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It took some doing, but finally Jarod was bundled into the backseat of the rental. Miss Parker had put down a foil blanket from her field kit, feeling very much like a serial killer as she did so. The blanket was large enough to both cover the back seat and to fold around Jarod’s shoulders. To keep the blood off the upholstery, she’d said, though she also detected the shivers travelling up and down Jarod’s body. It was a disgustingly humid day, so she guessed it was due to blood loss.

Four blocks from the hospital, Jarod closed his eyes. One block later, Miss Parker noticed.

“Jarod, you still with me?” she said. No response. “Jarod?” Nothing. Miss Parker glanced over her shoulder at the back seat. She turned back to the road, ashen. There was a puddle of blood pooling on the floor of the legroom area. From Miss Parker’s quick impression, it seemed as though it stemmed from the leg wound.

“Damn it. Damn it. Son of a bitch,” said Miss Parker, and followed these up with several successively ruder word choices. “I’m going to kill you if you die, Jarod, don’t you dare.” Then, after a pause: “I need to get you back to the Centre alive.”

As if she needed to give a reason why she didn’t want him to die. She wasn’t sure who she was arguing with. Jarod? He was out cold. Herself?

Maybe.

She pulled into the hospital’s temporary parking zone outside the emergency department.

“Jarod?” she called, gently shaking him after coming around to the back door. Then, when there was no response, not-so-gently shaking him. “C’mon, Jarod. Jarod, wake — wake up. Help! I need some help over here!” She shouted this last in the direction of the automatic doors leading to emergency intake. “Someone, help! I need help with my — help!”

Two paramedics fresh off a patient delivery jogged over with a wheeled stretcher. They didn’t blink at the blood in the backseat, simply loaded Jarod onto the stretcher and bustled him off. Miss Parker leaned back against the car and watched Jarod disappear around a corner, thronged by emergency personnel. There was a nurse at her shoulder, barraging Miss Parker with questions, but to Miss Parker he sounded a thousand miles away.

For the first time since Jarod’s escape, she was letting him out of her sight willingly. She had better not get too comfortable with the feeling. It couldn’t happen again.



“Miss, I need some kind of identification.”

The nurse at the emergency department’s reception desk was down to the penultimate straw on the camel’s back. In her defence, there were two discrete screaming kids harmonizing in the waiting room at the moment. To make matters worse, this woman who’d come in with the GSW John Doe was stonewalling her.

Miss Parker blinked at the nurse. She’d been functioning at maximum adrenaline for a good hour and a half and was now running on fumes. She straightened in her chair, a cheap plastic thing which rubbed runs into her stockings at the back of her legs. Identification. The nurse wanted to know her name. If she gave her name… now, how would it go? The Centre would find out. The name would show up on Broots’s radar, and knowing her luck, it would get back to Mr Lyle. Lyle would blunder into the situation with all the subtlety of a sawed-off shotgun and would try to steal the Jarod collar out from under her. She couldn’t hand over any identification.

“Don’t have it,” she said, words slightly slurred.

“None at all?” The nurse’s expression could be described as ‘politely incredulous’.

Miss Parker had a light bulb moment.

“Look, we were mugged,” she snapped. Indignation came easily. “We didn’t have much on us, and it pissed the guy off. He took my wallet and my phone.” She made a mental note to make sure her phone was turned off or silenced, so it wouldn’t ring later and give the game away. “Then he —”

“Don’t worry about the rest of the incident, you can tell the officer later,” said the nurse. Every word was clipped with chronic impatience. “Can I get a name, at least?”

“Officer?” Miss Parker echoed.

“Yes, officer. We have police on the facilities for cases like these, where the injury appears to have resulted from an act of violence. That is, a crime. He’ll go over the details with you. Now please, miss, a name?”

“Jamison,” Miss Parker blurted, distracted by the idea of having to deal with yet more questions, this time from a cop. The name came automatically to mind. It had been her mother’s, before she met Daddy.

The nurse raised her fingers, poised to type.

“Jamison. J-A-M-I-S-O-N? Good, thank you. Is that your name or the patient’s name?”

“Mine,” said Miss Parker.

“First name?”

“Ma—” Her real name in combination with her mother’s maiden name could still send up red flags at the Centre. She changed tack mid-word. “Margot.”

“Thanks, Margot. We’ll get back to your details later. What is the patient’s name?”

The name ‘Jarod’ would summon Centre sweeper teams even more effectively than Miss Parker’s own name. She scanned her recent memories for inspiration and landed on a recent conversation with Sydney about his twin brother.

“It’s, ah. His name is Jake.”

The nurse caught the stammer and frowned.

“Jake…?”

She couldn’t appear to hesitate, so she gave the first name that came to mind.

“Parker.” Miss Parker grimaced, internally cursing herself. The nurse didn’t seem to notice. She tapped away at her keyboard.

“Jake Parker, great. What’s your relationship to Jake, Ms. Jamison?”

‘His perennially unsuccessful kidnapper’ wouldn’t open any doors, she knew. She’d have to be family to have access to Jarod while he recovered.

“I’m his wife. I kept my name.”

The nurse gave her a tight-lipped smile and slid a form across the desk to Miss Parker. “You can fill out this form on behalf of your husband. This mugger, I suppose they got Jake’s wallet too?”

Miss Parker nodded.

“And I suppose you wouldn’t happen to know Jake’s insurance information off the top of your head?”

Miss Parker shook her head. “I can get the information from his employer. It’s after hours right now, though. They’re closed for the weekend.”

“Understandable. You’ll need to get that information to us as soon as you’re able.”

The Centre would agree to cover Jarod’s medical expenses, no question. They had money coming out of their ears, and to boot, they had a vested interest in making sure their lab rat remained alive. This did, of course, put a very concrete deadline on her capacity to avoid reporting back to the home office. She wanted to delay that eventuality as much as possible. The less time Lyle had to swoop in and spoil things, the better.

Some time later, she was rescued from her front-row seat to a performance of Infant Distress in A Minor by a police officer. The officer handed her a cup of coffee (gratis, yet revolting), introduced himself as Sgt. Hobbes, and requested her statement. Miss Parker tried to keep the story light on details, and as close to the truth as possible. Fewer details meant less potential to accidentally contradict herself later.

“Jake and I were out on a walk together when we heard a noise coming from the parking garage under AdeptMax Industries.” She gave the address to a building two miles west of Lorefice’s last resting place, which Hobbes dutifully copied down. “It sounded like it could be someone in pain, and Jake likes to try to be a good Samaritan, so we decided to have a look. We didn’t see anybody at first, but then a man came out from behind a car, and —”

“What did he look like?”

“I was getting to that, keep your hair on.” She had a choice to make here. She could invent someone. There was a lot of potential there for forgetting or confusing details later on, which could lead to trouble in the time it took the sergeant to flip between one page of his notebook and the next. Or she could describe someone specific. She could pick an acquaintance at random, paint a word picture by memory. Or — “He was about six foot two, dark curly hair, thick eyebrows. Looked like he worked out a lot.”

Had a hole in his head. Two, in fact, her mind supplied.

The thing about describing Lorefice as the mugger was, it had potential to turn out either very convenient or very inconvenient. Bullet point A, Jarod likely had Lorefice’s genetic material all over him. And, bullet point B, what with Lorefice’s comfort with firearms it seemed like a fair bet that the man was in the criminal database. So, it probably wouldn’t hurt for Jarod to have an established reason for having Lorefice’s DNA on him, if only to keep the cops out of their hair for a couple extra hours. QED.

It also created a link between the two of them and a dead body which might not have otherwise existed. You take the bad with the good.

“Caucasian, or…?”

“White guy, yeah.”

“And the car?”

“Pontiac. Grey, I think.” It had been a desaturated blue colour, but she didn’t need to leave him all the bread crumbs. Grey Pontiac, she repeated to herself. AdeptMax Industries. Jake Parker, Margot Jamison. So much for ‘light on details’, her exhaustion must be spurring her to run her mouth. She hoped like hell she could keep all the fudged details straight.

“Thanks, this is great. Then what happened?”

“He had a gun, a pistol I think. He asked for all our valuables, but we were just on a walk, we hadn’t brought much. We gave him what we had, our wallets and my cellphone. He seemed frustrated, and he started waving the gun around more, at Jake and then at me. Jake tried to get between me and the gun, and the guy shot him.” It wasn’t hard to act as though she was still shaken from seeing her ‘husband’ shot by a mugger. She simply had to collapse a few barriers in her mind and the memory made her voice shake. “I think he panicked, he must have thought that Jar — that Jake wanted to attack him. He shot him twice, in the leg and the chest.”

Miss Parker replayed the true incident in her head — Jarod spotting her across the lobby, the gun shots echoing down the hallway, Jarod staggering sideways into shattered glass and sliding into a heap on the floor. Miss Parker’s fingers stopping up the hole in Jarod’s chest, Jarod’s heartbeat hammering erratically under her hand.

For a jarring, impotent moment, she’d thought Jarod was going to die. While the barriers were down, she could admit the idea had been terrifying. Why it had been terrifying, she didn’t care to think about. What would the Centre have done if she’d let Jarod die in front of her? Knowing the Centre they’d probably have ordered the body retrieved. Dead or alive, Jarod was important. A shudder ran across her shoulders and up to the nape of her neck.

Sergeant Hobbes looked up from his notes, having noted the break in her story.

“Nearly there, Ms. Jamison. What happened next?”

Miss Parker blinked rapidly to shake herself from the flashback.

“Once he’d shot Jake, the mugger looked scared,” she continued. “He took off in his car. I didn’t see the plate, before you ask. There wasn’t anyone around, but I’d parked the car not too far away so I ran to get it. And then I brought Jake here.”

She let out a shaky breath.

“Is that enough? I’m exhausted. I need to see my husband.”

“Almost. When —” He caught the full force of Miss Parker’s tired glare and trailed off. “You know what, it can wait. Don’t leave the premises without informing me or another on-site officer. I hope your husband pulls through, Ms. Jamison.”

But when Miss Parker asked after Jarod at the intake desk, she was rebuffed.

“He’s in surgery, ma’am. We’ll let you know.”

Miss Parker ducked into a single-occupancy washroom and pulled out her phone. If she hadn’t silenced it, it would have been ringing off the hook. Broots had left over a dozen messages, Syd a mere two. Miss Parker pulled up the most recent one from Broots.

“Miss Parker!” said Broots’s tinny voice. “I wish you’d pick up your phone. That is, I hope you’re OK, and if you’re OK, I wish you’d pick up your phone. Mr Lyle worked out that I know where you went, and he’s been hounding me non-stop. He also tracked down the linguist we asked to figure out the surname, but of course he doesn’t know it’s — he doesn’t know which we identified as the most likely.” Miss Parker spared a moment of gratitude for Broots’s latent paranoia. She wouldn’t put it past her brother to pull a recording of this call. If Broots hadn’t self-censored, Lyle would have gained the name Lorefice, which was sure to pop up in a police report sooner or later.

“And he doesn’t know the first name’s Marco,” Broots continued. Miss Parker winced. Never mind. She took back every compliment she’d ever paid Broots. “So, uh, you’ve still got your head start. Lyle’s threatening to send me to a T-board, though. Really wouldn’t mind some help keeping him off my back. Anyway. Call me back! Buh-bye. Why did I say buh-b—”

Miss Parker shut the phone off and stuffed it into her bag, alongside her firearm. She shouldn’t worry. Broots might be an origami bird under pressure but he was loyal. He wouldn’t blab, not from a brute force approach. Maybe Brigitte could have pulled it out of him, but she was long gone.

When Miss Parker let herself out of the washroom, she caught the intake nurse’s eye across the waiting room. The nurse frowned and gave her a small shake of the head. Miss Parker looked over to the double doors through which Jarod had been pushed on a wheeled stretcher. He’d be all right. Even in her head, she didn’t pose it as a question. It was Jarod. He’d be fine.

In her mind’s eye, she saw Jarod sprawled in the back seat of the rental car, red pooling under him and dripping off the foil blanket onto the floor.

He’d be fine.

The waiting room was quieter, and Miss Parker realized after a moment that the two screaming children had left. Grateful for a small morsel of peace, she sank into a grubby chair and closed her eyes.



When Miss Parker opened her eyes again, it felt like it had been five minutes. Judging by the reddening skyline outside, however, she’d slept straight through ‘til dusk. She straightened in her seat and immediately felt the compounded aches and twinges coming back to bite her in the ass for sleeping in a deeply unergonomic hospital waiting room chair. She groaned aloud.

“Jamison! Margot Jamison!”

Miss Parker looked around to see what had woken her up. The intake nurse wasn’t at her desk. The waiting room had emptied out some. Miss Parker counted two more people who were trying to catch some shut-eye while waiting for their turn to see a doctor.

“Jamison!”

Damn, where was this Jamison woman? Holding everything up for everybody else, how rude could you get?

Wait.

The events of the day rushed back to Miss Parker. Tailing a sandwich artist to an empty office building. Jarod’s lung shredded by a bullet. Jarod losing consciousness in the backseat of her rental sedan. The police interrogation. Margot Jamison. She rose from her chair.

“I’m Ms. Jamison,” she said.

“I know,” the intake nurse snapped. She stood not two yards away, arms akimbo, looking very much like she’d like to give Miss Parker detention and have her write lines. “I’ve called for you six times now. I don’t have time to come out from behind the desk to fetch patients and family members.”

“Got it, fine. Won’t happen again,” said Miss Parker with sarcastic humility. “Is there news?”

The nurse deflated slightly. “Yes. Your husband is going to be OK.” She tried for a reassuring smile; Miss Parker tried to return it with a reassured smile. They both gave the impression they were acting out a scene in a community theatre production. “The procedure was a success. He is healing, and will need a lot of rest, but you can see him. There was blood in his chest cavity, and it will take time to drain. The doctor will tell you more when she meets with you.”

And she gave Miss Parker directions to Jarod’s hospital room.

Jarod was going to be OK — as she knew he would be. Miss Parker closed her eyes for a moment. It wasn’t unreasonable to be relieved. This would make her job easier.



It was a private room, which seemed a lucky break.

(Miss Parker would later discover that in fact this hospital had a policy of putting GSW survivors in private rooms, to better cooperate with Philadelphia PD presence. For now, though, it seemed like a real stroke of luck.)

She stepped into the room and her eyes fell on Jarod. He was sleeping. She didn’t think she’d ever seen him asleep before, not even on any of the DSAs Sydney had recovered from Jarod since the initial escape from the Centre. The old cliché was that being asleep made a person look younger, and in a way that was true here as well. Or, more accurately, he looked… uncomplicated. Sweet, even. His sleeping expression reminded her of the snippets of guileless enthusiasm she’d seen in him in the early days post-escape.

As if in response to her thoughts, Jarod’s brow furrowed.

“Won’t,” he mumbled. “I won’t. Let me go, I won’t.”

He hadn’t opened his eyes. Miss Parker froze and strained to pick up his mumbled words, wondering what he could be dreaming about.

His voice grew louder. “Stop! Don’t… hm. I’ll.” He broke off for the span of several seconds, like someone had pressed pause on his nightmare. Then it started up again. “I’ll do it. Leave… alone. Stop!”

His body pitched violently to one side, towards Miss Parker, such that he was inches from sliding off the mattress. For the first time, Miss Parker noticed a thin tube tucked under his hospital gown, leading away to an opaque cylinder which reminded her of some sort of antique vacuum cleaner. The contents of the tube were dark red, and the plastic had twisted during Jarod’s nightmare. Miss Parker thought back to what the nurse had said — Jarod would have to have blood drained from his chest. The suction had been cut off, however, when he’d moved.

Miss Parker stepped close and shook Jarod by the shoulder. He jolted awake with a gasp.

“Miss Parker! What —”

He stared around at his surroundings. His gaze paused on the door and on the window, lingering long enough to note the lack of an obvious opening mechanism on the latter. Always looking for a way out.

“You were dreaming,” said Miss Parker.

Jarod’s eyes snapped back to look at her. This time, there was no eruption of irrational fear, as there had been back at the scene of Lorefice’s death. She remembered his panic-stricken look, scrambling backwards away from her, reduced to prey instincts by terror. What had that been about? Now, he only looked cautious.

After a pause, he nodded warily.

“Nightmare.”

“Sounded like a bad one.” She kept her tone light as she stepped around the bed and straightened out the drainage tubing as best she could. Jarod watched as she did so.

“Still in it,” he said bitterly. He grabbed a fistful of blankets and pushed them off his wounded leg. “Or the prologue to it, at least. In the dream I was back at the Centre, hanging out with your brother. I guess I have that to look forward to. I have to admit, I’m surprised to wake up here, and not in Blue Cove.”

Miss Parker pulled a chair up to the side of the bed and sat down. It was more comfortable than the chairs in the waiting room, but not by much.

“You said you wouldn’t make it to Delaware,” she said simply. “You’re the one with medical experience on your resume, I thought I’d take your word on that. Anyway, I’m not in a rush. You’re not going anywhere like that.”

Jarod’s facial expression smoothed out, all expression vanishing. He stared at his leg. There wasn’t anything to see — it was wrapped in layers upon layers of dressing and gauze — but he seemed to be boring through to it with his blank gaze.

“I’m not going anywhere like this,” he repeated. “That’s, yeah. I’m not. I can’t escape.”

Miss Parker opened her mouth to respond, but found she was too disconcerted to speak. Jarod was nothing if not certain in his capacity to beat the odds, at least when it came to going up against the Centre. Never in all the time she’d known him had he ever sounded so defeated. It was wrong, that’s what it was. Jarod shouldn’t sound defeated. She almost had the vaguest urge to say something encouraging. Almost.

“No,” she said, because she could think of nothing else to say. “Not today.”

“Not today, and —” Jarod broke off, and Miss Parker wondered with horror if there was some emotion clogging his throat. Instead, he grabbed at his thigh and groaned. Miss Parker got to her feet.

“I’ll get a doctor,” she said automatically, business-like, turning to the door. Jarod gestured for her stop. She hovered in between.

“No,” he said, muffled by gritted teeth. “It’s OK. It hurts, but it’s fine.”

“Oh, Christ. Machismo, Jarod? Really?” said Miss Parker. “I'm not a doctor but I’m pretty sure going on pain meds after being shot, twice, is normal and expected. I'm getting a doctor.” But she didn't leave.

Jarod closed his eyes, apparently to ride out the pain. He jerked his head to the door.

“Their anesthesia drugs are too strong,” he said. “I’ve been through withdrawal before, it was a similar dependency mechanism. No interest in doing it again.”

Withdrawal? Miss Parker stared incredulously for a moment before a neuron kicked a memory into gear. The synthetic narcotics the Centre had tried out on him, twenty-odd years ago. Teen-aged Jarod sweating through his blankets and vibrating out of his skin while a stranger held him through it. She couldn’t blame him not wanting to repeat the experience, no matter how long ago it had been. She sat back down.

“Why did he shoot you, anyway? How’d you piss him off?”

Jarod’s eyes opened again, and he shot her a weak glare.

“Lorefice was a kind of middle-management figure in a protection racket. Recently promoted and paranoid about it. I joined the group at an uncomfortable time, Lorefice was almost positive there was a mole, or an undercover cop or that someone was gunning for his new position. Then some lady shows up at his day job asking about his new hire, who’s a person of interest in a case she’s working on. She has a picture of me, looking tidy and upstanding and not at all like a rough-around-the-edges prospective racketeer.”

He watched calmly as realization spread across Miss Parker’s face.

“Then, of course, he was certain there was a mole or an undercover cop in his operation, and just as certain it was me. So he showed up to our next meeting armed.”

She’d gotten Jarod shot. Twice. This was her fault. For one wild moment, Miss Parker considered apologizing. Then her face hardened.

“One of the risks of your vocation, Jarod,” she said, only barely above a whisper. If she spoke any louder, the wobble in her voice would be audible. “Or former vocation, as of now. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.”

Jarod turned away from her and stared at the ceiling.

“How did you find me so fast this time?” he asked the ceiling.

Miss Parker’s shoulders were so tense her shoulder blades were making dents in the fabric of the chair’s backrest. She forced them to relax.

“You left some notes in a pants pocket in the clothes dryer before you left Cedar Rapids.”

Jarod chuckled ruefully.

“One mistake,” he said. “I guess it only ever had to take one stupid mistake.”

They both fell silent for a long moment, until Miss Parker realized Jarod’s breathing had shifted to a long, deep rhythm. He’d fallen asleep again.



Sometime during the night, Miss Parker woke for the second time in twelve hours to a tremendous crick in the neck. She didn’t have to wonder what had woken her this time: Jarod was groaning in his sleep. Sweat dampened his hair and one hand unconsciously tried to creep under the gauze and dressing on his chest. Miss Parker reached over and pulled his hand away from the wound. They couldn’t be held up by complications with his recovery, she told herself.

She couldn’t bear to fall asleep sitting in a chair again, nor could she afford to let Jarod out of her sight. In the closet opposite the washroom, she found extra pillows and a scratchy blanket. A love-seat next to the window served as her bed, once she’d pushed it between Jarod’s bed and the door — he’d have to limp around her if he wanted to try to escape. Once she’d made herself halfway-comfortable, she glanced over to check on Jarod. He no longer looked uncomplicated; his features were pinched and pained. The heel of his hand — the one she’d pulled away from his chest — pushed against his upper thigh, as if trying to push the pain farther away from himself; his fingers were white-knuckled, digging into the flesh.

She pulled his hand away, but within seconds it drifted towards the wound again. On the third attempt, she held on, gripping Jarod’s hand tight in her own. After some brief resistance, Jarod’s hand relaxed in hers. Miss Parker fell back on her stacked pillows and drifted back to sleep.

And held on ‘til morning.





Chapter End Notes:

Very cool to see eyeballs on TP fics in 2021! Would love to hear from you, I value feedback. Kindly forgive any inaccuracies about the US heallthcare system, I'm not American.






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