With My Soul Read online

  Then his head fell back, and Bryce closed his eyes.

  “SHIT. SHIT. SHIT.” Gail gave up on keeping Bryce awake. Whatever Stan had used to drug him, it was still running through his system. She opened the glove box and grabbed a pen. Bryce notably lacked a notebook or pad of paper. But he did have the warranty envelope for the car’s tires.

  She grabbed the oldest and wrote on the back, Bryce, looking for Jana. She’s still somewhere around the hospital. Love, Gail.

  Not trusting Bryce to actually look around the car at all when he woke up, Gail teased Bryce’s hand open and put the note in his hand. He was already out again, with his head tipped back while he snored.

  With a sigh, Gail left Bryce in the car to sleep off the drugs. She decided she’d have to start at the beginning. Maybe Jana returned to her room. Gail went back to Jana’s floor. One of the nurses saw her, “We’re closed for visiting, Ma’am.”

  “Sorry, I’ll come back.”

  Gail would have said something about checking on Jana, but if the nurses realized she was gone too soon, then Gail and Bryce’s chance of getting her back would be nil. The elevator doors shut and Gail stared at the numbers. She didn’t know where to start, what to do next.

  She had failed utterly. She should have gone out of the room with Jana and risked the guards noticing. They allowed themselves to get split up, and everything went horribly wrong. And now she was stuck alone in an elevator wondering what to do about Bryce, where to find Jana, and exhausted beyond words.

  Hitting the button to the parking garage, Gail released a shuddering breath. She needed to regroup, think up a new strategy. She returned to the car, climbing into the driver’s seat. Bryce was still out.

  There was a pay phone in the parking garage. A phone book hung from a metal cord. It gave Gail an idea. She placed a call to the hospital. When the hospital operator answered the phone, Gail said, “I’d like to speak to Vice President Kendall of SpaceTech. He landed approximately an hour ago on a helicopter and is expecting my call.”

  “Right away, Ma’am.”

  Kendall fairly snarled across the phone, “As I said, I don’t want to be disturbed. What do you want?”

  In the background, Gail heard her sister’s scream. She felt sick, scared, and enraged...in that order.

  Gail would never be an actress, but she adjusted her voice as well as possible, “Security picked up a guy who says he wants to talk to you. Shall we send him to your suite?”

  She couldn’t very well ask where Kendall was. Presumably if she was his lackey, she would know. Too many variables made the task impossible. Regardless, she knew now that Jana was with Kendall, and Gail needed to find him now.

  “No. Just keep him there. Don’t let him wander. I told you I didn’t want to be bothered.”

  “I’m sorry, Sir. It just seems like there’s something up with the guy we picked up.” Gail needed to end this call, like half a minute ago. Kendall was smart. He’d pick up on her wide gaps of knowledge if it proceeded any further.

  “Fine. I’ll deal with him when I’m ready. Don’t call again.” The phone slammed down. Gail hung up a half second later.

  She needed Bryce. Seriously needed him.

  Gail hurried back to the car and grabbed Bryce’s coffee mug, emptied it and ran to the rest room to fill it with water. She dumped it on his head, but the water didn’t wake him. Bryce was now unconscious and wet. Jana had been screaming when Gail called. Screaming. She couldn’t wait for Bryce.

  Gail pulled the note out of Bryce’s hand, scribbled that she was going to Kendall’s office, and then stuffed it back. His hair was wet and he smelled vaguely like coffee. If she weren’t so freaked out by everything, Gail would enjoy the moment. This was the kind of thing a couple would talk about on their fiftieth anniversary...if they survived to get married.

  Gail could see Bryce like that. First a husband. Then a father. Right now he was the guy who would drive in the middle of the night to help Gail rescue her sister. Even if his head was thrown back and dripping onto his seat, he was handsome to her. Gail hoped she could tell him about it later.

  For now, she had a sister to rescue.

  Chapter 17

  GAIL TOOK THE STAIRS, all the way to the eighth floor. It was a guess to choose the top floor. If she had any chance at all with Kendall, she needed the element of surprise. Without a layout of the floor, it was going to be hard.

  The first three flights Gail ran the stairs. By the fourth flight, she had changed to a walk and was wheezing. She needed some serious workout time at the gym. Gail hadn’t realized she was this far out of shape. Her whole body felt heavy. She was tired and scared and needed to keep moving.

  Come on. You can do this. They were her mantra, the words she would speak over and over when a test was coming up and she worried that she would fail. Only this time the cost was much too high for that option.

  Gail moved faster. Floor 6. Floor 7.

  Pausing a moment to catch her breath, Gail waited, her hand on the door. She couldn’t hear anything on the other side. She didn’t have an adequate plan. This was a horrid way to rescue anybody.

  Trying to put the tiniest amount of pressure on the bar that pushed the door open, Gail carefully and slowly opened the door. Of course it made noise. She had never studied stealth. Maybe she’d have to add sleuthing and tiptoeing around to her core classes. Some things aren’t taught in a university.

  The first thing Gail noticed was the smell. This floor smelled different from the rest of the hospital, less like antiseptic and more like new carpet and metal. The halls were empty. The setup was different, too. There were three doors in the entire hall. Nothing was marked.

  At each step Gail expected someone to burst through the door and arrest her for trespassing or something. The whole wing had a hidden vibe. A patient who accidentally ended up on this floor would feel out of place. In the end it was Jana’s screams that told Gail the door to use.

  It hurt Gail physically to hear her sister cry out like that. It was a pain in her chest, just like the time her first boyfriend, Mitch, broke up with her. But this pain was accompanied with something darker, a bitter rage. That someone could hurt her sister...a mere child...roused a fierce anger in Gail. She planned to do some damage on Kendall, a whole lot of damage.

  Gail carefully turned the door lever down, her jaw clenched as she ever so slowly lowered the handle until it clicked. Biting her lip, she pushed the door open a centimeter, an inch, two inches. At any moment she expected the door to be jerked open.

  It wasn’t.

  The set up looked like the reception area of a fancy law firm or corporation. The screams were louder now, and coming from another door, this one half-open. Now Jana was yelling, “Let me go.”

  The ‘go’ ended on a high pitch, half frustration, half tears.

  Gail swallowed hard. She reached down and carefully removed her sneakers and then her socks. She needed the element of surprise to make this work. Now to find a weapon. If Stan was armed, she needed to knock him out fast and hard. She found a heavy stapler, the kind as long as her arm that could staple through fifty pages. Lifting it off the desk, Gail heard her sister scream again.

  This was the last time these bastards would hurt her sister.

  The last time.

  With a giant stapler in one hand, Gail slipped to the door, every step carefully planned, every motion silent. Stan and Kendall studied Jana with the kind of intense glee a Roman senator might have felt in the coliseum watching a man fight to the death. A barbaric joy in the pain of another. It turned Gail’s stomach. In that moment, she knew the depths of hate.

  Stan lifted his foot as high as he could. He had taken his lab coat off and his underarms were soaked. The room smelled of sweat and cologne. Gail wasted no time. While Jana begged them to stop, her small foot lifted in a parody of Stan’s, Gail sped behind Stan, drawing back the stapler and smashing it down on his head as hard as she could. He crumpled to the floor.

&nb
sp; Gail knelt, moving his lab coat and finding the gun. Every moment mattered and she moved quickly with her heart pumping and her mind focused. She had no idea if the gun was loaded. Bryce had taken her to a gun range once. After that, she begged off, not liking it in the least. Now she wished she’d practiced a little more.

  The gun was heavy. Heavier than she remembered. Seeing Gail Kendall reached for his own weapon. Gail gasped.

  It occurred to her in a strange distant acknowledgement that she was shooting another human being. Gail watched from that safe distance knowing that she was killing Kendall. She had to stop him from hurting her baby sister.

  Gail shot four times.

  Even at close range, two of the shots missed, spraying plaster across the room. The third and fourth hit. The sound blasted Gail’s ear drums. Now Kendall was spraying. She’d hit an artery in his thigh. She’d been aiming for his heart. Released from Stan’s control, Jana found the furthest corner away from the men and curled up with her knees tucked in tight and her head hidden.

  Gail couldn’t hear anything. She stared at Kendall. He was holding his leg, trying to stop the bleeding and he seemed to be talking to her. She stepped back, the gun still in her hands. Some part of her felt separate, removed from herself, surreal. The whole event felt fake, like she was in a play and when the curtain fell, she would go home and life would be back to normal again.

  The gun felt like a vicious beast in her hand. She didn’t dare lay it down for fear that, even injured, Kendall or Stan would find a way to kill her with it. Had he not been so focused on enjoying Jana’s pain, the outcome might have been different for Gail.

  Backing up until she felt the wall, Gail slid down. The two men had been voyeurs, watching her little sister suffer. Now the tables had turned. But Gail couldn’t watch Kendall die. It wasn’t in her. She turned her head and looked at her beautiful little sister curled up in the corner. Jana would go home tonight. Gail would make certain of that, whatever else happened.

  Gail waited for someone, anyone, to come. Someone must have heard something. She sat next to Jana and waited for Kendall to die. Some distant part of her thought that she should call for help. They were in a hospital, for Heaven’s sakes, and Kendall could be saved.

  Counting in her head, Gail turned every thirty seconds to see what was happening to Kendall. He was still spurting.

  Gail wasn’t so much in shock that she didn’t know what was happening to Kendall. Every fiber of her being rejected the notion of even a small attempt to save the bastard. The man was a monster. She had seen his laughter while Stan forced Jana to lift her leg. After the terror he put Jana through, no...Gail was fully aware that he was dying in front of her. He deserved to die. She repeated it again and again to keep herself from falling apart.

  Still, given another ten minutes, she might have changed her mind.

  She was relieved when the spurting stopped. Absolutely grateful. His death was horrific and the manner of dying hard to witness. She didn’t go near his body, didn’t feel for a pulse or check for respiration.

  Gail scooted closer to her sister, laying the gun on the side away from her little buddy. Then she put an arm around her. She still couldn’t hear worth a crap, but feeling Jana burrow into her side made Gail feel strong. She might never become a doctor, not after murdering the vice president of a major corporation. She would probably end up in jail for the rest of her life, but Gail knew in the depths of her heart that her sister would be safe now because of the actions she took that day.

  BRYCE OPENED HIS EYES feeling mighty annoyed. He was wet and the water definitely had a strong smell of coffee associated with it. Cars were starting to filter in, and from the light outside, it was the crack of dawn.

  When he moved to stretch, he noticed the note on his lap. He picked it up and read the words, looking at the cross-outs. Crap, Gail wasn’t back yet. Neither was Jana.

  The part about Gail going up to Kendall’s office scared Bryce. No one knew as much as he did how sadistic and twisted Kendall could be. He liked to play with people the way little girls played with dolls, move them here and there, twist off a leg, cut their hair. When Bryce thought of Kendall, it was with an overwhelming sense of dread.

  He jumped out of the car and ran to the elevator. He wished Gail had written the time she’d left on the note. That would have given him some idea of what he was walking into.

  Bryce felt like an idiot for falling for Stan’s trick. Of course the doctor would have something up his sleeve. It wasn’t like he was a normal doctor, the kind who actually liked people and tried to heal them.

  The elevator was sooo sloooww going up. Bryce tapped his foot and stared at the lights as if wishing could make them go faster. The elevator opened into a quiet hallway.

  The first thing Bryce noticed was the smell. The smell of blood permeated the air giving it a thick, heavy coppery smell. His dad had spoken of the smell of death before, just once, but that kind of thing sticks in the memory.

  The only reasonable outcome was that Kendall had murdered Gail and maybe her sister and left them for his goon squad to clean up. Bryce had to swallow a few times and force himself forward. He found one of the office doors ajar and quietly moved through. Another door inside the office was partially open, and in the sliver of the room he could see a human leg, male. His hands shaking, he pushed the door open, flinching when he stepped in.

  His whole world shifted and reset. Everything was okay. His Gail was alive, sitting next to her sister. The bad guys were down, possibly dead, but down just the same.

  Bryce knelt next to Gail, “Are you okay?”

  Gail pulled him into a hug, crushing him until he said, “I can’t breathe. I’m here. It’s okay.”

  “You don’t have to wait for me. I’ll understand,” Gail said. Tears filled her eyes, and she looked at Bryce with such despair that he drew her close again.

  “What are you talking about? I’m here.” Bryce said.

  “I’ll be sentenced. I killed him, and I have to face justice,” Gail said. She nestled closer, her hands clutching Bryce’s shirt.

  “I’m going to call Drake. As for Kendall, that asshole should have been dead a thousand times for things he’s done to people. This was justice. Can you stand up?” Bryce nudged and pulled, helping Gail stand. He was still a bit groggy, but he knelt by Jana, “Honey, I want you to close your eyes and put your arms around me. I’m going to carry you out of here, but I don’t want you to look, okay?”

  Jana sniffed and nodded. She said, “I can’t see anything anyway. They said they would fix it, but they made me play robot and I only see color pieces. I don’t want to play robot anymore.”

  “No, we’re not going to play that game ever again,” Bryce said. He lifted Jana into his arms.

  Gail picked up the gun. She said, “I can’t leave his here, in case Stan wakes up.”

  “Okay.” Bryce would have told her to be careful, but she was already pointing the gun to the floor with an expression of loathing.

  Bryce found an open office further down the hall. He settled Jana into the nearest chair. He asked Gail, “Do you want me to take that for you?”

  Gail nodded. She was smart about the way she handed it over. Some people were terribly incautious with weapons. Bryce didn’t shoot cans with the boys back home because sometimes they were complete idiots.

  Bryce emptied the bullets and stuffed it in some random person’s desk drawer. Surely someone would appreciate having a murder weapon lying on their monthly accounting reports.

  “Let me make a few calls, and then we’ll go from there,” Bryce said. He called Drake’s number first. It was the middle of the night there. Drake answered on the second ring, but sounded half asleep.

  “I need help,” Bryce said. He explained the situation, the trouble Gail was in and why Kendall really deserved what he got.

  Drake was so calm and reassuring on the phone. It was like they were talking about a ball game. Drake said, “Who else knows Kendall i
s dead?”

  “Just me, Gail, and her little sister, Jana, and the doctor, Stan, if he’s still alive. He’s either knocked out or dead. I didn’t check. I got the girls out. We’re upstairs at the St. Ann’s Research Hospital in Florida in Kendall’s suite.” Bryce paced the length of the phone cord until it stretched, pulling the base a couple of inches across the desk. He turned sharply and walked toward the chair. If he didn’t keep moving, Bryce feared he would collapse. At least he wasn’t seeing double.

  “Stay where you are. Call the police from the hospital phone. Tell them you think your girlfriend killed someone in self-defense, then say you are locked in and need assistance. Tell them that you, Gail, and Jana are hiding. I have a couple of high-profile friends who might be able to step in.”

  Bryce thanked Drake profusely before hanging up.

  Then he realized, he hadn’t locked the door. Stan could have come back and attacked them all. After securing the room, Bryce made the phone call to 9-1-1. The operator asked for clarification when he said he was in the hospital.

  Gail and Jana were huddled together on a couch. Bryce knelt by Gail, “Gail, I’ve called the police. Don’t say that you murdered him, okay? It was self defense. Kendall is always armed. He was carrying but too busy enjoying your sister’s pain to draw, and your sister was in danger. You saved Jana’s life. Remember that.”

  Lifting her chin, Gail met Bryce’s eyes. “I did, didn’t I?”

  “Yes, you did. The police can trace the calls from the lab. They’ll see that we were telling the truth about rescuing Jana. The next few hours are going to be tough. Drake is calling in some friends and favors for us.” Bryce put a hand on Gail’s shoulder and kissed her head. He had seen his father make that gesture with his mother a thousand times. Now he understood. Sometimes, comfort was all a person could give.

  The investigation dragged on and on. Gail wouldn’t let Jana out of her sight, no matter how many times the nice policewoman suggested that Jana come with her for a bite to eat. Finally Bryce said, “Did you call their mother? Maybe she could come for Jana and then you can question Gail.”