Page 51 of Lone Wolf

He withdrew quietly.

Down in the gift shop, he found a bottle of shea-butter lotion like the one Tyrell’s sister used back in the day and cut with water to make it last. On the ride up he shared the elevator with a bald teenage boy in a wheelchair. Evan held the door open, but the kid said, “I got it,” and rolled out angrily.

Back to Jayla’s room. She was still lying on her side, her rib cage slowly rising and falling. He weighed the bottle in his hand, thinking twice. What a useless fucking gesture, bringing lotion to a girl who’d just lost her sole parent.

Evan dropped the bottle into her duffel bag along with a burner phone and slipped out.

The chair by the nurses’ station was empty. He halted by the counter. “Where’s the cop?”

Chewing the end of a pencil with vigor, the nurse didn’t look up from her monitor. “Bathroom.”

Only one cop remained at the elevator and he was turned toward the wall, on a phone call, joking with someone in a manner Evan took to be flirtatious.

He went down to where he’d parked at a metered space a block away; he preferred to avoid parking lots with their choke points and controlled exits. Sitting behind the wheel of his F-150, he stared through the windshield. A few empty patrol cars remained parked near the ER.

The bad feeling started in his gut and wormed its way outward. The response was half-assed, security theater more than effective protection. LAPD wasn’t taking this as seriously as they needed to with a killer like the Wolf out there. He would’ve felt better if Jayla were in WITSEC. He trusted the Marshals across the board, especially when it came to hiding and protecting people.

But he couldn’t exactly call in a security upgrade. Nor could he kidnap Jayla to protect her without bringing on a storm of complications.

For a time he watched people stream out of the high-rise parking structure and into the hospital, limping or wheeling their broken way along, sipping coffee, consoling one another.

He considered various courses of action, disliking each more than the last.

Sometimes there were only bad options.

A decision had to be made, no matter how brutal.

He started up his rig, banked into the parking structure, and rode up to the empty fifth level. The south-facing perimeter looked out through open air onto the hospital. He found a spot across from Jayla’s room. After backing in, he opened one of the locked vaults in the bed of his truck and pulled out his Savage 110 Elite Precision Left Hand bolt-action.

Millions of Savage 110s had been purchased off the shelf, so if he ever left behind a spent cartridge casing, he didn’t have to worry as much about ballistic forensics. Chambered in 7.62x51 mm NATO, the sniper rifle was good for anything between seventy-five and one thousand meters. Tommy had configured it for a scope—a Leupold Mark 6 3–18x44 with the standard mil-dot reticle that Evan had been using long before it had become an FBI Hostage Response Team standard.

Bellying down in the back of his pickup, he found Jayla through the scope, in bed facing the window. Aside from the steel-cable railing beneath him, he felt like he was floating over the street.

Her eyes were open. A dark spot beneath her cheek showed where the pillow had absorbed her tears.

Putting his RoamZone on speaker, he called the hospital and asked to be put through to her room. When the phone rang, she popped up nervously and stared at it, unsure what to do. It rang and rang some more. Finally she picked it up.

“It’s me,” he said. “You can’t see me but I can see you through the window if you’d like to talk to me.”

Her gaze swung in his direction.

“When we’re done with this call, power down and throw away your cell phone so you can’t be tracked. I put a burner phone in your duffel bag with my number keyed into it. I won’t call you until it’s safe for you to go home.”

Wait? What?

“Please get beneath the bed. I’m going to put a bullet through the window. A viable assassination attempt will get the feds involved and they’ll move you somewhere safe with real protection. And then I will end this.”

Phone pinched between shoulder and cheek, her hands flurrying. What? No.

“I’m sorry.”

I’m scared.

“I understand.”

I can’t go away. I have no voice. How am I supposed to …

He couldn’t translate the last words, but he could guess at them.