16. Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Sixteen
U nease sits heavy in my gut. It’s so profound I almost feel seasick, as if the hushed hospital room were swaying from side to side.
He’s been gone for too long. I know nothing significant has happened to him in the middle of a busy hospital, even if it is the middle of the night. But what if the doctor gave him bad news? What if he’s freaking out, and he needs support? We haven’t had the chance to talk about his family a lot, but I get the strong feeling that he thinks his grandmother is the only person in the world who loves him.
She seems lovely. She’s out of it right now, alternating between whispering quietly with Tristan, who is crouching next to her bedside, and dozing in the darkness. I’m glad he has a relationship with her, because I’m not sure I have the bandwidth to be good with new people right now.
All I can think about is counting the seconds until Tobias comes back and my heart can stop trying to beat out of my chest. I look at Tristan, assuming he’ll give me one of his prepackaged- but-reassuring paramedic smiles and take the edge off all this anxiety.
Instead, he returns my look with one just as concerned. Anika is asleep again, and Tristan’s hands are clasped tightly in his lap, while his gaze flits between mine and the door.
When he stands up, we both know why without having to say anything. We quickly move into the hallway toward the nurses’ station. The halls are all dimly lit, but the station is full of several nurses sitting at computers, their faces all illuminated by the screens as they tap quietly on the keyboards or talk amongst themselves in low voices. I don’t see the nurse who took Tobias anywhere, but she could still be with him. The thought doesn’t settle my nerves at all, though.
There’s a woman sitting at the desk facing the front. She’s middle-aged, with bronze skin, intense but flawless makeup, and a slick, dark ponytail, who gives off a general air of authority.
“I didn’t get called about a direct transfer, Tristan. What are you doing up here?” she says, looking preoccupied but not unkind.
“I’m actually off shift, Maricella. I came to check on a patient and give her grandson a ride. Anika Tanikon. Do you know where her nurse is? She took the grandson to talk, and they’ve been gone way too long.”
Maricella looks at me, probably to figure out how I fit into this equation, but then shrugs it off. She glances at her screen quickly, but I immediately notice the crease that forms around her eyes.
“That’s weird. You said the nurse that talked to the grandson was female? Your patient has been assigned to Jameson since she arrived, who’s both male and has been on lunch for the last half hour. Who did you talk to?”
Tristan and I look at each other, but we both move slowly, like a moment out of a horror movie. Which isn’t a comparison my brain would have pulled until Tobias made me start watching the stupid things, and now I have even more horrific images running through my brain of what might be about to happen to him. As if my imagination needed the help.
“Go,” Tristan snaps, before reaching for the desk phone. “What’s the extension for security?” This question is for Maricella, who is clearly taken aback but locking into Tristan with the same kind of emergency hyper-focus he seems to have for situations like this.
I don’t hear her answer, because I’m already running. I have no idea where I’m running to, but at least I’m finally doing something.
Hopefully, Tristan is getting security to lock the place down. Or, if he can’t convince them to go that far, at least start looking for where Eamon took Tobias.
If that’s what’s happening. Is that what’s happening?
It has to be. There’s no other explanation for it.
The ‘nurse’ said something about the ICU, so I follow the signs overhead at a brisk jog, ducking around slow-moving patients and even slower phlebotomists with their giant fucking carts, doing my best not to plow anyone down in the process.
When I finally make it, I can’t get in without a keycard. But the unit is small, just a hallway with bays on either side, and the doors are transparent. I can see far enough to know Tobias isn’t in there unless he’s being held in a corner somewhere, which seems unlikely. If he’s trapped, it would be farther away from all the real doctors and nurses.
“Fuck!”
I’m loud enough that I turn a few heads from the sleepless people around me, but I don’t care. Why didn’t I get him a fucking phone yet? Why did I trust him to be safe just because it was a public place?
Why did I trust myself to keep him safe in the first place?
I’ve screwed this up from the start. I’m just another person in the long series of people in his life letting him down. Now he really needs rescuing, and not only am I not there, I don’t even know where to look.
The next hour is a blur. I think it’s an hour, at least. I keep moving through the hospital, looking over every floor inch by inch, begging nurses to look wherever I can’t go. Tristan got ahold of security at least, because they’re searching, too, but their enthusiasm is lukewarm at best.
They keep asking if there’s an order of protection, or to confirm that the person isn’t a child. And I’m saying ‘no’ every time, but it doesn’t seem to land.
As soon as they wrap their heads around the fact that it’s an adult man who we believe has been taken against his will by another adult man, it’s like they shutter closed. They don’t care, or don’t believe us, or don’t think it’s in their jurisdiction to get involved. Some combination of the above.
I don’t know and they’re not explaining. But the more we look, no matter how much energy Tristan puts into barking orders and calling in any professional favors or personal influence he has, it becomes clear that they’re not interested in helping us. It’s not a child, it’s not a patient, and it’s not someone that they’re legally obligated to care about.
Call the cops or get out, is the end result.
I equivocate for about a minute and a half before I decide to call the cops. I know Tobias wouldn’t want me to. I know he’d be pissed, but we’re past that now. Eamon has him and is now fully aware that he’s capable of running. Fuck knows where he’s hiding and what he’s planning to do to him.
Tobias’s grandmother is as safe as she can be while she’s here, at least. Tristan dealt with that, talking to the charge nurse from before about limited visitors until Tobias is found.
I feel like I’m going to unravel. I’ve never felt this impotent in my entire life. Not during all the times I’ve tried to help people get their lives back together, with varying degrees of success.
Not even the first time I experienced this kind of disaster, when my family imploded before my eyes, and I did absolutely nothing to stop it. Memories of all that violence and misery—ones I’m normally so good at stuffing into the dark crevices of my mind where they belong—are trying to peek out at me. I don’t have time for it, though. I can’t change anything that happened back then.
I can’t change what’s happening now, either. But I can pretend. I wait for the cops and I look at every person walking through the lobby to see if maybe—if there’s even the slightest chance—I’ll snag Eamon and Tobias. Over an hour since he went missing. Wandering around in front of everyone.
At some point, I call Sav and wake him up. He doesn’t know anything but promises to do some digging. Tristan seems to make some calls of his own in the same vein. I want to go back to Possum Hollow and look for him, but where? It’s a small town, but not that small. Where can you look if someone wants to hide a person ?
It’s a good thing I don’t, though. Because boy, do the cops have some questions for me.
I know Tobias wouldn’t believe me, but I hate cops as much as he does. I’m only doing this out of desperation. As soon as they arrive at the hospital, they want to take this conversation to the station. Tristan and I begrudgingly agree, but once I step into the station, the flashbacks hit me with brute force.
I was nineteen years old when I spent twenty-two hours being questioned about my father’s murder. The whole thing is a blur, but somehow also etched into my memory. Like something that’s been scrubbed down and faded with time, but still permanently warped the surface there.
The memories aren’t linear. It’s more impressions. The coldness inside the holding cell was a big one, as well as the hunger. It was long enough ago that they fingerprinted me with ink, not digitally, and I remember how the ink managed to coat every last inch of my hands. It almost seemed deliberate, like another way to dehumanize me. It didn’t have to be that messy, but they were so determined to make it impossible for me to get clean.
Getting poked and prodded and harassed was bad enough, but for some reason that ink was the worst part. I hate being dirty, and it cast this film over my fingers that I was constantly aware of, which contaminated everything I touched. Eventually it got on my face and my clothes, and the rest of my skin, making every part of me nearly burn with this tacky, grimy, indelible sensation. It became so uncomfortable, it even overrode my grief, after a point.
Although maybe that was just the easier way to think about it.
“So, you’re not related to him?” Officer Bumblefuck asked.
His real name isn’t Bumblefuck , but I don’t remember, and I don’t care to squint hard enough at his badge to figure it out. It’s close enough.
“No, he’s my friend. He was staying with me to get away from his abuser.”
The officer makes some more notes with an impassive face.
“Yeah, I’m familiar with Eamon. I’ve seen the two of them together before. I’ve seen the kid hanging around all those guys a lot. Also high as a fucking kite at your bar.” He gives me a serious look. Not unsympathetic, but the condescension in it is undisguised and I bristle before he even speaks. “How do you know he didn’t just leave? You know what these guys are like. A kid like that is going to be flighty. He runs, he stays. Is Eamon really abusing him, or are they just getting high and fighting? There’s no way to know what’s going on in these people’s heads.”
The layers upon layers of things he just said that make me enraged… I want to flip the table. I want to flip the fucking table and then pin him to it by his throat while I explain—in explicit detail—how cruel and incorrect his attitude is.
Instead, I take a deep breath, and I try to release a tiny bit of tension with it when I exhale. I know I have no power here. I already know how this is going to end.
“When he came to me, he’d been beaten half to death. I know him. He’s been physically, sexually, and emotionally abused by this man for months at the least. It’s getting worse. Eamon is a violent criminal. Tobias chose to leave him, and now Tobias is missing. This seems pretty cut and dry.”
The condescension I’m getting from the cop doubles, but now it’s coated in a layer of misplaced pity. Like I’m some poor schmuck who got the runaround and is too na?ve to know it.
“Young, damaged guys like him change their minds. From where I’m standing, they’re both criminals. I’ve got no crime scene, no evidence of violence, and you’re telling me he was so badly abused before, but there’s no hospital record and neither of you bothered to file for a protective order or even an assault charge. What am I supposed to think?”
I slam my fist on the table. It’s a burst of anger, white-hot and then immediately smothered, like all the other emotions raging to come to the surface right now.
“He was too fucking scared,” I snap. “He begged me not to.”
The cop takes it in stride, though. He clearly doesn’t see me as a threat.
Instead, he just holds out his hands, like I’m a horse he’s trying to settle.
“I understand where you’re coming from.”
I beg your finest fucking pardon, Officer Bumblefuck, but you clearly don’t.
“I know you’re worried about him. But I have to go by the evidence, and there’s no evidence to say this is anything other than interpersonal squabbling among some low-level criminals and you getting caught in the crossfire. Are you sure you and Tobias didn’t have a fight? Something that might have pissed him off and sent him running back to his old friends?”
I snort. No matter how many times I describe Eamon and Tobias’s relationship explicitly as intimate partner violence, he keeps defaulting back to whatever language he’s used to. Friends. Buddies. Criminal associates. It swings back and forth, but he’s incapable of calling anything what it really is, because that wouldn’t help sell his theory that this is all just one big misunderstanding, and Tobias is an indigent criminal who can’t be expected to stay in one place under any circumstances.
“Look, Officer,” I say, steeling myself to appear as rational as humanly possible. “Tobias isn’t a drug addict. If you’ve seen him high, it’s because Eamon forced him. He’s only associated with criminals because Eamon forced him.” Okay, that’s technically not true, but we’re going for the big picture here. “He’s an adult, but he’s been manipulated and controlled by a powerful, violent criminal since he was still a teenager. He’s refused to leave my apartment because he’s so terrified of this man—so terrified that Eamon will kill him the next time he sees him—and the only reason we left tonight was because his grandmother is in the hospital. He barely even got to see her before he spoke to a nurse who wasn’t really a nurse and then disappeared. How is this not evidence of foul play? He’s been taken. He’s missing. He’s being held against his will, and god knows what is being done to him. He could already be dead, and you—”
My voice cracks, and I trail off. I was getting more heated the longer I spoke, but nothing was stirring in the demeanor of the man opposite me.
Nope. Nothing. This was still a big waste of his time, as far as he was concerned.
I can’t do anything else, but I will at least spare myself the indignity of breaking down and crying in front of this fucking waste of oxygen.
Officer Bumblefuck sighs and leans in, furrowing his brow in a way that he’s probably practiced to try to look sympathetic.
“Look, pal. My hands are tied. I can’t file a Missing Persons Report with no evidence, especially if the person is gonna pop up at the sight of a robbery or a drug deal in a couple of days. Keep an eye out, keep asking around about him, and next time he comes back to see you, encourage him to file a report so there’s a paper trail. Until there’s a paper trail, nothing’s going to happen. It is what it is.”
I’m flipping the table in my mind’s eye. Papers are scattering and hot, bitter coffee is splashing over his pock-marked, doughy face. Then I’m cracking his skull open on the linoleum and leaving him here while all the blood and spinal fluid slowly drains out of his body, before going to find Tobias myself.
In reality, I nod. I don’t thank him or accept what he’s saying, because I’m not that weak, but I do accept that I’m not going to change his mind. There’s a record of me trying to make the report, at least. I’ll try the same thing tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after. That, and have everyone I know harass everyone they know to see if anyone’s seen Eamon or Tobias.
I don’t have the power to do anything else. It’s that, or wait to hear that Tobias has been killed. Which is not something I’m willing to contemplate right now.