Justice by Oleander - 2012 Watty Awards, Finalist

Chapter 27

© Carey MacLean, 2012

Chapter 27

Somehow, call it intuition, call it the time of day even, or maybe the serious look on the man’s face but she knew that Captain Saunders wasn’t there for a social call.

“Mika,” he stuck out his hand to shake hers in greeting.

“This isn’t a coincidence is it?”  She asked; her heart sunk when he shook his head indicating the negative.  “It’s Xav, isn’t it?”

“Mika, I need you to follow me,” he said without confirming or denying and led her toward the patient private rooms.

Saunders ushered her into a room and followed closely.

She heard the IV drip machine ticking away in its rhythmic setting.  She was terrified of what she would find on the other side of the curtain.  She looked over her shoulder and the Captain nodded for her to go forward.

As she walked around the slightly drawn curtain, she saw him – Xavier.

“Oh my God!  What happened?”  She asked.

Xavier was awake but quite groggy.  He looked dizzy and judging by the lump on the side of his head where a bandage covered what she could only assume was a gash, she understood the reason for the dizziness.

“I had the Chief call you in thinking that you’d want to know,” Saunders told her sympathetically of the plight she was stuck in.  “I’ll leave you two be.”

“What the hell happened to you?”  She asked a second time after the Captain had left the room.

“I’m okay,” he told her and reached for her hands which lay limp at her sides.

She sat on the bed beside him as he began to tell her about what transpired after his last text.  How he had been followed, how he had led whoever it was that was following him on a wild goose chase to find out who it was, to how he recognized Makey’s car right before he passed out from the crash.

“You’re lucky they found you,” she told him when he informed her that Connor was the one that ran a trace on his phone to locate him.

Talking about tracing reminded her of what she had found and stowed away in her purse.  She quickly rummaged through the mess and pulled out the small sealable bag and dangled it in front of him.

He couldn’t believe his eyes.  Xavier tried to sit up but Mika put a hand on his chest and kept him lying on his back.

“Is this-” He swallowed the sawdust feeling in his throat.  “Is this what I think it is?”

“I’m not sure but he tried to dispose of it and I found it behind the trash bin when I was taking out the trash while I made dinner tonight,” she explained.

“Where’s my phone?”  He once again tried to get up to look for it.

He received an incredulous look of annoyance at his efforts from Mika which made him stay put.  Reaching over him, she grabbed it from his bedside table and handed it to him.  He called Carl, the ME to let him know he had something for him.

The stars must have been aligned right for once.  The man had been in the building and rushed up to gather up the small parcel.  Scattering back out of the room like the lab rat the man could be, he promised to run the diagnostics on the liquid within the vial without compromising the possibility of prints on the outside of the container and get back to him within the next few hours.

He couldn’t sleep.  Something told him that it was odd that Mika were to be called in at such an odd time.  Truth be told, it wasn’t the fact that she was beckoned to work in the middle of the night, it was the night she had been beckoned forth.  A niggling feeling in his gut told him that something was off.