Page 31 of Gabe

A few minutes later, several police cars with blue and red flashing lights drove past. I stayed hidden, waiting for the commotion to die down. A basic breaking-and-entering, when the only thing stolen was a few bottles of antibiotics, wasn’t a particularly noteworthy crime. The police wouldn’t bother with it for long. All I needed to do was wait until the lights and sirens disappeared, and the night was dark and silent once again.

It was four am by the time I returned to the RV. My legs ached from kneeling in such a cramped position behind the dumpster for so long, but I was otherwise unharmed, and Gabe was exactly where I’d left him. He didn’t seem to have twitched a muscle while I was gone. Even his hair was in exactly the same position.

“Hey, I’m back. I need you to wake up enough to take these pills. Then we can head back to the safe house.”

I didn’t know why I bothered to talk to him. The unconscious man couldn’t hear me. Even when I managed to rouse him from his sleep, I wasn’t sure how aware he was of anything happening around him. I managed to get him to swallow a couple of the antibiotic pills by literally putting them on his tongue and holding a glass of water to his lips.

He choked on the first few sips of water, which dribbled from the corner of his mouth, before he eventually swallowed the pills and almost immediately fell back asleep.

Breathing a sigh of relief, at least for now, I turned the ignition in the RV, the engine roaring to life, and started driving back to the safe house.

CHAPTER 12

Gabe

Everything around me felt like it was moving when I woke up. I cracked my eyelids open, and I was looking at an unfamiliar ceiling.

No, wait, not unfamiliar. I’d seen it before.

But where?

Memories came back to me slowly.

Meeting with Director Thornton. His accusation, and then his death. The shoot out with unknown assailants. The feeling of a bullet tearing through my shoulder. Hiding submerged under the surface of the lake for hours as I swam to safety, breathing only through a thin reed.

But what happened after that?

I had a brief memory of making a phone call.

Sitting up on what turned out to be a bed, I groaned and clutched my shoulder. It hurt, but not as much as I expected, and the wound had been expertly stitched and bandaged.

Oh, now I recognized my surroundings. I was in the RV. Looking toward the driver’s seat, I was unsurprised to find Frankie behind the wheel.

“You’re awake,” he said, sounding happy, though he never took his eyes off the road. “Hold on one moment.”

I swayed with the change in momentum as Frankie pulled the RV to a stop at the side of the road. As soon as he turned the vehicle off, he joined me at the back of the RV and immediately started checking my wound. “Thank God your fever broke. How are you? We’re about twenty miles from the safe house. Can you wait that long, or is there anything that needs to be taken care of now?”

Fever?

That explained why I felt so shaky.

When Frankie unwrapped the bandages, I got a good look at the damage. The first thing I noticed was the sign of infection. I remembered crawling from the lake with my whole arm and shoulder on fire and touching anywhere near the wound felt like I was being shot all over again.

“Is everyone all right?” I asked, directing my words to the top of Frankie’s head as he was leaning down to inspect my shoulder. His braids looked better than before.

He froze and looked up at me, dark eyes wide enough to see the whites all the way around. Then he laughed, the sound coming mostly out of his nose like he wasn’t sure if he should be controlling his reaction or not.

“Of course that’s your first question.”

My brow furrowed in confusion. I didn’t know what time it was, or even what day it was, but one thing was clear. The people I was meant to be protecting had been left alone for much longer than expected. Of course I would want to know if they were all right.

Why was that surprising?

“Yeah,” Frankie nodded as he returned to his work. “We’re all fine. Sebastian is even starting to show some improvement. You’re the one we need to worry about right now. What happened? How much do you remember?”

I explained in detail about my meeting with the FBI director and the subsequent fallout. My memory was extremely clear about what had happened and didn’t turn fuzzy until after I crawled out of the lake.

“Oh, yeah,” Frankie laughed. “Spending hours submerged in a lake with an open wound will definitely do it. No wonder your wound got infected.”

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