Ranger looked down at my arm with the needle marks.
“Me, too,” I said.
“Babe,” he said, so soft it was barely a whisper.
He took a universal handcuff key out of a pocket on his cargo pants and opened my cuffs. He looked at the chunk of wallboard still attached to the chain and raised an eyebrow.
“Pooka might be a brilliant biologist, but he doesn’t know a lot about construction,” I said. “If he’d drilled the bolt into a stud I couldn’t have gotten free.”
“I’m sure it still took some muscle to get this out of the wall,” Ranger said.
“I was motivated.”
Ranger tossed the cuffs and the chain into the back of the SUV, and Tank drove us up the driveway to the ramshackle house.
I led Tank and Ranger to Becker, and we got him out of the woods and unshackled. Tank folded the backseat down and stretched Becker out in the Cayenne cargo area. Ranger and Tank did a fast walk-through of the house. We left Tank on the property to wait for Rangeman backup to arrive, and to keep everything secure until the police took over. Ranger, Becker, and I left in the SUV.
“Did you call Morelli or did you call dispatch?” I asked Ranger.
“I called dispatch. Morelli is unavailable.”
“Did Lula call you?”
“Lula called everybody. Fortunately I was on the list because no one else would have thought of the key fob. You could also have been tracked through your phone, but you left it behind in your messenger bag.”
“I ran out of pockets.”
The woods disappeared after a half mile, and we were in a lower income neighborhood of small bungalow-type houses.
“Where are we?” I asked Ranger.
“South Trenton. This street runs into Broad. Blatzo lives one street further south. We’ll be at St. Francis in less than ten minutes.”
I looked back at Becker. His eyes were closed. His breathing seemed regular.
“How’s he doing?” Ranger asked.
Becker kept his eyes closed, but he gave me a thumbs-up.
“He’s doing great,” I said.
“Tank will have called ahead. The hospital should have someone waiting for us at the ER entrance. How are you doing?”
“I’m okay. Slight headache. Probably a drug hangover. Or it might be my life. He stunned me and injected me with something that had me out for a couple hours. Becker said that while I was out Pooka took blood from me and infected me with plague.”
I took a moment to breathe and pull myself together. It was hard to stay calm about the plague.
“What about the blood caked on you?”
“I was chasing an FTA and Pooka came out of nowhere and bounced me off the front of his van. He got to me while I was still dazed, and he used my cuffs and stun gun to immobilize me. When I came around I was in the back of the van.” I looked at my arm. “I think it’s all surface scrapes and bruises. At least it’s stopped bleeding.”
Ranger swung into the drive to the ER entrance and stopped in front of the doors. Two uniformed Rangeman guys were waiting for us, plus a nurse with a gurney, and a bunch of men in badly fitting suits.
“Who are the suits?” I asked Ranger.
“CDC, FBI, EPA, Homeland Security, Trenton PD.”
“I’m surprised Morelli isn’t representing the Trenton PD. He’s the principal on the murders.”
“Word is he’s getting a colonoscopy.”
So maybe I didn’t have such a bad day after all. At least I didn’t get something stuck up my butt.
We off-loaded Becker onto the gurney, and I walked beside him, holding his hand into the building.
“You’re going to be okay,” I told him. “Even if you are infected with the plague, it’s treatable now.”
“My parents…”
“You need to call them. I know they’ll want to see you and make sure you’re okay.”
“I haven’t got a phone. Pooka threw my phone away. He was worried about being traced through it.”
Ranger was standing behind me. “I’ll have Hal get a phone to him.”
“And Gobbles,” Becker said. “I need to talk to Gobbles. I should have listened to him. He said to stay away from Pooka.”
Becker was wheeled off into an examining area and two of the suits walked with him.
Susan Gower was the charge nurse on duty in the ER. I went to high school with Susan and smoked my first and last joint with her.
She came over to me and grimaced. “You look like you got hit by a truck.”
“It was a van,” I said.
“Do you want to have someone look at whatever it is that’s wrong with you?”
“No,” I said.
“Yes,” Ranger said.
“Boy,” she said, looking Ranger up and down, “if I wasn’t happily married—”