A Distant Heart by Sonali Dev (31)

31

Rahul
A long time ago

 

“Where the hell have you been?” The last thing Rahul needed was to deal with Jen’s wrath right now. But it was valid; all her damn anger was valid. She had been trying to call him for the past hour, but he had been too busy. “The bastard showed up! He pressed a gun to my belly. Do you know I’m pregnant? Are you aware?” Jen pointed at her protruding belly.

Yes, he was aware. Of all the fucked-up things about this case, the fact that Jen was carrying a child was somehow the worst part. He had once tried to tell her to go slow when she’d been badgering him relentlessly to try and find two of her patients who had gone missing. She’d dragged him through the narrow lanes of Dharavi where the two sisters had lived, questioning all their neighbors about their whereabouts.

“Should you really be racing around in the heat in your state?” he had asked her.

She’d bitten his head off, lecturing him at such considerable length about how pregnancy doesn’t impede one’s ability for locomotion that he had learned his lesson and never referred to her pregnancy again.

She wasn’t the kind of person you could try to be overprotective of. In fact, all attempts to get her to back off chasing these thugs who were stealing organs from undocumented slum dwellers and leaving them untraceable met with a: “You have a better plan, officer?”

That had reminded him so much of Kimi.

Suddenly, it was clear to him how everything reminded him of Kimi. He had refused to admit it, and now he had gone and made the biggest mistake of his life. The way her arms and legs had clutched him as he pumped into her, unable to stop. Blood rushed to his face.

Here he was, on duty, with a pregnant woman telling him a psychopath they’d been trying to track down had pressed a gun to her belly, and he couldn’t stop thinking about the violent satisfaction of releasing inside his best friend. And the raging need to go back to her right now. He had left her, possibly lost and embarrassed and needing him. He imagined her now, her arms wrapped around her knees, wondering what she had done wrong to make him flee.

Truth was, he wasn’t as worldly as she saw him. Sex had never been an enjoyable experience for him. It had always been a purely physical release, something that came tinged with self-loathing and the memory from long ago of his fourteen-year-old hand forcefully pressed against a khaki-clad dick. But he hadn’t thought about that once today. He hadn’t even remembered it until he had tried to sit up and she had tried to hold him and he’d seen a wash of pleasure in her eyes so pure and untainted, all the self-loathing had descended on him like a wave that took you down too fast to outrun.

“Hello, Rahul, are you even here?” Jen snapped her fingers in his face.

“I came as soon as I got your message.” He just hadn’t seen it because he’d been too busy. “Tell me everything.”

“First, I think my friend in Qatar might be able to get us the records for all the transplants performed across the Gulf in the past six months. He did say that there’s been an unusually rapid rise in numbers. For years there were no organs and now people are moving up the list as though it’s the Costco line on the day before Thanksgiving.”

“Excuse me?” Usually, he got a lot of Jen’s American references because Kimi made him watch so much American TV and movies.

“Never mind. I’m absolutely sure the organs are being pulled off our donor registry database.” Jen had worked like a madwoman over the past six months to compile a donor registry in Dharavi because the rate of organ failure was so high.

One day, she had noticed two of her patients disappear suspiciously, and she hadn’t been able to let it go. She’d made his life hell until he had listened to her and finally found a few desecrated body parts buried in sewage. Then five more people had disappeared, and he had realized that she wasn’t a mad American charity junkie desperate to find the meaning of life in the slums of Mumbai. She was just a doctor who wanted to save lives.

They had become friends and watched as the tally of people on her registry who disappeared rose and rose. Unfortunately, no more bodies ever showed up. This made the case impossibly hard because the victims were undocumented. And those who didn’t exist couldn’t disappear.

Now the bastards who were wreaking this havoc had broken into Jen’s clinic. The place was completely trashed. Broken glass and papers strewn everywhere. A picture of Jen with her husband, Nikhil, slashed up. Rahul was careful not to touch anything until his forensics team arrived.

“The thug and all his cronies wore masks, but I could tell they were desperate. I swear I don’t even know what stopped him from emptying that gun into me. He knows something. I can smell fear, and he was scared enough to explode. Maybe he knows how close we are to busting him.”

Rahul kicked himself again for not having picked up her text sooner. But his phone had been on Kimi’s desk, and his ears, and all the rest of him, otherwise occupied. Not that he would have made it here before the bastards left, even if he’d had the good sense to show more control.

“He took my laptop. But of course he underestimated this brain.” Jen tapped her head. “What kind of idiot leaves important information on a local drive?” She called her assistant on the phone. “Can you bring me your laptop? I keep all my records on a remote server. He’ll never find them.”

“You should have been a cop,” Rahul said, as the forensics team arrived and started to comb through the room.

“So why are you hurtling between total distraction and looking like your best friend died?”

The question was so unexpected, Kimi’s pleasure-dilated pupils flashed in his mind, harsh and bright. Her breath had been sweet. How could anyone’s breath be sweet? Her moans had seeped under his skin. And he had left her behind. When he knew that might be the last time he’d ever smell that breath, hear those moans.

“Rahul, seriously, what’s wrong?”

“It’s weird that we’re working on this case. My friend, she’s been waiting for a heart donor for a few years now. She just found out that they might have a match for her in Hong Kong.” He still couldn’t believe that the drug that was supposed to give her a new lease on life had started to destroy her heart within months, and also destroyed her dreams along the way. I guess Columbia’s going to have to wait, had been her only reaction. Even though it had taken all her wily powers of persuasion to convince her parents to let her go.

“Is the donor on a ventilator?”

“Yes.”

“Medicine is magic, isn’t it? Nikhil loves to say that.”

“Actually, she’s magic all by herself.”

“Ooh! DCP Savant’s in love.”

Rahul stood so fast Jen stumbled back. “Shit,” she said, losing her footing and landing on her bum. “Calm down, tiger!”

“I’m sorry.” Rahul went down on his knees next to her. “Are you okay?” He tried to pull her up and she stumbled again. Her bare foot was bleeding.

“Hell! I think I stepped on broken glass.” She stared down at her foot. “Just my luck. My stupid feet are so swollen, I had to take off my shoes.”

It was bleeding pretty badly. She tried to reach it, but it wasn’t easy to do over her pregnant belly and that made her laugh. She shoved her foot toward him. “Do you see anything?”

He picked up her foot. The shiny edge of broken glass was peeking out of the bleeding cut. “I think I see it. Do you have some tweezers in here?”

She pointed to a turned-over cabinet that they couldn’t touch because he couldn’t contaminate the crime scene.

“See if you can get it with your fingers.”

He poked around but couldn’t.

“I have some tweezers upstairs in the flat.”

“I’ll go get them.”

“Or I could walk up there. No point waiting down here. We have to get out of the forensics team’s way anyway.”

“You’re not walking on that foot.” He found some gauze and pressed it lightly on the wound.

“Well, then, Romeo, why don’t you carry me up there and tell me all about your lady love.”

“She’s not my lady love,” he said, and still all he could think about was how her skin had felt under his lips, around his damn cock. Had he always known?

He had never let himself think about it. About wanting to touch her, to kiss that mouth, that upturned nose, those deeply set eyelids and long arched brows. He had never let himself think about it because he knew it should never happen. And now it had and he would never, ever be able to stop reliving it.

“Well, chop-chop,” Jen said. “Unless you want to daydream while I limp up on my torn-up foot.”

He shook his head and scooped her up, setting off another spurt of laughter. Apparently, his misery was incredibly amusing to Dr. Joshi. For a pregnant woman she was really light. He stepped into the street and the line of street vendors turned to stare at them.

“We’re going to get the rumor mills to go completely wild, aren’t we?” she said through her laughter.

“As long as your husband doesn’t show up and decide to shoot me.” Rahul hadn’t met Nikhil Joshi, but he knew that he was visiting from Africa this week.

That made her laugh even more. “Nic and guns mix like you and a tutu. Plus, he’s one of those guys who doesn’t feel jealousy. To him, it would be such a sign of weakness and distrust in me that he’d be mortified if he let himself feel it.”

“Sounds like a great guy.” Especially since the idea of seeing another man carry Kimi anywhere made him feel crazed right now.

“He is. And so are you, officer,” she said and wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed his cheek.

That took him so much by surprise he stopped in the middle of bounding up the stairs. “What was that for?”

“For carrying me up the stairs as though I don’t weigh as much as a whale. And for being you. Your Kimi is a very lucky girl.”

Those would be the last words he would ever hear her say before the day spun into disaster so fast, the wreck would be impossible to salvage.

* * *

Getting Forensics to record the scene and then debrief took another hour. He tried to text Kimi a few times. Typed and deleted his apology over and over. Finally, it made sense to wait and speak with her in person. Not that he knew what to say to make things right.

Was that as good for you? Too cheesy.

Can we do that again? Too needy.

Tina jerked under him as he revved the accelerator too hard.

Well, at least he knew what he could not say to her. Because, what the hell!

He needed to get a hold of himself. One roll in the hay and he was starting to turn into an idiot and forget himself.

Kimi was his best friend and the most beautiful girl he knew. Why was he surprised that she had made his head explode? Among other things.

By the time he reached The Mansion, his damn heart was singing, like a fucking lunatic. He hadn’t felt this light in as long as he could remember. He kept feeling all sorts of feelings and sensations squeezing and tingling through him. A tiny part of him kept warning him that this sort of joy could never end well. But this time he didn’t believe it.

Yes, he’d been an idiot and had run because what he was feeling had become unbearable. But surely, Kimi would understand. She had looked ecstatic enough that she couldn’t turn him away now. He parked Tina by the bougainvillea pouring down the stone wall of The Mansion and broke into a run. This time toward her, instead of away from her. Because, he couldn’t not. All those times she’d thrown him out and he’d run back should’ve been a sign. He couldn’t run from her.

They were going to find a way to work this out. No matter their differences.

Bhola usually saw him from the gatehouse and hurried to open the gates. Today he glared at him and waved his hands as if to shoo him away.

“Open the gate, Bholaji.”

Instead of letting him in, Bhola stepped out of the gate and came at him. If Rahul hadn’t known what a softie Bhola was, he would have backed up at the menace on his face.

“What did you do?” he growled, shoving Rahul in the chest.

“What? Where’s Kimi?”

Bhola grabbed his collar, but he couldn’t hold on because tears started streaming down his face, and Rahul’s heart started to pound.

“Which hospital?” Rahul shouted over his shoulder, running back to Tina.

“Lilavati,” Bhola said through sobs. “But she may not be there by the time you get there.”

* * *

At first they wouldn’t let him in. “Family only in the ICCU,” they said.

He flashed his badge, ready to fight anyone who stood in his way. But the badge did the job.

He ran through the hospital until Kirit Patil grabbed his arm and stopped him.

“She doesn’t want to see you. Whatever you did, you almost killed her.”

They were the sweetest words he’d ever heard. She was alive. He wouldn’t ask for anything more. Nothing more. “Just tell me how she is.”

Kirit gave him a look of disgust. “She’s had a massive cardiac arrest. They’re trying to stabilize her. If she stays stable we’re flying her to Hong Kong in a few hours.”

A few hours. Good. That was a good thing. She was going to be okay.

A nurse came out of her room. “Are you Rahul?”

Kirit tried to hold him back, but Rahul pushed his hand off his chest.

“She wants to see me?” he said directly to the nurse, who nodded.

He was inside her room so fast he didn’t hear what Kirit said behind him.

“Kimi?”

She looked shrunken in the huge machine-like bed, her eyes sunken, her lips blue, her skin almost gray. Had it been just a few hours since he’d seen her so vibrant she had shaken his world?

He took her hand and she moved those huge eyes to him. “You came back for me.” She had barely whispered the words when a siren went off and all the instruments in her room seemed to blink and blow up as her hand fell limp in his.

Someone yanked him away from her and pushed him out of the room that filled with doctors and nurses so fast his answer stayed trapped in his throat.

I’ll always come back. But she already knew that. She had to know that.

“I want him out of here,” a woman’s voice said behind him, and anger swelled inside Rahul. Anger at her, anger at all the truth in why she wanted him to stay away from her daughter.

“Rahul, I think you should leave,” Kirit said behind him.

He nodded without looking back. He couldn’t look away from the door to Kimi’s room. Couldn’t step away from the sounds of physicians fighting to revive her.

One, two, three . . . and the electric thump.

They were fibrillating her. Kirit stood beside him in silence. Their breathing loud despite the sounds.

One, two, three . . . another thump.

“She’s back.”

How did he not collapse with relief?

Dr. Girija came out of her room and told Kirit that they were putting her on a heart-and-lung machine.

Kirit turned to him again as soon as the doctor was gone. “Leave now, Rahul.” There was a finality in his voice this time. “This heart is her last chance. I’m not sure if she’ll make it home because we won’t keep her on the heart-lung machine if the transplant doesn’t work. She didn’t want us to.”

Rahul turned on him. “She’s coming back. How can you talk about her not coming back?” The last time he’d felt this kind of rage at Kirit, he’d just lost Baba. He pulled back his anger. He wasn’t going to lose anyone this time.

“How could you do what you did? She would not be on that machine if not for you.”

A painting on the wall tilted to one side as Rahul backed up into it.

“Whatever you’re thinking, it’s madness,” Kirit continued, not backing down. “Kimi is not a normal girl. She hasn’t had a normal life. How could you take advantage of that? She has an unhealthy obsession with you. I trusted you. You made a promise. You need to keep it and stop this madness. No good can come of it.”

He was right. No good had ever come out of Rahul getting anywhere near her. And he’d hurt her enough.

“Just bring her back. Please.”

With that he left her behind. Because he’d do anything. He’d leave her alone forever, if it meant she’d be okay.

He made that promise over and over again as he sat on their rock, until the restless waves had soaked through his pants all the way to his knees, until the sun had drowned into the ocean, leaving nothing but darkness. All these years and it felt like he’d never left this spot.

The next day, when he heard his emergency ringtone go off, he thought everything was over. And in a way it was, because some bastards attacked Jen and her husband in an alley near their flat.

By the time he reached the crime scene, Jen and her baby were already gone. Her husband had been moved to the hospital with a head injury and her registry database was wiped clean. Not a trace of the evidence she had been collecting was anywhere to be found.