“That’s why he has the machine that’s making the whooshing noise?”
Mendoza nodded.“He’ll be breathing on his own by tomorrow, most likely.”
“They’re keeping him until then, right?”
He nodded.“He’ll be here a couple days, yeah.After that, we’ll have to figure something else out.”
We would?“Won’t he be going home to his mother?”
“She kicked him out,” Mendoza said.“Last week, when he quit his job at the Apex to go to work for you.”
She had?“He didn’t say anything about that to me.”
“He wouldn’t,” Mendoza said.“He’s been sleeping in your office or his car since then.”
That explained the pizza box under the desk and the laundry in the backseat, anyway.
And derailed my train of thought.
“Have you put out a call for Zachary’s car?If we find it, maybe we’ll figure out where he was when this happened.”
“It won’t be there anymore,” Mendoza said, “but yes, I have a call out for the car.”
“Did he tell you anything helpful before I got there?”
He shook his head.“I’d only been there a minute or two.After the ambulance picked him up and took him to the hospital, the doctors knocked him out and worked on him for a while.It wasn’t until he woke up this afternoon, and told them to call me, that I realized he was here.”
“You didn’t get a call this morning?”
“This morning,” Mendoza said, “nobody knew who he was.Whoever did this took his wallet with his identification.”
“You called his mother, I assume?”She might have kicked him out, but she did deserve to know where he was.
“The hospital did,” Mendoza said.“We don’t want him going home with her, though.Just in case these guys come back.”
I guess we didn’t.Although if that was the case, we didn’t want him bunking in the office by himself, either.I might drive up one morning and find him dead.Or the place burned to the ground.
“We have a couple days before we have to worry about it,” Mendoza said.“He has insurance, I assume?”
He did.And I dreaded to think of the kind of money I was going to have to spend on this.Hospital stays don’t come cheap.But yes, he had insurance.So at least he didn’t have medical bills to worry about.
“What happens now?”I asked.
“I work on figuring out where he went last night and who he might have rubbed the wrong way to make them do this,” Mendoza said.
I nodded.“I can help you with that.I’ll come with you.”
“Not a chance,” Mendoza said.
I put my hands on his hips.“You realize that this is a free country, right?You can’t stop me from going wherever I want to.”
“I can put you in jail,” Mendoza said.“For interfering with a police officer in the execution of his duties.”
“You wouldn’t dare.”
He arched his brows, and I added, “OK.Fine.You’d dare.But you won’t.”
“Why not?”
