Troublemaker

  A concrete support pillar and some tall shrubbery partially blocked his view of the condo building, something that grated but the homeowners’ association wasn’t willing to do away with part of its mature landscaping and shady trees just because he didn’t like it. He couldn’t explain that the greenery provided points of ambush because civilians simply didn’t get shit like that, so he dealt with it. It wasn’t as if he had a lot to worry about; the crime rate in these units was very low, and was in fact a selling point for the young families who made up the majority of residents.

  Still—habits were a bitch, but he couldn’t ignore half a lifetime of training. To keep from walking around a blind corner, he swung wide into the street the way he always did so he was approaching straight on; there wasn’t a lot of traffic in the condo development, and he didn’t often have to wait until a car passed.

  But even with a direct approach, he still didn’t like it. Sometimes, such as now, he liked it less than at other times, and he couldn’t have said why. He didn’t have to; instinct was what it was.

  He stopped in his tracks.

  Sometimes . . . such as now.

  The sudden surge of awareness was like an electric shock, sending all of his senses into hyperalert. He instinctively moved his right hand to the pistol snugged into the holster at the small of his back even as he tried to pick up any movement in the shrubbery that shouldn’t have been there, anything that was responsible for making the back of his neck suddenly prickle. He couldn’t see anything, but still his senses were screaming. Something was there, even if it wasn’t anything danger—

  The thought hadn’t completely formed when the shadows of the shrubbery moved slightly, black on black. More adrenaline shot through his system, and Morgan acted without thought, training taking over as he dropped the plastic bags and dove to the left, leaving his right hand free as he pulled his weapon.

  His body was still airborne, stretched out, when he saw a faint flash and a sledgehammer hit him in the chest.

  He had two distant but clear thoughts: Suppressor. Subsonic round.

  He slammed to the ground, the impact almost as jarring as the sledgehammer to the chest. He rolled with it, the pistol grip fitting into his palm as if his hand and the weapon had been made together, one functioning unit. One part of his brain knew he’d been hit and hit hard, but the other part stayed ruthlessly focused outward, intent on doing what he needed to do. He fired toward where he’d seen the flash, the sound sharp in the crisp night air, but he knew only a rank amateur would stay in the same place so he tracked his next shot away from the shrubbery, following the barely seen black-on-black shadow, and pulled the trigger again.

  His mind disconnected from the shock waves of pain rolling through his body because that was the only way he could function. His thoughts raced, analyzing probabilities and angles of fire, selecting the best option even as adrenaline overrode the devastation and kept his body moving. Without being aware that he was moving, he rolled behind a fireplug, and didn’t realize where he was until he was already there. A fireplug wasn’t much cover, but it was some.

  His vision was wavering, things rushing at him then drawing back, as if pushed and pulled by an invisible tide of air. Peripherally, he was aware of entrance lights coming on, of curtains being pulled back as his neighbors peeked out to see what the hell was going on. He blinked fiercely, trying to stay focused. Yes—the increase of light brought a man’s form into dim view and he fired a third shot, controlled the upward kick of the muzzle, fired again. The dark form toppled to the ground and lay still.

  God, his chest hurt. Shit. This had really fucked up his tattoo.

  His vision wavered again, but he grimly held on, keeping his weapon trained on the downed threat. “Down” didn’t mean “out.” If he let go, let the darkness come, the other guy might get up and finish the job. Dead didn’t count until it was confirmed dead, and he couldn’t confirm shit right now.

  But doors were opening, people were shouting. The sounds were distorted and strangely far away, the lights fading. Through the growing shadows he thought he saw some of the braver souls venturing out, investigating the gunfire. Words swam at him, around him, and some of them sank into his consciousness.

  “Shawn! Are you crazy?” A woman’s voice, both angry and afraid.

  “Just call the cops,” said a man—maybe Shawn, maybe someone else.

  “I already did,” said a third voice.

  “What the hell is going on?”

  More noise, more voices added to the chorus as people began approaching, cautiously at first, then with more confidence when nothing else happened. Morgan tried to call out, say something, make any kind of noise, but the effort was beyond him. He could feel his breath hitching as the distant pain rolled closer, like a tidal wave that was about to swamp him.

  This might be it for me, he thought, and was almost too tired to care. He tried to control his breathing because he’d heard that hitching sound before and it was never good. He didn’t have to hang on long, he thought—maybe half an hour, if people would get the lead out of their asses and get him to the hospital. But half an hour seemed like an eternity when he wasn’t certain he could hang on even one more minute.

  He rested his head on the concrete sidewalk, feeling the chill of it. His outstretched hand was just resting on the winter-dead grass at the edge of the sidewalk and he had the distant thought that it was kind of nice to be touching the earth. If this was it for him, well, it sucked to go, but all in all this wasn’t too bad, considering all the grisly ways he could have gone.

  But, damn it, he was fucking pissed because if he died, he didn’t know who had killed him or, more importantly, why.

  Someone bent over him, a vague shape swimming out of focus. He had to send MacNamara a warning, and with his last ounce of strength he gasped out, “Ambush.”

  CHAPTER 2

  CONSCIOUSNESS—OR THE LACK OF IT—WAS A STRANGE thing, fading from one to the other and back again without a line of demarcation and without any direction by him. Sometimes he surfaced a few degrees from total nothingness to a vague and distant awareness of being, and the same vague and distant acknowledgment of the black nothing, and even knowing what it was, distinguishing between the two. Then he’d sink back down, and there was nothing until once again the tide of consciousness floated him upward like a piece of trash in the sea.

  Once there were a lot of bright lights, and warmth, and a sense of well-being, but then that too vanished.

  I’m not dead.

  That was Morgan’s first coherent thought. Though he’d occasionally been aware of other things: pain, noise, indecipherable voices—sometimes one he almost recognized—as well as an annoying beeping, none of that had really meant anything to him; they were simply there, at a distance, like a pinpoint of light at the top of a deep, dark well. There came a time, though, when he drifted high enough that he realized what it meant that he could feel the pain and hear the noises: he was alive.

  Time was meaningless. People talked to him. He couldn’t respond even when he could understand, but they seemed to know this. They handled his body, doing things to him, explaining every step of the way. Sometimes he didn’t care, a lot of times he did, because, hell, some things just shouldn’t be done to a man. Neither seemed to matter. They did what they came to do, and that was that.

  Moving wasn’t an option; he not only seemed incapable of it, he wasn’t interested in trying. Simply existing took all of his strength. His lungs pumped at a strange rhythm that he couldn’t control, there was a tube down his throat, and damn, maybe living wasn’t such a good idea.

  But dying was out of his control too. If he’d been given a choice, he might have stayed down in the darkness because whenever he surfaced, the pain was an ugly motherfucker that slapped him around and made it look easy. He’d have kicked the bastard’s ass if he could have, but it won every battle. At other times the pain was more distant, as if a layer of wool protected him from it, but it was a
lways there. Eventually, and laboriously, he decided the layer of wool was really drugs . . . maybe.

  His only weapon against the pain was stubbornness. He didn’t like losing. He fucking hated losing. A vestige of will, of sheer bullheaded stubbornness, made him focus on the pain; it was his target, his adversary, and he kept coming back for more. It might knock him down, but by God, it couldn’t keep him down. Even when he felt like doing nothing more than howling in agony—if he’d been able to howl—he fought for awareness, for each increment of improvement.

  On a very basic level, fighting was what he knew, what he was, so he fought everything. He didn’t fight just for awareness; he fought the tube down his throat that kept him from talking, the needles in his arms that kept him—in his own mind, at least—from moving. They—the nameless they—promptly strapped him down so he couldn’t move a muscle, not even his head.

  Rage joined the pain. He was so damn mad he thought he might explode, and what made it even worse was that he had no way of expressing his absolute fury at being so helpless, while every inch of his body and all of his instincts were abused.

  Then, exhausted, he would sleep—or sink into unconsciousness again. Maybe they were one and the same. He sure as hell couldn’t tell the difference.

  One day he opened his eyes and focused—actually focused—on the middle-aged woman who was standing beside him fiddling with the lines coming from multiple plastic bags hung on a metal tree. For the first time he thought, Hospital, which meant his torturers were actually taking care of him, but that didn’t help his feelings. He put all of his animosity into the glare he leveled at her.

  “Well, hello,” she said, smiling. “How are you today?”

  If he’d been able to talk he’d have told her exactly how he was, and his language wouldn’t have been pretty.

  She seemed to know exactly what he was thinking because her smile widened as she patted his shoulder. “The tube will come out pretty soon, then you can tell us all about it.”

  He tried to tell her all about it right then and managed only some faint grunting noises, then he humiliated himself by promptly going back to sleep.

  When he woke again, he knew immediately where he was . . . kind of. Moving nothing but his eyes—because he fucking couldn’t move anyfuckingthing else—he took stock of his surroundings. His vision was blurry, but he was trained to observe and analyze and after an indistinct length of time, he fuzzily came to the conclusion that though he was in a hospital bed with raised rails on each side, and he was obviously in some sort of facility, he definitely wasn’t in a hospital. The room, for one thing—it was painted blue, there were curtains over the windows, and it had a regular door with a regular doorknob instead of the massive doors found in hospital rooms. It seemed to be an ordinary bedroom that had had a ton of medical equipment shoved into it and positioned however it would fit into the room.

  Then there were the nurses—damn their sadistic hides—who tended him. They sometimes wore colorful uniforms, but sometimes not; the middle-aged woman who had been there the last time he woke up was always dressed in jeans and sneakers and a sweater, as if she’d just come in from a farm somewhere. Sometimes when his door was opened, he’d catch a glimpse of someone armed standing just outside, and it was never anyone he recognized.

  All of his thoughts were blurred, his memories even worse. He had a very fuzzy memory of Axel MacNamara being there a couple of times when he’d awakened, asking insistent questions—not that MacNamara ever asked any other kind—but the best Morgan had been able to do was blink his eyes a few times and he wasn’t sure what the hell he was blinking his eyes for, so eventually MacNamara went away.

  But even as he fought through the fog of sedation and trauma, anger still burned deep and bright inside him. When he could think, he remembered what had happened, though the ambush kept getting mixed up with the aftermath and sometimes he’d have shot the nurses if he’d had a weapon in his hand. He couldn’t formulate all the ramifications of his ambush, but he knew they had to be bad, and no matter how unfocused and helpless he was, he was still damned and determined to find out who had done this and what their goal was. A more naive and protected person might think the goal had simply been to kill him, but Morgan had stopped being naive somewhere around the age of three, and “protected” wasn’t in his job description. Killing him had to have been part of a larger plan—the question was what plan, and who was behind it?

  He could think that, but he couldn’t communicate well enough to transmit. His helplessness was so galling he’d have wrecked the place if he’d been capable of moving, but the way he was strapped down, he couldn’t even press the call button for the nurse—if he’d wanted to call, which he didn’t, because whenever they showed up they did stuff he didn’t like.

  One day, though, when he woke up he felt as if he’d turned a corner. He didn’t know which corner, but with it came a sense that his body had decided to live. The medical staff must have come to the same conclusion about his physical state of being. An hour or so later a doctor—he guessed the guy was a doctor, though hell, maybe he was someone they dragged in off the streets because he was wearing jeans and a flannel shirt—came in and cheerfully said, “Let’s get that tube out of your throat, get you talking and drinking and eating. You ready? Cough, that’ll make it easier.”

  One second Morgan was looking forward to having the tube out of his throat, and the next his body was in total rebellion against what was happening to it. Bullshit! The only thing that could have made it easier was if he’d been unconscious. It felt as if his lungs were being dragged out with the tube, and his chest was being hacked in two. His vision blurred and darkened, his body arched involuntarily, and if he’d been able to, he’d have done damage to the son of a bitch, because if that was “easy,” then “hard” would have killed most people.

  Then the tube was out and he was breathing on his own, shaking like a leaf in reaction and soaking wet with sweat, but at least he could talk—sort of. In theory, anyway. His throat felt as if it had been scrubbed with sandpaper, and his mouth wasn’t in any better shape. It took him three tries to get out one raspy, almost inaudible word:

  “Water.”

  “Sure thing.” A smiling woman with salt-and-pepper hair poured some water into a cup and held the drinking straw to his mouth, and he managed to get some water down his raw throat. He could practically feel the membranes of his mouth absorbing the moisture, and he greedily sucked down two more swallows before she moved the cup away.

  He gathered his strength for more words. “No more . . . dope.” He needed his head clear. He wasn’t sure exactly why, but instinct was driving him hard.

  “Don’t go too macho on us,” she replied, still smiling. “Pain puts stress on your body and stress will slow down the healing. Let’s reassess every day, okay?”

  Meaning they were going to give him more dope whether he wanted it or not. He was fairly sure in a regular hospital his wishes couldn’t be ignored, but this was obviously not a regular hospital. They were going to do whatever they thought needed doing, and he could just live with it. The pun wasn’t lost on him. But then everything else was because, damn it, he went to sleep again.

  The next time we woke up, Axel MacNamara was there.

  The visit must have been timed to coincide with the downswing of effectiveness of whatever drugs they were giving him, because Morgan felt at least halfway alert. Yeah, MacNamara thought of things like that. The bastard planned everything, probably down to how long he chewed each bite of food.

  Morgan wouldn’t have said he was clearheaded, just that the mental fog wasn’t as thick. He was clear enough to be aware of a vague sense of fear, one he couldn’t analyze—hell, he could barely identify it. He’d trained himself to ignore fear’s existence, settling instead on “alarm” as his fight-or-flight trigger. But now he was afraid, though he couldn’t have said of what. Maybe it was that this fogginess, this sense of disconnect from everything except pain, would bec
ome permanent. Maybe the damage was too great to heal completely. Maybe this was his new reality. But—no. He could sense his own improvement, though from “near death” to “really shitty” wasn’t that long a road.

  To hide his unease, he said, “Hey,” to MacNamara, then scowled because the word sounded mushy, his voice thin and weak. He shifted himself around, intending to reach for the foam cup sitting on the rolling table beside him, only to discover that he was still strapped down—and that pain meds on the decline also meant he had to deal with his shot-up and patched-together body that protested every movement. Both the pain and his helplessness pissed him off.

  “Get these . . damn straps . . . off me,” he rasped, anger lending some strength to his voice.

  Axel didn’t budge. “You gonna try to rip the IV lines out again?”

  The idea was tempting, but he knew if he did, the straps would come back. He wanted to be in control of his body.

  “No,” he said grudgingly.

  MacNamara deftly released him, then pressed the button that raised the head of the bed. Morgan got dizzy for a minute, but he took deep breaths and willed himself not to show any sissy-assed weakness such as passing out. He’d never live that down.

  “You up to answering questions?” MacNamara asked in that abrupt way of his, no time wasted in pleasantries or even asking how Morgan was feeling.

  Morgan kind of half-glared from bleary eyes, mainly because his default mood was that deep and festering rage. “Ask,” he said, reaching again—this time with results—for the foam cup, which he sincerely hoped held some water. The movement was just short of agonizing; his chest felt as if someone were hacking at it with a cleaver. He ground his teeth together and kept stretching his arm out, partly because he was damned if he’d give in to the pain and partly because he really wanted that water.

  Anyone else would have gotten the cup for him, but not MacNamara. Right now, Morgan appreciated the lack of sympathy; he wanted to do it himself. He closed his shaking hand around the cup and lifted it. There were a couple of inches of water in the cup and he sucked it dry, then fumbled the cup back onto the table. He sank back against the pillow, as exhausted as if he’d just finished a twenty-mile run.