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Left a message for patient Alexandra Cabot. Still unaware of her condition.
Alex awoke to her alarm at six that morning. She groaned, her body thick with unresolved fatigue, and reached for Olivia yet again. And yet again, her cold hands reached through thin air. She groaned again.
"Liv…" she called out, sitting up in bed. She had to be somewhere in the apartment. She knew that the detective had a tendency to up and run, but the place was surrounded and Olivia couldn't be so much of a masochist that she'd want to put herself in danger. Right?
Alex rapped on the shut bathroom door, but it just swung open with the force of her knocks to reveal an empty room. "Olivia…" she called again. Living room, empty. She walked towards the kitchen where by now the aroma of coffee would normally pervade the air. Today, no such smells existed. And the kitchen was unoccupied.
The apartment was empty.
Enraged, Alex ran towards the front door and swung it open, startling the two uniformed officers standing on either side.
"You let her out, you idiots? What happened, did you fall asleep? Run out of doughnuts and leave to get some more? What the hell?" she shouted at the two surprised cops.
"Ms. Cabot, Officer Peña and I have been here all night. We have not left, nor slept. Being night shift workers, we are not particularly tired because we sleep most of the day. Nobody has come in or out of this door since we took up post at midnight," one of the officers quickly explained.
"Well Detective Benson is not here, and there is only one exit to this apart…wait."
Alex ran back inside, with the stares of the two officers following her. In the living room, the curtains blew with a gust of wind in front of the open window to the fire escape.
"No," she murmured shaking her head. "No no no no…"
"Ms. Cabot?" the officer inquired.
"Take me to the two in the car downstairs," she replied softly.
The two cops escorted Alex out of the building where an unmarked squad car with two street-clothed officers sat. She stormed over there and began violently knocking on the driver's window. The window rolled down.
"Where is Detective Benson?" she asked sharply.
"I would say upstairs, but clearly she must not be," the officer on the driver's side replied.
"We haven't seen her all night," the other officer added.
Alex threw her head back in frustration. She looked over to where the fire escape would be, and realized Olivia could have very well avoided the view of the two officers. She couldn't blame them too much—they thought their job was to keep people out, not in.
Biting her lip and holding back frightened tears, she regained her composure. "Take me to the 16th precinct," she croaked out.
"How the hell did this happen, Alex? Weren't you with her?" Elliot yelled.
"I was sleeping, Elliot! When I went to bed she was right there with me!" Alex retorted. "Why are you blaming this on me? It's not productive. What we need to be doing is figuring out why on earth she did this and where she could have gone. We can't track her cell, she left it in our apartment. We have to know where she is…whether she's alive," she added, her voice shaking.
Elliot sighed and put a hand on Alex's good shoulder. "She's alive. Whatever the reason is for her leaving, she had one."
"Well you can ask her what it was yourselves," Fin came hurrying in. "We found her at Bellevue, checked in through the ER in critical condition forty minutes ago."
Three hours earlier…
Olivia knew what she was doing was incredibly reckless. She didn't feel good about it, not for a minute, but she knew she had to do it. Maybe she shouldn't always have to be the hero, but no one else seemed to want the job.
She fingered the syringe in her pocket as she walked up her apartment steps. She walked slowly and pretended to be talking on the cell phone she wasn't carrying, trying to make herself as conspicuous as possible.
It had to only be a matter of time before they came for her, she thought to herself when she sat on her bed. If they were watching her apartment, which they just had to be, they knew she was there, alone. And that's what she wanted. She was there to bait El Guepardo and stop him once and for all.
It was not part of her plan to fall asleep on her bed, but when after twenty minutes the apartment still held its silence, she slowly drifted off. It was not two minutes later that the sound of her front door opening jostled her awake once more. Silently, she thanked some higher power that she hadn't managed to fall into some deeper sleep.
She braced herself silently, pulling out her and pointing it at her bedroom door. Her gaze was steadfast as the footsteps came closer and closer…
Next thing she knew, her gun was on the floor and she was in a headlock. She didn't understand it! First there was no one in the room, and suddenly she was helplessly trapped. Then she remembered the significance of El Guepardo's name—he was impossibly quick. She thought she could out speed him, but evidently she was terribly, terribly wrong.
"Pleasure to meet you, Mr. Caldera," she choked out through the arm that was strangling her neck. She stared up into the barrel of the gun that was pressed into her forehead, and down to the knife that threatened to slice through her abdomen. "I never thought I'd get to see the face of the man that killed my ADA."
"Hah," the gruff voice came back. "I wasn't aware you had eyes in the back of your head, Detective."
"Part of…" she coughed, "our training as cops," she joked grimly.
"Well get a good look, then, whatever you're seeing will be your last sight," Caldera replied, ripping the blade through Olivia's shirt, causing her to cry out in pain.
"Come on, please don't do this," Olivia pleaded. "I promise we'll stop the investigation, we won't tell anyone anything!"
"I don't do negotiation anymore, muñeca." He cocked the gun that leaned against her face, and she bit her lip.
"Very well then," Olivia said softly.
"Weak, detective. I thought I'd get more of a fight out of you than that," he chuckled. "Talking all tough and…oof!"
The sound of Caldera's gun dropping to the floor was deafening in the otherwise quiet apartment. Olivia grinned where he couldn't see her as she pulled the needle out of the left side of his stomach. "Funny how some of the most effective weapons can be found at your local hospital if you have enough friends," she said smoothly, Caldera's body dropping to the floor at her words.
It was only a mild sedative, of course. She wasn't here to kill him. No matter how much she hated the bastard, she was just giving herself the time to call the station and bring him in without him ever knowing until it was too late.
"Don't worry, you'll get your Miranda warnings when you wake up," she smiled.
She walked towards the kitchen where her home phone hung on the wall. Having left her cell on her nightstand so she couldn't be traced, it was the only way she was going to be able to reach the precinct. Her feet reached the cold tile of the small kitchen and then…
BAM.
Olivia screamed out and doubled over as the pain shot through her stomach. Where did that come from?
"Oh please, Detective, you really believed I would send my man in here with no backup? Didn't you learn anything in the academy?"
"Who are you?" she demanded, still not able to look up as she applied pressure to her burning, gushing wound.
"I believe if you actually took the time to look up at me, you'd recognize me," the voice sneered.
Slowly, she raised her head. Standing before her was the spitting image of Marcial Rodriguez, but with shorter hair and lighter skin. She'd seen that face before. Pictures of just a few days earlier popped into her head, with some polite stranger holding a door open after she clumsily dropped her phone, and she growled.
"You're the brother," she said. "You're at the so called 'top' of this pyramid. You're the one ordering all these murders."
"Very good," he laughed. "Too bad you're the only one who knows that, and your knowledge is about to become quite useless."
"Go ahead, do it. Put a bullet between my eyes. It won't be as pretty as Caldera's work, but it'll do the job, right?" she retorted. "I mean, I guess there has to be a reason you never did the killing yourself, but I'm sure this will be no problem for you."
"Really, Detective, I'm not sure this is the best time to be insulting the man whose mercy you should be begging for," he said walking closer to where she knelt, still trying to control her bleeding.
"I'm not begging you for anything," Olivia replied calmly. "I came here fully accepting that I might not leave."
"Very noble of you, especially considering you have that beautiful lawyer that you seem so fond of," he snickered, now standing virtually on top of her. "Gotta love a little dyke detective."
"She knows the hazards of my job," she gritted through her teeth, knowing full well that if Alex had any idea where she was right now she'd get the tongue-lashing of a lifetime and probably a few slaps to the face.
"Do you think she and that partner of hers will still try to prosecute this case after you're dead? I just need to know if I need to put up the money for two more hits before this is all done with," he whispered.
"I don't think that will be necessary," Olivia replied.
"Are you sure?"
"Quite sure."
She took her hands off the gushing wound and immediately kicked her leg out to strike the man's knee. He lost his balance and toppled to his ass beside her. Running on adrenaline, she shot up and tackled him down, making a move for his gun.
"What do you think you're trying, bitch?" he jeered. She punched his nose and broke it, and he hissed in pain, dropping the gun, but reaching it again just as fast. He wrapped his hand around the small handgun and Olivia stomped down on his wrist. She attempted to use her other foot to kick the gun further away, but even with a cracked wrist his grip on the weapon was tight.
Suddenly she felt more than a little dizzy, and she could no longer stand. She dropped to the floor again, feeling fuzzy and watching the room start to spin a bit. She stared at the ground that was rapidly turning red.
"It's over, Detective. Say goodbye," the man said softly. His face was barely in focus; she could just pick out his features and the small trace of blood that was pouring out of his nostrils.
But it wasn't over until it was over. With her last ounce of strength, she raised her leg once more and took a cheap but effective shot to his groin. She'd heard that a kick down there hurt even more than a broken nose for a guy, and all evidence pointed to that truth as he howled and growled, the gun slipping out of his fingers as he reflexively reached for the injured area and landing on her bloodied chest.
The room was so out of focus that she didn't know where the hell she was shooting. But the blurry vision and the strangled sound of a sharp intake of breath and a body hitting the tile confirmed that she'd done well.
She loosely reached her arm out for the long cord on the wall that attached to her home phone, and for a fleeting moment she attempted to humor herself by being grateful she'd never bothered to enter the 21st century. She pulled on the cord and the phone fell to the floor. She blindly pushed where she suspected the buttons to call 911 would be.
"911, what is your emergency?"
"Medical emergency, two gunshot wounds, both critical…trace the call…"
"Ma'am, can you stay on the phone with me?"
Olivia had already lost consciousness.
And now she was in a bed in the ICU, hooked up to a ventilator and completely unresponsive. Elliot and Alex sat on either side of her, staring at someone who was so much more than a colleague to both of them, wondering how she could've done this to herself just for her job. They'd been there for hours as Olivia underwent surgery and returned from recovery, but she had yet to wake up.
"What was she thinking?" Alex shook her head, tears still running down her face. Elliot just looked at her and shrugged. He didn't really know what to say to the blonde—it was hard to know what to do when she cried, because it never seemed to happen. "At least when this crap happened to me, I didn't go looking for it."
"She was just doing what she felt was right," Elliot said, knowing his explanation was pretty lame.
"If that was you on that bed, how would Kathy feel, Elliot? It's bad enough knowing she could be dead right now; it's worse knowing that she walked right into it."
"Alex, look!"
Olivia's eyes began to show signs of movement, and her arm flinched. "I think she's waking up. I'm going to go grab a nurse," Alex announced and ran out of the room.
When Olivia opened her eyes, she was greeted with the sight of two nurses standing over her. One was checking her reflexes and the other smiled at her. "Welcome back, Detective Benson," she said sweetly. "You just took a little nap. I'm going to take out this tube, alright? I need you to breathe out."
Olivia exhaled as the nurse pulled out the ventilator, coughing at the strange tickling the tube made in her throat. She took a few deep breaths and felt immediately better.
"Liv," Elliot said, walking up beside her. "Thank God you're alright."
"I'm fine," she croaked out. "He's dead."
"Who's dead?" Elliot recalled what he'd heard from a doctor that had talked to an EMT, remembering that two others had been brought in, one in mild condition and one DOA. "Never mind, we'll talk about that later."
"El? Where's Alex?" Olivia asked hoarsely.
"She's right…" he turned around to where Alex had been sitting before. The chair was empty. He spun around the room, but only saw the two nurses. He looked out in the hallway, but the blonde was not to be found. He sighed.
"I'm sorry Liv, she left."
What's the deal with Alex? Things will get heated pretty soon...