A/N: Thank you so much for all the kind reviews. They make my day. :-)
Under The Influence
Chapter 14
"Someone just tried to kill Vanessa."
Joe heard the words and felt as if he were suddenly frozen in time, trapped in that heart stopping moment when bad news is received, but not yet comprehended. As the meaning sank in, the words wrapped themselves around his heart and squeezed tightly.
"She's all right." Joe heard his father reassuring him, as Fenton's voice brought him back to the present. "Joe, did you hear me? She's okay."
"What happened?" Joe finally asked.
"Your mother and Andrea went down to the cafeteria to get a cup of coffee. They weren't gone more than ten minutes. When they got back to Vanessa's room there were doctors, nurses and a couple of hospital security guards there. One of the nurses had gone in to check Vanessa's vital signs and found a man dressed in hospital scrubs trying to suffocate her with a pillow," Fenton explained. "Unfortunately, he got away."
Without another word, Joe turned and strode towards the door. Frank exchanged a worried glance with his father before taking off after Joe. Catching Joe's arm just before he made it through the doorway, Frank spun him around.
"Where are you going?" Frank asked, certain he already knew the answer.
"To see Vanessa," Joe replied tersely, trying to pull his arm from Frank's iron grip.
"Joe, you can't. You know that," Frank reminded him.
"Someone just tried to kill her! And it wasn't me! I was here," Joe snapped looking at the others, "with two of Bayport's finest as witnesses!"
"Unfortunately, that doesn't negate the restraining order," Fenton concurred. "Joe, you have to stay away from her. At least for the time being."
Joe glared first at his father and then Frank, before finally slumping against the wall in defeat. In a last ditch effort, Joe looked at Ezra Collig, his eyes pleading.
Hating himself for having to enforce a restraining order he knew was unnecessary, Collig shook his head. "I'm sorry, Joe. I can't let you see her. Until the judge lifts that restraining order, my hands are tied."
Joe closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the wall, banging his fist against the hard surface. Taking a deep breath, he opened his eyes and looked at his brother helplessly.
"Will you go…" Joe had barely begun when Frank cut him off.
"Of course. I'll go to the hospital right now and check on her," Frank said, relieved that Joe had given up on the idea of trying to see Vanessa at least for the time being. "Meet you back at the office?" he asked. "Oh, wait. We all came together."
"I'll give you a ride back, Joe," Con offered.
"Thanks," Joe replied dismally, as he turned and headed out the door.
"Is he going to be all right alone at home?" Ezra asked, concerned, as he watched Joe and Con walk out the door.
"I'll call Biff and ask him to go over and keep Joe company until we get back," Frank replied pulling out his cell phone, knowing Collig was right to be worried. With the news he had just received, leaving Joe alone for any length of time was just begging for trouble.
oooOOOooo
Con Riley pulled into the driveway of the Hardy home and came to a stop. Looking over at Joe, he wondered if he should stick around until Frank returned from the hospital, when a dark blue SUV pulled up to the curb in front of the house. Using the side mirror, Con watched as the driver emerged and a little chuckle escaped from his lips.
Turning to see what had caught Con's attention, Joe rolled his eyes and sighed heavily. "Apparently Frank thinks I need a babysitter," he muttered as Biff Hooper, his tall, muscular, blonde-haired, blue eyed best friend, strode up the driveway.
Con bit back the retort on the tip of his tongue, as Joe opened the passenger side door and got out of the car. Bidding Joe and Biff goodbye, he backed out of the driveway and headed for the hospital.
Joe walked across the lawn and into the house in silence, followed closely by Biff. Continuing down the hall and into the kitchen, Joe heading straight for the refrigerator. Opening the door, his head disappeared inside. He re-emerged a few seconds later with two cans of soda, one of which he tossed to Biff. Popping the top, Joe took several long gulps. Leaning back against the counter, he eyed his friend speculatively.
"So what did he say, 'Don't let him out of your sight.' ?" Joe asked, knowing Biff's sudden appearance wasn't an accident.
"I believe his exact words were, 'Don't let him do anything stupid.' " Biff responded good-naturedly.
Joe shook his head and couldn't help but smile at his brother's concern. While he'd never say it out loud, Joe silently acknowledged that, over the years, he'd given Frank ample reason to feel that way.
"You weren't planning on doing anything stupid today, were you?" Biff raised an eyebrow questioningly as he took a swig of soda.
"No, not today," Joe replied. "You're safe."
"Good. Frank has a tendency to get rather testy when we don't follow his instructions to the letter."
"I hear ya," Joe chuckled, thinking back on all the times he'd faced Frank's wrath for making spur of the moment changes to some of Frank's meticulously well thought out plans. Pushing himself off the counter, Joe crossed the kitchen in a few long strides and took a seat at the table.
"Do you have any leads?" Biff inquired.
"Yeah, actually, we do," Joe replied and proceeded to tell Biff about the letter from Marcus Wentworth, the information he'd given them on the other beneficiary and the specific criteria that had to be met to receive the inheritance, concluding with Andrea's comments about Ryan Bender.
Taking a moment to absorb all the information, Biff let out a low whistle. "Could the guy be anymore obvious?" he exclaimed in disbelief. "No one on the entire planet other than him would benefit from Vanessa being killed and you being convicted of doing it."
"Not as far as I'm concerned. He's the only one," Joe agreed. "But we need proof. Sam has already started a background check on him. When Dad and Frank get back, we'll decide what to do next."
As the two young men lapsed into silence, Biff noted the look of sadness creeping into Joe's eyes, growing increasingly more intense as the minutes passed. Unable to drive the nagging thought from his mind, Biff wondered how Joe would cope if Vanessa succumbed to her injuries. He remembered the stranger Joe had become after Iola's death – angry, reckless and full of rage. Meeting Vanessa had been the turning point for him. Slowly, over the next few years, Vanessa had coaxed the old Joe Hardy out of hiding and infused him with a passion for life that had been missing much too long.
Could he survive losing Vanessa, too, Biff wondered. Probably, he decided, but he'd be changed forever. The angry stranger would return and Biff knew, more than likely, the change would be permanent.
'Nope, can't let that happen,' Biff vowed, studying his friend carefully. 'Gotta keep his spirits up. Keep him thinking positively.'
"Hey, do you remember the first time you tried to teach Vanessa how to drive your motorcycle?" Biff asked, hoping to turn Joe's obviously dark thoughts to memories of happier times.
"Do I," Joe replied with a smile. "I've got permanent scars to remind me."
"I wasn't sure your bike was going to survive that day."
"Forget my bike!" Joe exclaimed. "I wasn't sure I was going to survive!"
Biff agreed, laughing at one particular recollection. "Man, when she hit the curb and you went flying off the bike I thought for sure you were a goner. You never even saw it coming."
"I think that was the one and only time my life flashed before my eyes," Joe said wistfully.
"I remember watching you sail through the air, and trying to figure out how I was going to explain to your parents that even though you'd tangled with every criminal element known to man and survived, you'd suddenly been done in by your girlfriend trying to drive through an immovable object during her first lesson on how to steer a motorcycle." Biff recalled every detail as if it had happened yesterday. "You should have seen the look on her face when you didn't get up right away. She thought she had killed you."
Joe leaned back in the chair, a smile dancing in his eyes. "She got the hang of it eventually. But she swore she'd make it up to me no matter how long it took."
"Yeah, and as I recall you milked that for all it was worth," Biff teased.
"Of course," Joe winked at him with a devilish grin.
"Hey how about the time you got mad at Frank during finals and told him too much studying resulted in temporary short term memory loss?" Biff asked, seeing his planned distraction was having the desired effect. "By the end of that week I think you and Vanessa had him convinced it was true!"
"Yeah, I'll never forget that," Joe acknowledged, with a chuckle.
It had been a few weeks before Frank graduated from high school and Frank had promised Joe that he would accompany him to a car show at the Southport Convention Center that weekend. Joe had been eagerly looking forward to it for weeks not only because he'd get to see the latest in high performance cars, but because he was going to share it with his older brother. When Frank headed off to college in the fall, Joe knew their time spent together just hanging out would be limited so he wanted to spend as much time as possible with his brother before that happened.
However, two days before the show, Frank begged off saying his chemistry teacher had announced the final exam, which accounted for fifty percent of their final grade, would be that Monday. Wanting to maintain his 4.0 average, Frank intended to spend the entire weekend studying, despite the fact that he already knew the material by heart.
Joe did everything he could to get Frank to change his mind, but Frank refused. Hurt and disappointed, Joe told him it was a proven fact that too much studying resulted in temporary short-term memory loss. Later that night as he griped to Vanessa about being abandoned by his older brother, Joe commented that he wished he could actually make Frank believe he was starting to forget things.
"That was when I realized you and Van were destined to be together. She's even more devious than you are!" Biff laughed out loud.
"She was that week," Joe agreed.
Seeing how disillusioned Joe was by Frank's last minute cancellation of their plans, Vanessa planted a few ideas in Joe's head as to just how he might make Frank believe his short term memory was starting to fail.
"The musical cars and disappearing books were bad enough, but I think changing the password on his computer almost did him in." Joe chortled, remembering the covert operations he and Vanessa carried out against Frank that week…
Monday morning found Vanessa seated in her car in the school parking lot, waiting for Frank and Joe to arrive. When Frank finally pulled into the lot and parked the van he and Joe shared, Vanessa parked two spaces away. Later that morning, she and Joe ran outside and moved the two vehicles, putting the van where Vanessa's car had originally been and her car in the space Frank had parked in. That afternoon, as he and Frank walked to the van, Joe took great joy in watching his brother approach the spot where he knew he had parked that morning and come to an abrupt halt. Frank stared at Vanessa's car for a moment or two before slowly walking to the van with a bemused expression on his face.
Buoyed by the success with the car switch, Joe took on something a little more challenging the next day. As he did every day, Frank stopped at his locker before lunch to drop off the books from his morning classes and pick up the ones he needed for the afternoon. Heading to the cafeteria, he dropped his backpack at the table Joe and their friends had commandeered before getting in line to purchase the mystery meal of the day. With Vanessa as a lookout, Joe discreetly removed one book from Frank's backpack and put it in his own, returning it to Frank's locker shortly after lunch. While Joe regretted not having the chance to see the look on Frank's face when he discovered the missing book at the start of class, he did enjoy the stunned look on Frank's face when he opened his locker after school and saw the offending book still on the shelf.
That night when Joe walked into Frank's room to return a shirt he had borrowed, he noted that his brother was changing the password on his computer. The next day, Joe and Vanessa snuck out of school, for a quick trip to the Hardy home. Using her extensive computer skills, Vanessa promptly changed the password on Frank's computer back to the old one. That night while studying in Joe's bedroom, he and Vanessa exchanged triumphant high-fives as they listened to Frank's muttered curses at his computer floating in through the open doors of bathroom that connected the brothers' bedrooms.
The end of the week brought another disappearing book, a misplaced set of keys and a "lost" jacket causing Frank to wonder if the stress of finals had indeed caused him to become forgetful. When Joe overheard him pose this question to Callie, he casually mentioned to Frank that if he had accompanied Joe to the car show as he had originally promised, he would have been more relaxed, less stressed and his short-term memory would have remained in tact.
"Did you ever fess up to that?" Biff asked, chuckling at the memory.
"Are you kidding?!" Joe exclaimed, horrified. "He would've taken me out to the cliffs on Shore Road and tossed me over the edge! Uh-uh. That secret goes to the grave," Joe warned.
"He won't hear it from me," Biff promised, sitting back with a self-satisfied smile, noting that his friend seemed a little happier than when he'd first arrived.
Hearing a car pull into the driveway, Joe checked his watch and was surprised to see he and Biff had been talking for well over an hour. He knew had Biff not been there to remind him of happier times with Vanessa, the wait would have been unbearable.
As they heard the front door open, Biff stood and downed the last of his soda. "Guess my job here is done."
"Hey, thanks, man," Joe said, gratefully. "If you hadn't been here to keep me occupied I probably would've…"
"…done something stupid?" Biff said, wryly.
"Something like that," Joe nodded.
Walking out to the foyer, they met up with Frank and Fenton.
"How is she?" Joe asked anxiously.
"She's stable," Frank assured him.
"Did you talk to the nurse? Get a description of the guy?"
"She didn't really get a good look at him," Fenton answered. "When she walked in and surprised him, he threw the pillow at her and took off. All she saw was a blur of green hospital scrubs."
As Joe listened, the apprehension that had begun to dissipate while he had been reminiscing with Biff returned even stronger. Whoever wanted Vanessa dead was still on the loose. With no description of her attacker, would they be able to find him and stop him? Or would his next attempt on Vanessa's life end in success?