Page 34 of If She Only Knew (The Cahills 1)

Too late.

Biggs wasn’t going to make it.

He eased to the bedside of the unlucky bastard. That’s what you get when you happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Too bad, Biggs.

Biggs drew a rattling breath into his scorched lungs.

You cost me, you son of a bitch, he thought, then took a small, rubber sheet from his pocket and placed his gloved hands over Biggs’s mouth and nose. The man stiffened, tried to gasp in another breath, struggled in his unconscious state.

His muscles strained with the effort of holding the big man down, but it was over before it really started. Charles Biggs had been loitering on this side of death’s door for much too long. He just helped the bastard over the threshold.

As he moved silently away from the bed and the damned monitors started beeping wildly, he smiled and walked on silent footsteps to a back stairwell. He opened the door and disappeared down the concrete steps.

The way he looked at it, he’d done the sorry son of a bitch a favor. A big one.

He stepped out of the stairwell on the first floor and ran into a nurse running full tilt in the opposite direction.

“Excuse me,” she said, her gaze flying to his name tag, then up to his face. A quizzical expression crossed her features. “Carlos?” she said. “Hey!”

He turned quickly. Dashed through the glass double doors and prayed the woman didn’t get too close a look at his face, as he nearly tripped over an elderly woman being pushed in a wheelchair.

“Son of a bitch,” he growled, stripping off the lab coat and cutting across traffic. He glanced back, saw the nurse at the door. She was talking animatedly to another woman. Her fingers were jabbing in the direction of the street. Still running, he rounded a corner, ignored the pain in his ankle, crossed another couple of streets and found his Jeep just where he’d left it.

Adrenalin surged through his blood as he climbed in, flicked on the ignition and, sweating despite the cool temperature, nosed the Jeep into traffic. He lit a cigarette and left the hospital behind. His heartbeat slowed as he put some distance between himself and the hospital.

He’d nearly gotten caught.

But hadn’t.

Grinning to himself, he glanced down at the white lab coat with its ID tag and the picture of Carlos Santiago staring up at him. He jabbed his cigarette onto the tag and the smell of charred plastic filled the Jeep.

“Muchas gracias, amigo.”

“Had Marla been drinking on the night that she lost control of the car?” Nick asked. He and Alex sat in an Irish pub a few blocks from his hotel. Alex was on his second scotch and water. Nick was nursing a beer.

“Nope. She’d just gotten out of the hospital.”

“What about Pam?” Nick asked, wondering about the woman who no one seemed to know. Marla?

?s friend.

“No one knows what she’d been doing but there was a little alcohol in her bloodstream. Not much.” From the booth where they sat, Alex’s gaze followed a couple of guys who were throwing darts near the back of the bar.

“Marla and she were close?”

“As close as Marla gets I suppose,” Alex swirled his drink. Ice cubes danced in the weak light. “She didn’t have a lot of friends.”

That surprised Nick. “She sure as hell got a lot of cards and flowers.”

“It’s expected. We’re pretty high-profile around here.” Alex yanked at the knot of his tie and Nick wondered if his brother ever wound down. Competitive to a fault, Alex had always been a classic type-A personality, following in the old man’s footsteps as if they’d been made by God Himself. Never questioning, always proving to the bastard that he was indeed more than qualified to be Samuel J. Cahill’s heir. A football scholarship to Stanford, undergraduate degree there and then law school at Harvard. Alex knew how to play the game.

“High profile but not well liked?” Nick asked as glasses clinked and conversation buzzed around them.

“It’s hard to say. People tend to kiss ass when you have money.” Alex pinched his lower lip thoughtfully, then motioned to the waitress for another round.

“So you really don’t know who your true friends are?”

“Something like that.” Alex tossed back the rest of his drink and set his glass on the glossy table. He rubbed his face and looked a decade older than his forty-two years.

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