“Yes,” Jessie told her more calmly than she thought possible. “But the knife is damaging his lungs and his breathing has become shallow and irregular and I’m worried he won’t survive until help arrives. I’m going to have to start CPR. I’ll need you to use the towels to keep pressure on his wound. There will probably be lots of blood. Don’t stop pressing. Got it?”
Hannah nodded.
“But before we do any of that, I need a favor.”
“Okay.”
“I dislocated my shoulder earlier,” she said. “There’s no way I can do chest compressions with it like this. I need you to yank it back into the socket.”
“Oh god. I think I’m going to pass out.”
“You’re not going to pass out. You just saw a man die, not for the first time, and you got through that. This is nothing. Besides, I can’t do this alone so you’re not allowed to pass out.”
That was almost five minutes ago. Jessie wouldn’t find out until later that Kyle had remotely disabled the elevators before beginning his attack. That meant that Nettles and Beatty had to run up thirteen flights of stairs to get to them. By the time they arrived, Jessie was gasping for air and her arms, already pumped out, felt like strands of spaghetti. Hannah had offered to take over chest compressions but Jessie told her to keep pressure on the wound. She didn’t want to tell her that she didn’t trust anyone else to do this.
When Nettles and Beatty burst into the room, they didn’t ask if they could take over, they just did it. Beatty attached Ryan to an Ambu resuscitation bag while Nettles attended to the knife wound. Jessie slumped down beside them, too exhausted to physically drag herself any farther away. Hannah crawled over beside her sister and wrapped her blood-drenched hands around her.
Even when the EMTs arrived, preparing to take all three of them to the hospital, she wouldn’t let go.
CHAPTER THIRTY SIX
“Kat’s here,” Hannah said, snapping Jessie out of her reverie.
Her friend had pulled up in front of their building and was walking to the lobby.
“Hi, ladies,” she said warmly as she looked at their suitcases. “Is this everything?”
It took a second to process the question. That happened a lot lately. Jessie had felt numb for most of the last day and a half.
Katherine Gentry, her best friend, had returned early from her neurological evaluation in Phoenix and had offered to let the two of them stay at her place until they found a new one. Looking at her, Jessie thought Kat’s time at the Mayo Clinic, even though it had ended prematurely, had served her well. She appeared rested and in high spirits.
The effects of her multiple concussions obviously couldn’t be countered in one half-week stay at the facility. But even in Jessie’s anesthetized state, she observed that Kat looked hopeful and healthy. Her dark blonde hair, usually tied up in a bun or ponytail, was loose around her shoulders. Always in good shape, Kat looked like she may have allowed a happy extra pound or two on her normally rock-hard, muscled frame. Even the long scar under her left eye and the pock marks on her face and neck that served as constant reminders of her time in a war zone couldn’t diminish her striking confidence.
“It’s enough to get us by for the next week or so,” Jessie told her. “We’ll have movers take care of the rest when I have time to set it up. We just need to be out of the place, you know?”
“Of course,” Kat said, not pushing the issue.
“I’ll meet you guys in the car,” Jessie said. “I just need to turn in the keys at the security desk.”
Kat and Hannah went outside. Jessie watched them go for a moment before slowly making her way up the lobby stairs, favoring her aching shoulder. She didn’t say it but she was also glad that Kat would be able to help them with everyday tasks they would otherwise struggle with. It turned out that Hannah had cracked a rib when Kyle knocked her into the couch. She was moving gingerly too, trying to take only small inhalations to reduce the ever-present tenderness.
Jessie had fared better than she expected. Some of the burn wounds on her back had opened up again, her hands were bandaged, and her left arm was in a sling. But otherwise, she felt physically all right. How she felt emotionally was another matter.
Despite pleading from both Captain Decker and Hannah, she had refused to go to the funeral. She wanted no part of it. She had buried too many people these last few years. She couldn’t do another. When Jack Dolan called and tried to convince her to go, she hung up on him.
She immediately shoved that thought to the back of her mind, so that it wouldn’t send her spiraling into the black hole that constantly threatened to consume her. Without the presence of the man she counted on to keep her head above water, the man she’d gotten used to having beside her through each day and night, she found steering clear of that black hole increasingly challenging.
So she chose instead to focus on concrete things that could buoy her spirits. There was some good news. Apparently there was an opening at Central Station for a police researcher, so she made sure to put in a good word for Jamil Winslow.
More significantly, within minutes of learning what happened at Jessie’s condo that night, Jack Dolan had ordered his overnight agents to raid Kyle’s townhouse. They quickly discovered that the man sleeping in his bed was a guy who went by the name of “Rick,” and had an impressive fake ID to support it. He bore a striking similarity to Kyle, even close up. They also found a secret tunnel traveling from Kyle’s townhouse, under the yard to the back unit of the townhouse one street over, as well as definitive evidence in the home that Jessie’s racist Facebook posts had been hacked.
Dolan’s bosses wanted to bring Rick in and throw the book at him. But Dolan had other ideas. With their blessing, he made it clear that if Rick refused to work for them, the Bureau would leak that he was doing so anyway. They would thank him for his assistance in foiling Kyle Voss’s plot and sharing the cartel’s plans in the U.S. The only way they would not leak this falsehood was if it became a fact. Otherwise, Dolan told him, he was essentially a dead man walking.
Facing that possibility, Rick, whose real name was Esteban Huerta, broke. Over the course of a fourteen-hour interrogation session led by Dolan and some colleagues at the DEA, Huerta gave them the particulars on how Kyle managed to secretly escape in order to attack Garland and Ryan. He also revealed the cartel’s plan to have Kyle reestablish himself in the finance community and eventually launder their money through the charitable foundation he’d established to help wrongly convicted prisoners.
Huerta agreed to become a double agent of sorts. Once Kyle Voss’s death became public, the FBI would come up with a cover story that kept him out of it. When he was recalled to Monterrey, he was to try to rise within the organization, all the while feeding a designated DEA handler with regular information on the cartel. Jessie was glad that there would be at least one positive outcome owing to Kyle’s release from prison.
She handed the key to the guard at the security desk, who smiled and nodded but said nothing. She didn’t blame him. What could he possibly say?
As she delicately made her way back down the stairs and out of the lobby to the car where Kat and Hannah waited, she reminded herself that there was one other bit of good news. It was related to Barnard Hemsley, the slovenly, coked-up divorce attorney who had made their lives so difficult.