CHAPTER 13
ARIA JUST KNEW THAT JAKE had something to do with that ball of flame on the horizon, the cloud of black smoke, the thunderous explosion that reverberated through the blue sky.
Aria stood at the window in the hallway, watching as the smoke rose in a fat column toward the heavens, her arms wrapped around her waist.
“Hope your boy wasn’t on that boat,” said Hagan from behind her. He’d risen early and she’d found the remainder of the protein bar wrappers next to his mattress along with three juices.
Which left two for the rest of them, along with another can of Spam.
She didn’t say anything. Frankly, despite her words of defense about Hagan, he lifted the tiny hairs along her neck with the way he looked at her.
The way he looked at Yola.
Even his gaze on Angel.
She was probably just edgy and tired, having sat up much of the night with Parker. He’d fallen into a deep, much-needed sleep shortly before Jake left for the plane.
She’d wanted to sleep too, but she couldn’t get her mind off Jake and the group of angry escapees he’d described meeting earlier.
Please, God, protect him.
She didn’t know why, but talking to God seemed to get easier with every plea, starting with the moment Jake nearly died under her hands.
And then there was Mimi and her simple, easy conversation about God and his love, his protection. “When you pass through the waters, I will be with you.”
“Oh my, is that a fire?”
Aria turned to find Mimi walking out of the staff room, Yola by her side. “Good heavens, what happened?”
“Jake blew a boat up,” Hagan said.
“You don’t know that,” Aria said. She turned to Mimi. “You should be in bed.”
“I can’t sit in bed one more minute. Not when the sun is finally shining.”
Aria didn’t mention the new storm gathering behind them, on the eastern horizon. And it was probably good for Mimi to walk around. She looped her arm through Mimi’s, Yola on the other side.
“Look at that view,” Mimi said. “We came down here for the first time in ’68, and Rollo took one look at that view and said he’d found home. He died free diving when he was fifty-seven, twenty long years ago. Loved what he did so much, it killed him.”
Aria looked at her, searching for the bitterness in her voice, finding none.
Mimi must have sensed it. “Oh, I was angry at him, that’s for sure. I couldn’t believe he left me. And for a long time, I let that anger protect me. It kept me from having to feel the real grief of his loss. See, I let my heart turn to stone and thought that was the best thing for it.” She patted Yola’s hand.
“I locked the grief inside, scared to feel the pain. But in doing so, I didn’t allow myself to live, either. I was a hard, angry woman.”
She looked at Yola. “Thankfully, God says he can remove our hearts of stone and turn them to flesh. That he’ll give us a new spirit. Replant what was once desolate and give us fruit. Blessings.” She kissed Yola’s cheek.
“I realized that I didn’t want my old, broken heart, but the heart that Jesus wanted to give me. So . . . I let him give me a heart transplant.” She looked at Aria and winked. “I let myself feel the pain of Rollo’s loss, and in it, I remembered the great love we had. See, our pain is the residue of love. And that’s when I realized God could take the hard memories and diminish them, replace them with good. In his hands, my heart is safe. He protects it. Heals it. I can trust him, because even when life hurts, he is good. And he is sovereign.”
“Is he though?” Aria let her words drift into the morning. “I mean, from my point of view, it doesn’t make sense.”
“What doesn’t?”
“All of it. But, mostly—”
“Why someone you loved had to die for you to live?”
Yeah, that.
“That’s a hard conundrum. How can God be good and sovereign when something terrible happens? Either he’s good—and has no control. Or he’s sovereign and causes bad to happen, right? Panic comes when we stop believing that God is good. Or, that God is sovereign. But he is both, and that is the key to peace, even in the midst of the grief, or fear. Whatever storm life brings.”
“I’d really love to believe that,” she said softly.
Mimi made a humming sound. “Of course, that would mean that you aren’t responsible for the fact that your sister died, and you lived. You might even stop believing that God took the wrong twin.”
Aria stilled at the words.
Mimi looked at her. “I have old ears, but they still work.”
Aria stared out into the horizon. “I was the one born with the bad heart. I was the one who was supposed to die.”
“So, God made a mistake? And of course it’s your job to fix it.”
She didn’t want to nod, but . . .
Yes.
The smoke was dissipating, turning a pewter gray, as if the fire might be dying.
“Stop fighting the new heart God gave you and embrace it, Doc,” Mimi said. “You don’t have to be afraid when your heart is in his hands.”
Behind her, Ringo started to bark, high yips that made them turn. Bailey had been wrestling with the pup and now let it go, and Ringo disappeared out the door.
Angel appeared in the doorway. “Jake’s back. I saw him pull up on a jet ski. He’s got someone with him.”
Aria arrived in the doorway just as Jake was struggling up the stairway with a man in tow, his arm over his shoulder.
Beaten and bloody, his shirt saturated and shiny, he appeared pale and dire. Dark hair, a thick shadow of whiskers, and he wore the blue shirt of the local police force. “What happened?”
“I found him being held captive by a bunch of convicts,” Jake said.
Aria came up on the other side of the man, helping him down the hallway toward another patient room.
“You have anything to do with that explosion out there?” she asked as they reached the room.
“Dad?”
She glanced down the hall. Bailey took off at a run. “Dad!”
The man drew in a long breath, winced. “Bailey! What are you doing here?”
“Whoa, there, kid,” Jake said, catching Bailey. “Wait until we get him into a bed.”
They brought the man into the room and eased him onto a bed. “Yola, I need my blood pressure cuff and a scope.” Aria turned to the man. “What’s your name, sir?”
“His name’s Wade,” Jake said and stepped back.
“Dad!” Bailey pushed past Jake. “Where have you been?”
Wade was groaning, but he reached out for Bailey and pulled him to himself, crying out. “Bailey! I thought your mother took you to Miami with her!” He put him away from him, tears cutting down his face. “What happened? Why aren’t you with her?”
Bailey’s face paled. “I was looking for Ringo—”
“I need some room here,” Aria said, and Jake put his hands on Bailey, easing him away. Jake glanced at her, frowned, but she didn’t have time for family reunions.
The man was shivering, his respirations rapid, and by the sweat covering his body, she suspected that whatever had caused his injuries had led to an infection.
Even septic shock.
She opened his shirt.
“I don’t understand. She must have thought you were with me,” Wade said, mostly to himself, because his eyes closed. He groaned.
Jake turned the kid away from the table.
Angel came into the room and put her arm around Bailey. “Let the doc take care of him.” She pulled him into the hall.
The man had an infraumbilical penetration stab wound in his lower abdomen. It seeped blood, was reddened and inflamed. The wound tracked anteriorly, but Aria couldn’t pinpoint the end tract.
“I need an ultrasound machine.”
Yola had returned with the blood pressure cuff and the stethoscope.
“Thanks. Can you find me a thermometer?” She took his blood pressure, found it low. Then she listened for blood in his gut.
She found gloves and snapped them on. “This is going to hurt, but I need to take a look.”
Wade moaned as she put her hands on him, probing the wound. “What were you stabbed with?”
“A screwdriver.”
She looked at him, then Jake. Made a face. “What kind? Do you remember how long it was?”
“I don’t know—it was dark, but I remember, there were building supplies—my neighbor, fixing up his house. I saw an intruder—oh—”
“Sorry.” The wound had underlying tissue showing, indicating an upward thrust. And if the weapon was long—eight inches or more—it could have found its way into the diaphragm and bisected his intestines.
She gestured to Jake, and he followed her to the window. Outside, the clouds had piled along the horizon, dark and hazy. She pulled off her gloves. “He needs surgery, a diagnostic peritoneal lavage so we can see where he’s bleeding. And I’m worried he’s going into septic shock.”
“I got ahold of help, but I don’t know from where.”
She nodded. “I hope it comes soon. By the darkening of the edges of the wound, he’s had it for a while—maybe even a couple days. And the fact he’s still bleeding has me worried.”
“So he was stabbed before he got on that boat.”
“My guess, yes.” Something, maybe, had changed about Jake. He seemed sturdier, more confident.
“So that was you, blowing up that boat.”
Jake nodded. “The group I saw before stole a boat, which, I guess we’re all doing, but I spotted them tuning up Wade here, and I just couldn’t—”
She held up her hand. “I get it. It’s in your DNA.” She sighed though and pressed her hand to his face. “But I’m glad you’re back. In one piece.”
He smiled at her, his eyes warm, and right then, her heart unlatched and Mimi’s words rounded back to her. “I was so scared to feel that pain. But in doing so, I didn’t allow myself to live, either.”
Oh, she loved this man. And it could really hurt. But maybe it was worth every single crazy, dangerous moment of it.
Yola returned with a thermometer in a sheath, and Aria took Wade’s temperature. It was elevated to 101. “Yola, see if you can find any acetaminophen at the nurses’ station.”
Aria could try antibiotics until help arrived, but if sepsis was setting in, they were running out of time. “How did this happen, Wade?”
Wade groaned, his voice weak. “I was supposed to leave with Bailey, but they called me down to the station to help with evacuations. I sent him to a friend’s house and I called my wife to tell her, to see if she could pick him up, if I didn’t get back in time. I left a message, but . . . when I got home to get Bailey, he was gone. I thought he’d gone with my wife, but when I called her cell, I couldn’t get through. I was headed to the hospital when the storm hit. I barely made it home. After it died, I went out again. I saw movement in my neighbor’s garage.” He opened his eyes. “I thought he might be home, and might have seen my wife pick up Bailey, so I went over. But it wasn’t Gary. It was this big guy. He was wearing a Key West Detention shirt. Right then, I figured out that the detention center had been hit and he was an escapee. I wasn’t sure what to do when he spotted me. We tussled and—”
“I stabbed him.”
She looked up and her blood chilled.
Hagan held Bailey to himself, a scalpel to his throat.
“Hagan—” Jake started.
“You. On your knees, your face to the ground, hands behind your back.”
Jake’s mouth tightened into a thin line.
“Now, or this kid bleeds.”
“I knew it,” Jake growled, something lethal in his tone.
“You’re a real whiz. Forehead on the ground, hands behind you.” Hagan tossed what looked like Parker’s bedsheet handcuffs at Aria. “Tie him up. Make it nice and pretty, Doc.”
Jake’s hands came around behind him, his wrists side by side, and she laced them tight. “Sorry.”
“It’s going to be okay,” he said quietly.
Hagan walked into the room, still holding Bailey.
Then, he kicked Jake. Right in the face, a blow that jerked Jake back.
Aria screamed.
Hagan advanced on Jake and sent another kick into his gut. Jake grunted but curled into himself, bringing his knees up. He bled from the welt on his face.
“Bailey here tells me you’re a SEAL. I’ve never killed a SEAL before.”
No, no, this couldn’t be happening. “Stop—Hagan, please—stop!”
“Sorry, honey,” Hagan said as Wade tried to raise himself off his bed. “This was all going to work out perfectly, if it weren’t for your hero here. He just had to rescue this nosy cop.”
Jake turned, deflecting it. He grunted though, the blow landing in his ribs.
“Please stop—” Aria said, her voice breaking. “You don’t have to do this. You can still get on the chopper, you can still get away—”
“You really think your boyfriend here will let that happen?”
She looked at Jake, who met Hagan’s face with such a calm, dark look it shook her to the bones.
Never.
And that, really, was the truth of it.
Jake wasn’t going to change. He’d always be the guy who did what was right. What was good.
He’d always be the guy who ran toward trouble, not away from it.
And that turned her entire body cold.
Especially when Hagan pushed Bailey aside and advanced on Jake.
He should have listened to his instincts.
Jake’s body burned, but nowhere more than in his brain where his suspicions had simmered away for two days.
He’d left Aria alone with this man.
Aria, and Angel and Yola and Mimi and even Bailey and Ringo, alone with a murderer.
Jake stared up at Hagan as he quietly worked his hands out of the bonds, unfeeling of the blow to his face, his ribs, his shoulder.
Just feeling, really, his hands on Hagan, wringing him out.
“Please.” Aria’s pleading made him want to wince. Don’t beg, Houlihan.
Because he had this. One more step closer, please . . .
Hagan smiled down at him, the scalpel in his hand. “Such a tough guy. A navy SEAL.”
“Not anymore. They kicked me out.” Jake cocked his head. “Said I was too much trouble. Actually . . .”
Hagan took another step. There we go, tough guy—
“They said I was crazy.” Jake smiled.
“No!”
Even Jake froze at the voice coming from behind Hagan. His attention jerked away from Hagan just as Yola launched herself at the big man.
Yola!
But, hooyah—just the distraction he needed.
Jake exploded. He kicked Hagan in the knee, twisting it, and with Yola’s weight, Hagan went down.
Jake bounced to his feet, his hands already free, and reached for Yola, who was punching Hagan’s head.
He pulled her away, handing her off to Aria, then threw his own punch into Hagan’s jaw.
His fist bloomed in pain, and he knew better, but he just needed that.
Hagan rebounded, swinging wildly at Jake, but he slapped the punch away, then grabbed his hand and twisted.
Hagan roared and rolled over, subdued by the force.
Jake threw his knee into his spine and bent Hagan’s hand back in a submission hold. Leaned down. “But it doesn’t mean I don’t remember a few things.”
Yola had bounced out of Aria’s arms as if ready to fight.
“I got him, Yo,” Jake said, barely looking at her. “But good job.”
“Cool,” Bailey said.
“Untie those wraps, Aria.” She picked up the sheets she’d used to tie him. Her hands shook. Unknotting them, she stepped over Jake as he put an elbow into Hagan’s neck.
“Please move. Because I’d like nothing more than to toss you out of this window.”
Hagan swore.
Jake looked at Aria. “Now, this time when you tie him up, make sure his wrists are flat against each other, not side by side.” He winked. “Another trick I learned in the navy.”
“He might have a broken arm, Jake,” Aria said, kneeling beside them.
“Are you sure about that? Enough to risk him—”
“No.” She grabbed Hagan’s other arm. Hagan let out a curse, something nasty, and it took everything Jake had not to cuff him.
She tied the knots tight, then Jake got up and checked them, tightened them more.
Hagan spat at him.
Jake pulled him up to a sitting position. “I’d really like to kick you in the teeth right now.”
“Jake!” Aria said.
He glanced at her, his mouth tight. “I’m not going to. Unless—” He looked again at Hagan. “Just give me a reason.” Then he turned and strode over to Bailey. Knelt in front of him. “You okay, kid?”
“That was cool.”
Maybe it was. He couldn’t help but smile. He tousled Bailey’s hair.
Aria turned to Wade, who’d sunk back down onto the bed. “I’m going to get you some penicillin and see if we can hold off this infection.”
He reached out for Bailey, who took his hand.
“Hey!” Angel said as she came into the room. “Parker’s missing.”
“He must have left when Hagan untied him,” Jake said.
Aria started out the door, but Jake grabbed her arm.
“Let him go.”
“What—no, he’s suffering.”
“He’s made his choice, Ari. You need to let him make it.”
She frowned, swallowed.
“You can’t fix everything.”
“Says the man who collects strays.”
“Oh,” Yola said then, and Jake looked at her as she slumped against the wall.
Everything inside him froze. “Yola?”
She had her hand pressed to her body, blood seeping between her fingers. “I didn’t realize . . . I mean . . . I think . . .” She looked down just as she fell to the ground.
Aria barely caught her. “Yola!”
“I just felt it. Maybe the adrenaline . . .” Yola’s eyes widened. “This is starting to hurt . . .”
Jake rounded the bed and scooped her up. Put her on the second bed in the room.
Yola was moaning, a deep haunting of pain that sliced into his soul. He stepped back from the bed, just staring as blood began to pool out of her, saturating her shirt.
“Jake! Get me some gauze pads, or something to stop the bleeding.”
Aria’s voice was a slap that moved him into action. Just keep moving—he searched the drawers of the cabinets next to the bed and found a giant bed pad. He handed it to Aria, who pressed it onto the wound.
“Gloves,” Angel said, but Aria just waved her away, leaning over Yola. “Just breathe, Yola. You’re in good hands—I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”
Yola nodded, her breath wheezing in and out.
Blood edged the corners of her mouth. No, no—
Aria looked up at him. “I need to get in there and stop the bleeding. He might have nicked her suprarenal aorta.”
Jake knew enough medicine to recognize the main blood vessel to the heart. And the way the pad filled with blood . . .
Aria’s jaw tightened, her voice small. “I need an operating room.” Her eyes filled and she blinked hard, looked at Yola.
“It’s okay,” Yola said quietly and put her hand on Aria’s, holding her wound. “I told you. God has something big for me. He told me to wait for it—and he was right.”
Jake pressed his hands to his head, his breaths coming too fast. No—no—
“I just didn’t realize it was going to be this big.” A tear tracked down Yola’s face.
“Jake. I need to open her up, stop the bleeding . . .” Aria said. But the way her face paled, her stricken expression . . .
They were out of resources.
“I have Mimi.” Angel’s voice, from behind him, and Jake turned, spotted Mimi, whose attention fell on Yola.
He stepped away, as Mimi came up to them. Angel held her hand.
“Oh, my precious Yoyo.” Mimi’s voice shook. She pressed her hand to Yola’s cheek. “How is it that . . . that you get to see the Savior before your Mimi?” Her breath caught, even as she forced a smile. “I’m so proud of you.”
Aria looked away, her face wrecked, her eyes closed.
Jake walked over to Hagan and ripped him off the floor. Stared at him as Hagan looked away, out the window.
Don’t.
The voice was a thump inside him, a hard knocking against his impulses, his urges.
Jake let out a shuddered breath and dragged the man out of the room.
Yola deserved not to die with her killer in the room.
“It was an accident!” Hagan shouted. “She jumped me.”
“Shut up, before you have an accident.”
He reached the supply closet and threw Hagan in, slamming the door.
Every cell in his body shook.
He turned and sent his fist into the supply room door.
Jumped back, wanting to open it.
Wanting—
Wanting to kill Hagan.
The thought backed Jake up, into the wall.
Jake closed his eyes. And see, he already knew the truth.
He was the villain. No different from a guy like Hagan.
Justified, maybe.
But still, a murderer in his heart.
I am forgiven. I am clean. I am loved.
Not a chance.
He blew out a breath and walked back to the room.
Silence. Mimi wept, a keening that emanated from deep inside her body. Angel held her, weeping also.
Aria had stepped away, her hands bloody, just staring at Yola.
Wade held Bailey in an embrace.
“She’s gone,” Jake said. “So fast?”
Aria met his gaze, nodded.
Oh, Yo. She lay there, her eyes closed, and frankly, he’d seen plenty of dead men—and women—but something about Yola looked different.
Felt different.
“That’s what a hero looks like,” Jake said.
“No, Jake. That’s what love looks like.” Mimi turned to him, drew him to herself.
He couldn’t . . . didn’t . . . he had no ability to reach out to her.
And for the life of him, he didn’t know why his throat filled, burning with the terrible, bone-shattering urge to weep.
Instead, he pushed away from her and stalked out of the room, down the hall, all the way to the end.
He stood in the open window.
And then, with everything inside him, he yelled. A reverberation that tore out of him, ripping through sinew and bone, exploding cell and breath.
A shout that shook the air, then dissipated into the darkening swell of the horizon.
And then he slid to the floor, his head in his folded arms, letting the brisk tongue of the wind lash him, bracing himself for the next storm.