Devil's Bargain

“Shot,” she replied shortly.

“Yeah, so I hear. Doc, can I…?” He gestured from himself to Jazz. The doctor shrugged, stuck his hands in his lab-coat pockets and sauntered out. Stewart—Ke

“Yeah.” She didn’t want small talk. Her head hurt, and her side was starting to really ache. She suspected the painkillers were more Motrin than morphine. “You already talked to my friend?” She didn’t give him the name. If Lucia wanted to go undercover, she wasn’t about to blow it for her.

“Friend?” he repeated blankly. Poked the IV bag again, then rang a fingernail off the screen of the heart monitor. “Oh, yeah. Luz something. Herma

“Me, too.” Not that Stewart’s partner Herma

“Fuck you, Callender.” It wasn’t a casual, off-the-cuff insult between friends. This was a gut-deep venting of feelings, and she felt the menace behind it.

“Same to you, Stewart.” A hot pulse of fury along her spine. Her hand curled into a tight fist, and relaxed. Much as she wanted to kick his punk ass, there was no way she could do it dressed in a backless gown with a through-and-through bullet hole in her side.

“So, did anything happen to you I need to know about?” Stewart asked in a bored tone.

“This is how you conduct an investigation?”

“It is when I know the witness is a lying bitch who wouldn’t know the truth if it bit her in the—where were you shot exactly?”

“See my previous fuck you comment. Fine, if we’re done, get the hell out. I don’t want to look at your ugly face anymore.”

Without looking at her, he reached over and put his hand on her side. Over the bandages. “Does it hurt?”

She didn’t move. Those twilight-blue eyes—on anybody else they might have been pretty—focused on her face, and his mouth stretched into a vindictive grin. He patted her bullet wound. Not gently. She bit the inside of her mouth to keep from wincing.

“Want to hear my theory?” Stewart wasn’t moving his hand. “I think some of McCarthy’s drug-dealing asshole buddies decided to send him a message by putting a few caps in his ex-partner. It was a classic drive-by hit, you know. Big dark pimp car, full auto spray. You’re just lucky, is all. But then, you get lucky a lot, don’t you? I’ve never seen anybody as lucky as you.”

He pressed harder. Jazz knew she was going pale, but she didn’t look away from his stare.

“Maybe if you’d tell the truth,” Stewart said, “you’d quit being a target. This isn’t the first trouble you’ve gotten into, since you turned in your shield. Is it?”

One attempted firebombing of her apartment, which had failed when the glass bottle full of gasoline hadn’t shattered on impact, and she’d been able to scramble over and drag the burning rag out of the mouth of it. She could still smell the bitter tang of the gas, the smoky, oily cloth. No prints on the bottle, according to police forensics. She still wished she’d taken it to Ma

She’d also been jumped coming out of a bar downtown. Two guys with knives. If she hadn’t been drunk, she’d have had them, but even so, she’d managed to put them on the run. No good description, though. She’d always wondered if the small one had been Stewart himself.

“I hear that you were just minding your own business and this car rolled up on you. You fired six shots back, your friend fired four, and the car took off. That correct?”

“Don’t know. Count the shells.”

“Oh, we will.” He nodded. “And Jazz? If I catch you in a lie, you’re mine.”

He squeezed this time. Hard. Fingers digging into her stitched-up side.

She couldn’t keep from gasping, but she didn’t just lie there for it, which was what he must have expected. She came straight up in bed and stiff-armed the heel of her hand into his nose.

Pop.

Stewart’s head snapped back, and he fell off his chair, rolled to his knees and staggered back to his feet. He caught himself with a hand on an IV stand, which rolled, and for a happy second she thought he might go down again. No such luck. He felt his nose with his other hand, sniffed, and glared at her.

No blood. Too bad. She’d been hoping for a broken nose, at least.

“Sorry,” she said. “Reflex.”

He didn’t say anything, just stared at her for a burning second, then turned and walked out of the room. The door slammed hard behind him.

Jazz let out a long breath and closed her eyes. Her forehead felt damp, and now that the crisis was over, she was shaking. And sick to her stomach. She pushed the button for on-demand morphine.

Just what she didn’t need. A bullet in her side, no partnership agreement, and a closer acquaintance with Ke

Lucia came back twenty minutes later, looking not exactly grim but definitely tense. She took the chair that Stewart had dragged close, gave Jazz a long look, and said, “I don’t like this.”

“Hospitals? Hey, I’m not a fan of them, either. And I think I have more reason to bitch about it.”

“No, I don’t like that they knew where to find us.” She wasn’t talking about the hospitals, or even Stewart. “I’ve been watching for tails. So have you.”

“So we missed one. Or they’ve got some high-tech tracking bug on us.” She remembered Borden, walking into Sol’s Bar without any reason to be there. That still bothered her.

“No, I’ve swept us and the car for bugs,” Lucia said, and combed sleek silky hair back from her face in a distracted motion. “Nothing. There’s no way they’ve retasked a satellite just to follow us around, so if they’re not doing line-of-sight surveillance, then they shouldn’t know where we are. And if they were doing line-of-sight, we should have spotted them.”

“Unless they’re good.”

“More than just good. I’m good.” Lucia definitely looked stressed, as if she felt responsible for Jazz lying here, leaking fluids. “Those cops—I take it not friends of yours? — aren’t investigating, they’re filling out paperwork.”

“It’s Stewart,” Jazz said, and stared up at the ceiling. It was blank, white, and noninspirational. “He helped put McCarthy away. He’s been gu

Lucia paused in the act of tying her hair back with a businesslike black elastic band. No scrunchies or decorations for her. She looked different with her hair back. Harder. Jazz approved. “About McCarthy…” Lucia began.

“No.”

“You don’t think we should discuss that?”

“No, we’re not talking about Ben, or his case, or whether or not he’s guilty, or what he has to do with this because I guarantee you, he’s got nothing to do with it. He’s in prison, Lucia. Let’s leave him out of this.”

Lucia didn’t answer that, just finished wrapping her hair in the elastic with a snap. “I called your sister, told her you’d been in an accident.”

“Oh, no.” Jazz sighed. “What did Molly say?”

Lucia avoided her eyes. “She was concerned. She said she’d tell your dad.”

“I bet. I’ll expect a cheap floral arrangement delivered to the wrong address next week.”

“She’s not that bad.”

“Bullshit.”

“Ma

“He’s got a thing about hospitals. Ma

“He did some good work for us, looking into the Cross Society.”

“And?”

Lucia shrugged. “On paper, it’s legit. He came up with a few flags—not so much red lights as yellow. Max Simms, for one. He may be in prison, but it’s likely he’s still got some influence.” She fell silent. The moment stretched, long and awkward.