Page 94 of Desperate Creed

And Rex...Braxton shook his head. He still couldn’t believe Rex had betrayed him.

So what was the best way to stay alive now? He needed to make sure those secrets that were worth killing for, were no longer secrets.

75

Maggie was on her second doughnut. It was hard to believe that only eighteen hours ago she and Frankie had met for lunch at Southern Blessings. It felt like a lifetime ago.

Around six in the morning, Jason and Ryder had left to take care of Grace and Scout. The two of them had come back with dozens of doughnuts. Ryder had pulled out two especially for her. She couldn’t remember telling him that her favorite was a cake doughnut with chocolate frosting. The two men had left, again, to distribute the rest to staff and family members in the ER and ICU waiting areas.

Earlier in the wee small hours of the morning—after things had settled down, after Frankie was resting without a dead man at the foot of her bed and after Maggie’s arm had finally been taken care of—Maggie and Ryder sat in one of the waiting rooms down the hall from the ICU unit. Neither could sleep. She told him about Gus and how she’d identified him from the street cam video. She told him everything she could remember that Alonzo had discovered. Then Ryder shared with her what information he had learned from Sheriff Krenshaw about the others who had been trapped with her and Frankie.

Six people were dead. The waitress, who had served her and Frankie and hadn’t gone down into the basement, was found with two other women: a kitchen staff worker and the hostess. Two unidentified men were found crushed when heavy kitchen appliances had fallen into the stairwell.

“Max and Loverboy,” Maggie said. “They kept thinking that would be the only exit.

“Loverboy?” Ryder had asked.

“I never knew his name. There was a woman with him before the storm hit. Beth. She’ll be able to identify him.”

The last was one of the older women.

“Clara or Adele?” she asked, but Ryder didn’t know for sure.

Together they had watched the sunrise, though their view was over one of the hospital’s parking lots. Maggie couldn’t believe how incredibly blue the sky was. Not a cloud in sight. The television in the corner had been muted but the weather map for the coming week showed temperatures in the upper fifties and lower sixties, and no sign of another storm. She remembered Stephanie’s outrage about the weather, and Maggie had to agree: this was a bit crazy.

It was in that early morning quiet when Ryder told her he and Jason would need to leave for Florida. Since he totaled his Jeep, they were down to one vehicle.

“What happened to your Jeep?” she asked him.

“It’s a long story.” He smiled and shook his head. Instead of attempting to tell the story, he said, “Hannah’s anxious to get up here and be with Frankie. They’ve been friends for a long time.”

“I know,” Maggie said. “I’m glad she has someone like Hannah.”

Ryder explained that he and Jason would stay with Hannah’s boys. He didn’t need to say that he was worried about Brodie. She could see it on his face. He had made sure that Maggie was taken care of. That she was safe. But he had other obligations to the other people in his life. He wouldn’t be the man she knew and cared about, if he didn’t leave her to go take care of his family.

At the time, they’d been sitting side by side, and she reached over and took his hand. There would be no declarations of their emotions or feelings. There wasn’t a need for words. And it didn’t feel like a copout. It simply felt right.

“We really need to stop spending so much time in hospitals,” she told him.

––––––––

Now, Maggie found a quiet corner with an outlet for a borrowed cell phone charger. A couple of hours after her unsuccessful search for Gus, her phone’s battery had finally died.

The dead guy at the foot of Frankie’s bed allowed Maggie to justify 24/7 protection for Frankie. The sheriff departments for several counties were still overwhelmed with the aftermath of the storms, so Agent Alonzo managed to get agents from one of the FBI’s field offices in Alabama. Two of the men had arrived at three in the morning. Maggie was impressed. She didn’t think Assistant Director Kunze would approve. She was anxiously waiting to hear how Alonzo had pulled it off.

She finally had the small waiting area all to herself. It felt too empty without Ryder. She watched the flat screen TV on the wall. They had left it muted with the closed captions crawling across the bottom. The local news was talking about a special report the station would be doing tonight. It would include details from one of their storm chasers who had survived his vehicle being sucked up into the storm.

When her phone rang, she grabbed it, sitting awkwardly so she could leave it plugged in.

Instead of a greeting, Alonzo said, “Are you near a television?”

“Yes,” she told him. “What’s going on?”

“Turn it to one of the cable news stations.”

She found the remote and channel surfed until she found one. A news anchor was talking about Carson Foods. Photos of the CEO, a couple of his executives and Senator John Quincy were lined up in the upper corner of the screen.

“Someone leaked a bunch of emails to the New York Times,” Alonzo told her. “In the emails, Carson Foods’ CEO admits to Senator Quincy that the levels of glyphosate are too high. But he tells him not to worry. He can control the reports and the test results, so their global initiative can go forward. Maggie, these leaked emails look exactly like the ones Tyler Gates and his buddy hacked into.”