Dangerous Games Read Online Free

hospital, but the whole Eastside. He subsided into himself, but still aware of the babble around him and unable to completely ignore the sniffling of a preteen boy two seats away who waited with a friend, his arm cradled and wrapped in a bloody plaid shirt that had the handle of a kitchen knife protruding. Could he have dealt with something like that at the boy’s age?
    Then Gloria Ramirez stood there in all her impressive cop calm, and his heart lifted. Before speaking to him, she paused to kneel in front of Kathy for a minute, and the two women held hands and spoke softly. Jack Liffey could see Kathy begin to cry then stop. Gloria embraced her.
    Eventually, Gloria came and kissed him on the cheek. She kept her face next to his as she whispered, “I’m so sorry.”
    Tears welled up suddenly, and he fought them back.
    “What have they said?” she asked.
    “Not a word. In four hours, more.”
    “Oh, for Chrissake. ” She got up and strode immediately across the busy room, decisively pushing past the double doors. He and Kathy watched her disappear like simpletons expecting a magic trick to occur there. Tragedy makes us all primitives, he thought.
    It was about ten minutes before she came back. Again, Gloria went to Kathy first, and he could tell by the way his ex-wife’s whole body lost tension that the news was bearable.
    “I’m sure she’s going to live, Jack,” Gloria told him. “I’ve seen enough gunshot wounds to know. If she was going to die, it would have happened. One of the assistant surgeons was taking a breather, and he told me they’re struggling to save her right kidney. She’s lost a few feet of her intestine, so I’m afraid she’ll have to wear an ostomy bag for a few months—which is no picnic for a kid—but she’s tough. Her wound isn’t critical. When they come out, prepare yourself—they won’t be bright and cheery, and they’ll say something like serious or guarded to cover their back. But it’s okay.”
    “She can have one of my kidneys right now if it’ll help.”
    Gloria shook her head. “It won’t be necessary. You can live a full life on one kidney. And they may still save number two. Can you tell me the cops you talked to?”
    He was unable to reply, trying to take in her report on Maeve’s condition, but he dug out the card that the lead cop had given him. His partner, an obvious rookie about nineteen had hung back, listening and learning.
    The card read, Sgt. Dean Padilla, LAPD, Anti-Gang Unit.
    The gang detail had, until fairly recently, been called CRASH—the rather ludicrous Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums—until Rafael Perez and the Rampart Scandal had disgraced that acronym for all time.
    “Padilla’s okay,” she said. “I know him. What did you tell him?”
    “You’re sure she’s going to be all right?” It was hard to shift gears. The memory of Maeve unconscious on that blood soaked gurney was all he could think about.
    “Trust me, Jack. The naked truth is they don’t waste four hours of painstaking surgery in a public hospital on somebody who’s circling the drain. Sorry, that’s a lousy expression. Can you tell me what you told Padilla?”
    He took hold of himself and repeated to her pretty much all of what he had told the cops a few hours earlier in the waiting room. Every word the gangbangers had said to him, as close as he could remember, along with the description of their car and the three letters he’d got off the plate.
    “Describe the boy with the gun again, please?”
    “It was a revolver. He had a shaved head, late teens, I’d guess. Chunky build, from what I could see. He had a mustache and one of those perfectly formed straight down exclamation mark beards under the lip so it all made a ‘T.’ They were throwing those gang signs with their hands, but it didn’t mean anything to me. Maybe one part of it was three fingers with the second-to-the-little-finger tucked in, and the thumb tucked, too.”
    “Could be an