Julia Spencer-Fleming - To Darkness And To Death

“Not too much, now. Dr. Gupta will be in to see you soon, and when he gives the go-ahead, we’ll move you to your room. Then you can see your family. If you want to.” She had dealt with enough domestics, as the staff called them, to know that sometimes family members were the last people a battered woman wanted to see.

Becky closed her eyes. Opened them. “Police,” she said. Her face twisted. She tried to sit up.

“Ssh.” The nurse laid a hand firmly on the young woman’s shoulder. “We’ve already informed the police that you’re out of surgery. As soon as you’re strong enough to talk, an officer will be in to interview you. You can talk to him alone or have one of the nurses with you-whatever you feel comfortable with. In the meantime, you’re safe here. I promise you. No one can harm you.”

“Randy Schoof.”

The nurse paused, one hand on the bed’s controls. “What?”

“Randy. Schoof. Hit me.” She sank back with the bed, trembling with exhaustion.

“Take it easy,” the nurse said automatically.

“Randy Schoof,” Becky said. Her eyes slid shut. “Hurts.”

“The medication will take effect soon.” The nurse looked up at the wall clock. Dr. Gupta wouldn’t be back for another check until she called him. She looked at the phone hanging from the wall behind her station. Internal line only. “You rest,” she said. “I’ll let Dr. Gupta know you’re awake. Don’t try to talk.”

She crossed the white room. The doors hissed open as she approached and hissed shut behind her. She turned right down the hallway, where the floor station gleamed ahead of her like the light at the end of a darkened tunnel.

“Stacy?” The charge nurse glanced up, startled. “Can you take recovery for five minutes? The patient’s still resting. You don’t need to do anything.”

Stacy frowned. “It’s not your break time.”

“Please? I need to call home. You know how it is.”

Stacy groaned exaggeratedly, getting up from her chair. “You gals with young kids. I swear, it really does take a village to raise a child. A village of coworkers.”

“Thanks.” She swung behind the counter and had her hand on the phone when Stacy called to her from halfway down the hall.

“Rachel? You owe me one.”

“I do.” Rachel Durkee forced a smile before picking up the receiver. She had to call her sister. Fast.

Shaun pulled into his garage and waited until the door shut behind him and the fluorescent lights popped on before getting out of the car. He stared in dismay at the caramel-colored leather seat, which now looked as if a big baby had wet all over it. God only knew if it was salvageable or not.

Slamming the door shut, he dug out his garage door key and let himself into the breezeway. He eased off his shoes, crusted with mud and leaf rot, and went on stocking feet through the kitchen and up the stairs. Jeremy was certainly at work, and the cleaning woman didn’t come on Saturday, but he was worried Courtney might be home already from her church thing.

He slipped into the guest bathroom and locked the door, stripped off his bloody shirt and trousers, and tossed them into the bathtub. His arm was a mess-a deep row of bite marks clotted with drying blood, surrounded by plum and indigo bruises. The skin around the bite already looked inflamed. He remembered, from the days when Jeremy was in preschool and biting was part of his peers’ social coin, that the human mouth was worse than any animal’s for germs and infections. Could you get tetanus from a human bite? It didn’t matter, he supposed-he wasn’t going to the doctor’s for any treatment, that was for damn sure. He reached for the medicine cabinet and froze as his face came into view.

He was a mess. His nose was puffy, the flesh beneath his eyes purpling. His skin had split over his chin, and a goose egg was hatching on his forehead. He looked like someone who had been in a knock-down, drag-out fight. Courtney was going to freak.

Shaun flipped the door open and grabbed the hydrogen peroxide. He unscrewed the top and, holding his arm over the bathtub, poured half the contents onto his wound.

He bit down on his yell. Holy God, did that sting. The peroxide bubbled furiously in the bite marks. He turned on the tap, and when the antiseptic had done its job, he used a washcloth to sluice away the dried blood. He let the tub keep filling, soaking his clothes, while he bandaged the bite. He scrubbed off his face and dabbed antibiotic cream on his cut. Short of breaking into Courtney’s cosmetics, there wasn’t anything he could do for his black eyes.

He leaned in closer to the mirror. Behind the bruising, his eyes looked the same as they always had, pale blue and preoccupied. He marveled that he didn’t look any different. That his eyes didn’t show he had killed a man.

He blinked. Of course, technically, he hadn’t killed van der Hoeven. He had simply… let him fall. They had been struggling, and perhaps he had pushed him harder than necessary. But still, he knew now. What it felt like.

He remembered a conversation with Russ Van Alstyne. He had been in college, and Russ had been home on leave. It was before they had given up on their awkward attempts at rejoining the severed ends of their friendship. What does it feel like? he had asked. Killing someone?

It doesn’t feel like anything, Russ said.

C’mon. You have to feel something.

Russ had taken a long pull on his bottle of Jack Daniel’s. When you’re doing it, he said, you feel hot. And fast. Like doing speed in a sweatbox.

And after?

Russ’s eyes looked a long, long way off, into a place Shaun couldn’t go. After, he said. After, you feel cold.

Shaun looked into his own fifty-year-old eyes and felt something Russ had left out. Or maybe, being a nineteen-year-old grunt, he hadn’t known the feeling for what it was. Exultation. And power. Let Terry McKellan sit behind a desk and say yes or no. Let the Reid-Gruyn board cluster around a table voting up and down. He had exercised real power, the ultimate power. He was taking his destiny into his own hands.

Don’t get cocky, he thought. Events were still too fluid, too slippery. Squeeze too tightly or hold too loosely and he could be right back where he had been, waiting for the ax to fall on Reid-Gruyn. Except this time he’d be waiting inside a jail cell. But if he were smart, and daring and, most important, willing to use the power he had taken into his hands… he looked down at them. Flexed his fingers. Let himself think, for the first time since he had hauled Millie van der Hoeven out of that tower, that maybe there could be another accident.

Lisa Schoof held the telephone tightly, as if loosing her hold, even for a moment, would let the malevolent black thing fly apart, its shrapnel embedding in her flesh, her blood seeping around the plastic wounds, her life dripping away from a hundred openings that could have no healing.

“Say something,” her sister hissed over the line. “For God’s sake.”

The thing that came to mind, I wish you had never called me, I wish I didn’t know, I wish it were still ten minutes ago, was useless. Lisa didn’t bother to ask for reassurance- Are you sure? Couldn’t there be a mistake? -because Rachel, smart, precise Rachel, didn’t make mistakes like this.

She cleared her throat. “How long?” she asked.

“How long what?”

“Until it’s out.”

Rachel clicked her teeth. A habit she had had since girlhood. “I can justify not calling the doctor in to see her for another half hour or so. She’s still sleepy and just had her medication. After that…”