In His Protective Custody Page 5

  Where the hell had Calloway gone?

  “Um, doctor?” the man in the next bed began hesitantly, raising his hand to get her attention just as if he were in a classroom.

  She looked in his direction. “Yes?”

  “The man in this bed? The guy you’re looking for? He got a call on his cell phone. Didn’t hear what he said except for, ‘Damn it, I’ll be right there,’ and then he just got up and left. Real quick like.”

  Who was that masked man? Alyx thought, mocking herself.

  Most likely, it was better this way. She had a feeling that even going out for coffee with Office Calloway was just another way of asking for trouble. Heaven knew she didn’t have time for any extra trouble. She had enough with unkindly Dr. Gloria riding her as if she was a year-old filly that needed breaking.

  With an appreciative smile, she nodded at the man in the bed. “Thank you for filling me in.”

  Picking up the chart that was hanging off the end of the man’s bed, she scanned the nurse’s notes quickly to familiarize herself with his condition.

  “So, tell me, Mr…” She glanced down at the third line for his name. “Fontaine, what brings you here to us today?”

  A widower with an eye for the ladies, Mr. Fontaine was only too glad to tell her. Slowly.

  Her feet were killing her.

  Alyx felt like she’d been standing on them for the past three days without a break. She couldn’t even remember the last time she’d sat down. Right after Calloway disappeared, the ER had turned into nonstop craziness.

  Lunch was tabled when three ambulances arrived simultaneously, bringing in the victims of a tour-bus-meeting-a-semi accident. According to the report taken by the first officer on the scene, the tour bus driver had turned back to look at his passengers for a split second as he was doing his regular round of banter-laced information.

  It was the wrong split second.

  There’d been no letup after that. The only good thing was that tonight she wasn’t being asked to take up any slack or to fill in for anyone who had neglected to come in. Tonight everyone who was supposed to be here, was here.

  Alyx smiled to herself as she changed into her street clothes. Tonight she might even feel human.

  “So how’s it going, Alyx?”

  For a moment she didn’t recognize the voice. Turning around, Alyx saw the youngest of her five cousins, Marja, peering into the locker room. Wearing her street clothes, Marja was obviously headed out.

  There was no lack of caring or warmth about her cousins. Mama had been so wrong about them. About her uncle and aunt as well. “When does it get easier?”

  Marja laughed. “Sorry to have to tell you this, but it doesn’t. But I can also tell you that eventually you start to realize that you do know what you’re doing and you won’t wind up killing your patients—although there will be some you wish you could. Is there anything I can do for you before I head out?” Marja asked.

  “Yes,” Alyx responded with feeling. “Teach me how to do without sleep.”

  Marja shook her head. “No can do. If you find out, let me know. Please.” About to leave, she remembered why she’d sought Alyx out in the first place. “Almost forgot. I’m here to relay a message,” she told her cousin. “Mama told me to invite you over to the house for dinner this Sunday. Three o’clock. Bring your appetite. Maybe don’t eat for two days,” she suggested. “The more you eat, the happier Mama is.”

  This invitation felt different than the rest. “Anything important?”

  “Yes. Dinner. Mama takes cooking very seriously,” Marja told her, not bothering to hide her broad smile. “Oh, and there’s something else.”

  Marja jerked a thumb toward the entrance. “There’s a cop waiting outside. He says he’s here to see you. You do something to run afoul of New York’s finest?” she asked, only half teasing.

  Alyx shook her head. “Not that I know of.”

  “Well, if you do, just give Natalya a call. She’ll send Mike—or call Sasha, who’ll get Tony to handle things for you. Now that you’re here and part of us, you’ve got an in with the NYPD,” she told her with a wink.

  Alyx smiled. “Nice to know.” She paused for a moment, searching for the right words. “Marja?”

  Already on her way out, her cousin turned around to look at her. “Yes?”

  “I just wanted to tell you how grateful I am to you—to all of you. It’s been kind of a rough year, and it’s just nice to know that there’s someone I can turn to for advice or just to hang out with.”

  Marja crossed back to the lockers and gave her a quick, warm hug. “Honey, we’ve always been here. All you had to do was call out.”

  Alyx nodded, somewhat embarrassed. “My mother had some things to work out.”

  Marja dismissed it with an understanding laugh. “Don’t we all? What counts is that you’re here—and coming to dinner on Sunday.”

  “I’ll be there,” Alyx promised.

  Marja nodded and started for the door again. “Oh, and don’t forget about that policeman waiting in the hallway.”

  Alyx closed her locker and gave the combination lock a quick twist. “On my way to see him right now,” she told her cousin. Her curiosity was definitely aroused. It couldn’t be who she thought it was.

  Could it?

  Chapter 5

  Z ane shifted his weight and debated leaving. He hadn’t been waiting long, but he wasn’t sure why he was here in the first place.

  Maybe his sense of order required him to come back to the hospital and offer some excuse to the woman who had patched him up. She had to be wondering why he’d pulled a disappearing act. Taking off wasn’t all that bad in his opinion, except that he had extended an invitation to her to grab a cup of coffee.

  He didn’t feel accountable to anyone but himself and this wasn’t the sort of behavior he condoned—despite the fact that he’d had a good reason. She had no way of knowing that unless he told her.

  So he’d asked one of the detectives he knew, Mike diPalma, about shift changes at the hospital. He’d heard that diPalma was married to a doctor who had surgical privileges at Patience Memorial. diPalma hadn’t known the exact time when the day shift ended, but he put in a call to his mother-in-law, a woman who was, according to diPalma, a walking encyclopedia about her daughters.

  Which was how he had come to be standing in the hall next to the entrance to the doctors’ locker room at this particular time. When the door opened, as it had several times already since he’d stationed himself here, he watched with hooded eyes to see who came out of the locker room.

  What the hell are you doing here?

  The question echoed in his head as his envoy emerged from the lockers.

  You’re taking things too far, he mocked himself. You don’t need to make up for before.

  The ER doc had probably forgotten all about the incident by now. He couldn’t have been the first patient to skip out on her before the final discharge orders were issued. This was New York, a city composed of eight million independent thinkers who, at times, marched to eight million different drummers.

  The door to the lockers opened again. This time, it was the ER doc.

  Zane instantly straightened, his back severing contact with the wall he’d been leaning against.

  “So it is you,” Alyx said, a bit surprised that Calloway was here, although for the life of her, she couldn’t come up with a single reason any other policeman would have been out here, waiting to see her. “Is something wrong? Do you feel weak, or—”

  “I’m fine,” he assured her. “Won’t be arm wrestling for a while, but otherwise, I’m okay.”

  “Then what are you doing here?”

  “I promised you a cup of coffee,” he said simply.

  She stared at him. If this had come from another man, she would have said he was coming on to her. She found it difficult to reconcile that image with the man who stood before her. “This is a little out of character, don’t you think?”

  He n
ever liked being read or analyzed. He considered it an invasion of his privacy. “Doc, with all due respect, you don’t know what my character is.”

  Alyx studied him for a long moment before rendering a contradiction.

  “Loner to a fault, given to one-word sentences whenever possible. Feels accountable to no one but himself. Has a strict moral code he doesn’t talk about. Would swerve to avoid hitting an animal—and possibly an adult—but definitely a child. Feels it’s okay to bend the rules as long as he’s the one doing the bending. How am I doing?” He grunted and she smiled. The flicker in his eyes told her that she’d hit the nail on the head—repeatedly. “You’re not as mysterious as you’d like to think. What really brought you back?”

  “My sense of duty,” he told her simply. He didn’t like explaining himself, but he had been the one to open the door to this so he couldn’t very well blame her for asking questions. “I didn’t want to leave you stuck with those discharge papers. And, like I said, I did promise you a cup of coffee.”

  She wasn’t entirely sure if he was on the level or not. “I would have found a way to survive. In both cases. I still have those papers. They’re in a folder on the nurse’s desk in the ER. If you’re serious about tying up loose ends, come with me and I’ll get them for you.”

  He gestured for her to go first. “Lead the way.”

  The ER was located only one corridor down from the locker room. Getting the papers took less than five minutes. When he signed them, she handed off the discharge papers to a nurse, who dutifully took them to be filed away.

  Alyx turned to face the patrolman. “There, your conscience is clear.”

  This was where he should take his cue and leave. Because something in the woman’s eyes warned him he might regret taking the road ahead.

  Something else told him he might regret not taking it.

  “Not quite,” he answered. Zane held the door that led out of the ER open for her, then followed her out. “And it’s not a matter of conscience, it’s a matter of doing what I said I would do. I still owe you a coffee.”

  As tempted as she was—because the man was very compelling—she knew trouble when she saw it. And Zane Calloway was big trouble. Right now, she needed to concentrate on her profession.

  “I absolve you of your debt. Consider it paid. I’m sure you have better places to be than a hospital cafeteria.”

  The only other place right now was home. An apartment where his memories waited in the shadows to haunt him. It could keep.

  “Like I said, you know nothing about me. I think you’d be better off not making any assumptions. And it doesn’t have to be coffee from the cafeteria.” He’d heard it was only a grade above used dishwater. “There’s a deli about a block away. Lukkas told me that they make a pretty decent cup of coffee there.” He realized she might not know who he was referring to. “Lukkas is—”

  Alyx nodded, cutting in. “Your partner, yes, I know. I was paying attention this afternoon. Nice man. He worries about you,” she informed him in case Calloway had missed that. “Well, if Officer Lukkas recommends it, then I guess we owe it to him to check the place out.” But she wasn’t going to feel right about the venture until she added a caveat. “As long as you don’t feel obligated to take me.”

  He was impatient to get going and was leading the way out. “Do you argue all the time?”

  Calloway’s take on what she’d just said surprised her. “That wasn’t arguing—that was just making my position clear. Trust me, you’ll know when I’m arguing.” God but he had a long stride. She practically had to skip to keep up with him—but she refused to tell him to slow down for her. “Arguing involves anger. I have no reason to be angry with you.”

  His mouth seemed to curve on its own. He thought of something that Billy, his youngest brother, had once said. That he could make a saint angry. “Give it time.”

  “Why? How many people are angry with you?”

  Reaching the front entrance, he pushed open the door for her, stretching to allow her to go first. “I don’t keep a tally. Some days, it feels like everyone.”

  The man had impressive manners. She liked that. Alyx laughed in response to what he’d just said.

  “I think that has something to do with living in New York City. Everyone here’s always rushing. Constantly,” she pronounced. “If you don’t feel as if you’re getting somewhere fast enough, you get angry.”

  “You’re not from around here, then?”

  “Initially, yes. But my mother uprooted the family and moved to Chicago when my father was killed.”

  Chicago wouldn’t have been his first choice in fleeing New York. It seemed like too much of a leaping from the frying pan into the fire kind of thing. He would have thought that the idea behind transplanting a family would involve going somewhere a little more slow-paced and suburban.

  “Mugging?” he guessed, thinking of the convenience store clerk.

  “Not exactly. My father fell on the subway tracks just as a train was coming into the station. The police ruled it an accident.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “I was too young to rule it anything. But my mother thought he was pushed. She blamed my uncle for my father’s death and couldn’t get us away fast enough.”

  He looked at her, confused. “She thought your uncle pushed your father onto the tracks?”

  “No, but my uncle was the reason we were all here in New York. If we hadn’t been here, there wouldn’t have been a subway to fall in front of, etcetera.”

  “Chicago has a subway system,” he pointed out.

  She flashed a smile and he watched a dimple wink in and out of the corner of her mouth. “Ironic, isn’t it? I didn’t say that my mother made perfect sense. She reacted emotionally.”

  “Like a woman.”

  “Like a person who lost someone they loved deeply.”

  “How young was ‘too young’?” he asked.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You said you were too young to have an opinion about whether or not your father’s death was an accident or a homicide. How old were you when your father died?” he wanted to know.

  “Eight.”

  He nodded, and she thought she glimpsed a momentary faraway look in his eyes. “Still old enough to leave an impression.”

  “Was that how old you were?”

  “How old I was when what?”

  “When your father died.”

  He started to protest that this wasn’t supposed to be an exchange of information. He was far more accustomed to gathering information than to giving any out. But the fact that this perky woman had figured that out all on her own did rather fascinate him. “I was ten.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He shrugged. That part of him had been sealed off and he wasn’t about to open the door, not even a crack. “It happens.”

  “How did it happen?” Alyx asked.

  “Abruptly,” was all he was willing to say. Pointing straight ahead, he said, “There’s the shop Lukkas mentioned.” Since it was approaching evening, he felt he should expand the invitation. “Would you like something to eat?”

  She shook her head. “Just coffee’ll be fine. I don’t want to keep you from anything.”

  “You’re not,” he told her, his voice even, mild. “If I needed to be somewhere else, I would be.”

  “So I’m a last resort to stave off boredom?” she asked, amused.

  “That’s not what I meant. How long have you been back in New York?” When he saw her glance at her wristwatch, he made the only logical connection. “You keep track of it in hours?”

  “No,” she laughed, “I have a calendar on my watch. Sometimes, with these extra shifts they keep piling on, I tend to lose track of the days. I’ve been in the city for six weeks.”

  He was here because he was here, and it was easier to remain than to go. But if he had been transplanted, there was no way he would have returned. “What brought you back?”

  She paused for a
moment as it came back to her. The pride that filled her when she opened her acceptance letter. And the cloud that instantly descended when she broke the news to her mother. Paulina Pulaski had just assumed that all her daughters would remain somewhere within the state. Her dreams for all of them had their limitations. “I was accepted by Patience Memorial to complete my residency.”

  As good a reason as any, he supposed. The women he interacted with had a street savvy to them that this one seemed to be lacking. There was an innocence to her that didn’t belong here. She was better suited to white picket fences and a slower pace.

  “Miss home?” he asked, thinking he knew the answer.

  But he was wrong.

  “Actually, most of home is going to be coming out here,” she told him. When he continued watching her, obviously waiting for an explanation, she elaborated. “My sisters just graduated from medical school last spring, or at least two of them did. They’ll be coming to New York to do their residency at Patience Memorial, too.” She smiled as she thought about having them all out here. It’ll be like old times—except without the hair pulling. “My cousins pulled a few strings. They’re all doctors at Patience Memorial. The place will be overflowing with Pulaskis.”

  Her father would have liked that, she couldn’t help thinking. There were times when he was a mere shadow, a man whose face she could no longer remember clearly. At other times, memories would bust over her, brought on by a sound or a smell, and those times his image was so vivid it was as if he was in the next room.

  “It’s a great hospital,” Alyx added enthusiastically.

  Zane nodded. “So I hear.”

  They gave their order to the tired-looking teenager behind the counter and waited. She wanted a mocha latte. He’d ordered a coffee, black—exactly what she would have guessed that he’d get.

  When their order was filled, they took a table near the door.

  “Where did you go?” Alyx asked abruptly as she sat down.