“Fuck!” It was the third time Willa had uttered this since arriving at the hospital. A searing pain shot through her left arm when she moved it. She twisted her head to look at the damage again; a dressing covered the wound, and a patch of blood had seeped through the fabric. She turned away again, disgusted by the sight of her own blood.
“She's back to normal I see,” Guy said, having just stepped into her hospital room. With him were Noah and two of their crew members, Ghost and Asher.
“Hey, sis, how are you?” Noah said. “Does it hurt?”
“What do you think?” she asked tiredly and grumpily. “I got shot in the arm, for God's sake.”
Noah didn't appear to take offense at her tetchiness.
“You know it's pretty much just a scratch, don't you?” Guy pointed out. “Didn't even hit a muscle. Someone's looking after you.”
“The only person who was looking out for me was Little Johnny. How's he doing? Have you guys seen him already?”
A sombre, melancholy shadow drifted across the faces of the four men in the room. They looked between each other, everyone refusing to meet Willa's gaze. She saved them the trouble of delivering the news. She knew those looks, had seen them several times in her twenty-eight years. They'd lost another soldier.
“Goddamn it!” she shouted, and her arm hurt again. It must have been the painkillers that prompted them, but tears escaped, and she shielded her face with her hand, crying behind it.
“I'm sorry, Willa. He was dead before the paramedics arrived,” Guy explained.
It always hurt to lose one of her guys, but Little Johnny's death stung more than any before him. Especially as she'd escaped with nothing more than a graze. Such an injustice.
“To get to the udder side,” she said to no one. She laughed, her eyes moist, her nose runny, then said it again. The blank faces of the men surrounding her bed only made it more funny. She didn't believe in the afterlife, or Heaven, or Hell; but she knew that wherever Little Johnny was, he would appreciate hearing the punchline. So what if everyone in the room thought she had lost it.
“I've already called his wife,” Ghost said.
“Was anyone else hit?” Willa asked. The pang in her heart for her loss had the effect of numbing the pain in her arm now.
“A little girl,” Noah said, eyes downcast. “Caught a stray bullet in the neck. She didn't make it.”
Willa swallowed, but the feeling of nausea in her stomach wouldn't shift. Every breath she took then was done bitterly, furiously. Getting shot at, though it had never happened to her until now, was a part of the life she lived. It came with the territory. Every day presented a new day to become target practice. Little Johnny had known it too. But this innocent kid hadn't signed up for the life, and now she was dead. Two lives taken and nothing achieved. Although the playground hadn't been her idea, she should have chosen a different location. This was on her.
Suddenly her face contorted into something inhuman. “I want Ambrisi's head.”
Her voice sent a shiver down the spines of the four men.
The ride over to the hospital was one of the longest Layke had ever experienced, and not surprisingly, the most harrowing. Everything Corman said went in through one ear and out the other.
The car hadn't fully stopped outside the hospital before she jumped out and raced inside to confirm what she feared about Willa. The ball in her throat wouldn't lodge, only grew bigger, thicker. If she'd been in her right mind she would have dialed it back, at least made an effort to appear detached. Detectives dealt with dead people all the time – what made this one so special? But she wasn't in her right mind, and this wasn't just anybody.
As she dashed across the hospital corridor to the reception desk, Corman hurrying to catch up to her, she couldn't help but think about the lost opportunities. Over before it had even begun. She wasn't ready to say goodbye. They hadn't gotten to know each other properly. Their last encounter was contentious, with Willa storming out of her apartment, mad at her, unaware that she didn't mean the things she'd said. How could life have been so cruel?
She practically shoved her badge in the receptionist's face. “We're here about the victims of the shooting.” She tried to say more, to get something concrete out of the woman, but her tongue wouldn't form the right words, and her brain didn't know what the right words were.
Corman stepped in. Good old, objective, non-invested Corman who still managed to look somewhat cheerful given the circumstances. This was just a regular day for him.
“We heard there were two fatalities. Can you confirm who they were?”
A sadness enveloped the receptionist's face. “One guy was dead on arrival. And the girl, she died in theater.”
The world began to spin around her. She gripped onto the desk to support herself, afraid she would collapse due to dizziness. It was just as she'd feared: Willa was dead.
“The lady who was shot is awake, if you wanted to see her?” the receptionist added hopefully.
Layke wanted to sit down, wanted to tell Corman to go ahead without her while she hung back and mourned a woman she barely knew, but had meant a lot more to her than she'd realized.
“Come on, Owen. Let's go talk to her, see if she knows anything,” Corman said, destroying her plans to wallow in her sadness.
Her body trembled, her heart ached, her feet felt numb as she trekked along the corridors. The last thing she wanted was to see survivors. It was as if their survival was there to mock and tease her, to remind her of what she'd lost. She hated everything for the two minute walk to the room, and she just wanted to sit in a dark corner and cry. So when Corman knocked on the door, didn't wait for a reply and entered, she walked in with her head down, hoping to hide her distress from the survivor.
“I was wondering when you guys would show up.”
Layke looked up. There she was. Not some random woman she had no connection to, but Willa di Blasio, as alive as she had been the last time she'd seen her. Although the smile didn't reach her face, it spread throughout her body. She let out the breath she was holding, and finally noticed the other people in the room: two of the di Blasio brothers and two others she'd seen a couple of times around Yum Yums.
“Detective Owen, you look like you've seen a ghost,” Willa said in a teasing voice. “Bet you're disappointed that I'm still here. You know, me being a dangerous criminal and all.”
The other people in the room became irrelevant then, as the two women focused only on each other. Everything that Layke wanted to say was right there in her eyes, but from the playful, mocking way Willa was staring at her, she could tell the message wasn't getting through. How she wished she could be alone with her. First she would scream at her for even suggesting such an awful thing, then she would kiss her because... because she'd never wanted to kiss anyone so much before. She was afraid she would shove everyone aside, dash over to her bed and plant one on her lips in front of them.
“Come on, Miss di Blasio, the Miami Police Department knows you di Blasios have nine lives,” Corman said with his usual grin. “You guys wanna give us a couple of minutes with the lady? We'd like to ask a few routine questions.”
With the exception of Guy, who always looked approachable, the other three men wore the type of hard expressions filled with years of bitterness that all criminals or wary citizens wore when the police were in their presence.
“Not really,” Noah said.
Corman laughed in his casual way. “Actually, it wasn't a request, son.”
Noah went to respond, no doubt in a less than polite way, but Willa stepped in. “It's all right, guys, I'll be fine. If they get rough with me, I'll shout, then I can take the cute little redhead while you guys take the old guy.” She smiled mischievously, winked at Corman, who seemed to be enjoying this as much as she was.
Layke wasn't smiling. And when the men left the room, she hung back as far as she could and kept quiet while Corman grilled Willa.
“Let's just cut to the chase. You know who did it, so why don't you save us all time and tell us who it was?”
“I don't know who it was,” Willa said with a straight face.
“We both know that's a lie. And I know how this stuff works: you tell us you don't have a clue, then a few days later the person you didn't have a clue about ends up face down in a ditch somewhere, and you don't have a clue about that, either.”
Willa laughed. “Sounds like the plot to a really good movie.”
“Okay, so you're saying you have no idea who was behind this?”
“A lot of people want me dead. What can I say, it goes with the surname.”
While kissing her would have been gratifying, strangling her would also have been good, Layke thought. Why was she doing this, playing games at such a serious time? Someone had just tried to kill her, had killed two others in the process, and she didn't seem to care. Was she a sociopath, or was this just an act? Either way, Layke wasn't impressed.
“Let's pretend for a minute that I believe any of that. Can you tell us anything about the car the shooters were driving?”
“It was brown, had seen better days.” She shrugged as best she could, while wincing. “I know nothing about cars, sorry.”
“Did you happen to catch the number plate?”
“No, I was too busy trying not to get shot.” She tried to move her arm then grimaced. “Which, as you can see, I didn't do a great job of. Little Johnny wasn't as lucky as me, though.”
“The man that died, was he one of yours?” Corman asked, for the first time taking an interest in something she was saying.
Willa's face became characterized with wistfulness, losing its cheerfulness. “He saved my life.”
“What were you doing in the playground? And how many people knew you would be there?”
“We wanted to play on the swings,” she said, back to her old self. “It's very therapeutic.”
Corman sighed. “Was there anyone else with you that may have seen something?”
“You should probably talk to my brother Guy and the other men with him. They were close by. Maybe they got a glimpse of a face.”
“Oh, I doubt that very much. No one saw anything, right?” Corman said sarcastically. He turned to Layke. “I'm gonna go talk to the boys. You stay here, see if you can get something useful out of this one. Maybe she needs a woman's touch to get her to open up.” He shrugged.
Willa laughed. “A woman's touch is about the only thing that could get me to open up. You know me too well, detective.”
He left the room. Left them alone.
Layke bit her lip, her eyes on Willa; Willa's eyes on her.
“What's wrong, detective, not interested in giving me a woman's touch anymore? And you were so good at it before.”
Layke's glare could have frozen Willa's blood, it was that cold. “Who shot you?” she demanded.
“I already told your partner, I don't know.”
“You do know. Was it Ambrisi?”
“Why do you want to know, so you can give them a medal, or scold them for not doing a better job?”
“For just one second can't you take anything seriously?” Layke blew up. Her temple throbbed, her cheeks flooded with color. “Someone just tried to kill you and all you want to do is joke about it.”
“I can assure you that none of this is a joke to me.”
“Then tell me who did it and let me do my goddamn job!”
Willa kept quiet, looked elsewhere, away from Layke's penetrative, scathing glare.
Layke walked over to the bed. “I hope your arm hurts like hell,” she said through gritted teeth. “I hope it hurts for weeks, every time you try to move it, every time you go in the shower, every time you laugh or smile.”
“Wow, so now we're finally seeing the real you.”
Layke ignored her. “In fact, I hope you can never use your arm the way you used it before, and you have to step back from this life that you're so hellbent on living. I hope that no one takes you seriously again.”
“I would still be able to use my right arm, and my hand, and my fingers...”
Layke begged her eyes not to betray her, not to allow even a single teardrop to fall; because she felt them close, felt her nose itching as it did when she was about to cry. Now wasn't the time, not with Corman and the rest of the di Blasio clan a few meters away on the other side of the door.
“And I hope... I hope you feel the way I felt when I heard that there were two fatalities and you could have been one of them. I hope you feel that every day.” She went to walk away, but Willa's tight grip on her arm stopped her in her tracks.
“How did you feel?” Her eyes were big and expectant, no animosity in them.
“Like... like I wished I'd never met you.” Layke yanked her arm away and hurried out of the room. Even without the tears she suspected that Willa saw exactly what lay in her heart. How could she not when it was written all over her face, punctuated in her words, broken in her voice?