Heartbreaker Read online

  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 always 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, probab