A Thin Disguise by Catherine Bybee
CHAPTER SEVEN
The drop ceiling tiles of the hallway were broken up by long fluorescent lights in various stages of function.
Olivia had a vague memory of being wheeled down this path before. A hospital staff member pushed the gurney while Rick, a bodyguard, walked alongside them.
She felt like an observer. One with limited space in her brain to carry any information she’d been given.
“So you get paid to sit in a chair?” the staff member asked Rick as they waited for an elevator to open.
“You could say that.”
The door dinged, and once again Olivia was in motion.
Each bump shot pain up her side and had her closing her eyes to try and manage the discomfort. She’d started saying no to the pain medications in an effort to recognize herself in the mirror.
When someone wanted to join them on the short ride down to radiology, Rick lifted his hand. “Mind taking the next one?” he asked.
Without question, the person waiting backed up as the doors closed.
“Do people always listen to you?” Olivia asked.
“Not my wife,” he said with a smile.
“Good to know.”
The lower levels of the hospital were a series of catacombs and relatively deserted.
The hospital employee parked the gurney outside a closed radiology door and disappeared inside, leaving Rick and Olivia alone.
Rick stood taller as a man walked toward them.
“By any chance do you know which way I need to go to find the cafeteria?” the stranger asked Rick and glanced around him to Olivia.
She blinked a few times.
Rick positioned himself in front of her and pointed in the direction they’d just come. “There is a map by the elevators just around the corner,” he told him.
The tall stranger looked at Rick briefly, then at her again. “Thanks.”
Olivia tried to smile, despite the pounding in her head.
As the man walked away, Rick moved to keep himself between her and the stranger.
“He didn’t look like he wanted to hurt me,” she offered.
“The more innocent they look, the more dangerous they are,” Rick said.
Olivia started to comment, but the hospital employee opened the door to the CAT scan room and moved her inside.
“What do we have?” Neil sat in his hotel room, Sasha at his side. Isaac and Lars were on point monitoring Marie Nickerson’s transfer. Once the woman was in the air, her whereabouts were between her and the federal marshals involved in hiding her in plain sight. Neil had to trust the witness protection program, even if it cut at him to do so.
Rick and AJ, two other members of his team, were assigned to Olivia.
Cooper, Claire, and Jax were back in LA doing the legwork.
Or hacking, as it stood.
The hotel suite had duffel bags tossed on the floor and three computers set up on a conference table.
Sasha sat at one, Neil at another.
Claire was on speaker so they could both hear.
“Olivia knows how to cover her tracks,” Claire stated. “She spoofed someone’s phone in North Dakota, making it almost impossible to locate where she was making her calls from. I spent some time digging and found a ping from her phone to the cell tower at the Wynn when she called you the night of the shooting. The next ping was when she called you again, this time the call bounced around. But we have a general area when you triangulate where she was walking when she was shot and the most likely places she would feel safe to stay—”
“All I want is an address.” Neil liked Claire’s skills, but didn’t need a detailed dossier of how she managed to obtain it.
“I have a block. There are three small hotels, not the kind that have cameras in every corner. My guess is the management doesn’t want to know what goes on there.”
“What about city cameras?” Sasha asked.
Jax’s voice carried over the line. “I’m working on it. Going back from when the trial began. The problem is I don’t know what I’m looking for. Was she wearing a wig, a costume? Dressed as a man? I’m going with the description from the night at the Wynn and the blonde wig.”
Neil looked over his computer screen at Sasha.
They needed to narrow this down, find out where Olivia had been staying, and empty it out before her bill came due and someone went into the room and found Olivia’s belongings. Sasha insisted the woman wouldn’t leave anything incriminating where others would find it, but that didn’t mean her fake IDs wouldn’t be found and eventually handed over to the feds.
That wouldn’t bode well for anyone.
“Give me the address you have,” Sasha told them. She jotted it down and stood.
“Don’t go in alone,” Neil instructed her.
The look on her face said she’d do what she damn well pleased if it suited her.
She grabbed her bag and walked out of the room.
Neil wanted to growl. “Where do we stand with medical and location?” he asked the team instead.
“Found a place in Colorado just outside of Durango. Remote enough to go unnoticed, but close to a hospital if the need arrives. We have a nurse, retired army. Spent some time living in tents in the Middle East in the nineties. Looking forward to combat pay.”
Sounded right up Neil’s alley for the team.
“Soon as Lars and Isaac are free of their assignment, I’ll dispatch them to Colorado. Claire, keep digging in that phone.”
“Will do. But, Neil?”
“Yeah?”
“What are the chances of Olivia remembering who she is and just bailing?”
“She’ll bolt the second she remembers. But if we can get her someplace safe, maybe she’ll give herself some time to heal and regroup.”
“And if she doesn’t recover her memory?” Cooper asked.
“That’s unlikely.” Neil just hoped it was later rather than sooner.
“Look who’s sitting up and eating.”
Leo had shown his ID to Neil’s man sitting in the chair outside Olivia’s room before walking in.
Her face had color, and someone had brushed her hair into a sweeping ponytail that trailed down one shoulder.
She put her fork down and lifted a napkin to her lips while she finished chewing. “I’m sure I’ve had better. I think.”
Leo had already gotten the report that her memory had yet to resurface. So he took her words as the joke they were meant to be.
“May I?” he asked, pointing to the chair beside her bed.
When the woman smiled, a small amount of light he hadn’t seen before reached her eyes. “Thank you for asking. Yes, please.”
He supposed her experience in the hospital was a steady stream of people doing without asking day in and day out. “You look better.”
“Hurts like a horse kicked me across an arena. But clearing my head from the narcotics is helping.”
“How is saying no to painkillers helping?”
She tapped her head with an index finger. “Less fog.”
“And the pain?”
She shrugged. “It’s just pain.”
He peered at the side of the bed, saw the same drainage bag that had been there since she returned from surgery. Same IVs, probes, and things that squeezed her legs since she was lying in bed. Her saying It’s just pain was unexpected.
“Don’t let me keep you from eating.”
She smiled and pushed the overhead table away. “I was done anyway.”
Now he felt bad. It didn’t appear as if she’d eaten a third of what was on her plate.
“Your name is Leo, right?”
It was his turn to smile. “Yes.”
“You’re a federal agent.” Her face twisted as she said those words.
“I am.”
“Have you found the person who shot me?”
“We’re working on it.”
“I suppose that’s all I can ask. For all I know I deserved to get—”
“Whoa, back up. No. You were standing there minding your own business. You didn’t deserve any of this.” He waved a hand at the room.
She lowered her eyes to her lap.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
She brought her gaze to his. “Did you shoot me?”
“No,” he choked out.
“Then why are you sorry?”
Because it should be me in that bed.
“I’m sorry it happened. That you were hurt.”
She frowned. “That’s a waste of an apology.”
He laughed. “I thought women liked apologies.”
“Not me, apparently.” She gifted him another smile. “Did you tell me what we were talking about when this happened?”
He cleared his throat and sat up a little taller. “It was a warm night . . .”
“We spoke of the weather?”
He licked his lips . . . stalled. “I was trying to get your name.”
Her eyes narrowed as she looked down her pert nose. “You were flirting with me?”
Leo repositioned himself in the chair. “Ah . . . yes.”
Now her smile was forced back, as if she were trying not to grin. “And was I flirting back?”
“Well . . .” What the hell was he supposed to say to that? No, you were trying to walk away. In this case, honesty was likely not the best route. “You weren’t running away,” he told her. Which wasn’t a complete lie.
“I was busy getting shot.” This time she chuckled.
“You’re laughing about it.”
“I’m not happy I took a bullet . . . or at least I think I wouldn’t be happy about something like that. Who would want that?”
He didn’t have time to answer before she kept talking.
“I’m much more upset that I look in the mirror and don’t recognize myself. That’s quite a bitch, isn’t it?”
“I can’t imagine.”
She moved her shoulders and started to cough. Short bouts of breathing between each eruption.
“Should I get the nurse?” He moved closer to the bed.
Olivia reached for her side and attempted to take a deep breath and started to struggle.
Leo jumped up and stopped at the door. “I need a nurse.”
The man in the chair brushed past him and looked into the room.
Both of them stepped back when a nurse rushed in. Calm and collected, the nurse soothed the anxiety swimming in Olivia’s eyes. When she lifted the bedsheets to look at Olivia’s side, she pivoted and closed the curtain between them.
Only when Leo heard Olivia’s cough start to subside did he step completely out of the room and start to pace.
“Hey?” Neil’s man stood a little taller than Leo and spent more hours at the gym. But his smile was easy, and his eyes were kind. “You okay?”
“She shouldn’t be in there.”
“And the Dodgers should have won the World Series . . . and?”
Leo stared. “What’s your name?”
“Rick. Neil and I were in the service together.”
That made sense. The men were cut from the same physical cloth.
Leo stepped closer, lowered his voice. “Do you know her?”
Rick shook his head. “I overheard the doctors. They want to transfer her out of the ICU. I encouraged them to wait until tomorrow. It’s harder to get in here than the main floors.”
Leo didn’t like the sound of that.
“If all goes well, the chest tube comes out tomorrow, and within a day or so she’ll be ready to leave.”
Leo’s heart started to pound. “And go where? She doesn’t know her name.”
Rick’s voice was a whisper. “We have it covered.”
Of course they would.
Except she was a witness . . . or could be at any moment. “We’ll bring her into the protection program,” Leo told him, knowing that would be the next step. “My superiors will insist on it. At least until she regains her memory.”
Rick paused.
Leo looked at him.
“Do you want to keep her safe?”
“I’m the reason she’s in here. I fucked up. Approached Navi, pissed the man off . . .” He ran a hand through his hair.
“Then you’ll do, tell, lie, or whatever you need to in order to get your superiors to go along with our plan. She is not safe in a protection program, or more to the point, those protecting her are not safe with her there.”
Those words stopped Leo midstep. He leaned closer. “Mind explaining?”
Rick smiled, shook his head. “Talk to Neil.”
Leo turned away. His gaze moved to the closed curtain.
“I’ll make a deal with you . . . If you can’t fall asleep on your own, I give you enough to take the edge off so you can.” The nurse was negotiating the pain medication with Olivia.
“I’m fine.”
“Your vital signs say differently. Sleep is the best thing for you, and you can’t sleep if the pain is too intense.”
“I don’t want the fog.”
“Small amount . . . I promise. You’ll wake up in the morning feeling so much better.”
Silence made Leo wonder what was happening behind the curtain.
When the nurse left the room, she stopped long enough to mutter, “That’s one stubborn woman.”
Rick chuckled.
Leo walked in.
The coughing had taxed her. Those eyes lost some of their luster, her skin had paled.
“Better?” he asked when their eyes caught.
Her smile was fleeting and not convincing at all.
“Why not let the nurse give you something?”
She shook her head.
“Do it for me.”
“The guy I flirted with is asking for a favor?”
“I see the tired in your eyes, a little will help you sleep.” For a second he thought she was wavering. “You have a lot of people looking out for you here.”
That wavering drifted away. “Like the man outside. The guard.”
Leo looked over his shoulder at the empty doorway.
“The doctor told me I’d remember day-to-day things. Like driving a car or how to use a computer, just not the details like passwords or addresses . . . or who I am. And one thing I know is that man out there is here to either protect me or protect people from me. And since no one has said I’m in police custody, I’m going to assume the former. In which case, I know something . . . that I’ve obviously forgotten . . . and that information needs protection.”
Leo blinked several times. Holy shit.
“And I see by the expression on your face I’ve concluded correctly.”
Leo sunk into the chair at her side. “I have to add smart and beautiful to your list of attributes.”
“You’re flirting again . . .”
He lifted both hands in the air, felt heat in his cheeks. “Guilty. And inappropriate in light of everything.”
“It’s okay. Refreshing, actually. But for all I know, I’m married.” Her face rejected the thought. “If someone was missing me, they would have come looking by now, wouldn’t they?”
Leo thought of Neil and everyone involved with him, all working together for her at that moment. But how they couldn’t say a thing to her. Not yet. “You could have come to Vegas for a quick weekend.”
“Alone?”
“Maybe for work. And maybe you’re not due home for a few days?”
She chewed on that for a full minute. “Dr. Everett said I have dissociative amnesia. He thinks because of the shooting. That my mind can’t process the assault, and it’s protecting itself by hiding the memory and those around it.”
“Did the doctor say how long it would last?”
“Hours, days, weeks, months . . . He said my memory could come back quickly or in slow chunks. But sometimes people like me will never remember the events leading up to the shooting, or the shooting itself.”
Leo pulled in a deep breath. “You were facing the street. My back was to the shooter. You saw something, because you reached for me and told me to get down.” He nodded toward the door. “The security is for you. We don’t have an ID on the shooter, and there is always a possibility that the people involved will . . .”
“Want to eliminate an eyewitness.” As she said the words, a glaze settled over her eyes.
“I don’t want you to worry about that.”
“You don’t have control over my emotions or thoughts.” All humor was gone from her face.
Leo sighed. “We are going to protect you. Get you through this and make sure you’re safe.”
“Someone was shooting at you,” she concluded.
“Most likely,” he admitted.
“And I got in the way. That’s why you’re guarding me. A random person on the street in a shooting would be left on their own. But a federal agent . . .”
Very smart and beautiful.
“Why are you in Vegas?” she asked.
“A case.” Her silent stare prompted him to continue. “Somebody did some bad stuff and my partner and I were here for the trial.” And since the reason Leo was in Vegas was the same reason Olivia was in Vegas, he couldn’t help but wonder if the conversation would prompt a memory.
Instead, she had the same blank look on her face when someone asked her what her name was.
“Then you stop to get my name, and I got shot.” Her words were a string of emotionless noise. Monotone. Cold.
“I’m sorry.”
“Now who is the one with the limited memory? Your apology is futile.”
Maybe so, but he wanted to scream it until she heard it.
“I believe I’ve had about all the new knowledge I can take for one day,” she told him.
He took his cue to stand. “I’ll be back in the morning.”
She pressed a button on the bed and lowered her head.
Outside the room he stopped at Rick’s side. “I assume Neil is still at the hotel?”
Rick smiled. “I’ll tell him you’re on your way over.”
It was time to get more answers.