The Devil's bounty

Nineteen

It was dark when Lock reached the UCLA Medical Center. This time he parked in the structure that was officially designated for visitors. He took the elevator up to the ICU and got out, hearing the shouts of a medical team, a doctor barking orders, nurses yelling back. He shrugged it off. It was Intensive Care: medical emergencies were hardly a rarity.

He walked down the long corridor. Unless she had been moved, Melissa’s room was the sixth door on the left. He had counted before, not just the room but the steps to it from the elevator — an old habit acquired over years of close-protection work. Any time he found himself in a location that was unfamiliar to him, he would work out exit and entry points so that he would know exactly how long it would take him to reach them if there was a fire or a power outage.

Up ahead, medical staff were rushing into and out of a room on the left. He counted the doors. He checked his count. Then he broke into a run.

He looked around for Ty but couldn’t see him. A nurse was rushing past. Lock grabbed her arm. ‘Melissa Warner? Has she been moved? Is that her room?’ he asked, clinging to the hope that he was mistaken.

‘Excuse me,’ she said, brushing him off with a scowl.

He kept moving. Suddenly Ty was there, although Lock hadn’t seen where he had come from. A woman screamed, the sound dissolving into a wail of denial. ‘No! No!’

Ty had his arms around her. One look at her told Lock that this was Jan, Melissa’s mother. She was trying to fight her way past Ty and into the room. He was struggling to stop her without hurting her. ‘Let the doctors do their job. Okay?’ he said.

Gradually she began to still until he took his arms away. She slid down the wall, wrenching at her hair with both hands, panic and fear overwhelming her.

‘What’s going on?’ Lock asked him.

‘I don’t know. One minute she was sitting up, looked fine, the next I’d come out so she could get some rest and all those machines went crazy. Her heart, I’m guessing. I saw them going for a defibrillator and they got a crash team in there.’

Melissa’s mother was getting to her feet. Lock and Ty helped her up. ‘I need to get some fresh air.’

‘You want me to come with you?’ Ty offered.

She shook her head, rosary beads falling over her knuckles. ‘That’s kind of you, but I’ll manage.’

Lock stood with Ty and watched her walk unsteadily towards the elevator. They glanced back at the room. The commotion seemed to be ebbing away. Voices were lowered but no one came out. Lock stared at his partner, both men thinking that wasn’t a good sign.

They waited. A nurse drifted out, eyes on the floor. A resident in green scrubs was next. He looked at Lock. ‘Are you the father?’

The question shook Lock. What was he to her? He wasn’t any kind of family. He wasn’t a friend. He had only met the girl when she had stumbled bleeding into the hotel two nights before. He was a stranger she had turned to for help. ‘Her mother just stepped outside. You want me to go get her?’

‘If you would,’ the doctor said.

‘I’ll take care of it,’ Ty said, striding past them, shoulders down, long legs stalking towards the elevator.

‘She’s gone?’

The doctor bit at his lower lip. ‘I’m very sorry. Sometimes…’ He trailed off. ‘Sometimes when there’s been a trauma like she suffered, the body just overloads.’

Lock’s gaze drifted towards the room where a dead twenty-year-old girl was lying on a bed, her heart literally broken beyond repair. ‘I brought her in after the shooting,’ he said to the doctor. ‘Would you mind if I saw her?’

The doctor didn’t say anything so Lock moved past him and into the room.

She was laid out on the bed. A nurse pulled the gown over her bare breasts as Lock walked in but he could see the raw, livid scar that arced across her abdomen, the stitches still visible from where she had been pieced together after the bullet had been removed. Lock crouched next to the bed, recent history rushing at him. He wasn’t at fault for this death, not in any way, but it still weighed on him. Melissa Warner had left him a legacy as sour as any family debt.

He reached up and his hands fell over her forehead. His fingertips drifted down, and he closed her eyes.