Chapter 52 Scrape, Rattle, Scrape
Scrape, Rattle, Scrape
Scrape, rattle, scrape.
Scrape, rattle, scrape.
Anca held Evan in her lap.
She lacked the strength to pull him into the car, so she sat with him in the rain. She was drenched through as if she’d jumped into the ocean. The rain had washed them both clean before stopping as abruptly as it had arrived.
Two of the men lay unconscious and the boy was spent, crying into the earth, face crusted with mud. That was fine by her.
Scrape, rattle, scrape.
Scrape, rattle, scrape.
Exhausted, she leaned to peer around the front of the Mercedes.
The giant man was belly-crawling toward her, forearm over forearm, hauling himself from the beach onto the road. Behind him he was dragging—could it be? was that possibly?—an anchor.
She felt shockingly calm.
Setting Evan down gently, she rose.
Scrape, rattle, scrape.
Scrape, rattle, scrape.
She walked toward him. She had never seen a face as damaged as his, not even her own after the assault.
His teeth were bared, mouth stretched wide, an hourglass set on its side. Strands of gummy blood spiderwebbed the tangle of beard and lacerated flesh that was his mouth.
He kept on.
Dragging an anchor.
A leviathan freed from the deep.
As she neared, he torqued his head, that Cyclops eye staring up at her. “Fucking cunt. You’d better cut this anchor off my leg. Or you have no idea what kind of holes we’ll tear into you so we can f—”
She kicked him just beneath the hinge of his jaw. Hard.
He spasmed once in the mud, legs contorted, a dead beetle.
Out cold.
Turning her back, she walked over to Evan once more to sit with him until he awakened.
She knew all too well what it felt like to come to alone.
“The prosecution team is pleased with the statement.” Naomi Templeton’s voice came clearly through the Mercedes’s elaborate infotainment system.
Gripping the steering wheel, Evan did his best to draw full breaths, but the pain in his upper left lung refused to diminish, tightening its claws across his rib cage.
Everything hurt. The arches of his feet hurt and his hamstrings hurt and his right patella hurt and both elbows hurt and his trapezius hurt and his hip flexors hurt and his forehead hurt and of course his left groin muscle hurt too because it was the weakest link in his body.
The hours he spent every week—and usually every day—to hold his pain at bay and his bones in proper alignment had saved him now from being entirely debilitated.
He’d woken up in Anca’s arms, the three Vikings sprawled unconscious across the road. The kid had pissed himself. As they’d pulled out, he’d cursed a blue streak at them. Anca had referred to him as a foulmouthed little creature, which had coaxed the first pained smile from Evan’s bruised face.
“If we can get IDs, we have the four dead to rights,” Naomi continued.
“Kidnapping, aggravated sexual abuse, assault with a dangerous weapon, possession of a controlled substance, unlawful administration of a controlled substance, and a host of Wiretap Act stuff. We’ll liaise with state on nonconsensual pornography, image-based abuse, unauthorized dissemination.
” She paused to draw a breath. “From the video you sent we can match tattoos and pull biometrics—gait, iris prints, hand geometry, voice recognition, even dental through the ski mask slits. We can bury them.” A tapping sound—a pen striking a pad. “We just have to know who they are.”
They zipped along the Long Island Expressway, the Mercedes shedding mud in the light rain. Evan and Anca were drenched but surprisingly clean. The downpour had bathed them.
“Working on it,” Evan said. “In the meantime, I left you three more.”
“What? How? Where?”
He told her. It took some time. The shortness of breath intensified and he had to take frequent pauses.
“You can charge the little delinquent, too,” he said. “He stabbed me with a hypo needle brimming with fentanyl.”
“Stabbed who?”
“Good point. Never mind.”
Opioid warmth was still leaching from his system, his head starting to throb.
His stomach was a pot of acid. He dug in the console, came up with the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup Templeton had thrown at him.
He rarely ate dessert, but when he did, he preferred 80 percent cocoa with almonds, maybe a sprinkle of sea salt.
He extracted the cup from its foil, chewed. It was disgusting. It was delicious.
“There’s a van parked right behind the upended tree.
” The pain in his left lung amped up with every inhalation.
Even to his own ears, his voice sounded wheezy.
“There’re two more syringes in the console, probably fentanyl, driver’s license beneath the visor, and a .
357 in the glove box. Driver’s license identifies the big one as Peter Macmanus.
Gum ’em up on charges. Can you keep them from making any calls? ”
“We can temporarily restrict access if there’s an ongoing investigation that could be compromised by immediate communication. Let me talk to Barton, make sure we’re squeaky clean on it so we don’t jam up the case.”
“Copy that.” He disconnected the call.
His clutch around the steering wheel had tightened, his knuckles bloodless. Each breath tightened the left side of his torso, pressure mounting, a particular kind of claustrophobic pain he wished he was not familiar with.
For the first time, he acknowledged he had a problem. Feeling beneath his clavicle, he pressed the top rib, biting back a bark of pain.
Tension pneumothorax.
When the Goliath had slammed him onto the road, the impact must’ve torn a hole in the lung.
The opioid muffled the pain, made it hard to gauge, but the slow onset of pressure meant the tear was tiny.
Tiny was still a problem since it created a one-way valve that pumped air into the pleural cavity between his lung and the chest wall.
The air was trapped there, expanding with every breath.
It would continue to compress the lung until it collapsed and he suffocated.
Fingers to his neck, he gauged his heart rate. Already increased, north of eighty.
“What is it?” Anca asked. “Are you okay?”
His breathing had quickened. His blood vessels would be compressing now under the pressure.
Dots of static invaded his visual field.
He exited the expressway, coasting through a few green lights.
The wheezing intensified, the lung leaking air.
It felt like there was a balloon inflating behind his chest plate.
He did not have much time.
Anca was leaning over the console now. “We have to get you to a hospital.”
“… can’t go … hospital…”
“You were just at a hospital.”
“… for … you…”
“This is ridiculous. You can’t—”
“Anca.” He managed to say it hard enough that she stopped.
“… no time … discuss.” Screeching off the road, he pulled into the gas station they’d stopped at on their way to the meeting.
The Mercedes skidded artfully, missing the pumps and slotting neatly into a parking spot to the side of the convenience store. “… not an option…”
“Okay,” she said. “I get it. What then?”
He unbuckled the seat belt, drew in a shuddering breath. “Help me … inside.”