Harper Allen - Mcqueen's Heat

Her smile wavered. Sighing, she turned back to Tamara. “Like I was saying, King, your uncle Jack called. Apparently he dropped round to the stationhouse to chew the fat with some of his old buddies and some fool told him you’d been taken to the hospital. I told him it was nothing serious but that I was giving you a few days off to let that shoulder mend.”

“You’re putting me on sick leave?” Tamara shot the other woman a glance. “Come on, Lieut, it’s just a pulled muscle.”

“Until you can swing an axe or carry a hose you’re off the roster, and that’s not negotiable.” Boyleston frowned. “Count your blessings, King. Joey might never return to work. When will we get the message through to the public, dammit—smoking in bed is like drinking and driving. You just don’t do it.”

“What’s your point?” McQueen’s thumb was on the call button of the elevator. He looked impatiently over his shoulder.

“My point is that if the dead woman had exercised some common sense, her little girl would still have a mom, Stone. She was smoking in bed. The only reason her room didn’t go up in flames first was because a previous tenant had punched a hole in the drywall, and it acted as a kind of crude chimney.”

Boyleston raked a hand through her cropped hair. “That’s a preliminary assessment, of course, but I doubt the official investigation’s going to find different. The bed smoldered just enough so that the woman died from asphyxiation, but the fire itself went into the walls and the attic.”

“Nice theory.”

As the elevator doors slid open Stone planted one hand solidly against them. Lieutenant Boyleston stepped in, but Tamara paused, alerted by something in the big man’s tone.

“Nice theory but what?”

He shrugged. “Nice theory but it’s crap.”

The elevator doors started to close and he slammed them back into place. This time Tamara heard the seam in the borrowed jacket give way completely, but his next words drove everything else from her mind.

“That fire today was arson—and whoever set it was targeting your friend and her child.”

“I thought you knew who the kid was! I didn’t know I was the only one she’d talked to.”

Stone swung his gaze from the woman sitting beside him in the waiting room. He was handling this all wrong and he knew it, he thought. It would have helped if Chandra had come with them but the child’s attending physician had stood firm on that, so it was just him and the woman.

And already it wasn’t working.

Tamara was sitting as stiffly as a statue, her face white, the strands of auburn hair escaping her braid like tiny flames flickering around her. He began again, aware that beyond the swinging doors was a ward full of sick children.

“Like I said, she was in the bathtub when I got to her. She already knew her mother was dead.”

And when I tried to lie about that, I just about lost her trust right then and there, he added silently, remembering the almost adult note of scorn in the childish voice.

“If Mom’s only sleeping, why isn’t she breathing?” He’d had an arm around the small shoulders while he’d been hastily dipping a torn sheet into the water, and he’d felt a tremor run through them. “She’s dead. She was dying of cancer anyway, so I’m glad. This way it didn’t hurt. It—it didn’t hurt, did it?”

That question he’d been able to answer truthfully. “She wouldn’t have known anything, Tiger,” he’d told her.

He blinked, torn from his thoughts by the quiet approach of the nurse entering the room. She was young and pretty, he saw. He was relieved. The kids behind those swinging doors deserved to hear a soft voice, see a kind face.

“Dr. Pranam says if you’d like, we can phone you when she wakes up.”

“I’d rather wait.” Tamara’s lips barely moved. “Tell Dr. Pranam I appreciate him bending the rules for us. I know visiting hours are over.”

“We bend a lot of rules.” The nurse smiled, but there was sadness in her voice. “Some of these little ones won’t be leaving, so we do what we can to make them happy. And like Dr. Pranam told you, the only way we could calm her when she arrived was to tell her that we’d find Mr. Stone and bring him to see her.”

“Stone.” He looked away uncomfortably. “It’s my first name. Stonewall.”

“Like the general?” The nurse laughed softly as she pushed open the swinging doors. “That explains a lot. I hear you laid waste to the fifth floor.”

“Stonewall Jackson was shot by his own troops.” As the nurse exited Tamara spoke, her face still white but the blank look in her eyes replaced with a glitter of anger. “So unless you want the similarities between yourself and your namesake to go further, I’d suggest you tell me everything you found out from Claudia’s daughter—starting with why you’re so certain she is her daughter. Why would Claudia come back to Boston to see me?”

“Petra said she was dying of cancer.” Stone saw her lashes fall over the angry blue of her eyes. He continued, wanting to get it over with. “Petra’s the kid,” he added. “I told her to call me Stone, and she told me what her name was. I was trying to keep her mind off what was happening.”

Tamara nodded tightly. “Go on.”

He didn’t want to go on. In fact, he didn’t want to be here at all, Stone thought savagely. The whole damn thing was bringing back too many memories—memories of other vigils in other hospitals—and the urge to just walk out was overpowering. Walk out and find a bar, you mean, an amused voice in his head said. So why don’t you, McQueen?

“She wanted you to take care of her daughter when she was gone,” he said shortly. “That’s why the photo was so important to Petra. She knew that with her mom gone she’d have to find you all by herself.”

“She didn’t mention her father?” Tamara was rubbing her thumb against a smudge of soot on her jeans. “She has to have a father, for heaven’s sake. Where’s he?”

“He died in a car accident before she was born, if I understood her right.” The smudge was now a smear, he saw. “I wasn’t listening to everything she said. I was too busy wondering what our chances were of getting out of there alive.”

He paused. “You don’t want her to be Claudia’s daughter, do you? You don’t want to believe any of this.”

“And I don’t believe it.”

Abruptly she stood. She walked over to a bulletin board and stood there studying flyers for a hospital fund-raiser, her back to him. Stone rose, too, his movements more controlled than hers.

“What’s not to believe? If nothing else, she had that photo of you. How the hell do you explain that away?”

She lifted stiff shoulders in a shrug. “Chandra thought it might have fallen from Joey’s helmet. It seems like the most logical explanation.”

“For the love of Mike—logical? Isn’t it more logical to accept that the kid’s telling the truth?” He had the sudden impulse to take her by the shoulders and force her to listen to reason. With an effort he turned away.

He was getting too involved in this, he told himself tightly. He’d spent the past seven years making sure any involvement he had with the rest of the world was as minimal as possible, and lately he’d come to realize even that was becoming too much to take—although her accusation that he’d been ready to detach completely in that rooming house today was far from being a given, he thought, frowning.

He’d wanted to look into its face. He’d been pretty sure he would see his own staring back at him. Instead he’d looked around and seen her, and that had been the biggest shock of all. He closed his eyes.

Beyond those swinging doors was a little girl whose world had been smashed to pieces—a little girl who was asking for him. He knew why she wanted to see him. He hadn’t told the woman who’d been her mother’s best friend everything that had passed between him and the child, he thought heavily.