't going to do anything. You've already bled through one towel since you got here.”

“The bleeding’s not that bad. Look.” He pulled the towel away and stuck the wound under my nose. The smell of hot blood encompassed me, making me want to puke.

“Stop! Stop!” I said, backing away. “Cover it!”

“Well you're going to have to look at it while you sew it up.”

I glared at him in stony silence and turned to the towel on the floor. I reached to pick it up, but thought better of touching the blood and instead searched under the sink for rubber gloves. Coming up with a pair of over-sized, yellow monstrosities, I slipped them on and picked up the towel, chucking it into the garbage can.

“I don't have diseases, you know,” he said, watching me from his seat on the edge of the bath tub.

“AIDS takes something like seven years to show up in a person's system sometimes.”

“I don't have AIDS.”

I ignored him and went back to the sink, digging for Clorox Wipes in the cupboard below. After scrubbing the floor clean I tossed the wipes away and scrubbed the gloves clean in scorching hot water. “Alright. Let's see it now,” I said, turning back to him.

He proffered his arm and I sat down on the toilet lid, leaning into him, eying the torn flesh through the rip in his coat sleeve. The bleeding had slowed and I felt pretty sure I could sew it together. He was right. It wasn't as bad as I had first thought.

I picked the tweezers up off the counter and glanced at his face. He looked stoic, calm. “Have you done this before?”

“Never on my left arm. I've always managed to do it myself.”

“What would you do without me?” I said it in jest and he didn't reply so I let it go. I probably didn't want to know who his next choice would have been.

“Take off your coat and shirt,” I said, bowing back down to the cabinet under the sink.

He complied without argument and I turned back to the sight of his muscular chest and arms. Taking a deep breath I held out a bottle of hydrogen peroxide. “We’ve got to disinfect it first. This will sting.”

“I figured you’d have something like that. You’re just that type of girl.”

“Who are you trying to be? Cary Grant?  Just shut up.” Pushing him back over the tub I stood and dumped the bottle on his arm, the tweezers, and the needle. He scrunched his nose and sniffed then turned away from the antiseptic smell.

“Now for the main event,” he said.

Gritting my teeth I grabbed his arm and dug around with the tweezers in the open wound, till I struck something hard.

“I think I found it.”

“Please make sure before you start tugging my bone out of my arm.”

“Do you think you’re going to cry, or do you want a pencil to bite or something?”

“Funny. Just do it. And start sewing in the middle so you don’t have a huge flap of skin left on one side.”

“Your intelligence about procedures in this situation is most disturbing.” I did as I was told, though it wasn’t exactly easy. The tweezers slipped about on the slick, blood covered metal.

Once I had the bullet out, I applied the towel for a minute more, soaking up the blood that poured from the newly unblocked blood vessels. Then I pinched the flesh of his arm together.

I've never been particularly fond of needles. I’m not the domestic type, so things like sewing and ironing aren’t my strong suits. Medical needles give me the willies. Not to mention the big rubber gloves made things a little clumsy. Glancing at him, between each stitch, it occurred to me that my reaction of distaste might not be the norm. Of course, his flat, emotionless stare could be an indication that he was the weird one, instead of me.

“So why are you here again?” I asked, dying for something to fill the empty void in his stare.

“What?” He blinked and focused on me, then curled his lip at the next stitch. Apparently he had been in the zone, refusing to accept the pain.

“Why are you here?”

“I had to check in with you.”

“You said you'd come to the funeral home.”

“Yeah. I know.” He grimaced. “I got delayed.”

“Delayed? That’s not like you.”

He shrugged. “And getting busted on a drop isn’t like you.”

“Huh?” I knew he referred to the girl, but it felt beside the point at the moment.

“What happened at the coffee shop?”

“Your tart broke my laptop, that’s what happened.”

“Tart?”

“Don’t play like you don’t understand.”

“Oh, I understand fine. You’re the one who’s confused,” he said.

“Really? Then why don’t you explain it to me.”

“Fine. That woman in the coffee shop? Her name is Candy. She doesn’t work for me. She works for the people I was leaving the code for. Now that doesn’t mean she and I haven’t had contact in the past, but it does mean that you should never have confronted her. You should have let her take the code and go.”

“I would have, but I left my bag and had to go back for it. She was rooting though it and probably figured out who I was.”

“Yes, I am aware. For future reference: leave the bag and call me. I’ll get it back.”

“Sorry. So what happened?”

“She got pissy and called her father, demanding he set his goons loose on me.”

“But why you and not me?”

“Because she had the same idea you did. She told her father I was cheating on her with some hussy from a morgue and that Daddy needed to defend his daughter’s honor.”

“So you are with her?”

He shook his head. “We’ve had an encounter or two, but nothing serious. She’s just the type who won’t let go. I’ve avoided her for a while. In fact, had I known she was the one picking up the code I never would have sent you. I didn’t know she did odd jobs for her father. I thought she stuck around the more legitimate fronts.”

“So, wait.” I tied off the last stitch and sat back, staring at him. “You and she were a thing, but not anymore. She saw me and got jealous and called Daddy. Daddy then comes after you, to defend his princess’s honor?”

“That’s what she wanted, but Princess got disappointed. Daddy told her to quit messing around in his work, so she decided to take matters into her own hands. She called me and told me she had something I needed and that it had to do with you. Naturally, I wasn’t going to leave you hanging so I went to her.”

“And?”

“And when I found out she was just upset about you, I tried to unruffle her feathers.”

Rather than consider this, I turned to wash the gloves free of blood. After drying them I found clean bandages in my first aid kit and wrapped his arm. Once finished I turned to leave the bathroom, but stopped, a thought occurring to me. “You must have gotten shot just recently. Within the last hour or so.”

He looked from his wound to me. “Yeah.”

“So where were you last night when you should have come to keep your appointment?”

He grinned sheepishly. “I like to take my time when I unruffle a woman’s feathers.”

I stared at him, flatly. It totally figured. “So she’s the one who shot you, right before your walk of shame.” I shook my head. “I should have known.”

Rising from his seat on the edge of the tub, he approached me but I shied away, back into the bedroom. “You’re better now. Go. I’ll call you once I’ve gotten some sleep and we can discuss Cohen.”

“I’m staying here.”

“No. You’re going.”

Much to my shock and dismay, he managed to put on a pout and still look hot in all his no-shirt grandeur. In disgust I pushed back against him and smacked him on the chest. “You expect me to let you stay here after what you just told me?”

“Hey! You’ve got two brothers on the burner, so who are you to talk?” He grabbed my arm to stop another half-hearted strike.

I glared at him, but knew he was right. If I continued to vacillate between him and Collin, I certainly couldn’t begrudge either of them other interests. “Fine. You can sleep on the couch.”

He shook his head and pushed me back towards the bedroom. “I need a few hours of comfortable, uninterrupted sleep. And it’s going to be on a bed. If you’ve got a problem with that, you can take the couch.”

Well that was silly. We both knew that wasn’t going to happen.

#

I woke up alone, but heard noises coming from the kitchen. Rolling over, I could see where blood had soaked through Corbin’s bandages and left a stain on my sheets. Nice.

He stood bent over, looking through my fridge when I stepped out of my bedroom.

“You don’t have any orange juice,” he said, as if it were inconsiderate of me not to have it on hand, on the off chance he might stop by for a three hour nap.

“There’s an orange in there.”

“Yeah, but I drink orange juice in the mornings.”

“Then you’ll have to make it yourself. I’ve got to get to class. I’m running late already.”

“You never told me about what happened with Cohen.”

I sighed and leaned on the door jam. “Can I at least shower first?”

“I can’t guarantee I’ll be here when you get out.”

“Fine.” I glared at him and sank into a chair. In a matter of minutes I laid out the situation for him. He interrupted only twice. The first time was to make a snide comment about Collin lacking the proper anatomy to commit the murder, and the second time was to ask how Richard the Shark had remembered him. I told him the Shark was a student at the university, and that he had come to Collin’s class the first day of the semester.

“You should have told me about that immediately.”

“How do you expect me to have done that? I didn’t even know you then. Hell, I barely know you now.”

“You do realize this complicates things.” 

“I know. So what do we do?” I asked.

“We? We’ll do nothing. I’ll take care of it.”

“No, no, no.” I shook my head. “That doesn’t work. I’m in deep here and I need to know what’s going on.”

“Don’t worry.” He snatched an apple from a bowl on the counter and gave me a fast, hot kiss on the lips. “I’ve got it under control. This is easy compared to some of the other messes I’ve had to get out of.”

With that he was out the door.

“Well I’m glad one of us feels at ease,” I said to the empty room. Hawkeye stood at his food dish and stared at me like I had gone crazy.

My phone rang. Darting to it on the nightstand, I saw Corbin’s number and grimaced. What did he want now?

“Haven’t you harassed me enough in the last four hours?” I asked.

“Be careful when you go out today.”

I didn’t like his tone at all, causing me to straighten my shoulders and walk to the window. Glancing out at the parking lot, I found nothing out of the ordinary, but then I wasn’t even an amateur detective, so that really wasn’t surprising.

“What’s going on?”

“Don’t worry about it. Just be careful. I’ll be in contact.”

He hung up before I had a chance to reply, and I took a moment to throttle my phone before glancing back out at the parking lot. Almost immediately my phone chirped again. This time Collin’s number appeared and I gritted my teeth. I had absolutely nothing to tell him.

“Are you here on campus?” I couldn’t help but notice the hesitance in his tone. Was he worried about the murder, or had something else gone wrong as well? With my luck we probably got busted by some random student out for Mexican food the other night.