“Get me the hell out of here.” She tried to dig into the roadbed with the toes of her boots, searching for traction. She made it two inches before hands gripped her legs, her hips, and eased her out of the wreckage.
“How bad you hurt?”
She managed to focus on the face, recognized Detective Baxter. “I can still see you, so I’m in considerable pain. But I think I’m just banged up. Passenger’s bad.”
“They’re getting to him.”
She winced as Baxter ran his hands over her, checking for breaks. “You better not be using this to cop a feel.”
“Just one of those little bonuses life hands you. Got some lacerations, probably going to have contusions all over that nifty bod of yours.”
“Shoulder burns.”
“You gonna punch me if I take a look?”
“Not this time.”
She rolled her head back, closed her eyes as he unbuttoned her ruined shirt. “Friction burns from the harness, looks like,” he told her.
“I want to stand up.”
“Just take it easy until the medicals look at you.”
“Give me a damn hand up, Baxter. I want to see the damage.”
He helped her up, and when her vision didn’t waver, she figured she’d gotten off lucky.
The same couldn’t be said of Sparrow. The passenger side had taken the brunt when it rammed a maxibus on one of its revolutions. Trueheart was working with another uniform to sheer away the metal trapping Sparrow inside.
“He’s pinned between the door and the dash,” Trueheart called out. “Looks like his leg’s broken, maybe his arm, too. But he’s breathing.”
She stepped back as the MTs hustled up. One wriggled into the driver’s side where she’d wriggled out. The calls turned to medical jargon and orders. She heard talk about spinal and neck injuries, and cursed.
Then she looked at the car.
“Holy Jesus Christ.”
The front end was all but disintegrated. Metal was blackened, melted, fused to metal. Window glass had gone to powder and continued to smoke.
“It looks like…”
“Like it was hit with a short-range missile,” Baxter finished. “You’d be toast if it’d broadsided you instead of skimming the front end. I was heading in to Central, and saw this flash, this streak. Big boom, and a vehicle, yours, flew right over mine. Flew up, came down, flipped three times then spun around like a top. Smashed a couple of civilian vehicles, laid waste to a glide-cart, skipped the curb, skipped back, then plowed into a maxi like a torpedo.”
“Civilian casualties?”
“I don’t know.”
She could see some of the injured, and hear weeping, some screaming. Soy dogs, soft drink tubes, candy sticks were scattered over the street and sidewalk like some nasty buffet.
“Harness held, until the last minute.” She wiped absently at a trickle of blood on her temple. “It held, or God knows… Reinforcements in the roof kept us from being crushed like a couple of recycled milk cartons. Major damage on the passenger side from the crash. He got the worst of it.”
Baxter watched the MTs fix the unconscious man to a back-and-neck board. “Friend of yours?”
“No.”
“You piss somebody off enough to fire missiles at you or did he?”
“Good question.”
“You need to have the MTs look you over.”
“Probably.” The pain was seeping through now, making mincemeat of the adrenaline and shock. “I hate that. Really do. And you know what else? The guys in requisitions are going to slap me around for this. They’re going to slap me around, then give me some piece of shit transpo to punish me.”
She hobbled over to the curb, sat among the confusion and noise. Then sneered in warning at the MT who headed, with his kit, in her direction. “You even think about using a pressure syringe on me,” Eve told her, “and I’m taking you down.”
“You want the pain, you keep the pain.” The MT shrugged and opened his kit. “But let’s have a look.”
It took her another two hours to get home, and then she had to catch a ride with Baxter as she’d been ordered not to drive. Since she didn’t have anything to drive, it wasn’t hard to follow orders.
“I guess I’m supposed to ask you in for a drink now or some happy shit.”
“That’s right, but I’ll take a rain check. I got a date. Scorching date, and I’m running behind.”
“Appreciate the ride.”
“That’s your best comeback? You’re in bad shape. Take a pill, Dallas,” he suggested as she eased her aching body out. “Flake out a while.”
“I’m okay. Go bang the bimbo of the week.”
“Now that’s more like it.” He gave a cheery chuckle and drove away.
She limped into the house, but couldn’t quite limp past Summerset.
He looked down his nose, sniffed. “I see you’ve managed to destroy several more articles of clothing.”
“Yeah, I thought I’d rip and burn them while wearing them, just to see what happened.”
“I assume your vehicle suffered similarly as it’s not in evidence.”
“It’s trash. But then, it always was.” She headed for the stairs, but he blocked her path, then scooped up the cat who was trying to climb up her legs.
“For God’s sake, Lieutenant, take the elevator. And you may as well take something voluntarily for the pain before you have to be humiliated into it.”
“I’m walking it off so I don’t stiffen up and start to look like you.” She knew it was stubborn, she knew it was stupid, but she took the stairs. The worst was, if he hadn’t been there at the door, lurking, she’d have taken the damn elevator in the first place.
She was dripping with sweat by the time she made it to the bedroom, so she simply stripped off her ruined clothes, tossed her weapon and her communicator on the bed, and whimpered her way into the shower.
“Jets on half power,” she ordered. “One hundred degrees.”
The soft spray of hot water stung, then soothed. She braced her hands against the tile wall, dipped her head, and let it flow over her.
Who had they been after? she wondered. Her or Sparrow? She was betting on herself. Sparrow, and the civilians in the line of fire, were just what they’d call collateral damage. So why try to take her out, and why hadn’t they done a better job of it?
Sloppy, sloppy, she thought. It’s all been sloppy.
“Jets off,” she grunted, and feeling a bit steadier, stepped out of the shower.
She knew her heart shouldn’t have jolted when she saw Roarke. Summerset-the big, fat tattletale-would have told him.
“The MTs cleared me,” she said quickly. “I’m just banged up, that’s all.”
“I can see that. You don’t want the drying tube. The hot air won’t do you any good. Here.” He picked up a bathsheet, walked to her, and wrapped it gently around her. “Do I have to force a blocker on you?”
“No.”
“Well, that’s something.” He feathered his fingers over the abrasions on her face. “We may be angry with each other, Eve, but you should have contacted me. I shouldn’t have heard you’d been in an accident from a damn media bulletin.”
“They didn’t release names,” she began, then trailed off.
“They didn’t have to.”
“I didn’t think. I’m sorry, I really didn’t think about it. It’s not because I’m-whatever I am with you right now. I didn’t think about the media, or that you’d hear anything about it until I got back and could tell you myself.”
“All right. You need to lie down.”
“I’ll take the blocker, but I’m not going down. AD Sparrow’s bad. He was with me. His spine’s messed up, and there’s severe head trauma. The passenger side was-shit. Shit. I don’t know how he lived through it. It was a short-range missile.”
She scooped her hair back and went into the bedroom to sit.
“You said missile.”
“Yeah. Probably one of those nifty one-man jobs. Handheld launcher. He must’ve fired from the roof across from Central. Had me staked out. Maybe Sparrow, but I’m thinking me. To mess up the investigation? To mess you up? Both?” She shook her head. “Maybe to put the HSO on the hot seat, taking out a cop when they couldn’t get her to pass the investigation over to them. Maybe to throw the suspicion onto the terrorists.”