226 Miles
Chapter 25
After the explosion an argument raged; was she dead? The bedrock of the presumption was summarily disproved; laid to waste by the pain being conveyed through her whole system with each shallow intake of breath; shock waves circulating; lacerating along the path of injury. She wasn't certain of course, but she held fast to the intuition that told her that feeling pain that was both excruciating and ceaseless after death seemed inconceivable; improbable; absurd. And if that wasn't enough, the bruising weight across her spine that held her pinned to the ground further established that luck, of a sort, had been on her side once again; confirming for Detective Morgan Steele; that at least for now; she was very much alive.
Acrid smoke provoked tears from her eyes; they streamed thickly in a vain attempt to try and clear her vision. She had lost her bearings after being inhaled by the explosion; hurtled through debris permeated air and expelled some distance from where she started; discarded into complete darkness behind what was left of the decimated shipyard. Her best theory was that she had landed somewhere along the fence line that led to the water since that was where she had been headed hoping to divest herself of the grenade when she had simply run out of time.
The fight she waged to remain conscious had been and still was of paramount importance and becoming more problematic as seconds crawled by. Somehow Steele had managed to hold on to the grenade even after absorbing assorted bone jarring blows; the first of which came in the form of shock waves affiliated with the enormous blast, another when she slammed into the ground with such force that she swore she could feel bones splintering and one final hit when a large, heavy piece of debris landed on top of her trapping her beneath its immense weight.
When she first registered the sound; their calls for her; Morgan speculated that she might be in the throes of hallucination; where help was near; where her imprisonment was close to an end. As the calls became louder; closer; real, she struggled to answer them, but found it impossible to expand her chest enough to take in the air needed to produce any sound above a whisper. Whatever was holding her down had made it virtually impossible to move and increasingly difficult to breathe. As hard as she tried, all she could manage was a weak, ineffectual, "Here…"
Kate had been the first to determine that an intensive search of the back lot needed to be done immediately after the explosion, "Steele's alive. She made it out the back way. There's no way she would allow herself to go out like this; not after everything she's been through."
Kevin and Javi jogged along beside her passing quizzical looks back and forth wondering exactly what Kate was referring to, "I saw her, Beckett. She was following me out the front and then the place blew."
"Javi, something happened in there that made her veer from the plan. She went this way for a reason," Kate's conviction fired Javi and Kevin with a flicker of hope that shifted their thinking her way.
"Yeah, okay. She's here; has to be," and Espo's calls for Steele became louder and more demanding than anyone else's.
Kevin searched nearby pushing mounds of debris aside, "We need lights back here. I can't see a damn thing."
"Quiet!" a voice the team didn't readily recognize called out in the blackness. "I think I heard something."
Shaw strode up beside Kate and the boys, "Turn all the radios off. I want thirty seconds of complete silence!"
The first fifteen seconds there was only the crackling of the fire consuming the remains of the warehouse. The next ten were filled with the night sounds of crickets, water birds hunting for their next meal, and passing traffic on the surrounding roads.
It was those last five seconds that probably saved her life; for in them Steele went to a place inside herself where only those who have faced death and survived have been; a place where Hail Mary plays are crafted; where seemingly lost causes are granted a last second reprieve. Awareness of the gravity of her situation spurred her on; Steele sucked in air beyond the meager space she thought she had and projected a call for help reflective of the fact that her life was dependent upon it, "Here!"
Having expended the last of her reserves emotionally and physically, Morgan's ears buzzed as the gray of unconsciousness came for her; pulled her away from the scene; leaving her less aware of the moment; her situation; a fate that was beginning to define itself as unavoidable. Time ceased to matter; being found didn't seem so important after all; the explosive in her hand drifted from her thoughts and her grasp.
"I've got it, Steele. You can let go now," a voice she knew, but couldn't quite place assured her.
Trusting in it because she lacked another choice; because she found herself wanting to; her fingers relaxed; releasing the grenade. It was the last thing Morgan did before unconsciousness wrapped her battered body in its protection finally allowing her the kind of respite from the night's events that only oblivion could provide.
X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-
Steele opened her eyes to find herself propped up on a stretcher in the back of an ambulance with an oxygen mask over her nose and mouth. "Welcome back detective," the paramedic spoke to her in a tone that was orchestrated to illicit calm; soothe the fragile psyche.
Steele looked past him out the back of the truck. Struggling to breathe deeply, she surmised that she had at least one broken rib inside somewhere, "Where's Agent Shaw?"
The paramedic's tone changed to one of admonition; his disapproving facial expression an added bonus, "You need to lay back and let us finish checking you out detective."
Steele cranked herself to a seated position; breath drawn through agonizing gasps as she swung her legs over the side of the gurney pulling the IV out of her arm, "You need to get out of my way."
Morgan jumped down from the back of the ambulance; pain ripped through her chest; doubling her over; freezing her in place momentarily while she struggled to recover. Whatever she had been trapped under had done its worst, "Steele, over here!"
Kate's voice distracted her from the pain, nausea and dizziness that migrated through her. Morgan had managed to completely compartmentalize it by the time she joined the team standing at the back of Shaw's SUV.
Shaw looked Steele up and down; expression reflective of the less than stellar condition she was in, "We just got a call from the precinct. My tech guys found something in the security cam footage. They're uploading it to us now."
The footage, she explained, was from a bank directly across the street from the park where Beckett had last seen Castle. When it finally began to stream across the screen, no one could move.
"There he is," Kevin announced as he watched Castle exiting the park and beginning to walk back in the direction of the precinct.
"He was coming back here," Javi's voice was overrun with anxiety as he continued to watch the scene unfold.
Within seconds a black van with sliding side panel doors pulled up in front of Castle blocking the camera's view of actual events. Seconds later when it pulled away, he was simply gone.
"What the hell just happened?" Javi was having trouble processing what he had just seen.
"Hang on, there's more," Shaw shared what she had been told by her guys; that they should watch the clip all the way through.
"What was that?" Kate asked suddenly.
"What was what?" whatever she had seen, the others had missed.
"Run it back and slow it down," Steele ordered meeting Kate's eyes briefly.
When they did they saw something fly from the passenger side window as though it had been purposefully tossed, "Can you zoom in on that?"
Shaw used the touch screen to manipulate the picture honing in on the area where the object had landed in the street next to the curb. As the film continued forward, they tried to identify the object. As they studied each frame, one by one, a hand reached into the zoomed image and picked it up. Shaw immediately backed the zoom out and couldn't contain an audible gasp when she saw who it was.
"That's our guy. That's freakin' Humpty," Kevin was incredulous.
"Son of a bitch; he was after Castle," Javi added equally as shocked as Kevin.
"Yeah, but it looks like somebody else got to him first," Shaw's gaze searched for Kate, but she had apparently slipped away from the group at some point. "Why would anyone want to kidnap Castle?"
"That's Castle's phone," Steele chimed in briefly distracting Shaw from her search for Kate.
Kevin looked perplexed, "So he never had him at all; just his phone?"
Steele nodded completely certain of it, "He saw the guys from the van ditch it after they grabbed him. He picked it up and kept it thinking it might come in handy at some point."
Shaw and Steele continued to review the footage for anything further they might be able to use to find out who really had taken Castle.
Javi and Kevin stepped away so they could talk privately, "Where's Beckett?"
"She's gone," Javi had no doubt about that. She might be a federal agent now; at least on the surface, but underneath it all; at her center; her heart; she was Detective Kate Beckett and that was who Castle needed most now.
"What do we do, Jav? This thing just went from bad to worse," Kevin asked carefully knowing Javi and how terribly wrong this conversation could go if he felt that he was being asked to be disloyal to Beckett.
"I don't know bro," for the first time since Montgomery's death Javi didn't seem so sure their pact of silence was going to allow everyone to come out of this thing alive.
"You know what almost happened the last time we kept this kind of secret," Kevin didn't really need to remind him, but he did it anyway.
"I know bro," Javi was torn; uncertain what to do. If only she hadn't just disappeared. "We have to find her."
Kevin thought hard about what to do next; his eyes on Morgan and Shaw. He knew what he would do if it was only up to him, "Hey, isn't Bracken in town tonight for one of those eco conferences?"
"Oh, shit. Yeah, it's at some hotel near Battery Park," Javi began walking toward their unit.
"If Beckett thinks Bracken took Castle, she might just put a bullet in him this time," Kevin wasn't joking and he didn't immediately follow Javi to the car. Instead he waited for Javi to notice and turn back around before he continued, "Are we really going to go down this road again, bro? You've seen what these people are capable of. It's Castle man...it's Castle." Kevin took several steps toward Javi to both make his point and to ensure they weren't over heard, "The don't want him, Javi. They want Beckett and what they think she has."
Javi's face was granite; immovable; unreadable. It had finally arrived; their moment of truth; two friends; partners; brothers. They had been on different sides before; had chosen divergent paths along the way and ultimately been okay. If they made that same choice again neither knew if that would still be the case. What they did know was that the decision they made this night would make or break their relationship and directly impact the fates of their two closest friends; a choice whose outcome would bring with it a weight they could end up carrying with them always.
The look they shared was tortured; conflicted, but true. Instinctively they both knew what came next, "We have to do this. We owe them that."