I stub the cigarette out on the edge of the ashtray on the lobby table.
Her voice comes back without invitation.
How else do I get him to look at me?
"Keller is self-absorbed," I reply. "But he's not going to abandon his daughter indefinitely."
"You should move her," he says finally. "Out of the cells. She's got every guard on that level distracted and that's before accounting for the fact that she put one of them in the hospital with a broken neck."
I say nothing because I am thinking about how she weighs less than a hundred and thirty pounds and is perhaps five and a half feet tall and managed, before three trained men could contain her, to incapacitate one of them permanently with a decorative hotel statue. They had only taken her because a third man had come through the door behind her while she was focused. A sneak attack. The only way they could do it.
She had almost walked out of that room armed and free.
"She's strong," I say, and I mean it as a statement of fact rather than a compliment, but it lands somewhere between the two.
Then I see her again as she was an hour ago. The pallor of her face under the cell lights. The way she was sitting, conserving herself. Dry lips. Two days without adequate food or water.
She is strong. But she is not going to last indefinitely in that cell and I am under no illusions about that.
Why should I care? She walked into my building uninvited. Her naivety is not my responsibility. She made her choices.
I am about to say something to Renzo about the Fremont rotation when the man comes in.
He moves fast, one of the lower-level guards, and he straightens when he sees us and directs himself to me.
"Sir." His eyes cut briefly to Renzo and back. "The lady. She just fainted."
Renzo looks at me. "Your call, boss," he says.
* * *
I am leaning in the doorway with a fresh cigarette when the doctor finishes.
Renzo stands beside me, arms folded, saying nothing.
The doctor is a small, precise man named Vitelli who has been on my private retainer for four years and who has learned,in that time, to arrive quickly and ask nothing beyond what is medically relevant. He clips the IV line to the stand with practiced efficiency, checks her pulse once more.
"Moderate head trauma," he says, addressing me directly. "It isn't serious but she needs rest and she needs to stay still for the next several hours." He glances back at her briefly.
"She's also close to malnourishment. Two days without a proper meal combined with the head injury is what brought her down. Once the IV has done its work she needs a decent meal." He closes his bag.
"After that, rest."
"Understood," Renzo answers, stepping forward to see him out. "Thank you, Vitelli."
The doctor nods in my direction and leaves. I draw on the cigarette and look at her.
She is on the bed that belongs to one of the guest rooms on the upper floor, the first room we reached when I came through the door carrying her, and she looks smaller in it than she did on the cell floor, which I wouldn't have thought possible. The IV line runs from the stand to the inside of her left elbow. Her color is better than it was twenty minutes ago.
Twenty minutes ago she was on the cell floor in a heap and I had stood in the doorway for a second before crossing the roomand dropping to my knees beside her and putting two fingers to her throat for a pulse and then picking her up and shouting for Renzo.
I replay that sequence now with some detachment and I find I don't entirely recognize myself in it.
I panicked, internally the response was immediate and disproportionate and I acted faster than the situation strictly required. She was breathing. The pulse was there. There was no reason to panic.
I tell myself what I told myself in the corridor while I was carrying her, which is that she is my collateral and collateral has no value if it stops breathing, and my interest in her continued health is entirely transactional, and that is the beginning and the end of it.
It is a reasonable explanation.
