Chapter Twenty #3
“All kinds, from antiseptic and gauze to those hormone injections they use on the women in the clinic.”
“What about the Pentobarbital?” I pressed.
“I, ah, I clean up at a vet too. They use that to put down the sick and old animals…”
Everything was falling into place.
“Why did he dump Riya?”
“He didn’t. I, ah… I don’t know, man. He was getting crazier by the day and he, well, he said he was going out to get candles and silk sheets and,” he closed his eyes for a second, like a wince.
When they opened again, they seemed pained.
“And I think he was going to rape her, all unconscious and the like. I just… I got cold feet, I guess. I didn’t know Riya real good, but I knew her.
She was a nice girl. I couldn’t just stand by and let her get raped. ”
“Oh, but letting her be in a coma for a year while he performed illegal and immoral surgeries on her, that was cool?” Brock asked, his tone getting a little too sharp. He needed to rein it in.
I gave him a hard look that had him exhaling a slow breath, his shoulders relaxing, before I looked back at Sully, brow raised, as if asking him to answer Brock’s question.
“A hundred thousand in cash,” he said, voice desperate. “In cash. And he wasn’t hurting her or anything. I made sure she was healthy when I dropped off supplies.”
“Where did you drop off supplies?” I asked.
“No. I can’t…” he said, shaking his head. “I got Riya out. She’s good. You have her. I saw her at her old apartment with you. She’s okay. I can’t tell you where he is.”
“See, the thing is, your boss is fucked in the head. He lost Riya, true. But because he can’t have her, guess who he showed up and took instead?
” I watched the realization register across his features.
“Yeah, the old ball and chain. And, see, he was nuts to do this to begin with, but my money is on him being a different kind of crazy now. And what are the chances that he will take a year this time? What’s going to stop him from using his silk sheets with his wife? ”
Sully went pale at that, swallowing hard like his dinner was trying to come back up. “Two-seven-six-three Highway thirty-four. It’s an old abandoned plastic surgeon. Still has the surgery room and everything.”
I nodded tightly. “Brock,” I said, nodding at Sully.
“No, I’m coming,” he growled.
“No, you’re taking Sully here to the police station to give his statement. In about forty minutes,” I clarified. “After I have gotten a chance to talk to Dr. Robinson myself.”
“Tig can…”
“Tig can, but you are,” I said, my voice like steel.
He was too worked up, and I was too. If I brought Brock, things would get out of control.
I needed Tig with me to hold me back if I lost it.
We needed the cops to show up so I didn’t get my license stripped for fucking around where I knew I shouldn’t.
“Alright, man,” he said, clearly unhappy but long since programmed to follow orders.
“I’d thank you for your cooperation,” I said to Sully, “but I think you’re a real shithead for this. Let’s go.” I jerked my chin at Tig, who turned and went out of the open doorway.
“Passenger,” Tig said, moving to block me from the driver’s side.
“Tig, I swear…”
“I get that you’re pissed, and you should be.
That girl didn’t do a goddamn thing in her life to deserve what happened to her.
And I don’t know Shannon Robinson, but I doubt she has either.
The only mistake they made was loving this dick.
But I am not putting my life in your hands when you can’t even unclench your fists,” he said, nodding at my hands, which were curled into fists at my sides.
“Alright, but if you granny-foot it, I am going to kill you,” I said, going around the car and getting into the passenger seat as he peeled away from the curb.
The drive did nothing to calm my mood. If anything, I got angrier as each minute passed. Luckily, the building was only ten minutes away.
Tig cut the lights before he turned in, and we didn’t slam our doors, not wanting to alert anyone if he was inside with a scalpel and an unconscious woman.
Inlet Plastic Surgery was a hideous salmon-colored building with white trim and odd geometrical architecture.
We ducked low to peek in the windows, looking for lights so we’d know where not to enter.
Eventually, we decided to just head in the front door.
Which, to our utter fucking disbelief, was actually left completely unlocked.
“How off his meds does he gotta be to not lock the door?” Tig asked before we headed inside.
The interior, while abandoned and dark, was clean.
I figured that was likely due to Sully going above and beyond to earn his hundred K.
We heard the low hum of music from the back left, and we both paused, pressing our backs to the walls in the hall and reaching for the guns we both carried legally but very rarely had a need to draw, let alone use.
Mine was from my boot. His was from his waistband.
We moved as silently as our boots would allow to a door with a small plaque declaring it was the surgery room, behind which the music was originating.
I looked at Tig, and he nodded, pulled his leg back, and slammed it forward.
That was a true perk of having a giant working for you—doors were nothing but a kick away from being sawdust.
I thought I had prepared myself. Really, very little was actually left up to the imagination.
But that being said, knowing about sick and twisted was different from seeing it.
Because what we walked in on was a surgical room, all stark white and surgical steel, blinding with the harsh overhead light. The center of the floor had a long steel exam table. And on that table was Shannon Robinson.
Her pretty strawberry-blonde hair was slightly damp, a little darker than in her pictures, brushed straight and tucked behind her ears that came almost to a point at the tops like a fairy, which was likely why she always had them covered in pictures.
It was almost humanizing to find she had flaws.
Her makeup was done, but poorly, obviously not by her own hand.
And she was dressed, somewhat, in a matching lingerie set consisting of a purple silk skirt that slit almost to the hip and a matching bra.
That was it.
That was all she had on, way too much of her milky white skin on display.
I feel it went without saying that she was completely unconscious while mostly naked on that cold table. Her chest was rising and falling, and there was a banana bag sticking out of one arm, and some other bag connected to the other arm which, I suspected, contained the pentobarbital.
And standing beside the table, hand still on his wife’s cheek, was a stunned Dr. Michael Robinson.
He looked like shit.
That wasn’t just my jealousy over the fact that he got to have Riya before me. He genuinely looked like a man who had lost it all and therefore had nothing to lose.
Because, to be fair, the man was good-looking in his pictures. He was tall and a lean kind of strong with dark hair, eyes, and a skin tone that hinted at some kind of Italian or Spanish ancestry.
But now, his hair was unkempt and slightly greasy. His clothes were rumpled. His eyes were slightly bugging and heavy-lidded at the same time, making him genuinely look completely psychotic.
“Don’t,” I growled when his hand raised to the closest bag. My arm rose too, my gun in it. “Won’t be any better for you if you kill her.”
“You don’t understand!” he shrieked, raking his hands through his nasty hair.
“I understand that you fucked over two good women, and they both dumped your ass, and you lost your ever-loving mind.”
“They both loved me,” he yelled, swinging an arm out and sending a rolling tray of various small medical equipment flying to the ground with a loud clatter in the mostly empty space.
“Right. And try to tell me you loved both of them too,” I said, having to hold back an eye roll.
“It was always Riya. Always. Since the day she walked into the interview.”
“Yeah, well, then you should have manned up and divorced your wife instead of betraying the two of them.”
He was pacing against the wall with the cabinets full of God-knew what, looking very much like a caged animal. “I couldn’t. My goddamn father-in-law would never allow it.”
It clicked then.
He should have still been in medical school debt.
His wife came from a wealthy family.
His debt had been paid off as what? Some kind of goddamn modern-day dowry?
Rich people were fucking weird like that.
But not quite.
“Why would he pay off your debt?”
Michael stopped his pacing, laughing in an utterly humorless way. “To treat him off the books.”
“For?”
“MS.”
Well then.
The puzzle was complete, wasn’t it?
Her father ran a big company. Men like that would be voted out by the board if they knew their big guy was slowly succumbing to a debilitating and incurable disease.
So he wanted to be treated on the down-low because companies like that looked at shit like medical records.
He was planning on holding on for as long as possible.
“Why’d you take Shannon if it was always Riya?”
“He took her from me!”
“Right before you planned to rape her and get her pregnant without her consent?”
“It wouldn’t be rape,” he scoffed. “And she would have been happy making a family with me.”
“Riya didn’t want to have children,” I reminded him.
“Every woman wants to have children.”
Jesus.
There was crazy and there was delusional.
“See, your plan backfired though. Riya is now in my place and she has my baby in her belly. So good job, you fucking lunatic.”
And right then, whatever fight was left in him, whatever drive there was to complete his crazy mission even with a fill-in woman, left him. His shoulders slumped, his head hung, and he slowly lowered down onto his knees.
I slid the safety back on my gun and put it away, moving across the room toward him.
Then he did the only thing he could have done to even remotely redeem himself in my eyes.
He looked up at me with sad eyes.
“Is she okay? Is she… happy?”
Just like that, all the anger left my system like a wave moved through me and washed me clean of it.
Because he really did love her.
And that absolutely did crack him.
That shit wasn’t satisfying to see; it was haunting.
It didn’t make what he did any better, any less fucked up, but it humanized a demonic thing to do.
If there was one thing I learned from all my years in the military, it was that people—good, upstanding, gentle people—were all capable of ugly, evil things.
None of us could claim to be any different.
Under the right circumstances and pressure, we could all do deplorable things to other people.
It was a small but indisputable part of human nature.
And the biggest trigger was always love.
Love for an ex who moved on, taking the form of a murder/suicide.
Love for a sister who was brutalized by a husband, leading to you standing over the man with his severed cock in your hand, his blood saturating you like a horror movie, blue and red lights illuminating the room.
Love for a brother who was killed by an invading force, five years later having you lead a small counter army, killing other men’s brothers.
Love cured when situations were ideal.
But just as often, love sparked a flame that burned bright and left bodies in its wake, charred and unrecognizable.
“She’s freaked. But she’s okay. And I’m going to make sure she’s happy,” I affirmed.
“Good. That’s good.”
“They’re on their way,” Tig said, and I nodded. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see him moving over toward Shannon, pressing his fingers into her throat.
“She’s fine,” Michael said, looking over. “I’ve been monitoring her.”
“You’ll forgive us for not taking the word of a man who smells like he hasn’t showered in a week,” I said, looking over at Tig, who nodded that her pulse was alright.
It was all of two minutes later when a parade of booted feet could be heard in the halls amidst the sound of men shouting, “NBPD!”
Tig and I put our hands up. “Gun, left boot. Permit is in my wallet, back pocket,” I supplied.
“No need,” a familiar voice called, making the officer who was leaning down toward my boot freeze and stand. “Think you can put your hands down, Sawyer, Tig.”
“Collings,” I said, turning to face him, giving him as genuine a smile as I could muster given the situation.
“Thought you were retiring,” I said to the man who had been keeping things in line in Navesink Bank for a good long while, who understood the strange balance of power all the various criminal organizations kept.
“Tomorrow,” he said with a snort.
“What a way to go out, huh?” I asked, watching as one of the officers read Michael his rights and cuffed him.
“What’s going on with…” Collings said, waving a hand toward Shannon.
“Pentobarbital.”
“And you know that because…”
“Because he did the same thing to another woman who is a client of mine. Brock has a witness and is likely on his way to the station with him now. We’ll explain it all.”
“And everything was done above board,” he mused, knowing damn well there was some law bending.
“Well, the front door was open…”
“And this place is for sale,” Collings agreed with a nod, knowing smile in place. “In fact, wasn’t that the real estate agent I saw outside?”
I chuckled at that. “Must have been,” I agreed.
“I’m going to need to talk to your client.”
“I know,” I replied, dreading that reality. “She did file a report, but I think she got filed under ‘aluminum hats and loons.’”
“Well, we’ll have to dig that up.”
The EMS came in as they were leading Michael out, going to the hanging bags and squinting. “Pentobarbital?” one asked, and they looked at each other.
“She’s been under about a week,” I supplied. “Her name is Shannon Robinson. She’s that guy they just hauled out’s wife.”
With that, Tig and I moved outside, exchanging a few words with Collings and agreeing to meet him down at the station once I picked up Riya.
I agreed, and Tig drove us back to my place.
But I had to run a quick errand first.