The Supreme Return Of Logan Kai

Chapter 9

The room was still processing that when the door opened and Director Cole walked in.

He had heard the commotion from the floor above and come down himself that much was clear from how he entered, quickly, with the alert expression of someone who had been trying to read the situation from whatever fragments reached him on the way down. His eyes swept the room. They landed on the monitor. They landed on the patient. They landed on Kai Shen standing at the side of the table with his bundle back over his shoulder.

“What happened?” Cole asked.

Before anyone could answer him, the sound came.

It was not the sound of hospital footsteps not the soft purposeful movement of staff, not the hurried pace of someone with an emergency. This was something else. Heavy and even and too rhythmic to be accidental, the kind of sound that only happened when more than a few people were all moving in the same direction with the same weight and the same intention.

It came from the corridor outside.

Cole heard it. His head turned toward the doors.

Everyone in the room heard it.

The doors opened.

The first man through was built the way a wall was built wide, thick, no part of him decorative, everything about him there for a purpose. He stepped to the right of the doorway and stood. The next man came through and stepped to the left. Then two more. Then four. Then another set behind them, filling the corridor in both directions, the kind of formation that was not hospital security and was not police and was not anything that belonged in a place where people came to get better.

Fifteen men, maybe more. Hard to count because they kept coming.

And then the man in the center walked in.

He was not the biggest one there. He was not the tallest. He walked in wearing a dark coat over a suit that had not come off any rack and he moved through the middle of fifteen large men the way water moved through rock not around them, just through, like they were his natural element and he was the thing they were arranged around.

His face was clean-shaved. His hair was back. He was somewhere in his early forties and he carried every one of those years in the front of his eyes, in the particular flatness of a gaze that had seen enough things that nothing surprised it anymore.

Director Cole's mouth opened slightly.

Then it closed.

He recognized this man. Every person in the city of Harlow who paid any attention to anything recognized this man. Raymond Voss. His name had been in the news three times in the last year twice for the kind of wealth that got you photographed at charity dinners and once for the kind of violence that got charges filed and then quietly dropped before they ever reached a courtroom. Loan shark was the polite word for it. What he actually was reached further than that and dug deeper, and everybody in the city knew it the same way they knew not to say it too loud or anywhere near him. 

He had money and he had men and he had a history that people who got on the wrong side of did not generally discuss afterward because they were no longer able to.

Cole stepped forward. 

“Mr. Voss.” His voice came out carefully. 

“I was not aware you were—”

“I got a call.” Voss's voice was not loud. It did not need to be loud. The fifteen men behind him created a silence that his voice could fill at any volume. 

“Someone told me she was in an accident. That she was brought here.” His eyes moved across the room across the doctors, across the monitors, across the patient on the table and they did not stop moving until they had taken in everything. “Someone better tell me she is all right.”

Cole opened his mouth.

Closed it.

“Where is the person in charge of her care?” Voss asked.

“Mr. Voss,” Cole said carefully, “I want you to understand that everything that could be done for your—”

“I am not asking about what could be done,” Voss said. His voice dropped half a degree.

“I am asking if she is all right. Answer me.”

The room was so quiet that the steady beep of the monitor was the loudest thing in it.

Cole looked at the monitor. He looked at the patient's face the color that had come back, the breathing that was even and full. Then he looked at Kai.

And in that look was everything  the fear, the confusion, the terrible math of the situation he was now standing inside. The man whose woman had just been saved was standing ten feet from the man who had saved her, and the man who had saved her had no credentials and no license and had arrived at this hospital this morning in a mountain robe carrying a bundle on his shoulder, and the only reason that woman on the table was still alive right now was because of him.

Cole did not know how to explain any of that to Raymond Voss.

Marcus did.

“Mr. Voss.” Marcus stepped forward from the wall where he had been standing. His voice had recovered its confidence somewhere in the last thirty seconds and brought too much of it back at once. 

“I want you to know that whatever you have been told about the treatment your about the patient's treatment, the hospital wouldn't takes full responsibility for what happened in this room. An unauthorized individual forced his way into this bay and performed an unapproved procedure on her without the consent of the attending physicians. We tried to stop him. What he did to her we do not even know what he did, we cannot account for it, and frankly the hospital's position is that this man needs to be removed immediately and the proper medical team needs to assess the damage he may have—”

“Marcus.” Doctor Reeves said his name.

“Mr. Voss, that man right there—” He pointed at Kai Shen. 

“He walked in here off the street, he is not a doctor, he touched your person without clearance, without—”

At that moment Voss turned his head and looked at Kai.

Raymond Voss.

Marcus did.

“Mr. Voss.” Marcus stepped forward from the wall where he had been standing. His voice had recovered its confidence somewhere in the last thirty seconds and brought too much of it back at once. 

“I want you to know that whatever you have been told about the treatment your about the patient's treatment, the hospital wouldn't takes full responsibility for what happened in this room. An unauthorized individual forced his way into this bay and performed an unapproved procedure on her without the consent of the attending physicians. We tried to stop him. What he did to her we do not even know what he did, we cannot account for it, and frankly the hospital's position is that this man needs to be removed immediately and the proper medical team needs to assess the damage he may have—”

“Marcus.” Doctor Reeves said his name.

“Mr. Voss, that man right there—” He pointed at Kai Shen. 

“He walked in here off the street, he is not a doctor, he touched your person without clearance, without—”

At that moment Voss turned his head and looked at Kai.