“Ty,” Zane barked, his voice a mixture of anger and desperation. “Open your eyes,” he ordered. “Get up!”
Ty did open his eyes, but when he tried to sit up, his limbs wouldn’t cooperate. He put every ounce of his energy and will into getting off the ground, but he realized with a sinking sensation that he hadn’t even managed to lift his head.
“Get up, Beaumont, it ain’t your time yet!” Earl called to him, sounding far away and gauzy.
He was dying. After all the things he’d been through that could and probably should have killed him, he had to go and get attacked by a goddamn mountain lion. Someone somewhere was going to find that funny.
Ty’s eyes focused on the impossibly blue sky overhead as he felt himself slipping away, and the pain faded too. He idly thought that angel wings sounded a whole lot like the rotors of a chopper, and he’d really have liked the chance to tell Zane that.
Chapter 16
ZANE reflected on the past painful twelve hours as he walked tiredly down the long, door-lined hall. Mara Grady, with an assist from Chester, had lit a fire under the local search-and-rescue people as soon as they hadn’t shown up on the day they’d planned—she’d actually mentioned a bad feeling; Zane was pitifully glad that she hadn’t ignored it—and several rangers with dogs had found them on the mountain just as Ty collapsed. A rescue helicopter had been in their wake, and Ty had been airlifted off the mountain to this hospital in Charleston.
He’d barely made it.
The doctors assured Earl and Mara that Ty was now out of danger. He’d woken once so far to be told what had happened, only to immediately fall back into unconsciousness.
Zane turned the corner at the end of the hall and slowed as he saw Earl outside the door to Ty’s hospital room. To Zane’s eyes and satisfaction, Earl Grady seemed to be agonizing over the state of his son. The elder Grady stood with his arms crossed and his head down as he rubbed at his newly shaved chin and frowned, looking into the room where his son slept. He hadn’t gone too far from the room, but he hadn’t gone inside much, either. It was like he couldn’t make up his mind. As far as Zane was concerned, he could stay outside. He wasn’t feeling too charitable toward Earl Grady. If the man hadn’t gone overboard insulting Ty—and f**k, Earl couldn’t have thought of a worse thing to call Ty than a coward—then his son, Zane’s partner, wouldn’t be lying practically dead in this goddamn hospital.
Even though it had been Earl’s unusual methods that kept Ty walking much longer than he should have been able, Ty’s father had still been seriously out of line. Zane would never wish him real harm, but he seriously hoped the man understood and regretted what he’d done.
“Everything okay?” Zane asked as he stopped next to the older man, meaning it in general terms.
Earl turned his head slightly and gave him a weak smile and a nod. He turned back to look into the room, covering his mouth with his hand and sighing. Ty was asleep in the bed, hooked up to several IVs and his color looking better than he had even an hour before. Deuce sprawled in a chair beside the bed, snoring softly. Zane had just walked Mara downstairs to the truck; she was heading home with Chester to pack them all some clean clothes and would return in a couple hours.
“Do you know why Ty joined the FBI?” Earl asked Zane abruptly.
Zane shrugged as he leaned against the doorframe. He had lots of little pieces to Ty’s puzzle: the “official” story of why he’d left the Marines, which was complete bullshit according to Ty; that his last partner had been killed in the line of duty, even though Ty had tried to take the bullet for him; that he’d known Dick Burns since he was in diapers.
“Not exactly,” Zane answered.
Earl glanced at him and smiled sadly. “He joined the FBI ’cause his daddy’s best friend asked him to,” he told Zane softly, looking back into the room to make certain Ty and Deuce were both still asleep.
Burns. Zane didn’t comment; if Earl needed to spill his guts, he could do it. But Zane was the wrong person to be looking to for any sort of absolution. He didn’t forgive and forget easily, not when he could still see the pain in Ty’s eyes.
Earl nodded in response to his silence, his eyes still on his sons. “Richard was paying me a visit one weekend a while back, and he was talking about work,” he told Zane. “He didn’t like what he was doing. Said he didn’t trust any of the agents he was working with to get the job done. I remember sitting there and him looking at me with defeat on his face. He was talking about early retirement. He said to me, ‘Earl, if I had just one good man I could count on, I could get a lot of good done’.”
Earl swallowed heavily, cocked his head, and then turned and met Zane’s eyes. “I told him where to find Ty.”
“You say that like you think it was a mistake,” Zane observed, shaking his head.
“It didn’t give Ty much choice, me sending Richard to him,” Earl answered flatly.
“No. It didn’t.”
Earl nodded again, as if knowing he deserved the harsh words. “Richard and I never gave a thought to what he wanted or to how dangerous it was,” he said, the words quiet and solemn. “We just… we just thought Ty could handle it and carried on from there. And Ty… he’d do anything to meet what he felt like were our expectations,” he told Zane as he lowered his head in apparent shame and turned away from the door, beginning to walk slowly down the hall. “Even when he was a young’un, he never made an excuse not to follow me into those mines. He was scared to death of ’em,” he told Zane with a tremble in his voice. Zane realized the older man was on the verge of tearing up. “I almost lost him today,” he said, almost to himself. He gave a soft snort and shook his head. “A damn wildcat,” he murmured.
“I guess he figured he’d done everything spectacular already,” Zane said, looking over his shoulder to glance inside the room. He didn’t have to study Earl to know the man was worried. He was worried, himself. Zane frowned. As angry as he was, he couldn’t bring himself to be cold and cruel to a father so obviously torn up over mistakes he’d made with his son.
How many harsh words had Zane himself said to Ty to light a fire under the man? Anyone who knew him knew that the best way to make Ty dangerous was to make him angry. It made him a useful weapon.
“He’s going to be okay,” Zane finally settled on. He didn’t want to think about the alternative. He wondered if this was how Ty had felt when it had been him three-quarters dead in a hospital bed. Right now he felt helpless. He was hurting. He was scared that he might have lost something he wasn’t even sure he’d had, and there hadn’t been a damn thing he could’ve done about it. “He’s strong,” he said to Earl confidently.