Page 108 of Booked for Murder

Bradley sighed. “I’ve been informed I require therapy to address my issues with monitoring equipment when the equipment happens to be attached to you.”

“I need therapy to address my panic regarding the damned beeps associated with equipment attached to me, too. Maybe we could go together. That’d make it a little less awful. I’m not sure how they’ll give me therapy, though. I only panic while I’m semi-conscious. I’m okay once I figure out what I’m hearing. I don’t know what your problem is. If the beeping stops, that’s when you should worry. Or the beeping gets particularly shrill, or you hear that flat-line beep. That beep is not a good beep.”

“Can we not discuss the beeps?” he asked in a strained voice.

I pointed at my foot. “I’ve been told it’s not going to be amputated yet.”

Everyone in the room sighed.

“What?” I demanded. “It’s important. I’ve kept it around this long, and I’ll be pretty miffed if I lose it because of a damned bullet. Of all the places to hit, why the hell did it have to hit my poor foot? Hasn’t it been through enough?”

My mother scowled and stared at the floor, my father heaved a sigh, and the Hampton family exchanged glances.

“That reaction is not filling me with confidence,” I mumbled.

“Your foot is perfectly safe,” Bradley’s father said, gesturing to my cast. “We’re just at a loss about the shooter. There’s no one theory we can all agree on, although we’re mostly in agreement they have zero skill with a firearm.”

I could think of a few reasons the shooter might want to inflict collateral damage, but after I considered what had happened, I wondered. “It could have been a botch. They used the usual method.”

“You remember what happened?” Bradley asked.

“I remember. The mender closed the entry hole in the head shot but left the heart shot open. The illusionist botched it, too. It’s like the shooter pulled the trigger a little too early, the illusionist wasn’t ready and scrambled to do the job as a result. I think there is an exsanguinator working with the outfit, too, and he’s not all that skilled. He couldn’t clean everything up, especially when the shooter hit others and he had to contend with multiple blood sources.”

“That matched the recordings we’ve seen,” Bradley’s mother said. “We were worried about how much you remembered. You were really close when the shooting happened.”

“Front-row seat close, yeah. It wasn’t a good moment. But the lady with the torn aorta got lucky Senator Maybelle was her blood type, otherwise, she would have died. I wasn’t her blood type, and I can’t make someone’s body accept an incompatible blood type in that sort of situation. There are limits to what I can do. If they hadn’t matched, she would have died, too. Is she recovering all right?”

“She’s doing great. They’ll be releasing her soon, as the menders couldn’t afford to leave that to heal naturally, so they did a lot of restorative work. She’s going to recover first, although she’ll have to do some physical therapy to rebuild her strength. They don’t want her to be very active for a few weeks just in case. You’ll recover last, as you can’t seem to keep from injuring your foot.”

I wrinkled my nose and stared at the offensive cast, which would keep me contained until Dr. Mansfield cut it open again and had her way with my foot again. “How is Mickey doing? If you have videos, you have videos containing a great deal of blood.”

Bradley snickered before clearing his throat. “Sorry. Better than expected, really. It turns out if you fascinate him enough with magic, the presence of blood can become a more academic presence. The last I checked, Beatrice had to tear him away from the recordings because he absolutely cannot figure out how you managed to treat three people at the same time. Four if you count yourself. He wasn’t sure if you did anything to yourself from the video.”

“I paid my foot token attention before getting to the serious work, because bleeding to death means I can’t stop others from bleeding to death. Were you able to learn anything important?”

Bradley shook his head. “Not anything substantial. The government is all over this because it’s the first time there were other injuries, so they’re viewing it as a terrorist attack rather than solely an assassination. There are some benefits to this situation, however.”

“There are? What benefits?”

“Mickey has been cleared because he can’t be at two places at the same time. When the shooting occurred, he was at a police station answering questions. The ability to use him as a scapegoat has been closed in other ways, too, as he has verifiable alibis for most of the other killings. The recordings make it pretty clear you were stunned when the shooting happened, and most experts have agreed you wouldn’t have been capable of working your magic until after the other exsanguinator finished their work. You’re also far more skilled with exsanguination, and just about everyone agreed it’s almost impossible for someone to go from utterly sloppy to as refined as you are with your magic. Now, there has been a lot of scrutiny over your methods, but that’s of the academic sort, especially from members of the medical field.” According to Bradley’s tone, the attention focused on me annoyed him. “I was on the other side of the park when the shooting happened. The gunfire made most people panic. I was one of the few who was trying to go towards the sound rather than away from it, so it took me a while to get to you. Then the police wouldn’t let me get close, not until I called Mom for the paperwork and pulled some strings with some cop friends.”

“You’ve been busy.”

“The doctor kicked me out of the hospital because of the damned beeps,” he complained.

“You have issues,” I informed him. “What’s next?”

“You get discharged from the hospital, we review the tapes as a group, and figure out what’s next. Frankly, we’re stuck. Why kill her then, before her speech? Why not shoot after everyone could witness it?”

“We have no idea,” Bradley’s father replied. “That’s part of the problem. We just have no idea why. For now, the only thing you need to worry about is getting better. It’s not like we can do anything anyway. The investigators have the site locked down tighter than Fort Knox, and the last thing we need is to draw additional attention to ourselves. We have no choice but to wait.”

“I’ll wait, but you better be coming by with breakfast, lunch, or dinner, else the hospital food might kill me. I learned my lesson this morning. Bring me orange chicken.”

“You can’t eat just orange chicken,” Bradley’s mother scolded.

“Why not?”

“It’s not healthy.”