Finding Him
Bursting through the double doors in search of the screaming woman, they were confronted with a packing room floor and a running conveyor belt.
The same panicked voice rose. "I'll do it! Stop this! I'll go in his place!"
Carlos had learned over his years with the Austin PD that the most intense captures were often a lot of build up, of searching, of piecing clues together, while the resolution was often quick and chaotic. Later, running through everything again and again, he'd feel that way about the events of the evening.
As Carlos searched for the source of the voice, Owen burst past him, following the moving belt.
"TK?!" Owen hollered. "Son?"
Judd nudged Carlos in time for him to narrowly miss catching a baseball bat to his head. The large firefighter caught the end of the bat in one hand and shoved the mask-wearing man wielding it.
"What're you doing, slugger?" Judd growled, pulling the bat out of the guy's hands and using it to swing at another mask-wearing man charging him.
Carlos reached out and pulled the Freddy Krueger mask right off the guy who'd prior held the bat and punched him square in the face. Turning, he saw the other guy, the one in a Grinch mask, pull out a switchblade and lunge for Judd with it. Judd, thankfully, saw it coming and grabbed the dude's wrist, slamming it —and him—against a rail separating the conveyor area from the rest of the packing floor.
"TK!" This time, Owen's cry wasn't one of a father searching for his son. It was the cry of a man finding him and not liking what he found.
Seeing that Judd had disarmed the Grinch and now had his firearm trained on both Grinch and Krueger, Carlos ran toward Owen, who had reached the end of the belt where a short ladder led down to the place where the belt dropped its cargo. Normally, Carlos knew, the items on the belt would fall into a box on the lower belt and continue on for taping and labeling. But today, the only thing at the end of the belt was the large ice bath he'd seen on the video.
Owen reached into the tub as Carlos bypassed the ladder and jumped straight down to the lower platform. Owen came up with TK.
"TK! I've got you, son, I've got you!" Not realizing Carlos was coming up right behind him, Owen cried, "Carlos! I've—" His words were cut short as Carlos helped him drag TK out of the tub of ice water and onto the non-moving lower belt. "TK, son, talk to me!"
Carlos' heart began to hammer as he realized TK's eyes were open, but he wasn't responding in any way to Owen's voice. His white undershirt was soaked with ice water and, Carlos realized, blood.
"Son! Son, look at me!" Owen urged, fingers at TK's neck.
Carlos could see he was alive, breathing, but the sight of him, eyes vacant, pupils blown wide, drugged out of his mind, it twisted an invisible dagger in his chest. Shrugging out of his blazer, Carlos bent to drop it over TK, only for Owen to push it away in favor of lifting TK's shirt.
"There are no wounds," Owen said in disbelief. There were angry red splotches at his shoulders and just under his breastbone, but no holes. "Whose blood is this?"
Carlos tried again to put his blazer over his trembling husband, and this time Owen let him, pausing to pull off his own fleece jacket and place it over TK's legs.
Carlos crouched at TK's right side, dismayed that he didn't turn his head to look at him. He didn't seem to be aware of either of them...his father or his husband. TK finally blinked. He shook, and he made little panting sounds, but he didn't seem conscious of anything going on around him. Just like the victims dumped in the streets. He was too late to spare his husband much of the same fate, save the moving vehicle part. Tears blurred his vision.
"Call 9-1-1," Owen ordered, smoothing TK's wet hair, still urging him to respond. "C'mon, son, c'mon. Talk to us...we're here, son, we're here..."
"Already did," Judd's voice said as he stepped down the last rung of the ladder. "They're coming around this end. We gotta get this door open!"
Carlos looked past him to the roll up door about fifty yards away. He saw Judd move the latch aside and thrust it upward. He watched the familiar paramedics of another local station, the 129, rush forward, medical bags shouldered, gurney rolling between them, and looked back down at TK. Carlos looked right into his husband's eyes and fought a sob as one tiny sign of recognition appeared: a tear.
It wasn't water. Owen kept smoothing his hair back, trying to get a response, and in so doing, he'd swept away the moisture with it.
"Babe," Carlos said, cupping TK's chilled cheek, "I'm here. I'm here, TK," he said, even as he let go and scuttled backward to let the paramedics assess him. He took Owen's offered hand, let his father-in-law pull him to his feet.
Other awareness came to Carlos even though his eyes remained trained on TK. The Austin PD was all over the place, shouting, kicking doors, searching for the other victims. Another couple of paramedics rushed in, disappearing past the conveyor belt, on the upper level.
In no time at all, the two working on TK had him on the gurney, restraints clicking into place, and Carlos and Owen rushed after them, both welcomed into the back of the ambulance to ride with him.
"Any idea at all what he's taken?" One paramedic, whose name tape read Madden, asked.
"No idea," Owen replied. "Detective Borregos' guys are, I'm sure, gathering any available evidence at the scene, but we're just the guys who pulled him from an ice bath in time to keep him from drowning."
"What the hell is going on in Austin tonight?" the other paramedic, whose tape said Treger, asked with a shake of his head.
"TK," Madden asked, "can you hear me? Can you squeeze my hand?"
Carlos watched intently, but TK didn't respond. His eyes were closed now, though he continued to tremble.
"How long was he in the ice bath?" Treger asked.
"Not sure, but not long enough to stop breathing," Owen answered.
"Maybe a paralytic?" Madden asked rhetorically. "Pupils are still blown. Not much in the way of reactivity. And he's not quite hypothermic, so I'm thinking this trembling isn't from being cold."
And then...oh, God, and then the worst happened.
"He's crashing!" Madden said.
Carlos watched, frozen, as Treger and Madden worked over TK's body. Compressions. Pause, check. Defibrillator. Clear! Wait. Check. More compressions. He recognized it all. He'd done compressions, himself, on occasion, waiting for paramedics to arrive and take over.
Carlos held his breath. Waiting. Please. Owen smacked his back. "Carlos!"
"We've got him back," Madden said, and when he saw the line move on the monitor, Carlos loudly sucked in a breath.
He thought, somehow, that if he looked away, TK would code again, so he kept his eyes fixed on TK's oblivious face until the rear doors opened in the ambulance bay and he was forced to exit, to watch them race the gurney indoors. Owen held him back when he wanted to follow all the way.
"We have to let them do their job, Carlos," his father-in-law said. By his tone of dismay, Carlos knew he wasn't happy about it, either.
oOo
With nothing else to do besides wait for word on TK's condition, Carlos called Marjan to update her and Paul. Owen called Tommy, who'd separated from Marjan and Paul after coming up empty at the warehouse. The intake clerk in the ER, recognizing Owen even though he was off duty, waved them through into one of two "family" rooms in the unit, where larger groups could wait comfortably.
Judd, who'd stayed at the scene for a bit after the ambulance left, texted he'd be there soon and that he'd called Grace. She'd be on her way, also, if she could find someone to watch Charlie.
Carlos nodded. "Marjan and Paul are on the way, too."
Owen told them, "Tommy asked for updates. One of her girls isn't feeling well, so she's going to stay home to look after her."
Grace called Carlos to let him know she'd heard about TK and would be coming down to the hospital if she could find a sitter for Charlie. "Judd'll be along, too, he hung behind to find out more about what the other victims were telling police."
Marjan and Paul arrived not long after. Carlos heard Owen describing what went down. He paced the floor until Marjan blocked his path and gently led him to a chair.
When Judd arrived, he told them what he'd learned hanging around the scene. "Mia, the girl that partnered TK with for their so-called experiments, is pregnant. She told the cops TK took the brunt each time because he was trying to protect her baby. On that video Marjan had, they claimed the 'giver' could refuse to participate, but that wasn't true. Mia said if she refused to do whatever she was supposed to do to TK, then she would have to go through it, herself. TK wasn't about to let a pregnant lady get shocked or drugged. He took it all on, himself." His voice roughened and his eyes darkened as he added, "He told them he was an addict, that he didn't want any injections. Mia said she wanted his people to know that, that he fought against it, but in the end, he couldn't let them inject her with some mystery substance."
Marjan wiped at tears.
Paul nodded and said, "Nobody thinks he was a willing participant, Judd."
Judd nodded. "Yep, I know that. We all know that. Just relaying what Mia said. Anyhow, cops found the other three victims in a room on the office floor. The woman TK was looking for who got kidnapped just before him, she was pretty out of it. She was paired with an older gentleman, and she was trying to protect him, too, 'cause he said he had a pacemaker. She didn't want him getting shocked. Then there was a guy and another girl who traded off. They're both a little loopy, I guess, from whatever they took, but by trading off, they lessened the overall affects. It looks like TK came out the worst of all of them."
Carlos swallowed hard. He couldn't fault TK for his altruism, but he ached over what it had done to him. Marjan looped an arm around his shoulders, saying nothing. "Do—" Carlos cleared his throat and tried again. "Do they know what the substances were?"
Judd shook his head. "Gathered up dozens of loaded syringes, ten or twelve spent ones that were empty, and hundreds of little packets of pills, but no way to know what he specifically got. Hospital will run toxicology, but that'll take a bit of time." Kicking at the curled-up edge of a carpet square, Judd met his eyes again. "Only good news in this whole nightmare is, they've got video footage of the whole damn thing. Jackasses recorded everything to make that little video Marjan stumbled on, and police found the central recording device and seized it. They're going to try to get what information they can from the videos...see if any of the footage was close enough to make out whatever it was that they forced into TK, but, you know, they said it wasn't likely to show anything that up close."
Carlos sighed. It was something.