Camouflage Cowboy. Jan Hambright

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      “It’s a reddish-brown color, with a black mane and tail. Beautiful.”

      Caleb nodded and laid his head back against the seat. “A bay,” he said again as he closed his eyes. “Red-brown.”

      Nick stepped back and closed the car door before turning to face Grace.

      “Thank you,” she whispered, some of the tension visibly leaving her body in a shoulder shrug. “He always overestimates his strength after every transfusion. It takes a day or so for him to bounce back.”

      “You can’t fault him for trying.”

      She swallowed and shook her head. “Sometimes I marvel at his will to survive, to go until he can’t go anymore.”

      “What’s wrong with him, Grace?” Caution brought her chin up as she studied him and he witnessed the battle between suspicion and trust as it warred across her delicate features and settled in her blue eyes.

      “He needs a bone-marrow transplant. He has aplastic anemia and has to have a blood transfusion every two weeks, but his doctor informed me this afternoon that his condition is worsening. We need to find a bone-marrow donor as soon as possible or he’s going to…” Her voice faltered.

      Die? Nick mentally finished the horrific statement and reached out for her, folding his arms around her slender shoulders. Sympathy leeched from his insides, but he felt her stiffen and pull away.

      “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “This isn’t any of your concern.” She went around to the driver-side door. “But thank you for your help.” She climbed into the car and fired the engine.

      Nick stepped back as she maneuvered out of the parking space and drove away. He stared after her for a moment, snagged the empty wheelchair and turned for the hospital entrance.

      Grace Marshall was clearly desperate. Hell, he’d be desperate, too, if he had a dying child, but desperate people did desperate things. Was it possible the donor she was seeking for Caleb was the governor? He didn’t know much about donor matches, but Lila Lockhart stood a good chance of being a blood relative to Caleb Marshall.

      Worry needled him all the way back into the hospital and followed him into the elevator. Was it possible Grace knew the governor could be her birth mother? Was she willing to blackmail Lila into donating bone marrow to her dying grandson, or she’d…she’d what? Sabotage Lila’s shot at a presidential bid?

      Nick’s sense of right had gone into battle with his sense of duty by the time he stepped off the elevator on the third-floor ICU unit and into the jaws of chaos.

      “Code blue…code blue. Paging Dr. Karnahan, Dr. Mark Karnahan to ICU, stat.” The request rang out over the unit’s PA system.

      Nick sidestepped a nurse as she rushed a lifesaving crash cart down the corridor to where Nolan and Harlan stood in the hallway. She spoke with them for an instant before wheeling it past them and into the room. Trevor Lewis’s room.

      Nick hurried toward them. “Nolan! What’s going on?”

      Nolan Law shook his head, his gaze going to the floor for an instant before he made eye contact again. “Lewis coded. One minute he’d agreed to tell us who the shooter was at the governor’s ranch, and the next I was performing CPR.”

      “I’m sorry, sir.” Nick’s blood churned in apprehension. Trevor Lewis had been stable up until this point. Stable enough to talk. Was it possible someone had a hand in changing his condition so he’d never say another word? What if that someone had been the source of the hinky feeling Nick had had in the parking lot when they’d first arrived?

      Nick got his bearings in the east-west hallway and bolted for the window at the end of the corridor overlooking the parking lot below. Nolan and Harlan followed close behind.

      “What’s going on?” Nolan asked from next to him as he stared out of the window three floors above the myriad of cars.

      “I should have said something, but when we arrived, I had the feeling we were being watched.” Nick put his focus on a man jogging through the lot wearing blue scrubs and a tan jacket with the hood pulled up. “There.”

      “I’ll be damned,” Harlan said. “We passed him getting into the elevator when we got off.” Harlan banged his fist against the ledge in frustration. “I barely got a look at him with his head down.”

      They watched the man disappear into a bank of trees and shrubs on the outer perimeter of the parking lot. There wasn’t a chance they could catch him at this point.

      “We better hope Trevor Lewis survives, because he’s our only link right now.” Nolan pushed away from the window, but Nick and Harlan remained, picking out each car that moved from its space on the tree-lined street beyond the hospital entrance.

      “Red compact…Ford Focus. Dark-gray SUV…Tahoe. Black pickup…Dodge.” Nick called out the vehicles. “White…pickup…Dodge.” Anyone in a hurry to clear the area would be long gone by now, but odds were if he’d driven away from the scene in the past ten minutes they’d have a make on what he drove.

      Harlan wrote the last vehicle description down on the small notepad he held in his hand. “It’s a long shot, but I’ll see if Sheriff Hale will plug the makes and models into the system. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

      “We don’t even know if the guy drove a car. He could have been on foot the entire time, could have been standing in this very window when we arrived and timed his escape accordingly. I’m going to check and see if the hospital security cameras caught a visual of his face at some point.”

      Harlan nodded. “I can tell you he was tall…six foot, give or take an inch. Powerful build. I’ll see if any hits on the autos produce an owner who matches his physical description.”

      “Let’s hope we catch a break.” Nick glanced down the corridor at the empty chair next to the entrance of Trevor Lewis’s room and realized he hadn’t seen Matteo. “Where’s Matt?”

      “He wasn’t here when Nolan and I arrived. The charge nurse said she saw him head for the vending room to grab a soda.”

      “That takes what, three minutes? He should be back by now. Let’s have a look.”

      Together, he and Harlan hustled along the hallway, focused on the vending-machine cubical on the right at the end of the corridor, marked by an information sign hanging above the entrance.

      He had a bad feeling about this. First Trevor Lewis; now Matteo? What the hell was going on?

      Nick slowed his pace, raised his right hand and motioned Harlan to the other side of the entrance before he sucked up next to the door frame and glanced inside.

      The small room was empty except for a row of soda and snack machines ablaze in fluorescent light.

      “Nothing,” Harlan said, shrugging his shoulders. “I don’t know how, but he must have gotten past us.”

      Relaxing his stance, Nick stepped through the entrance and surveyed the room for hidden nooks and crannies, still unable to shake the worry surging in his veins. Where was Matteo Soarez? He’d never leave his post.

      Frustrated, СКАЧАТЬ