LITMIR.BIZ

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      “I’m not up on American history unless it has Scots connections.” His area of expertise was seventeenth-century Scottish history.

      “Was Elliott Ness a Scot?” Joceline wondered aloud.

      “I’ll look into it,” Kilraven promised.

      Winnie went to get coffee. Kilraven and Joceline sat rigidly, watching the doors open and close as medical personnel in green scrubs went to and fro, occasionally flanked by white-coated physicians with stethoscopes draped around their necks.

      “Busy place,” Kilraven ventured.

      “Yes.” She turned over her purse. “Have you called your mother?”

      “She’s on her way here,” he said. “I made her promise not to drive.” He grimaced. “She’s wrapped two cars around telephone poles in the past five years.”

      “Oh. She drives like you, then,” Joceline said with a pleasant smile.

      He glared at her. “I have never wrecked a car.”

      “Sorry. I forgot. They were blown out from under you. Major difference.” She was nodding.

      He shifted. “Everybody gets bomb threats.”

      “Yours aren’t threats, and how lucky that you weren’t in the cars at the time they exploded.”

      “Can I help it if I inspire passion in people?”

      “People in black ops do that, I’m told.” She chuckled.

      He shrugged. “I’m trying to walk the straight and narrow, especially now,” he said with a smile. “I’m doing the most boring job the company could find for me. Surveillance.”

      “It’s safer than what you used to do,” she said. She frowned. “Did you send Rourke after me?”

      “Yes, I did,” he said, “and stop trying to run him off. Monroe is deadly serious, as you might have noticed today. Jon told me that Monroe said you’re next. You have a small child and the two of you live in an apartment building with no security to speak of. Rourke will protect you.”

      “Who’s going to protect him from me?” she wondered aloud.

      “That is a good question.”

      They paused to stare at the door leading to the surgical wing. A surgeon in green scrubs came out it, looked toward Kilraven and motioned for him to join him. Joceline went, too, ignoring the surgeon’s obvious surprise. Under other circumstances, Kilraven would have chuckled at her concern for a boss she constantly drove nuts.

      Joceline could hear her own heart beating and hoped Kilraven wouldn’t notice. She was scared to death. If Jon Blackhawk died, it would be like the sun going out forever. She refused to even entertain the possibility. But she knew that he could die. And might. She gripped her purse like a lifeline, hoping, praying … let him live, please, I’ll go to church more, I’ll give to charity more, I’ll be a better person, be kinder, more tolerant … She closed her eyes. You can’t bargain with God, she told herself.

      “I’m cautiously optimistic,” the surgeon said, glancing at Joceline when her explosion of soft breath diverted him. “The bullet missed the major organs and lodged in the wall of his chest. It did some damage to a lung, and of course filled the pleural cavity with blood. We’ve removed the bullet and inserted a tube to drain the excess fluid and reinflate the lung. The damage to his lung is minimal. Apparently he was shot from a distance, and with a nonfragmenting bullet, thank God. The damage will heal. It helps that he’s young and in great physical shape.”

      “Can I see him?” Kilraven asked quietly.

      He hesitated. But he was a kindly man, and these two people loved his patient. He wondered if the woman was a girlfriend. She was certainly concerned.

      “In a few minutes,” he told them. “We’ll move him into recovery temporarily, then he’ll go to ICU for a day or two. Just as a precaution,” he emphasized when he noted his two listeners going pale. “We want to make sure complications don’t develop that might retard his progress. We’ll keep him for three or four days after that, again, to make sure he’s progressing as we think he should. But I think he’ll be fine,” he added gently.

      “They’ll come to get us, when we can see him?” Kilraven asked, glancing at Joceline as if it were a given that she’d go in, too.

      “I’ll send a nurse,” he promised. “He’s an FBI agent, isn’t he?”

      “Yes,” Kilraven replied. “One of the best.”

      “We do a big business in gunshot wounds in our emergency room,” the doctor said with a heavy sigh. “Sadly there are more guns than trauma surgeons in this area.”

      “One day that will change,” Kilraven said.

      The doctor only smiled. “Not in my lifetime, I’m afraid. I’ll get back to work. They just brought in a child of seven, victim of a drive-by shooting.” He shook his head. “In my day, drugs were only whispered about. There was no wide-scale distribution, no gangs with guns, no …” He shrugged. “It was a less tolerant world, but far less violent.”

      “They did this experiment,” Kilraven said quietly. “I read about it. They put rats in a confined area until they were so crowded that they could barely move. They became aggressive and began attacking the others and even cannibalizing them.”

      The doctor nodded. “We are too many, with too few resources, in too little space in cities on this planet. Nature has a way of thinning the population without any help from us.” He glanced toward the emergency room. “However, I must add that I prefer nature’s approach. Guns and knives are messy.”

      “I agree,” Kilraven said. “I’ve seen my share of the results.”

      Nobody added that he’d helped a few criminals into emergency rooms.

      The surgeon smiled reassuringly and went back to work.

      Joceline was trying to avoid letting Kilraven see her tears.

      “Hey, now,” he said in a teasing tone. “Don’t do that. Never let them see you cry.”

      She laughed with a hiccup and brushed at her eyes. “He’s an awful boss,” she muttered. “Keeps me working late, throws things, insults me …”

      “Jon insults you?” he asked, shocked.

      “He asks me to make coffee,” she scoffed. She brushed away another tear. “Imagine that!”

      “He’s just tired of threatened lawsuits from visiting attorneys who have to drink the coffee the agents make,” Kilraven explained.

      “Then they should stop letting Murdock make coffee,” she pointed out.

      “That’s been suggested,” he replied. “At the same time, they mentioned dirt and shovels …”

      “There’s a large potted plant in our office that could use a jolt of fertilizer,” she mused. “However, Agent Murdock is far too large to plant in it.”

      “We could …” he began enthusiastically.

      She held up a hand and glowered at him. “Please! This is a hospital!”

      “Just a thought.” He sighed. “I bring my own coffee now when I visit Jon at his office, though.”

      At the sound of her boss’s name, she relaxed a little. “I’m glad he’ll be all right.” She hesitated. “I guess I should get going.”

      “You can see him first.”

      She was uncertain. “You and Winnie should go in.”

      “Winnie will say that you should,” he said with a gentle smile.

      “Thanks,” she murmured huskily and

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