Boone looked at her. His face was as serious as if he was a doctor examining her. “I want to make sure there’s nothing internal going on,” he said.
“I’m fine,” Charly said firmly.
She could tell Boone didn’t like his orders to be questioned. He looked at the paramedics. “Give me a few minutes,” he said, “and then you will be transporting her to the hospital.”
“Yes, sir,” the older medic said as he glanced at Charly, and then both medics moved away from them.
“I don’t need to go to any hospital, Chief,” Charly said. “I wasn’t injured.” He didn’t like her speaking up, but that was tough. It was her body. Her call.
“I want you checked out,” Boone said.
“But for what? I’m fine.”
“Let the doctors be the judge of that,” Boone said. “I’ve seen too many people claim they’re fine at the scene, and they feel fine, only to have unchecked internal injuries that eventually do them in. Better safe than sorry.”
Charly exhaled. She knew what he said was true too. But she hated doctors and hospitals!
“What happened?” Boone asked her.
“I was driving along and then this red sedan drives up behind me, riding my bumper. I go faster, I slow down, I move over, but they just kept riding me. And then, when it looks like they’re leaving, they swerved toward my car, and I swerved away from their car and lost control. I ended up on two wheels and then I ran into that tree.” She pointed to the tree.
Boone looked. There appeared to be a little scuff mark on the big tree, but it looked otherwise fine. Then he glanced at her car. But for a noticeable indentation on the hood, it looked okay too.
“It’s just a little banged up,” she said of her car, “but thank God it’s still running.”
“I’ll have one of my men take it to the hospital,” Boone said, “because that’s where you need to go. And guess what? That’s where you’re going.”
Charly stared at him. What kind of caveman was he? Did he not realize it was the twenty-first century? Did he not realize women were liberated long ago? But she knew it wasn’t just a woman thing. He ordered men around too.
But deep down, she knew he was right. It was always better safe than sorry.
“Did you get a look at the driver?” Boone asked her.
Charly shook her head. “One of your officers asked me the same thing. But like I told him, It was too fast for me to see any real features. They appeared to be young, maybe as young as seventeen-eighteen-year-olds, I know that.”
“They?” Boone asked. “It was more than one?”
“The driver and a passenger, yes. Both were males. Both were white. One appeared to have long hair. And they both were laughing a lot.”
Boone nodded. “Okay,” he said, and took her by the arm. “Let’s get you checked out.”
“Not in an ambulance, please,” Charly said, rising to her feet as he assisted her up. “I’ll drive myself there.”
“You’re do no such thing,” Boone said firmly. Then he told the paramedics they could leave. Told one of the two uniformed officers to drive her car to the hospital where she could retrieve it after she was checked out. And then he placed her into his Ferrari.
And Chief Ryan personally drove her to the hospital.
And waited for what turned out to be nearly three hours, until all tests were run and the doctor gave her the all-clear.
But he realized, as he watched her at that hospital, that he was developing feelings for her that went well beyond the sexual. He didn’t understand why, and he didn’t like the feeling. It made him feel too vulnerable, as if she was pulling his strings. As if she had all the power in their twosome.
He was never going to allow that.
That was why, when the doctor told him that her tests were all negative, he didn’t wait to say goodbye to her. His man had driven her car to the hospital. She had wheels to get home. He just left.
But for a man as busy as the chief to go to the hospital at all, Charly was impressed. The nurses and doctors, who all knew the chief, were too. It was a very nice gesture for him to wait around like that, they said. Some of the nurses even said, outside of the chief’s presence, that he generally treated females like pieces of meat. “You must be a very inviting piece of meat,” one of the male nurses joked.
But for Charly she didn’t see it that way at all. It wasn’t a physical thing to her: it was an emotional thing. His kindness was like a balm to her soul when she needed it the most. She was a stranger in a town nobody really wanted her in. She felt alone and isolated at home; bullied and mistreated on the job. And although she was trying to make the best out of her bad situation, and she stood up for herself at every turn on that job, it was still, even before the accident, a bad situation.
Chief Ryan was turning out to be an ally; an unlikely spark of light in her life. And even more than that the way he went out of his way to be kind to her. In her entire life, nobody had ever treated her the way he was treating her.
Nobody.
Because just like Sarge, Charly had never seen anything like it either.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
After returning to her office and working several more hours, reviewing all of the duties and responsibilities on the manifest Amos had prepared for her, she drove back to her apartment in Low Town. All she wanted was to soak in her tub and forget about her tough situation. But as soon as she turned into the complex, and made her way toward the row of one-story apartments where her apartment was located, she nearly slammed on brakes.
She couldn’t believe it. That same red sportscar was parked in front of her apartment, but this time there was no mystery about it. The chief himself was standing outside of the car, leaned against it, with his muscular legs crossed at the ankle and his burly arms folded. And instead of watching her arrival, his entire focus seemed to be on a group of young black and Hispanic men sitting on the hood of their muscle car, listening to rap music, and drinking beer.
The chief, it seemed to Charly, was giving them that stare of intimidation, and she didn’t like it. She sped up, parked her Nissan next to his car, and got out. She had a vanilla folder with her: homework.
“May I help you, Chief?” she asked as she walked around the front of her car toward him.
“How are you?” he asked, still staring at those guys.
“I’m fine. The doctors said all of my tests were negative. May I help you?”
Boone finally looked away from the young men. When he saw Charly standing there, looking so vulnerable it seemed to him, although he couldn’t say why he felt that way, he exhaled. “Just thought I’d drop by,” he said.
Charly didn’t know what to say to that.
“You doing okay then?” he asked her.
She nodded. “Yes, I’m fine.”
“Those guys giving you any trouble?”
Charly was offended by that insinuation. “Why would they give me trouble, Chief?” she asked him.
“Why? Because all of them have rap sheets twenty pages deep at least. From murder, rape, assault, drugs, you name it. That’s why.”
Charly was a little shaken by the litany of crimes he recited. She knew she wasn’t dealing with choirboys, but damn. Murder? Rape? An anguished look appeared in her eyes as if that was the last thing she needed to hear.