She got the number and did a quick walk around, scouting each room. Everything was accounted for. There was nothing out of the ordinary. Butch had not been admitted—unless he was in one of the other rooms in the main house. Sometimes patients who were VIPs stayed there.
Marissa picked up her skirts and hightailed it for the back stairs.
Butch curled into himself even though he wasn't cold, operating on the theory that if he could just bring his knees up high enough, the pain in his stomach would ease a little.
Yeah, right. The hot poker in his gut was not impressed by that plan.
He peeled his puffy eyelids apart, and after a lot of blinking and deep breathing, he came to the following conclusions: He was not dead. He was in a hospital. And shit that was no doubt keeping him alive was being pumped into his arm.
As he rolled over gingerly, he came to one more realization. His body had been used for a punching bag. Oh… and something nasty was in his belly, like his last meal had been rancid roast beef.
What the fuck had happened to him?
Only a vague series of snapshots came to mind: Vishous finding him in the woods. Him with a screaming instinct that the brother should leave him to die. Then some knife action and… something about that hand of V's, that glowing thing used to take out a vile piece of—
Butch lurched over onto his side and gagged just from the memory. There had been evil in his belly. Pure, undiluted malice, and the black horror had been spreading.
With shaking hands, he grabbed the hospital johnny he was wearing and yanked it up. 'Oh… Jesus…'
There was a stain on the skin of his stomach, like the scorch mark of a fire that had been snuffed out. In desperation, he weeded through his sloppy brain, trying to remember how the scarring had gotten there and what it was, but he just came up with a big fat zero.
So like the detective he'd been before, he examined the scene—which in this case was his body. Lifting one of his hands, he saw that his fingernails were a mess, as if something like a file or some small nails had been hammered under a number of them. A deep breath told him his ribs were cracked. And going by his swollen eyes, he had to assume his face had partied with a lot of knuckles.
He had been tortured. Recently.
Reaching into his mind again, he panned for memories, trying to get back to the last place he'd been. ZeroSum. ZeroSum with… oh, God, that female. In the bathroom. Having hardcore, who-cares sex. Then he'd gone out and…
His recollections came to the end of their train track at that point. Just shot off the edge of reasoning into a pit of
Had he squealed on the Brotherhood? Betrayed them? Had he given his nearest and dearest away?
And what the hell had been done to his belly? God, he felt like there was sludge in his veins thanks to whatever had festered there.
Letting himself go limp, he breathed through his mouth for a while. And found there was no peace to be had.
As if his brain didn't want to stop working, or maybe because it was showing off, the thing kicked up random visions from the distant past. Birthdays with his dad glaring at him and his mom tense and smoking like a chimney. Christmases where his brothers and sisters got presents and he didn't.
Hot July nights that no fan could cool off, the heat driving his father into the cold beer. The Pabst Blue Ribbon driving his father into fist-cracking wake-up calls just for Butch.
Memories he hadn't thought of for years came back, all unwanted visitors. He saw his sisters and brothers, happy, shouting, playing on bright green grass. And remembered how he'd wished he could be among them instead of hanging back, the oddball who'd never fit in.
And then—Oh, God, no… not this memory. Too late. He pictured himself as the twelve-year-old he'd been, scrawny and shaggy, standing at the curb in front of the O'Neal family row house in South Boston. It had been a clear, beautiful fall afternoon when he'd watched his sister Janie get into a red Chevy Chevette that had rainbow stripes down the side. With perfect recollection he saw her waving at him through the window in the back as the car drove off.
Now that the door to the nightmare was open, he couldn't stop the horror show. He recalled the police coming to the door that night and his mother's knees going out when they finished talking to her. He remembered the cops questioning him because he was the last person to see Janie alive. He heard his younger self telling the badges that he hadn't recognized the boys and had wanted to tell his sister not to get in.
Mostly, he saw his mother's eyes burning with a pain so great she had no tears.
Then flash forward twenty-plus years. God… when was the last time he'd spoken to or seen either of his parents? Or his brothers and sisters? Five years? Probably. Man, the family had been so relieved when he'd moved away and started missing holidays.
Yeah, around the Christmas table, everyone else had been part of the O'Neal family fabric and he'd been the stain. Eventually he'd stopped going home altogether, leaving them only phone numbers to reach him, numbers they never dialed.
So they wouldn't know if he died now, would they? Vishous no doubt knew everything about the O'Neal clan, down to their social security numbers and bank statements, but Butch had never spoken about them. Would the Brotherhood call? What would they say?
Butch looked down at himself and knew there was a good chance he wasn't walking out of this room. His body looked a lot like those he'd seen in Homicide, the kind he investigated in the woods. Well, natch. That's where he'd been found. Discarded. Used. Left for dead.
Rather like Janie.
Exactly like Janie.
Closing his eyes, he floated away on the pain in his body. And from out of the swill of agony, he had a vision of Marissa from the first night he'd met her. The image was so vivid, he could almost smell the ocean scent of her and he saw exactly what had been: the filmy yellow gown she'd had on… the way her hair had looked, down over her shoulders… the lemon-colored sitting room they'd been in together.
To him, she was the unforgettable woman, the one he'd never had and never would but who nonetheless reached into the core of him.
Man, he was so fricking tired.
He opened his eyes and took action before he really knew what he was doing. Reaching up to his inner forearm, he peeled the clear plastic tape off the skin around the IV insertion site. Sliding the needle out of his vein was easier than he'd thought it would be, but then again, the rest of him hurt so bad, messing around with that little piece of hardware was a drop in the bucket.
If he'd had the strength, he'd have gone looking for something with a little more punch to off himself. But time—time was the weapon he was going to use because that's what he had at his disposal. And going by how shitty he felt, it wasn't going to take long. He could practically hear his organs coughing up their livelihoods.
Closing his eyes, he let go of everything, only dimly aware that alarms were going off in the machinery behind the bed. A fighter by nature, the ease with which he gave up was a surprise, but then a heavy tide of exhaustion crashed over him. He knew instinctually that this was not the exhaustion of sleep but rather of death, and he was glad that it came so fast.
Drifting free of everything, he imagined that he was at the start of a long, blinding hallway at the end of which was a door. Marissa was standing in front of the portal and as she smiled at him she opened the way into a white bedroom full of light.
His soul eased as he took a deep breath and began to walk forward. He'd like to think he was going to heaven, in spite of all the bad things he'd done, so this made sense.
It wouldn't be paradise without her.
Chapter Six
