I made a mental note to check if anyone had been sleeping in the bed in the room above me.
The Taser worked its magic, and Tara was unable to maintain her grip on the gun. I climbed out of bed, grabbed her gun, and placed it on the end table. I turned on the light. Curly and I watched her writhe helplessly on the bed a few seconds. I wrapped my belt around her neck and spun her face down and placed my knee in the small of her back.
“Good job, Curly,” I said. “Can you hand me a zip tie?”
He tossed me one of the plastic twist-tie handcuffs with his free hand, and I secured Tara’s wrists behind her. Only then did he remove the Taser barb.
Tara had used a silencer, so we didn’t have to worry about the gunshot waking anyone up. Curly and I got her onto a chair and hooked her arms over the back of it. He fastened her ankles to the chair legs with zip ties while I kept my belt tight around her neck. Then Curly cut the ties around her wrists and re-zipped each of them to the arms of the chair. Then he walked over to the door that connected the adjoining room and opened it. I released the belt and came around to face her.
“Where’d you get the midget?” she said.
“Little person,” I said.
“How long has he been hiding under the bed?”
I looked at Curly. “What, six hours?”
“Give or take,” he said.
To Tara I said, “Who tipped you off I was in town, the lecturer?”
“Doesn’t matter. You going to kill me, or what?”
“I told you. I just want to ask a favor. You look great, by the way.”
“Uh huh. What’s the favor?”
“Have you ever seen your body double?”
“The little gymnast from Atlanta? Eva something?”
“Right.”
“Yeah, I checked her out one time.”
“You think she looks like you?”
“She doesn’t look anything like me. You know how it works. She’s close enough. What’s this got to do with you being here? What’s the favor?”
“I want you to tell Darwin you want a different body double.”
She looked at me a moment before speaking, and something cagey showed in her eyes.
“And if I don’t?” she said.
“You will.”
She laughed. “Why’s that?”
“Because she’s become a talented trapeze artist. She’s about to get her big break in life, and it’s such a small thing to ask of you, and by doing it you and I will be allowing one perfect thing to survive out of all this madness in our lives.”
“Uh huh. So how long have you been fucking her?”
“Hand to God,” I said. “I’ve never even met her.”
“He’s doing it for me,” Callie said, coming in from the adjoining room.
Curly saw her and said, “Jesus, take me now!”
“Ah,” said Tara. “The pretty killer.”
“How are you, Tara?” Callie said.
“I’ve been better. You?”
Callie said, “That sort of depends on you.”
Tara nodded slowly, working it out in her head. “I see. So you’re the one fucking Eva. But more than that, you’re in love with her. How sad.”
Tara didn’t sound sad, but she’d said it, and that was something. Tara sighed.
“Okay,” she said, “I’ll tell Darwin.”
“You will?”
“Sure. Why not.”
I turned toward Callie, to see what she thought, but all I saw was the gun in her hand, pointed at Tara’s face. She pumped two rounds into the space between Tara’s eyes, and perhaps a third one into my heart because I felt a stabbing pain. I grabbed my chest and fell to the floor. Callie raced to my side.
“Are you okay?” she asked. “Is it your heart?”
Just before losing consciousness I heard Curly ask Callie, “You ever thought about doing it with a guy? ‘Cause if you have, I’m available.”
Chapter 39
I came to after hearing my voice say, “I’m okay, it’s all psychosomatic.”
I opened my eyes, looking for Callie, but received the shock of my life when the person who came into view was a total stranger in a nurse’s outfit.
“Oh, my God!” she screamed, and pressed the button hanging on the side rail of the hospital bed I was laying in.
Hospital bed?
The nurse raced out of the room, leaving me to wonder what the hell was going on. I tried to figure out what happened. I remembered Callie shooting Tara, and then the pain came. I know why Callie shot her. Tara wasn’t the type to let things go. If we turned her loose she might track Eva down and kill her out of spite. At the very least she’d tell Darwin, and he’d have Eva killed. So Callie’s actions made sense.
But I should have seen it coming.
I looked around the stark room, trying to get my bearings. I may have been in a hospital bed, but I wasn’t in an actual hospital. I was in one of the hospital rooms at my headquarters at Sensory Resources. I wanted to think about how I got here, and if someone had contacted Kathleen yet. I wanted to think about Addie, wanted to worry if she was scared. The poor kid couldn’t afford to lose someone else in her life. I wanted to think about settling down and becoming a family. I wanted to think about all those things, but they’d have to wait because all I could really focus on was what Darwin might do to Callie.
You just don’t go around killing Darwin’s people without repercussions. I had to find Callie and get her somewhere safe. I had to speak to Darwin, had to work this out. I tried to sit up, but found I was hooked up to a battery of machines.
That couldn’t be good.
I reached my hands around my body, searching for my cell phone. Surely Callie had put it within arm’s reach. No, I thought, she wouldn’t have come here with me. She was probably in hiding, waiting for me to find a way to call her, so we could put together a plan to deal with Darwin. Or maybe she rushed back to Vegas to protect Eva.
Wait.
Tara Siegel had been in the room, dead, strapped to a chair when I went down with the chest pains. Callie couldn’t have been there when the paramedics arrived. She and Curly would have had to clean the scene as best they could, and then run.
If that’s the case, Darwin has every reason to believe I killed Tara.
Thinking about it now, I realized what caused the crushing pain in my chest was the same thing that caused it at the Peterson sisters’ trailer, and the same thing that made me question my motives for killing all the Rumplestilskin Loan candidates before them. It’s the same thing that made me put off killing Rob and Trish in Nashville, and the same thing that bothered me about every other person I’d killed for Victor going all the way back to my first job for him, when he hired me to kill Monica Childers last Valentine’s Day. As it turned out, Monica didn’t die by my hand, but Callie and I had done all we could to carry out the hit.
They were people who didn’t deserve to die. I’m not saying they were innocent. When someone has a contract on his or her head, there’s always a reason. They’ve been found guilty of something and sentenced to die by whoever employs me.
But that doesn’t mean the punishment fits the crime.
In all the years I’d killed people before meeting Victor, I knew the world would be a better place without those people. Whether I was killing terrorists or spies for the government, or wise guys for Sal Bonadello, I never lost a moment of sleep over my job.
But then, less than a year ago, Victor came into my life.
My first contract for Victor was Monica Childers. I killed her the day after I met Kathleen. Victor had given me some story about how we all have at least two people in our lives that deserved to die because of the terrible things they did to us. That was easy for me to relate to, since I’d had a number of these types of people in my life and I’d done something about it.
Monica Childers may have done something bad enough to make one person wish her dead, but in the court of humanity and justice, she didn’t
deserve to die. I think I knew it at the time, but I was running on auto pilot. I’d sold myself on the idea that a hit man shouldn’t ask questions. I believed a hit man’s job was to carry out executions, not weigh the merits of them.
But my conscience obviously felt different.
The reasons for Monica’s execution didn’t stand up. When she turned up alive, I felt relief. Then to learn she’d been raped to death by the terrorists I’d been hunting—it hit me hard.
The Rumplestilskin Loan recipients had certainly done a monstrous thing, allowing someone to die in exchange for receiving a loan, but they’d been told it was an unpunished murderer. I knew in my heart it was a major stretch to kill them for allowing other people to die. By the time I got to the Peterson sisters, my body decided to rebel.
So Victor’s victims were responsible for my heart issue. That makes sense, except for one thing: I got the pain again when Callie killed Tara Siegel. And Tara was not one of Victor’s lethal experiments.
I’m no psychiatrist, but I think Tara fit the pattern of a person who didn’t deserve to die. Tara was certainly no innocent, and there were several circumstances under which I’d have killed her. But she was good for the country, in that she was working for the government, killing terrorists. Also, she and I had a history, and in this particular situation I hadn’t intended her to die. When Callie shot her, I felt responsible for the death of an innocent person, a former friend—even though my “friend” tried to kill me moments earlier.
Looking around the hospital room, hooked up to various monitoring devices, I made the life changing decision to never again accept a contract from Victor. I wasn’t worried about my ability to kill guilty people, or those who deserved to die. After all, I’d recently done it, with no repercussions.
Ned Denhollen had probably been a decent man, but I suffered no remorse for killing him. Was it because he’d been supplying those kids with date rape drugs? No. It was because I feared my daughter Kimberly was about to be dragged into it. So Ned had to die. The kid I shot the night they tried to rape Callie didn’t affect me because he was already dying and I’d done nothing more than put him out of his misery. As for Wolf Williams, he deserved to die for a number of reasons, including his threat to kill my new employee, Alison.
The door burst open so suddenly it startled me. The nurse flew into the room, dragging a doctor behind her.
“Calling Doctor Howard,” I said, “Doctor Howard, Doctor Howard—The Three Stooges, remember?”
Dr. Howard managed to repress a grin. “That wasn’t funny the last time you were here, and it isn’t funny now. Good to see you back with us, Mr. Creed.”
Dr. Howard treated me years ago for a particularly nasty bullet I took from a Ukrainian enforcer. If the good doctor was treating me, that meant I was back at Sensory Resources, in the medical center. My offi ce was a mere hundred feet from this very room. When we buy our new house, Kathleen, Addie and I will be living about twelve miles from here, in Bedford.
“Mr. Creed, I’m Carol,” said the nurse.
I lifted my arm and gave her a small wave. “Nice to meet you, Nurse Carol.”
Dr. Howard assaulted me with questions and annoyed my eyes with his pen light. Ignoring him for the moment, I turned to Nurse Carol.
“I need my cell phone,” I said.
She opened the drawer by my bed, moved some items around, then she tried the closet, where she searched through the clothes someone had hung there.
She handed it to me. I pressed the power button.
Nothing.
I looked at her. “The battery’s dead? How’s that possible?”
Dr. Howard said, “Mr. Creed, there’ll be plenty of time for questions later on. In the meantime I really must insist you cooperate with me.”
“That would be easy to do if my life weren’t at stake.” To Carol I said, “Can you call Lou Kelly for me?” Lou was my right-hand man. His office was on the other end of the building.
“Why don’t you go get him in person, Carol,” Dr. Howard said. “It’s probably a good idea you leave us alone a few minutes.”
She hooked the door to the wall so it would stay open, and headed down the corridor to fetch Lou.
Dr. Howard tried to beat McCauley Culkin’s question record in the movie Uncle Buck, and I answered them the same way. Yes, I felt that, yes, I can focus; no, not dizzy, yes, I’m thirsty, yes, yes, yes.
I had to know something. “Doc, what kind of machines have you got me hooked up to? I know I came in with a chest pain, but that’s psychosomatic. You can call my shrink on that, you don’t believe me.”
“Mr. Creed,” he said. “You’re hooked up to these machines because you’ve been in a coma for the past three years.”
Chapter 40
In a coma? Three years?
I was, as the British say, gobsmacked.
Gobsmacked is much stronger than being surprised. It’s a term used to describe something that stuns you speechless and stops you dead in your tracks.
That’s what I was, gobsmacked.
I thought about eating live scorpions, or smearing cattle dung all over my body. Maybe I’ll become a Whig, I thought, or take up phrenology. Every one of those things made more sense than what he’d said to me.
“Could you repeat that?” I said.
“You’ve been lying in this bed, unresponsive, for…” he consulted a chart. “Three years, two months and five days.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“You know me better than that.”
I did. But it still didn’t make any sense.
“Why am I so lucid?” I asked.
“Psychosomatic comas are different than those caused by direct physical injury.”
“Come again?”
“You didn’t suffer any physical trauma to the brain or brain stem. Basically, your brain took a three-year vacation.”
The room seemed to swirl around me as the significance of my situation hit home. There were a million questions I probably should have asked. But the first thing that popped out of my mouth was “When can I get up?”
In the movies, when the beautiful starlet opens her eyes and comes out of her coma, she does so in full makeup, with every hair in place. By the end of the scene she’s out of bed, drinking champagne, dancing, and lives happily ever after. In real life it’s not as easy as you think to get out of a hospital bed after three years of hibernation.
While Dr. Howard explained all this, he addressed some other aspects of my medical condition. He said there’d be weeks of tests and physical therapy before I could safely be released. He said I could get off the feeding tube, and they would gradually introduce real food into my diet, and see how I responded.
Three years?
That means Kimberly was half-way through college! Afaya could have blown up the airports years ago. Callie, Quinn, Alison…could all be dead by now. And what had happened to Kathleen? I must have scared her to death being unconscious all this time. And Addie must be what, eight years old?
And Darwin. Why hadn’t he killed me already? His people could have waltzed into this cracker box medical room and snuffed me faster than Monika Lewinski blowing out the candle on a one-candle cake. Wait, I thought. Is that reference dated now?
I had to get up and out of here before Darwin got the news of my resurrection. I had to get my cell phone working, had to make some calls and get some help. I didn’t want to involve Kathleen in all this, but I had no choice. Unless the world had turned completely upside down during the past three years, Darwin would know my condition within hours, and my life expectancy would be about as long as a Twinkie in Kirstie Alley’s pantry. Wait. Three years has passed. Maybe she’s lost the weight again. I made a note to catch up on my pop culture first thing.
“Donovan, thank God!”
I looked up and saw Lou Kelly entering the room, followed closely by Nurse Carol.
“Nice haircut,” I said.
“Wait till you see yours!” he sa
id.
“Lou. Turn your back to the doctor and look at me.”
He shrugged. “Okay…”
“Have I been in a coma?”
He nodded.
“How long?”
“Three years, give or take.”
The nurse joined us. Lou said, “Right. Carol, could you get me a newspaper and a magazine and anything else you can find with a recent date on it?”
“How about a movie ticket stub?” she said.
“Perfect.”
“Lou, this is crazy,” I said.
“I know, buddy. But it is what it is. At least you’re back with us. How do you feel?”
“Pissed.”
He laughed. “Same old Creed,” he said.
Dr. Howard continued his examination. The thermometer went in, then out. Th e little thing with the light went in my ears. Then he felt my lymph nodes, checked my pulse, pushed on my stomach, looked up my nose and in my mouth.
Nurse Carol returned with enough evidence to convince me I’d been Rip Van Winkled for more than three years. I tried to get to my feet.
“Whoa,” said the doctor. “You’re still on life support. You can’t get up yet.”
Lou moved to hold me down, but I waved him off .
“Can I at least sit up?”
Lou and the doctor exchanged a look. Lou nodded.
“Lie still a minute,” he said. Th e nurse helped the doctor remove several tubes. She held some gauze against the wounds to stop the bleeding.
“I think you’re out of the woods,” my doctor said, “but I’ll need to keep the rest of the equipment hooked up for twenty-four hours. It’ll help us monitor your brain activity and let us know if you start experiencing seizures.”
“Why am I still alive?” I said.
“Because you’re receiving the best medical care in the world,” Lou said.
“That’s not what I mean.”
“I’m not sure what you’re asking.”
“Why hasn’t Darwin killed me yet?”
Dr. Howard said, “Let us finish up so you can speak freely. Carol and I don’t want to hear anything that’s unrelated to Mr. Creed’s treatment.”