“You got any?” he gasped to the guy, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

  The guy shook his head, but the girl felt in her shoulder bag and brought out another bottle, this one full and unopened.

  “Thank you.” Rye felt a little better already as he downed most of the second water.

  “Remember it isn’t real,” the girl said. When Rye stared at her, confused, she shrugged, worldly wise. “Bum trip, right? It can help to chant ‘I have what it takes to get through this’ as a mantra, you know?”

  Rye shook his head, then nodded his thanks before taking a deep breath and heading off. When his phone buzzed another message, he wanted to smash it.

  We can get to you at any place. Come meet us at our place.

  “How am I supposed to know where that is?” Rye asked his phone.

  Hall of Mirrors, came the answer.

  Which was closed for maintenance, or so the sign said when Rye got there a minute later. The temporary sign, on the main door. So there’d be another door, another way in. He found it. This one was a service door, small and dark, but the space inside was bright with glimmers and glitters of glass.

  “A mirror maze,” he murmured, swallowing at his reflections and reflections of his reflections. “It’s not real,” he told the line of Ryes stretching into the distance, growing smaller and thinner and paler as they went. He groped out and saw a dozen arms rise in a line, where the row of mirrors reflected.

  “Show yourself!” he yelled, turning away from tiny squat and huge fat Ryes, holding his breath and expecting a hand on his shoulder at any moment. A few paces later the space he was in turned, so he turned with it, to find himself inside a sphere, mirrored all around, but not like the floor-length looking glass in a changing room.

  This was all mirrors within mirrors, a kaleidoscope, under flashing lights, showing him everywhere as the moving circular floor beneath his feet spun him in a helpless circle and the mirrors tilted and righted, came forward and receded. He was close and far, everywhere and nowhere and spinning and throwing out an arm only made him hit cold glass.

  He wasn’t alone. He caught a glimpse of dark hair, once, then again farther down. There could be one man in here with him or a dozen. The revolving floor stopped, leaving him facing a large pane of glass, like the ones in the interview rooms back at HQ…and probably, like that, with people behind it. Well, he could smoke them out. Or rather, shoot them out. If he could remember how to use his gun and get his fingers to cooperate.

  “Gabriel Ryland,” a voice said. “Currently with Texas Rangers ‘F’ Company, headquartered at Waco—”

  “You asking or telling?” Rye replied. He wanted to listen to the speaker, sure, to glean as much intel on the guy’s background, age, ethnicity, social status or whatever as he could. But he also wanted to rile up whoever had lured him here. Oh, and fucking drugged him.

  “Formerly a Texas Highway Patrol Trooper trained at the Department of Public Safety headquarters in Austin—”

  “You writin’ my résumé for me?” Rye interrupted. “And I take it I ain’t up before some HR panel here, so why not show yourselves?” He finished the last sip of water and cast the bottle aside. “Oh and why drug me, you fuckin’ cowards?”

  “Like we said, to show you we can get to you anywhere,” the voice answered. “And it wasn’t anywhere near OD levels…this time.”

  Hispanic. Rye would stake his life on it…and hoped he didn’t have to. “Camargo, right? So, what, I’m getting to you and you brought me here to kill me?”

  The voice laughed and said something in Spanish before switching back to English. “If we wanted to kill you, you’d already be dead, cabrón. No. We brought you here to bribe you.”

  Rye had expected that. “Oh yeah? How much?” The amount of money the voice mentioned had him staggering. “That’s monthly, of course,” he quipped, thinking it must be a one-off payment.

  “Of course.” The voice was getting impatient.

  “I got three words in reply.” Rye raked his gaze along the glass. “Go to hell.”

  A sigh reached his ears. “Last chance,” a different voice said, and Rye braced himself…only to have a higher figure thrown at him.

  “How about, I’m gonna see you burn?” Rye said in answer.

  “We got no problem taking you out,” the second voice told him.

  “Do that and every scrap of evidence I have gets released to every law enforcement agency, police department and media outlet from here to Washington,” Rye lied.

  “Fine. Next stage.”

  Rye had no chance for a smart answer or a question—lights blinded him and sirens deafened him, forcing him almost to his knees. A clang behind him was a door opening and he staggered to it—and through it. Someone reached out a hand to him and Rye went to punch—

  “Rye, it’s me!” Jonas caught him and dragged him to a dark corner in the shadow of some machinery. “What happened? Where did you go?”

  “They got to me. Got a message to me, I mean.” Still groggy, Rye didn’t want to admit he’d been drugged. “On my phone.”

  But when he took it out to show Jonas, none of the messages from the cartel remained. “They must have some program, some tech that erases them after a few minutes.” He cursed.

  “This…this…” Jonas shook his head, his lips compressed. “Is serious. Rye, you might not be happy about this, but I told Darrell. And I’m glad I did”—he raised his voice over Rye’s attempt at protest—“because when I saw something was going on just now, I told the others you got food poisoning and Darrell stayed to help me. He’s here.”

  Right here, Rye discovered when Darrell came over from where he’d been lurking, checking carefully all around first. Jonas filled him in. If the SAPD sergeant thought Rye had acted rashly, he kept it to himself.

  “Okay, so we can add attempted bribery of a LEO to the list.” Darrell straightened his shoulders. “This has gone too far. You know that, right?” He spoke to both of them. “We got no other recourse but to hand this upward. So you are both gonna come to the station when I’m on shift a little later. I’ll set things up, and we’ll get everything documented, written, audio and video. Then take it from there.”

  * * * *

  Rye wouldn’t have agreed if he wasn’t still groggy. Back at Jonas’, he took the longest shower on record and drank another gallon of water while he was in there, trying to get the shit out of his system and sober up. Thank fuck those bastards had only slipped him a mild dose. That girl who’d helped him probably took a lot more recreational drugs, and routinely.

  Even after he shut the water off, he stayed in there, letting the steam and Jonas’ eucalyptus-scented shower tablets—something Rye had never even heard of—bring him back to his right mind. Was this the best plan? The lack of evidence, of proof, of—

  “Rye!”

  “I’m coming out,” he assured Jonas, who was barging in, sounding half hysterical. “I was just tired, thought the steam…” He took in Jonas’ stricken face and the cell phone in his hand. “What? What, Jonas?”

  Jonas swallowed. “It’s Darrell…”

  Chapter Fourteen

  “And you still don’t know any more?” Rye asked again, sparing Jonas a look then returning his attention to the road. He swerved to switch lanes.

  Jonas, eyes on his phone, willing more information to come through it, shook his head. “Aldric hasn’t said anything else after that one text and isn’t replying at all.” He reread the stark, horrifying message saying that Darrell had been found severely injured near his car and taken to hospital. Reading it yet again didn’t make it any more understandable.

  “So it was a crash, a road traffic accident, and he was thrown from the vehicle?” he wondered out loud. Again.

  Rye pointed at the radio. “Nothing on any channel about a major crash.”

  “Why major?” Jonas asked.

  “To fit your scenario? We’d be talking high-speed, heavy impact. Streets would be closed.” Rye shook his head. “Try again?”

  Jonas pressed Call again. “Nothing. I think his phone must be off now.”

  “In the hospital? I’d say so,” Rye replied.

  Jonas lifted his gaze from his cell. “This isn’t the way to the Regional.”

  “It’s the way we’re going,” Rye answered.

  Oh of course. They were taking a roundabout route, looping back on themselves and using smaller secondary roads. It was necessary…wasn’t it? Jonas wasn’t sure about anything anymore. But he did know that it added time to their journey.

  “Maybe…it’s not…what we’re thinking,” he tried to say. That this, whatever it was, was a senseless accident, terrifying and awful for everyone concerned…and nothing to do with them. His words, what he was trying to do with them, felt so cowardly, and he felt ashamed for uttering them. For thinking them. With a muttered “Sorry,” he fell silent.

  Rye squeezed his leg and neither he nor Jonas spoke for the rest of the way.

  “Thank God!” Jonas exclaimed as Rye parked, and they hurried from the car into the bright antiseptic of the hospital.

  “Hey—” The security guard trying to slow their run melted back when Rye flashed his ID.

  “Darrell Williams,” Jonas panted. “He was brought in—maybe to ER?”

  Surgical Unit, they learned, after the guard took them to a receptionist behind a plexi-glass barricade, who took an age finding information on her computer.

  “Surgery?” Jonas gasped the word, looking at Rye. “But why? What happened?”

  “I’m not permitted to disclose that information.” The woman finally looked up, and what she saw in their faces seemed to soften her a little. “Please try to understand.”

  “We…” Jonas gave up on speech and just nodded. “May we…I don’t know…wait?”

  “Surely.” The receptionist used a walkie-talkie to summon an orderly. “Surgical Ward,” she murmured to the uniformed man, then jerked her head at Rye. “LEO.”

  Jonas remembered Aldric telling him and Elliot, after his first date with Darrell, that Darrell got special treatment because he was a law enforcement officer. “He even gets to cut in line!” he’d said, amazed. “Oh, he doesn’t cut in—the other people tell him to go ahead, before them! And I think the taco truck man gave him a bigger serving!”

  Well, if Rye being a Ranger got them to see Darrell, Jonas would be happy about it too.

  “Hate hospitals,” Rye muttered as they hurried down long, maze-like corridors and crossed hallways whose shiny tile flooring reflected the overhead fluorescent lighting, following signs. “Hate the damn smell, even.”

  Jonas nodded. He hated the sounds, the electrical buzz of the strip lighting, the burbles over the intercoms, the squeal and clang of carts and wheelchairs. Everything seemed to echo and bounce back, making the place feel claustrophobic.

  The orderly stopped outside a door and when he opened it, everyone inside sprang to their feet, subsiding when Jonas and Rye walked in. Everyone except Aldric, who looked like he’d been pacing to and fro from the door to the water cooler on the opposite wall. Not that there was a lot of floor to pace.

  “Aldric!” Jonas rushed to him. He wasn’t demonstrative by nature but hugged his co-worker. His friend. “What happened?”

  Aldric shook his head, and Elliot steered him into a seat. “I don’t know!” he wailed. “Someone from the station called me and told me what I told you. He got into work but left without saying where he was going. They’d been trying to get him on his cell and were about to call home—me—when someone reported in that a man was lying near his car.” He paused and accepted a plastic cup of water from Elliot.

  “And when the license plate was read, it was Darrell’s?” Rye finished the story for him.

  “And the injuries are so severe he needed immediate emergency surgery.” Aldric’s hand shook so much he slopped some of the water over the side of the cup.

  Jonas took it from him and placed it on the table among the old magazines.

  “He’s in a good place.” Elliot waved a hand to indicate the hospital, not this shabby waiting room. “This hospital has a good reputation.”

  The door opened again, and this time Jonas was one of those springing up, not the cause of it. And once again, they all sank down as an elderly woman, the handkerchief she held in one hand to dab at her eyes covering most of her face, stumbled in.

  “Ma, careful!” a middle-aged woman following her said. “Sit down before you fall down! Look, Dad’s tough. You know that. He’ll make it. And he wouldn’t want you to be like this, would he?” She led her mother to the seats at the other end of the room, glaring at everyone already there as if they were intruding.

  Rye took the box of Kleenex from the ledge that held the water cooler and placed it on the far edge of the table, near the two women. “Get you some water, ladies?” he offered, getting tight head shakes in reply.

  It hadn’t occurred to Jonas that the waiting room was a general one, but of course it was, and for all Elliot’s words about how top tier this place was, the room, with its dog-eared magazines on the table and its generic artworks on the walls, was depressing.

  The door didn’t burst open this time because the women had left it open, so the man filling the doorway then barreling in made Jonas jump.

  “Darrell?” the guy asked, looking from one to another of their small group.

  Jonas knew him. His uniform gave away his job and his rusty-red hair made him memorable. Officer O’Hara was Darrell’s former partner, before Darrell had made sergeant.

  “Still in surgery,” Aldric replied. “Sean, what do you know?”

  “Hi.” The female officer with Sean gave them all a half-wave, a flutter of her fingers. “We don’t know much—”

  “Officer Laurie Strauss. My new partner,” Sean interrupted. “Well, I say new. It’s been…ooh, how long now?”

  “Please!” Aldric begged.

  Sean glanced around and pulled up a plastic chair to huddle close to the group, then stopped, looking at Rye. Aldric had his hand over his mouth as the two introduced themselves. “It seems he stopped and got out of his car,” Sean began. “Maybe he was responding to a suspicious vehicle or person.”

  Or it stopped him. Jonas bet Rye was thinking the same.

  “And he could have disturbed someone or someones. Maybe they were actively involved in criminal activity or had an active warrant out, and so, on seeing a patrol officer, thought…” Laurie was too kind to finish. “But word is there was a physical altercation.”

  “Shots fired?” Rye demanded.

  Aldric grabbed Elliot’s hand.

  “No reports of gunfire, so the belief is no weapon discharged,” Sean answered.

  “Oh, thank God.” Aldric heaved out a long breath, some of his color returning.

  “No damage to his vehicle either.” Sean shrugged.

  “Let’s be grateful he was taken to hospital so quickly,” Elliot said.

  Footsteps bustled up outside in the corridor, too brisk and competent to be anything other than a medical professional, and Aldric was on his feet even before a white-uniformed nurse appeared in the doorway.

  “Mrs. Rensin?” she asked, directing her attention at the elderly woman, her smile reassuring. “Your husband is out of surgery now and we’re happy to say all went well. If you’d like to come with me…?”

  The woman’s attempts at speech were muffled in her tissue, and her daughter, bombarding the nurse with questions when her mother couldn’t, supported her from the room.

  “Should we have asked her for any news?” Jonas asked Rye in a mutter, indicating the nurse who’d just left.

  “Don’t guess so,” Rye whispered back. “She’d have said. Or someone would, if there was anything to tell us. We—”

  He broke off as footsteps marched down the corridor. There was no other way to describe the speed and purpose of the beats that rang out. A second later, a man filled the doorway, and Jonas’ mouth fell open at his resemblance to Darrell. He was an older, taller, broader version, in a different uniform, with similar-enough hair and eyes to proclaim a relationship between himself and Darrell.

  He simply stood, framed by the doorway, raking everyone present with his gaze, as if taking their measure, or feeling out the room. “Darrell Williams?” he demanded, his voice a deep command, yet tight.

  Elliot was the first to reply, on his feet and shaking his head. “He’s— Well, we don’t know.”

  He received a short, sharp nod in reply before the man turned with military precision and marched out. “Darrell Williams!” he called. Not shouted or yelled—Jonas would guess he didn’t need to. He’d seen professors like that in his time teaching, ones who barely had to raise their voice to exert their authority. “Where is my son?”

  His voice stretched tighter to almost break as he said the latter part, and the corridor went into a bustle and flurry in response. “Chief?” Jonas heard someone say. Not that he needed that extra clue to tell him who the man was.

  “Have you met Major Williams before?” he asked Aldric, who shook his head.

  “I’ve always asked Darrell to extend invitations to his father and both brothers for any celebration or event we hold,” Elliot said.

  He didn’t need to say none were accepted. Jonas had met Darrell’s younger brother and his fiancée at a five-a-side soccer game—Darrell and Jonas played on a team—but not the others.

  “Let me guess. All military?” Rye asked.

  “San Antonio is the Military City,” Sean said, bristling a little. Laurie’s hand on his arm calmed him. “Since Darrell…” He waved a finger at Aldric, then at Elliot and Jonas, perhaps to include them or make his meaning clear, then stopped, looking appalled. “No, I don’t mean… Jesus.” He scrubbed his hand over his face. “I’m trying to say that there’s only his younger brother, Ryan, and Leah, who, well…”

  “That he gets on with,” Laurie suggested, a blander version of the Williams’ family dynamics.