Devil's Due

Chapter Twelve

Lucia woke up in the hospital, with an IV in her arm and an oxygen mask on her face, and for a panicked moment she thought, I'm dying.

Didn't feel that way, though. In fact, she felt a lot better. Sore and weak, but better. Her mouth was dry as old paper. She cleared her throat and tried to sit up.

"Whoa!"

A face, looming over the bed. Jazz, looking delighted. Behind her was James Borden, all angles and smiles. His hair was creatively mussed, and his clothes looked lived-in. So did Jazz's, but that wasn't remarkable.

"Look who's awake," Jazz said, and reached for her hand, and the warm pressure of her fingers felt nice. Felt real. "How you feeling?"

Lucia nodded slightly and tried to talk. No good. Her voice wasn't even a hoarse croak. She gestured toward the pink pitcher of water on the stand next to the bed, and Borden hurried around to pour some for her.

Water, after such a long thirst, tasted like a revelation of the divine. Lucia whimpered with delight and swallowed until the cup was dry.

"Better?" Borden asked. He refilled it. "You've been out awhile. Couple of days." Some silent conversation between Borden and Jazz passed over her head. "You remember anything?"

"No." That was a word. A small one, and it sounded rough, but it was a recognizable word. Progress. "Pansy. All right?"

"Pansy's fine," Jazz said. "Never even got a sniffle or a fever. No infection at all. No other victims reported, either. Looks like you were the lucky one."

"What happened?"

"What do you remember?" Jazz asked.

"Going to sleep, after—after the hospital. Tired."

"Nothing else? You're sure?"

Lucia swallowed another ball of fire that seemed to be clinging to the back of her throat. "Dreams, maybe. Nightmares."

"But you don't remember leaving your apartment."

The fragile sense of well-being shattered. "I—left?"

Another look passed from Borden to Jazz, Jazz to Borden. Lucia was still fuzzy, the world still indistinct, but even so she didn't care for the way they were avoiding her questions.

"Yeah," Jazz said softly. "You left. At least, that's what the security logs say. You entered the code to disable the alarm, and you just—vanished. No sign of how you got out of the apartment."

This wasn't right. Couldn't be right. She hadn't I

well enough to leave. She remembered setting the alarm for instant alert and stumbling off to bed.

There was, of course, another way out of the apartment that wouldn't appear on the security logs—her own Ma

"We didn't," Borden said. "You were missing for four days. And on the fifth day, you were found sleeping in a supposedly unoccupied room at the Raphael."

"What?"

"Yeah," Jazz said grimly. "I'm not a woo-woo girl, but I'm not ruling out alien abduction."

That was impossible.

Lucia didn't remember anything from the moment she'd fallen asleep on her bed, fully clothed, to waking up here.

Nothing. Just dreams, and those were fading fast.

"Where was I?" she asked. Her voice was faint and weak, and Jazz looked at Borden again, this time for support.

"Honest to God, L. — I wish to hell I knew. The only good thing anybody can tell us is that you were being treated for what was wrong with you. IV antibiotics, just like they would have done here, apparently. You're weak now, but you're on the mend. Fever's gone, no sign of infection from the swabs they took, and you're not even going to want to know about any of that swabbing business, believe me." Jazz blew hair off of her forehead and gri

"Renegade doctors whose heads I'm going to mount on my trophy wall."

"Yes, bwana. I'll carry the elephant gun."

Four days. Four missing days. Six, if she'd been unconscious here since they'd found her. Almost a week of her life gone into a black hole.

"What about Susa

"No. They let her go. McCarthy's watching her," Jazz said. "Although believe me, it's been a challenge keeping him from being here twenty-four-seven. Look, I've been thinking…maybe the Cross Society decided they owed you one. Considering that it was their fake red letter that got you in trouble in the first place."

Eerily possible. Gregory Ivanovich had defeated her security once. He could have done it again. And carried me out? If he'd used her emergency exit, he could have done it?”

"I'll deal with that later," she whispered. "What about Susa

"Forensic evidence proved out her story. Her husband's prints were on the knife, hers overlaid his. So she picked up the knife after he did. So yeah, KCPD released her." Jazz cleared her throat. "Problem is, she's already had one attempt on her life since they let her go. We had to step in again."

McCarthy. Omar's bloody corpse flashed in front of Lucia's eyes again. "Anyone—" McCarthy " — hurt?"

"No, the shooter tried for a sidewalk hit. McCarthy got her behind a car in time. No damage."

"No red envelopes?"

"Evidently, saving her life isn't important." The grim set of Jazz's face told Lucia what she thought about that. "I chewed Laskins a new asshole trying to get Simms to tell us what happened to you. No comment from the jailhouse psychic. He'll put himself out for strangers, not for his own. Bastards, all of them. I'm sick of this fucking circus."

Lucia smiled faintly. She could well imagine Jazz on the phone with Borden's boss, reading him the riot act. Laskins wouldn't have been pleased. For all she knew, Jazz might have hopped a plane to California, where Simms was jailed, to try the psychic in person.

Borden was looking elsewhere, deliberately taking himself out of the conversation. She wondered if Jazz had considered the ramifications of having him in the room, and then realized that Jazz nearly always considered the ramifications. That was part of the contradiction of the woman. She was impulsive and rash, and she also saw consequences coming a mile ahead. That didn't mean she allowed them to dictate her course of action.

Lucia cleared her throat again. "She's still with him? With McCarthy?"

"Yeah. He put me in charge of finding you." Jazz shrugged, eyes glittering. "Called him every night to tell him that I hadn't. And every night, he told me that I'd better find you, or it'd be my ass."

"You did find me."

Jazz nodded. "Yeah, tripped over you getting admitted to the hospital. World-class detective, I am. But on the bright side, guess I get to keep my ass."

Lucia drank more water. Borden raised the pitcher inquiringly; she shook her head. "I wish I knew what—what happened." Because anything could have. That was a disturbing void in her life. "When can I get out of here?"

"When you can gnaw through the straps," Jazz said. "I want you here until you can kick ass and take names."

That, Lucia thought, would take nothing more than a decent meal, a walk around the building and a fresh set of clothes.

Because she was so very, very ready to kick ass.

It took something more than an afternoon—a day and a half, to be exact—for the various doctors to present themselves and sign off on her release. She'd grimly demonstrated her ability to walk, eat, drink and pee in sufficient quantities to get everyone off her back.

Ben McCarthy didn't show. She kept expecting to turn around and see him walking through the door, kept expecting to feel his presence behind her. Didn't happen. But then, she reminded herself, he was working. Doing her job, in fact.