Chapter 21

On the one hand, Bashir wasn't being called out to a death scene. As he drove like hell toward the hospital, he kept reminding himself of that. Detective Walker had told him to come to the emergency room. He wasn't being summoned in any official capacity as the medical examiner. All of those were better than the worst-case scenario.

On the other hand, he was getting called into the emergency room because someone had tried to kill—and almost succeeded in killing—Sawyer.

He was alive. That much Bashir knew. Stable, too, but Bashir knew more than a lot of people how quickly that could change. All the way to the emergency room, he mentally relived moments in his ER and ICU rotations when people had been seemingly stable—or didn't even have life-threatening injuries or conditions—and then crashed.

As he whipped through city streets, he remembered the man who'd brought his teenage son in after a car accident. The boy had broken his arm and needed to be seen. Dad had insisted he was fine. Then everyone was scrambling into the son's room because Dad had collapsed on the floor, and it was only much too late that everyone learned he'd hit his head at some point. There was nothing anyone could do, and the kid left the hospital with a broken arm, a devastated mother, and some emotional trauma that Bashir hoped he'd received some good therapy for.

Sawyer was stable… for now. He'd been stable when Detective Walker called.

Who was to say that in the twenty-one minutes since they'd hung up, Sawyer hadn't coded? Who was to say they weren't doing CPR on him right this minute? Or that Bashir wouldn't walk into the lobby, only to be intercepted by a grim-faced Detective Walker telling him he and Sawyer would never resolve their problems?

Bashir had a reputation for being even more calm and level-headed in the face of death than most of the cops on the force, but there was nothing calm or level-headed about him as he sprinted into the ER. He clipped his shoulder on the automatic door because it didn't open fast enough, and he stumbled a couple of steps before righting himself and hurrying up to the front desk.

"I'm looking for Detective Sawyer Villeray." The words tumbled out in a panicked, breathless rush. "I was told he was—"

"Are you a relative?" the woman asked with all the unflappable chill of an ER nurse. "I need your name and—"

"He's with me." Detective Walker appeared, her expression grim and eerily calm. "This is Dr. Ramin. I called him in."

The nurse scowled, but then signed Bashir in and gave him a visitor badge. The process took about two minutes, every second of which Bashir was losing his damned mind, especially while Walker's expression didn't change. She offered nothing to let him know either way about Sawyer's condition, and the longer she went without saying, "For the record, he's fine," the more sure Bashir was that Sawyer wasn't fine.

Fuck. He's dead, isn't he?

Bashir was two seconds away from throwing up when he and Walker stepped away from the desk and into the hallway. She was striding up the hall like a woman on a mission, and he finally couldn't take it.

"Detective." He halted. When she faced him, he asked, "Is he okay or not?"

The pained expression that crossed her face almost dropped him to his knees, but just before his balance was going to give out, she said, "He's in rough shape, but he'll be okay."

All the air rushed out of Bashir so fast, he had to lean against the wall and let the room slow down. He wasn't usually this reactive to anything. Situations like this usually had him doubling down on the calm, shutting out all the emotions until logistics were dealt with and he could finally collapse. This time, he'd shot right past logistics and into full-on uncharacteristic panic, and realizing his biggest fear hadn't played out…

"Jesus Christ," he whispered. Then he glared at her. "Do you think you could've led with that? Maybe not let me think he was fucking dead or something?" His own outburst startled him, and clearly Walker wasn't expecting it either.

"I… sorry?" She tilted her head. "I didn't think the two of you were…"

"That doesn't mean I don't care about him!" He barked. "For fuck's sake." He pushed himself off the wall. "Can we just—can I see him, please? "

She stammered a little, then started walking, slower this time. "I'm sorry, Doctor."

He grunted in acknowledgment. "What happened, anyway?"

"He was staking out someone." She glanced at him. "Your, um… Your colleague."

Bashir nearly stumbled again. "What? He was following Tami around?" Fuck, Sawyer had made his point. He hadn't needed to stalk her, especially since she was still in custody, and—

"No," Walker said flatly. "Dr. Boyce."

Bashir's lips parted.

"Sawyer had a hunch about him," Walker barreled on. "So he followed him. And apparently someone—we don't know if it was Boyce or someone else—decided to run Sawyer off the road. Deliberately." She stopped outside a room and met Bashir's gaze. "This was an attempt to kill him, Dr. Ramin. There's no doubt in my mind."

Ice water slithered through Bashir's veins. Road rage happened. So did accidents and DUIs. Not everyone getting run off the road was murder or attempted murder. Bashir didn't want to believe someone would try to kill Sawyer—never mind that they'd come anywhere near succeeding—but he also needed to be objective about all of this.

He squared his shoulders. "Were there witnesses?"

"There was one, but she didn't see much." Walker took a breath. "What she did see was an SUV hitting Sawyer's vehicle repeatedly. She didn't see him go off the road, but her dashcam did, and from the looks of it, Sawyer deliberately went off an embankment into the river."

"Went off—deliberately? Why would he do that?"

"You'll have to ask him." She gestured at the closed door beside her. "But I reviewed the footage myself, and…" Walker nodded. "It looks to me like Sawyer either lost control or deliberately went off the side."

Bashir swallowed. "What, um… What kind of SUV was it?"

"A Lincoln Navigator. Black."

His guts wound themselves into knots.

"How the hell can you afford one of those things?" he remembered Tami asking Boyce a few months ago. "Especially on top of a Porsche?"

Boyce had gone off on a long soliloquy about investments, Bitcoin, and getting alimony from "that cheating skank," though Bashir had tuned most of that out as his usual bragging nonsense. It echoed in his mind now, that was for sure.

In the present, Walker gently said, "I need to go chase down some leads." She tilted her head toward the door. "You just be with him for a while."

Numbly, Bashir nodded. "The, uh…" He cleared his throat. "Boyce has a Navigator. Just… Just FYI."

No surprise registered on her face. She was likely ten steps ahead of him, and she'd just been waiting for him to arrive so she could go investigate. She probably hadn't wanted to leave Sawyer alone.

Reaching for the door, Bashir whispered, "Thanks, detective."

She gave a sharp nod and left.

Bashir steeled himself, then pushed open the door and slipped inside. As soon as his gaze landed on Sawyer, his heart dropped into his feet all over again.

His time as a med student had desensitized him a little to the hospital environment. All the wires, leads, monitors, and machines weren't nearly as scary after learning what they all did. Seeing someone surrounded by all that in a hospital bed didn't alarm him as much anymore because he understood that most of the equipment was just keeping an eye on the patient, and half of it wasn't even turned on—it was just there because it happened to be in the room or on the same pole as a necessary monitor.

But when it was Sawyer lying there on the semi-reclined gurney, dressed in a snowflake-sprinkled hospital gown with bandages on his face, an IV in his arms, and an army of monitors looming over him… it fucked with Bashir's head. This wasn't a patient. This was Sawyer.

Bashir carefully closed the door behind him, then crossed the room to the side of the bed. There were glued and stitched cuts along one side of Sawyer's face and neck. From broken glass, most likely. The bruising on his face had probably come from the punch of the airbag. Hopefully the plastic collar around his neck was just there out of an abundance of caution and not because something had fractured. His left arm was wrapped in thick bandages and draped across his stomach. The right seemed no worse for the wear except for the IV in his hand and a small contusion on his forearm.

He looked like shit, but his chest was rising and falling and all the readouts on his monitors were… not normal, but not in any dangerous ranges.

Sawyer's eyelids fluttered, and he gazed up at Bashir. He was obviously on some hefty drugs, but after a second, his focus sharpened, as if he'd suddenly recognized who'd come into the room.

"Bashir." He started to sit up, but gasped and squeezed his eyes shut.

"Hey." Bashir touched his more or less uninjured arm. "You're supposed to be getting some rest. "

Pain kept Sawyer's expression contorted for a moment. Then, slowly, he started to relax back against the pillows. "I'm sorry." He sounded miserable. "Tami. I didn't… You know I wasn't—"

"Sawyer. Don't worry about that right now."

"No. I need to." Sawyer shifted, wincing again, and he held Bashir's gaze. "I fucked up. I thought it—all the evidence was pointing to—"

"Sawyer."

That shut him up, and he stared up at Bashir, his battered face full of fear and worry.

Bashir swallowed. "The important thing right now is that you're okay. Everything else—"

"But I accused your assistant of—"

"The evidence accused her." Bashir's voice came out full of resignation. He'd been angry with Sawyer, and he hadn't wanted to let go of that anger, but as he'd spoken the words, that anger died away. Sawyer's job was to follow the evidence. That evidence had pointed straight to Tami.

With a sigh, Bashir pulled a chair over to the bed and sat down. "The evidence accused her," he repeated, "not you. And I… I know you were doing your job."

"But I still…" Sawyer trailed off, and Bashir couldn't tell if the pain in his expression was physical, emotional, or a miserable mix of both. "I shouldn't have used you to leverage her."

Bashir winced, some of that anger flaring up again. "Did you, though?"

"I…" Sawyer gazed up at the ceiling. "I had to push her. And at that time, all we really knew was the evidence said it was someone with access to the morgue. We…" He looked at Bashir again, eyes pleading with him to understand. "I have to use whatever angle I have. Find a vulnerability and expl oit it. I'm not asking you to like it. I'm just asking you to understand that my only goal in that interview was to find and stop whoever's killing these people."

Bashir stared down at his own wringing hands. He wanted so, so badly to insist the end didn't justify the means and that he was still pissed at Sawyer over it. On some level, he was still pissed. But he had the same motive Sawyer did—people were dying, and the two of them needed to do everything they could to find the killer before more people died. Sometimes that meant saying and doing things they didn't like. Especially in Sawyer's position.

That wasn't to say Bashir would've let truly shady or dirty shit slide. He would never have forgiven Sawyer for bullying or threatening Tami into giving a fake confession, which more cops did than people realized. There was a fine line between that and cornering someone into giving up information. It wasn't something Bashir could've done. It was one of many reasons he gave cops a wide berth in his personal life.

But he just couldn't spin what happened with Tami into anything other than Sawyer wanting the truth. When Tami hadn't given him the truth he was looking for—the truth it turned out she didn't have—he'd gone digging elsewhere.

And now… here he was.

Bashir moistened his lips and met Sawyer's pained gaze. "I get it. I… In your shoes, I honestly don't know if I would've done anything different."

Sawyer watched him silently. The question in his eyes was impossible to miss: You understand why I did it, but is that enough for us to go back?

Exhaling, Bashir took Sawyer's hand, making sure to avoid the IV. As they laced their fingers together, Sawyer also released his breath.

"I'm sorry," he whispered.

"You were doing your job."

"Still."

Bashir nodded. "I know." He watched his thumb running alongside Sawyer's hand. "What did you find on Boyce?"

Sawyer shifted again, which of course made him wince. "Not a whole lot, honestly, apart from the fact that someone tried to kill me."

Bashir thought about what Walker had told him. "When you went off the bridge—was that deliberate? Or did you lose control?"

Without looking at him, Sawyer murmured, "Deliberate."

"Why?"

"Because he'd rammed my car a few times, and I didn't know what he'd do if I gave him the opportunity to do it again." Sawyer's right shoulder lifted in the ghost of a shrug. "Figured I'd take my chances with the river."

Bashir couldn't help it—he laughed. "You do realize how bugfuck insane that sounds, right?"

"Yeah. But let's see you make rational, calculated decisions when someone's roped you into a high speed game of bumper cars against your will."

Bashir cocked a brow. "They're giving you some good drugs, aren't they?"

"Eh. Not really." He scowled up at the bag of fluid hanging over him. "Pretty sure that's just… goldfish water or something."

"‘Goldfish water'?" Bashir gave his hand a gentle squeeze. "I think there's more drugs in there than you think."

"Not enough."

Yeah, enough, because Sawyer's lids were obviously getting heavy. Bashir didn't try to keep him awake. He needed all the rest he could get. That, and Bashir knew from his own experiences that there was nothing more miserable than someone trying to keep him focused while drugs were trying to pull him down. Better to just let him go to sleep, and they could talk more when he was lucid. Hell, Sawyer was probably exhausted just from forcing himself to be that awake and coherent for a few minutes to talk to Bashir.

As Sawyer slept, Bashir kept a gentle grip on his limp hand.

They had their work cut out for them. With the case, yes, but he was giving himself a reprieve from that for tonight. Detective Walker was working on it. If Bashir was needed, he'd respond. Right now, all Sawyer needed to do was recover. All Bashir needed to do was be here and support him. For a little while, they could tap out and let the other adults handle the case.

But this thing between them—they'd need to do some work on that once they had enough breathing room. Bashir had been so sure he was done being personally involved with Sawyer. He was also usually the type who could remain objective enough to know that one crisis didn't negate another problem. He wasn't the kind of person who would suddenly put aside an interpersonal conflict because the other person was injured or sick. His whole family was still shocked he'd stuck to his guns and refused to visit his dying uncle. That he'd meant it when he said that the man's health issues didn't erase his homophobia, and he wasn't interested in pretending otherwise.

A few years ago, Bashir had been in the process of breaking up with an old boyfriend, Tim. Tim had decided he didn't want to stop cheating, and Bashir had decided he didn't want to put up with that. Then Tim had been seriously injured snowboarding. Bashir had come to the hospital to advocate for him until his family arrived, and he'd helped Tim get home after he was discharged. But then, to Tim's astonishment, Bashir had continued moving out.

"You're just going to leave me?" Tim had sputtered from the couch. "When I'm all fucked up like this?"

"I was leaving you anyway. Do you think being laid up cancels out cheating on me?"

So, no, it wasn't remotely beneath Bashir to stick to his guns.

But Sawyer's accident had rattled him.

He didn't think it was because Sawyer's brush with death made him a saint. Rather, it directed a very unflattering light onto how unforgiving Bashir had been over this situation. He'd known why Sawyer did what he did. He'd known the evidence was, whether he liked it or not, pointing squarely at Tami.

Yet he'd cold-shouldered Sawyer anyway, and now he was just relieved beyond words that Sawyer was still here. Still willing and eager to talk to him, and… still here. Still alive.

He gently brought up Sawyer's hand and kissed the backs of his knuckles.

We're going to have a lot of work to do when this is all over.

But I'm in if you are.