Forged in Smoke (Red-Hot SEALs #3)(14)
From eavesdropping on the random conversations that took place across the kitchen counter, it sounded like Lieutenant Rawlings had more than mere medical experience. Indeed, he was as close to a doctor as one could get without completing their internship. Cosky had told Kait that Rawls had graduated from medical school and passed his medical exams, he’d even completed his first two rotations of internship. Why in the world he’d thrown all of that away to join the navy and eventually the SEALs, well, that just wasn’t her business, was it?
What was her business was whether he was mentally stable enough to approach with her problem and whether he could write prescriptions. Or if he couldn’t write her a prescription, whether he knew someone who could—someone who’d fill her prescriptions with no questions asked and no medical history required.
The medical history was bound to get sticky, considering she’d been listed as dead by the King County coroner earlier in the week.
She’d been off the immune suppressors for six days now. In most cases, donor rejection was chronic, rather than acute, so the damage to her heart would accumulate over a period of time. As long as the cyclosporine and mycophenolate were reinstated at a higher dose soon, the immune-system suppression should occur soon enough to prevent damage to her heart.
The ventricular tachycardia, however, was a different obstacle completely. She needed that prescription of Cordarone. Every day without it put her life at risk. She had four doses left in the bottle; after that she’d be courting a heart attack with every beat of her heart.
She was down to the wire now. She’d tried to find Rawlings time after time, but the man was a master at avoiding unwanted company. And while he wore a walkie-talkie, along with the rest of the men in camp, she didn’t particularly relish the thought of her medical history floating over the airwaves and around camp. Unfortunately, she’d officially run out of time. She was going to have to approach Zane or Cosky and ask one of them to contact Rawlings for her. And no doubt they’d want to know why.
She shook her head in disgust and scowled down at the kitchen counter. She should have just stuck it out earlier, regardless of Wolf’s interference, and asked the pair for help then.
“We’ll discuss scheduling when Wolf returns,” Mac said, his gaze hard on Amy’s face, as though he expected her to protest.
“I want to pick up Mom while we have the chopper. She’d be safer with Zane’s father and his crazy-ass friends than where she’s currently holed up,” Simcosky announced, his square face uncompromising. He held Mac’s gaze steadily.
The commander shrugged. “That’s Wolf’s call.”
Faith swallowed a comment. The whole operation would be Wolf’s call since he owned the helicopter. But she didn’t bring that salient fact to the commander’s attention. Her standard operating procedure during the SEALs’ strategy sessions was to pretend she was invisible. Sometimes it felt like she actually was invisible, the men ignored her so completely.
Not that she was complaining—there was a reason invisibility was considered a superpower.
Maybe by the time Mackenzie’s contacts located Dr. Benton and the rest of her crew, she’d have eavesdropped on enough conversations to know whether she could trust them with the real reason her friends had been targeted and taken—assuming, of course, that they weren’t planning on packing her off to God knew where with Kait and Beth and the rest of the women.
* * *
Chapter Three
* * *
TEN MINUTES AFTER Wolf took to the skies, Rawls dragged one of the kitchen chairs into his bedroom and shoved it against the wall next to the window, angling it until he had a clear view of the helipad. He’d know the minute Wolf returned to the compound.
He scanned the room for Pachico’s translucent form, but his ghost was still missing. The sudden silence after days of endless chatter, and obnoxious top-of-the-lungs singing, weighed on him, filled him with ominous portent. The calm gave him way too much time and peace to think, which led to questioning . . .
How much of the past five days had been real versus hallucinations? Had Pachico even existed? Or—more specifically—had the transparent version of Pachico been a product of a damaged mind?
Before settling into the chair to watch for Wolf’s return, he backtracked to the kitchen, pulled open the cupboard above the stainless-steel sink, and dragged down the bottle of Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Honey. Bottle in one hand and an eight-ounce juice glass in the other, he backtracked to his bedroom and settled into the wood chair.
He set the bottle on the windowsill and stared at it. The golden liquid inside glowed with molten intensity beneath the sun’s rays.
Since that incident when Zane and Cos had walked in on him yelling at Pachico to “shut the Goddamn f*ck up” he’d spent from dawn to dusk outside, avoiding his camp mates as much as possible. When he did return to the cabin, it was to sleep. Or try to anyway. Pachico had turned sleeping into an exercise of frustration and futility.
It didn’t matter how much toilet paper he jammed into his ears, or how hard he pressed the pillow over his head, Pachico’s voice never dulled. In retrospect, the fact that he hadn’t been able to mute the bastard’s singing lent credence to the possibility the ghost was a byproduct of blood loss and his oxygen-deprived, damaged mind. If Pachico had been a hallucination, external methods to muffle his yammering would prove ineffectual.