LITMIR.BIZ

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the ward, he looked through the high windows set into the door and noticed that the nurses were hovering around a bed on the far side of the wall. Judging by the pretty toes he could see, the patient they were working on was not Harrison. He turned back to Elana and issued a terse instruction. “You call your brothers, and I’ll call Mariella. Maybe, between us, we can find out what the hell is going on.”

      Elana nodded and pulled her bag off her shoulder to look for her cell phone.

      “Elana?” Gabe waited until she met his eyes before speaking again. “I’ll get to the bottom of this, I promise. I won’t let the family down.”

      * * *

      Elana held Gabe’s eyes and slowly nodded as her panic receded. When Gabe looked at her like that, with those deep, serious eyes, wearing his I’ve-got-this expression, she knew she could take his word to the bank. He would do exactly what he said. Jarrod was hot fire and Thom quiet, steady rain, but Gabe was the solid rock beneath her feet.

      Thom, hell. Elana looked down at her screen and saw his missed calls. She could imagine him running his hands over his face, a frown between his strong eyebrows. If she called Thom, he would pepper her with questions she didn’t have answers for, would question where she’d been and why she wasn’t picking up. Talking to him would be like pouring another layer of guilt onto the mountain she already carried around, and that load threatened to break her, mentally and physically. Jarrod was so much easier to talk to—his comme ci, comme ça attitude could be annoying, but he was uncomplicated. Jarrod was shallow, and right now, she needed shallow. It allowed her a place to escape, the freedom not to feel.

      Sometimes, she would do anything not to feel. All her life she’d run away from situations and conflicts, choosing to flee rather than feel, deal. She’d run to Thom when she couldn’t cope with whatever was happening at home—her parents fighting, Rafe and Luc sniping at each other and taunting Gabe. As an adult she turned to Gabe to solve her work conflicts, to Thom when she needed a comforting ear and endless support, and to Jarrod when she wanted to escape.

      She did a lot of running, a lot of avoiding, and Elana knew that it was a flaw she needed to address. The problem was that it was so much easier not to. Swimming at the shallow end of the pond, not putting in the effort, avoiding depths and currents, was a lot easier than wading into deeper waters. Besides, her father was dying, her family was falling apart and the renovation of Elana Marshall into a better version of herself could wait until this blew over. While she waited for more information, she could seek comfort. She could also choose to escape.

      Door number one or door number two?

      Elana glanced at Gabe and saw that he was involved in a tense conversation. She quickly moved away, her thumb hitting a much-dialed contact on her phone.

      “Hey, it’s me...”

      * * *

      Technology, the Fixer thought, was awesome, and God bless those brainy nerds who developed the ability to combine ones and zeros and somehow convert those numbers into a live video and audio feed. The Fixer didn’t know how it happened but was grateful that it did. It made life so much easier.

      Sitting in the expensive vehicle in the parking lot of El Acantilado, Harrison’s flagship restaurant, The Fixer stared down at the cell phone screen, eyes bouncing between the six tiny images on the phone. Touching the first screen, the picture zoomed in to reveal live footage of the helicopter carrying Harrison landing on the roof of Whispering Oaks, an isolated private clinic just outside Malibu. To the Fixer’s untrained eyes, Harrison’s transfer from the helicopter to roof and then into the elevator was as smooth as silk. After the helicopter took off, the Fixer closed that screen, enlarged another and watched the team push Harrison’s bed down a corridor lined with fine art. To those who didn’t pay attention, the clinic looked like a boutique hotel or an exquisitely decorated private residence. The grounds had been planned by a top landscape designer. There were two pools, one heated and one not, a gym and a massage room. There was a cozy library, a billiards room, various reception rooms. And that was the point—this was a new type of medical facility, where the patients could, if they had enough money and were healthy enough to do so, pretend that they were on vacation at a country house.

      The medical staff moved Harrison into his room, and the Fixer watched as they did their thing. They operated as a well-oiled machine and the Fixer nodded, appreciative of well-oiled machines; it was, after all, the way the Fixer and Harrison ran their not-so-legal business.

      It had started innocently enough, as a favor for a friend. Harrison’s school friend, a Californian politician running for the Senate, colored outside the lines with a woman who was not his social equal, and that liaison resulted in an illegitimate child. Harrison acted as the intermediary, negotiating silence and a move across the country, to where Harrison was conveniently building a new restaurant, by offering a vast amount of money and a change of identity. Harrison then helped one of his most talented chefs escape a drug charge by offering the investigating officer a deep-sea fishing trip on The Mariella, his state-of-the-art yacht. When a prominent stockbroker’s daughter was found on a tourist beach, sky-high, naked and in the arms of an equally naked, very underage teenage boy, Harrison fished her out of jail before the press latched onto that juicy story. Harrison saw his actions as helping out his friends; it was the Fixer who saw the economic potential of his benevolent interference.

      The Fixer’s instinct had been proven correct, and they had the bank balances to prove it. Extricating the great and not-so-good of American society out of sticky situations proved to be a lot more lucrative than either of them could have imagined.

      Harrison’s initial skepticism about their second business had been unfounded. He was a chef and a businessman, but the power appealed to him—Harrison liked feeling involved. Harrison didn’t care about the money their sideline generated—he had enough to last him several lifetimes—but he liked having the leverage, the inside knowledge, the ability to, if necessary, affect an outcome because someone owed him something. Could that be the reason he was lying in a coma, holding on by the medical thread of tubes and machines?

      “Monitor the Captain very closely over the next hour. I want to know if anything, the slightest thing, changes.”

      The Fixer heard Dr. Malone’s instruction, his voice filling the car through the top-of-the-line Bose speakers. Dr. Malone left the room, and the nurse scribbled on Harrison’s chart. Zooming in again, the words she wrote became clearer: “Patient stable, no discernible change in condition. Seems unaffected by transfer from St. Aloysius. Instructions to monitor closely for next hour.”

      Good. The Fixer reduced the size of the screen and watched as the nurse left the room, leaving Harrison to lie there on his own. The Fixer frowned, wondering whether the move to Whispering Oaks was the correct one. It didn’t matter—it was the only card to play. The private hospital was specially designed for situations such as these, for patients who needed specialized care and ultimate privacy. The world would be shocked to realize who’d actually passed through the clinic’s doors: presidents, oil sheikhs, foreign dignitaries, dictators and divas had all sought help here. They’d been treated for everything ranging from depression to life-threatening conditions as bad, or worse, than Harrison’s. The Fixer had used the clinic before to treat a charismatic clergyman-turned-senator who suffered from a recurring bout of syphilis.

      It had taken some quick maneuvering to clear the clinic so that Harrison was the only patient. Luckily, there had been only two patients in residence; one was discharged and the other was transferred to another facility, the Fixer arranging it so that only the most trusted and long-serving of the staff remained on the premises to care for the man they’d been instructed to call the Captain.

      There were security cameras in each room, and it had been a breeze to hack into the clinic’s system and hijack the feed. The Fixer had eyes and ears on Harrison and, very importantly, on every visitor he received.

      It was eavesdropping on steroids. But, as the Fixer had learned a long time ago, information was power, and it could be obtained by any means possible. Thanks to these tiny cameras, the Fixer would be the first to know Harrison’s status, whether he was stirring, awake or, frankly, dead.

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