Page 34 of Final Exit

“Simmons has a lot of explaining to do.” His voice shook with anger, and Bailey was again reminded of the text messages he’d sent to his team leads about not hurting any Enforcers.

Everything she thought she knew about the Ghost was being turned upside down. The man crouching on the floor now, studying the bloody footprints, wasn’t some mustache-twirling villain out to kill Enforcers. If anything, he was the complete opposite. He cared, maybe too much. So what was happening to all the Enforcers?

Could Kade be right that they really were going to some retraining facility? Had she been wrong about Sebastian and Amber? Or was she wrong about the identity of the Ghost? Maybe Kade really was a good guy, and someone else was killing Enforcers.

“There’s too much cross-contamination in here,” Kade said. “I can’t see a pattern. But if all of this is Hawke’s blood, I don’t think he could have made it that far. He has to be close by.”

“Wouldn’t the agent he fought know where Hawke went?”

“You would think so. But Simmons said the guy got knocked to the floor. By the time he regained his footing and turned around, your guy was gone. However, since Simmons didn’t mention that someone fired a gun in here, I’m not inclined to put much stock in anything that he told me.”

He walked the perimeter of the room, feeling along the walls, pressing against them. He was looking for hidden panels.

Bailey mimicked his search on the opposite side of the room. But a few minutes later, neither of them had found anything that didn’t belong in a typical kitchen.

“I suppose he could have made it into another room.” He didn’t sound convinced. He turned in a slow circle, then stopped. “The cabinets.”

“None of them are big enough for Hawke to hide inside. He’s not as big as you, but he’s still a large man.”

“Notinthe cabinets. Behind them. Look at the top left corner on the end.”

She did, and her pulse started pounding with excitement. “There’s a tiny gap. This whole section must swing out like a door.”

It took a good five minutes of feeling around and running their hands along the wood, but Bailey found the tiny switch—on the back of the stove. She pressed it and heard a loud click.

A whole section of cabinets popped out about an inch. Together they swung them open all the way, revealing a small, previously hidden room.

And Hawke lying in a puddle of blood.

Chapter Ten

Saturday, 5:03 p.m.

Bailey clutched the edges of her hard plastic chair, her knees bouncing up and down with nervous energy as she scanned the emergency room waiting area. There was the usual assortment of maladies typical in most ERs. Toddlers sniffling against their mothers’ shoulders. An elderly man coughing into his handkerchief while his wife stroked his back and clucked her tongue in sympathy. A baseball coach looking equally worried and harassed as he tried, without success, to corral a handful of preteen boys while waiting to find out whether his star hitter’s season was over, courtesy of a possible broken arm.

Kade leaned in close from his seat beside her. “Squeeze any harder and that chair is going to crack.”

“I can’t help it. Why haven’t we heard anything about Hawke yet?”

“It’s only been half an hour.”

“Since we got here, yeah. But the ambulance arrived before us. And they must have done some kind of assessment and treatment along the way. The doctors should know something.”

She expected him to give her platitudes, to tell her everything was going to be okay, the way most people would. But he didn’t.

“He’s going to die, isn’t he,” she whispered. “He lost so much blood. And we couldn’t wake him up.”

“We stopped the bleeding and called 911 right away. We gave him a fighting chance. It’s in the doctors’ hands now. And God’s.”

She looked up at him. “You believe in God?”

“I do. Is that a problem?”

She shook her head. “No. Just... unexpected.”

“Because the big bad FBI guy is the epitome of evil?”

A smile tugged at the corners of her mouth. “Something like that.”

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