Saint Luke's was exactly as much fun as Lucia expected. She thought that she probably could have walked away, anonymous in her booties and scrubs, before anyone thought to look for her, but she didn't. Loyalty to Pansy won out against an atavistic desire to just get the hell out, and besides, McCarthy was there, looking sardonic and grim. The nasal swabs were exciting, and the industrial-strength shower and shampoo even more so. Fresh medical garb awaited at the end, but this time she wasn't alone; both McCarthy and Pansy had been given hospital couture as well. McCarthy's hair was damp and sticking up in points. Pansy looked well-scrubbed and a little less scared. "Doxycycline," the doctor said, and handed over a giant bottle to each of them. "Take it as indicated. If your tests come back negative, you can discontinue it immediately, but if not, keep taking it. No skips. Continue to the end of the regimen, no matter how good you feel. Tell us immediately if you get any symptoms."

"Symptoms?" Pansy said faintly.

"Fever's the first sign," he said. "I want to see all of you in three days, sooner if you have even the slightest rise in temperature or start feeling under the weather. Clear?"

"If we get symptoms - " Pansy began.

"Then you check in here, and we start you on an IV antibiotic course. But we don't even know that what you've been exposed to is dangerous, and even if it is, we certainly don't know that you came into contact with any significant amount, or contracted anything from it. Lots of don't-knows and it's in there." He shrugged. "Just relax. Chances are you'll be fine."

He wasn't the most caring doctor Lucia had ever met, but she appreciated his clear-eyed, blunt approach. Even if he did look barely old enough to have graduated from high school, much less completed any kind of medical school.

His eyes met hers, and she was surprised to find that he wasn't nearly as young as he looked. Not inside, anyway.

"Good luck," he said, and held out his hand. She shook. He had a firm grip, soft, strong fingers. "Three days, back here, or I send the FBI to handcuff you and bring you in."

"We'll be back."

And that, it appeared, was that.

Ten minutes later, Pansy's cell phone rang. She unfolded it. "Hello?" Her face brightened and took on a little color. "Manny! Any news?" Pansy, Lucia was amused to note, was like watching the news with the sound off. "Oh. Okay." Obviously, no results yet, but then she perked up again. "Yes! Yes, fine..."

When she hung up, Lucia said, "You're going over to his place."

Pansy paused in the act of putting her phone back in her purse, obviously surprised. "How did you know?"

"Remind me not to put you undercover, Pansy. And besides, I think I know Manny well enough to know that he's not going to allow you to go home alone. Since he's working, he'll want you there, where he can watch out for you."

Pansy blinked and smiled. "Kinda nice, isn't it? Having somebody care?"

"Yes." Lucia, on impulse, reached over and took her hand. "You may have saved my life, you know. I don't forget that kind of thing. Anything you need, Pansy, I'll deliver."

It wasn't an idle promise, and Pansy must have known it. She squeezed Lucia's fingers, and nodded.

"I'd better get moving," she said. "He's sending a car for me. Knowing Manny, it'll be a Bradley Fighting Vehicle, with a full squad of off-duty marines."

Lucia smiled a goodbye and let her walk away. Pansy looked small and fragile, but there was a core of inner steel in her that Jazz must have sensed the first time she'd met her. A fighter, that one. She'd been cool and calm when she'd spotted the problem, and not many people could have handled it with such grace.

"What about you?" McCarthy. He was standing next to her. Some people appeared ridiculous in scrubs, but he managed to carry more gravitas than the doctor who'd just walked away in his official lab coat. Light blue suited Ben, she thought.

"I guess I'll go home," she said. "I don't imagine I'll be able to sleep much."

He nodded and opened the plastic bag they'd given him for the contents of his pockets. All he had was a wallet she supposed was left over from before his incarceration, some keys, and the assorted motel keycards that Omar had procured. Rawlins had asked for his gun, and hadn't asked to see the permit. She'd have to see if she could borrow a gun from Omar for McCarthy.

Omar. She'd forgotten about him. She'd have to call and tell him to take a few days off - or better yet, see if he could trace the fake FedEx. Pity she hadn't opened the red envelope all the way. She dearly wanted to know what they'd had to say. Whoever they happened to be.

McCarthy fished the keys out of the bag in his hand and shook them lightly with a bemused expression.

"What?" she asked.

"Just thinking. Jazz put my car and apartment stuff into storage, but I guess I should pick up the car, at least. Most of these keys don't mean much anymore. Apartment's gone. Office - well, I don't think they were saving my desk in the squad room. Anyway, I think I'll pick up the car, then head for the motel." He still wasn't looking at her. "Unless you want to grab some dinner. You've got to be hungry by now."

"Starving, actually. We could eat, then I could give you a ride to your car." She smiled slowly. "Besides, I'm the only one who's actually armed, I believe. Unless you're hiding a gun somewhere I don't want to know about."

"I don't like to boast about my weapons." He dropped the keys back in the bag and followed her out.

Her car was downstairs, in non-emergency parking. They got in and she drove silently through the moderate nighttime traffic to Vine Street. Odd that she didn't feel a need to talk, and even odder that she didn't feel awkward with his silence. He was thinking, she sensed.

"Where are we eating?" he asked, as she slowed and turned into the parking garage.

"Best pizza in town," she replied. "Delivered. Sorry, but I can't stand being in these scrubs another moment. We can pick up your car after."

He didn't comment, just raised his eyebrows a little. She key-carded into the parking garage and found her spot, then led the way to the elevators. They let them in the lobby, which was vast, cool, and had two security guards on duty.

"Ms. Garza." The first one nodded. "Evening. Should I even ask about...?" He gestured at her clothes.

"Mr. Marsh, I'd rather you didn't," she said. "This is my friend Mr. McCarthy. Ben, they'll need your driver's license. Nothing personal. This is a high-security building."

"How high-security?" McCarthy asked, and handed over his license. Marsh scanned it in and handed it back.

"Can't talk about that," he said, and smiled. He was a huge man, intimidating when the situation called for it, but generally good-natured. Lucia liked him. She especially liked that he never let anybody he didn't know pass without ID. "Let's just say Ms. Garza here isn't the most high-profile resident we've got."

"Jagger and Clapton both keep apartments here," she said. "For when they come to town."

"You're kidding. To Kansas City?"

"Home of the blues." She shrugged. "You'd be surprised. This place has millionaires, CEOs, a few movie stars. I'm lucky they let a peon like me in the door."

"You're good to go, Mr. McCarthy," Marsh said. "Check in before you leave via intercom. Elevators won't work without a passkey or us releasing one for you."

McCarthy was looking at her as she slid her passkey into the slot in the apartment elevators and pushed the button for the sixth floor. "What?" she asked.

He shook his head. "You must be loaded, living in a place like this."

"Let's say I have resources." Not that she was particularly proud of how she'd come by them. The elevator rode smoothly up to six and dinged arrival, releasing them into a corridor with gleaming white walls, original artwork at regular intervals and deep plush carpeting.

"Jagger live next door?"

"He has his own floor," she said, and led Ben to the second door on the right. Two key locks. Once she'd ushered him in, she flipped on the lights and went to the control panel to shut off the intrusion alarms. The blinking lights went from red to a steady, soothing green.

"Damn," McCarthy was murmuring. "So I guess breakfast at Raphael's was just par for the course for you."

She glanced around, seeing it through his eyes. A sleek, modern kitchen in black and golden woods; a panoramic view past the dining table. A balcony out past the living room, overlooking the city. It was comfortable and classic, and it had virtually nothing of her personality in it.

"Looks like a really nice hotel," he said. "This how you live?"

"Pretty much," she said, and went to pick up the phone. She called the pizza place and ordered two large pies. McCarthy, it seemed, was a meat-lover. She wasn't much surprised. Hers remained, of course, vegetarian.

"Make yourself at home," she said, and picked up the TV remote from the low coffee table. She tossed it to him, and he fielded it without hesitation. "You said you missed TV. Have at it."

She walked past him and grabbed clothes from the closet before making her way to the bathroom to change. She heard the TV start up as she was pulling on a black knit top. Baseball, it sounded like. Men, she thought, and smiled. Her hair needed brushing. She took care of it and thought about applying makeup, but it seemed ridiculous at this point. She looked tired, but she'd come by it honestly, and no amount of concealer was going to help.

You realize, she told her reflection, that you're thinking about makeup and appearances when you're about to eat pizza. With an employee, no less.

Unsettling. She shook her head, tossed her sleek black hair back over her shoulders and went out into the apartment.

McCarthy was on the couch, feet up, watching - yes, she'd been right - baseball.

"Beer?" she asked. He turned to look at her, and kept looking. "I assume beer and baseball still go together."

"Sorry," he said, and muted the sound on the TV. "It's been awhile."

Whether he meant baseball or something else was open to interpretation. He stood up and joined her in the kitchen as she opened the refrigerator and pulled out a cold bottle. Imported beer, the only kind she willingly drank. She popped the cap with an opener and handed it to him, opened a soft drink for herself, then clinked their bottles together. "To surviving another day," she said.

"Amen."

They tipped bottles and drank. McCarthy was still watching her, but his eyes closed when the taste of the beer hit his tongue. Sheer ecstasy, from the look on his face.

"Wow," he said, when he put the bottle down on the counter. "It really has been awhile. And obviously, you know beer."

"I try." She took down two plates. "You want to tell me anything?"

"Like?"

"Like your theory on why the evidence exonerating you showed up so conveniently when it did?"

He took another sip of beer. Stalling for time.

"Didn't seem very convenient to me," he said. "Considering I'd already had the crap beaten out of me."

"Maybe they decided you'd suffered enough."

"Let's just say that little things like compassion don't enter into the equation for the Cross Society. And I mean that literally, by the way."

She slid onto a bar stool and sipped from her bottle. She hadn't offered a glass; he hadn't seemed to mind. "I don't think I understand."

"What Simms does - you understand about him, right? That he's looking at alternate realities, not just telling the future?"

"Excuse me?"

McCarthy shook his head.

"Oh boy. You'll need a lot of beer, somebody smarter than me and some kind of consulting physicist." He shrugged. "Okay. There's this thing called string theory. Don't ask me how it works - I'm just a cop, okay? But the idea is that there are a whole bunch of realities all layered up against each other. Every decision everybody makes, there's a slightly different chain of events, right? Take six billion people times about a billion decisions - good, bad or indifferent - and you get how many potential realities we're dealing with here. The thing is, most of these decisions end up being meaningless, in the great scheme of things. They cancel each other out, and such. So instead of sixty fazillion realities, you get some manageable number, like a couple of million that simultaneously exist in the here and now."

Lucia listened, thinking hard. Mostly, she happened to be thinking that she'd never really believed the unlikely story of the Cross Society, or Max Simms, though Jazz seemed to have come closer to buying it, and Jazz was hardly the credulous type. "So, Simms supposedly can use all this theory to predict the future."

"No, Simms is the real deal, he's some kind of savant. He doesn't need theory to do what he does - he just sees it. Like some psychic in the circus."

"Then why the physics explanation?"

"That's what where the Cross Society comes in. They made what he does scientific."

"Uh-huh. And Eidolon...?"

Ben flipped a hand in assent. "Started out the same way, but Eidolon took it further. Has to do with predictive math, or something. Both the Cross Society and Eidolon can track decisions and look at the different outcomes. Only problem is, once playing god gets to be a multiplayer game, it gets nasty. Eidolon actually came first, by the way. It got a ton of defense department money, and Simms actually worked with a staff of high-level physicists to develop a computer system that could do what he did. That was his mistake. He created himself right out of a job. Then he founded the Cross Society to do the same thing, once he realized Eidolon was going to manipulate events to their own advantage. Counter of a countermove."

"And when Eidolon wanted him gone..."

"The new CEO made sure that he was taken out of the picture. I figure Simms should have been killed, but he managed to work the decision tree enough that he only got convicted and sent to prison. You'd better believe that Eidolon's been working hard to keep him there, or better yet, make sure he dies behind bars."

"How do you know all this?"

"I was in early." McCarthy shrugged and turned his beer bottle in neat, precise circles. "Simms wanted people in the Cross Society who could carry out orders, not just sit around and talk theory. I was..." He fell silent for a few seconds, eyes hooded. "I was supposed to help them make things better. But I figured out pretty fast that wasn't how it worked. You start out fighting the good fight, but pretty soon you're just fighting for your life."

"And you didn't agree."

He took a drink, then another. "I didn't say that. I'm no saint, Lucia."

"If you agreed, then why did the Cross Society put you in prison?"

"I told you. I refused to carry out an order."

"To stand by and let Jazz get killed."

His shrug was so small it could have been interpreted as fidgeting. "Hey, even a total bastard's got limits."

"So what's changed? Why let the evidence come to light to get you out?"

"Why the hell do they do anything? Their spreadsheets or Simms or whatever told them I could do something for them."

She nodded. Silence fell, broken by the clink of their bottles on the black marble counter. It seemed eerily quiet, here above the city, in this hermetically sealed building.

The buzz of the intercom made both of them jump, though McCarthy tried to look nonchalant about it.

"Pizza," she said.

She kept the gun handy anyway.

The sound McCarthy made at the first bite of pizza was like a man in the throes of - well, ecstasy. "Oh, God," he murmured. "That's just...unbelievable. Sorry, but you've got no idea how many nights I thought about - "

"Pizza?" She kept her voice cool and amused. "I'd imagine there were other things to think about."

He chewed and swallowed. Gave a Cheshire cat smile. "Pizza's the one I'm willing to talk about."

"Careful, Mr. McCarthy. I'm not on the menu."

"No question about that. Shit, I can't even afford the pizza." He blinked, and before she could feel even the first impulse to take offense, said, "And I didn't mean that the way it sounded."

She had to laugh, because his expression was priceless. "Don't worry. My dignity is hardly that fragile."

"I meant - "

"I know what you meant. Enjoy the food."

He did, wordlessly, letting out involuntary sounds now and then that strongly reminded her of other things he might have missed, during his time in Ellsworth. Which made her skin prickle and made her pulse thud faster. No. This is strictly dinner. Nothing more.

She was good at self-deception. It was why she had always been so damn good at undercover work.

He kept on watching her, as he made his way through his second beer and last slice of pizza, stealing glances when he thought she wasn't looking. She felt them like feathery touches on her skin. Her glass was dry; she debated opening another soft drink, then decided to have a beer herself. She went to the refrigerator to pull one free.

"No," he said flatly, and reached past her to close his hand around hers. She resisted the urge to drive her elbow back into his gut, mainly because the warmth of him, leaning against her, undid all her reflexes. "You're on antibiotics. No beer."

"What are you, my doctor?"

"Depends," he said. He was still pressed against her, his hand hot around hers. "Do you need examining?" His voice had dropped to a low, dark-velvet whisper, warm against the back of her neck.

She needed a whole lot of things, and it shocked her, the depth of that need. How long had it been? Nearly a year, she realized, since that business with Dallas that had turned out such a mess. Not a good memory, though the sex...no, even the sex hadn't been worth that. McCarthy made her body come alive in ways she wasn't prepared to deal with - nerves hot and tingling, skin tight and sensitive to every touch, every breath he took.

She could say no to a lot of things, and a hell of a lot of men. It came to her as an inescapable fact that she simply couldn't say no to Ben McCarthy.

The beer bottle slipped back into its place in the door of the refrigerator, and his fingers moved over hers, warm where hers were cold and trembling. Then he traced the sensitive inner side of her arm, his fingertips drawing a line of heat to her elbow, then around. He brushed her hair back in one slow, feather-soft motion, and let out his breath in a sigh that moved, moist and possessive, over her skin, across her throat. She felt her knees going weak. Her pulse pounded torturously fast. I can have this. I deserve this. Just this once. I know it's not smart. I don't care.

Without any warning, he stepped back. Far back. Cold air crept along her skin, an arctic chill, and she felt the goose-flesh he'd given her for entirely different reasons tighten in response. She shut the fridge door and turned to look.

He was walking away, his back to her, beer in his hand. Walking to the windows, where he stood staring out at the city lights and swigging beer as if his life depended on it.

"Ben..."

He tipped the bottle up and sucked down the last of the foam, then set the empty down on a table. He picked up the plastic bag that held his personal items.

When his voice sounded, it was rough and abrupt. Hard-edged. "Do they call cabs, your guys downstairs?"

"I can drive you - "

"No."

She pressed her hands to the hard marble of the countertop and willed herself - commanded herself - back to some kind of professional demeanor. There was nothing she could do about the rate of her breathing, or the flush in her cheeks, or the dilation of her pupils. But she could ignore it. "Yes," she said. "Yes, they can call a cab for you."

"Set it up, would you? I need - " He swallowed convulsively and drew the back of his hand across his mouth. "I need to pick up my car. It's getting late. And even though this motel promises to keep the light on, I'd better..." He was at a loss for words. She could sense the turmoil in him. He made an effort to put some nonchalance back in his voice. "Besides, I probably have some television viewing to catch up on. Any suggestions?"

She briefly entertained a few suggestions, but they were anatomically impossible. "You seem to enjoy baseball."

"Yeah, love it. Baseball, Mom, apple pie, though come to think of it, I always preferred peach..." He was rattled, terribly off balance, and she imagined this was something of a new experience for him. She watched him visibly take control. "You've been really kind to a down-and-out ex-con. Thanks."

It hadn't been kindness. He knew that, and she wasn't willing to humiliate herself by pointing it out. "Any time," she said. Her lips felt numb and cold. "You'll watch your back?"

"Sure. Watch yours. And - " His eyes met hers, blue and limitless and blind with the same yearning she felt. "You take care of yourself. You heard the doc. Any fever..."

"Go," she said. She didn't know why, except that she knew he desperately needed her to order him out.

He nodded and left, shutting the door behind him. She walked to the intercom and pressed the button and told Marsh her friend was coming down, and would he please call a cab.

And then she went to the couch, turned on the television and sat numbly watching baseball - which she didn't even like - well into the night, thinking.

P/S: Copyright -->www_novelfreereadonline_Com

***