Finding The Edge. Debra Webb
she ducked under his desk, squeezed as far beneath it as she could, folding her knees up to her chin and holding herself tight and small.
A soft swoosh of air warned the door of the administrator’s office had opened.
She held her breath.
The intruder—maybe Pierce, maybe a cop—moved around the room. She had no intention of coming out of hiding until she knew for certain. The sound of books sliding across shelves and frames banging against the wall clarified that the intruder was neither Pierce nor a cop. Footfalls moved closer to her position. She needed to breathe. She pressed her face to her knees and dared to draw in a small breath. Black leather shoes and gray trousers appeared behind the desk. Her eyes widened with the dread spreading inside her.
Definitely male.
The man dropped into the leather executive chair and reached for the middle drawer of the desk. His rifling through the drawer contents gave her the opportunity to breathe again. He moved on to the next drawer, the one on his right. More of that rummaging. Then he reached lower, for the final drawer on that side. She prayed he wouldn’t bend down any lower because he would certainly see her.
She held her breath again. He shifted to access the drawers on the other side, and his foot came within mere centimeters of her hip. He searched through the three remaining drawers. Then he stood. Sharp movement across the blotter pad told her he was writing something. Finally, he moved away from the desk.
The door opened and then closed.
Eva counted to thirty before she dared to move. She scooted from under the desk and scanned the room. She was alone. Thank God. The books and framed awards and photos on the once neatly arranged shelves lay scattered about. Her gaze instinctively dropped to the desk.
I know what you did.
The words were scrawled on the clean expanse of white blotter paper. For ten or more seconds she couldn’t move. She should go...get out of this office. Whatever that—she stared at the note—was about, she didn’t want to get dragged into it. The men who had stormed the ER had all been wearing jeans or cargo pants, not dress trousers and certainly not leather loafers. Just go!
At the door, she eased it open and checked the administrator’s private lobby. Clear. She’d almost made it out of the secretary’s office when she heard hurried footfalls in the corridor. Renewed panic roared through her veins.
With nowhere else to go, she ducked under the secretary’s desk.
The footfalls moved across the carpeted floor. She heard the sound of Pierce’s office door opening. The man was popular tonight. Had the guy who’d written the note forgotten something?
A soft curse came from the general direction of Pierce’s office.
Eva hoped SWAT was ready to storm the place. She would hate to survive a bunch of crazed thugs or gangbangers or whatever they were and be murdered by a man wearing dress trousers and black leather shoes.
“Eva!”
For a moment she couldn’t breathe.
“Eva!”
Dr. Pierce. She scrambled out from under the desk. “Yes, sir. I’m here.”
Fury or outrage—something on that order—colored his face. “The police are here. They’ll need your statement.”
Thank God. “Is everyone okay? The gunmen have been contained?”
He nodded, then frowned. “I thought you were going to hide in my office.”
She shrugged and in that instant something about the expression on his face made her decide to keep what happened in his office to herself. “I heard someone coming. I freaked and hid under the secretary’s desk.”
“Someone came in here?”
He had to know someone had. He couldn’t have missed the disarray in his office or the note on his desk.
She nodded. “I couldn’t see what was happening, but I definitely heard footsteps and the door to your office opening and closing.”
“You didn’t get a look at who it was?”
She shook her head. Was that suspicion she heard in his voice?
When he continued to stare at her without saying more, she offered, “Is everything okay?”
“Yes.” He smiled, rearranging his face into the amiable expression he usually wore. “It is now. Come with me. We should get this police business squared away so we can return to the business of healing the sick.”
The walk back to the emergency department was the longest of her life. She could feel his tension in every step he took. She wanted to ask him again if everything was okay but she didn’t dare stir his suspicions.
Right now all she wanted was for this night to be over.
Magnificent Mile Tuesday, May 8, 2:15 p.m.
Eva hurried up the sidewalk. She glanced over her shoulder repeatedly, checked the street over and over. She hated that her behavior no doubt looked entirely paranoid, but the truth was paranoia had been her constant companion for better than forty-eight hours. Since she received the first message.
Two men had swerved to the curb on her street as she walked home from the market on Saturday afternoon. She might have kept walking except the one hanging out the passenger window called her name.
Eva! Eva Bowman! He’s coming for you, la perra. You killed his hermano menor.
The man who’d tried to rape her—the one who’d fractured his skull in that damned bathroom and then died—was the younger brother of one of Chicago’s most notorious gang leaders.
Just her luck.
Eva walked faster. She hadn’t meant to kill anyone. She’d been fighting for her life. He’d fallen...his death was an accident. An accident that wouldn’t have happened had he not been trying to rape her.
The detectives on the scene had tried to make her feel better by telling her that Diego Robles—that was the dead man’s name, Diego Robles—and his gang of nearly a dozen thugs had murdered six men and two women on Friday before overtaking the ER where she worked.
Except it hadn’t made her feel better. Robles had been nineteen years old. Nineteen. He had an older brother, Miguel, who was thirty-five and the leader of the True Disciples, an extremely violent offshoot of the Latin Disciples. The brother had passed along his message to Eva on three occasions without ever leaving a single shred of evidence she could take to the police.
The first warning had come on Saturday afternoon via the two thugs in the car. Another had come when she walked out of the corner coffee shop near her apartment building on Sunday morning. Then, last night, another man had showed up at the ER asking for her. When she’d appeared at the registration desk, he’d waited until no one was looking and leaned forward to whisper for her ears only.
You will die this week.
With that he’d given her a nod and told her to enjoy her night.
She’d reported all three incidents to the police and all they could do was tell her to be careful. No one had touched her or damaged her property. She had no proof of the threats other than her word. But last night when she’d been too afraid to go to her car alone and then too terrified to go to her own apartment, she’d understood she had to do something. She worried the only evidence to back up her fears would come in the form of someone finding her body after it was too late.
Lena had demanded, to no avail, protection from the police for Eva. Kim Levy, her friend and another nurse at the Edge, had urged her to speak to Dr. Pierce. Kim had been in the ER on Friday night. She understood