by Mark Lukens
“I think he’d like that.”
“So he’s conscious?”
“In and out. They’ve got him on some medication. Some painkillers, I’m sure. He just got out of surgery about an hour ago.”
“Did he say anything about what happened? About who did this?”
Carol started crying again, consumed with grief for a moment. She tried to talk, but I couldn’t make out the words.
I drove along, speeding up, already planning my route to the hospital. I felt strange, my head light, swimming through this world that couldn’t be true.
“Carol?” I asked, trying to sound gentle, but I could hear the impatience in my voice.
“He can’t talk,” Carol managed to say through her tears. She sniffled again, catching her breath like she was hyperventilating.
I glanced at Alicia—she was staring right back at me.
“He can’t talk,” Carol said again. “They cut out his tongue.”
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
For just a second the world seemed to swim out of focus, the edges of my vision blacking out. I thought I was going to have to pull my truck over. Then everything swam back into focus, a sudden clarity, like high-definition video. The hairs on my skin felt like they were all standing on end, my balls shriveling.
“God, Carol,” I managed to say. “I’m so sorry. I’m coming to the hospital. I’ll be there as quickly as I can.”
“Thank you,” she breathed out through her tears, her voice shuddering. “Have you heard anything about your wife?”
It took me a second to register what she was talking about—Michelle.
“Stanley told me your wife was missing.”
“Yes,” I said, and it sounded like I’d barked out the word to her. “Yes, she left. She’s missing. But no, I haven’t found anything out about her disappearance.” I wondered how much Stan had told her about Michelle, about the strange things that had been happening. I wondered how much Carol knew, how much danger she might be in and not even know it. “But the police are working on it,” I added.
“I have to go, Zach. I need to get back to Stanley. Just keep him in your prayers.”
“Of course. I’m so sorry this happened.”
Carol hung up.
“What happened?” Alicia asked.
I figured she’d heard enough of the conversation to assume it had been something bad.
“Stan’s in the hospital. He was attacked.”
She nodded impatiently like she’d already figured out that much.
“He was attacked sometime between last night and early this morning. His truck was stolen. He was beaten up pretty badly. They cut his tongue out.”
The air seemed to be sucked out of Alicia’s lungs, and she made a strange sighing sound as she said my name: “Zach.”
Her voice said it all. We were involved in something far more dangerous than we had even imagined, and it was escalating quickly, going way too fast for me. I just wanted things to slow down. I knew it probably wasn’t a good idea to go to the hospital, but I had to see Stan. I’d gotten him into this, so I had to be there for him.
*
Alicia and I stuffed the money from the bank into our pockets. I shoved some of it down into my socks, and she put about half of it into her purse. We got out of her car and hurried to the hospital entrance, taking the elevator up to the third floor. After asking a nurse at the nurse’s station, we found Stan’s room. Even though the nurse didn’t seem alarmed that we were there, or nervous in any way, I still approached Stan’s room cautiously, afraid the police might already be there, or were still there. But when we entered the room only Carol was with Stan, sitting on a chair pulled up close to his bedside.
Stan looked terrible. His body looked crumpled under the bedsheet, that sheet surely hiding horrors. One arm, his left one, was bandaged all along his wrist and forearm, his fingers like fat purple sausages sticking out of the gauze, his wrist fat and bloated, broken or damaged in some way. His face was worse, black and blue and puffy, one eye swollen shut. There were red marks around his neck like he’d been strangled.
His one open eye focused on me as I entered the room.
“Stan,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”
He moved his mouth, but didn’t open it, almost like it was sewn shut somehow from the inside. He swallowed forcefully and winced, like just that act was agony. He grunted lowly, like he was trying to talk, his open eye rotating wildly.
Carol drew a sharp intake of breath, her hands to her mouth. She reached out to touch him, but then drew her hand back, like she wasn’t sure which part of his body she could touch and not deliver pain. Her eyes were rimmed in red and filled with tears.
“Don’t try to talk,” I told Stan. I could feel tears brimming in my own eyes.
Stan’s right hand, which wasn’t nearly as damaged as his left one, clutched at the bedsheets, his forearm muscles knotting, scratches and cuts all over his skin, along with yellowish and purple bruising.
“It’s okay, baby,” Carol whispered, deciding to pat his shoulder lightly.
Stan’s breaths were quicker, like he was excited . . . or scared. His good eye darted around, his body trembling. The machines he was hooked up to were beeping faster. I was sure a nurse was going to rush into the room at any second and tell us to leave because we were disturbing the patient too much.
“Just rest,” I told Stan. “Just try to rest.”
Stan grunted again and shook his head no. He looked frustrated, his eyebrows crinkling together, his mouth drawn down into a frown, his lips never parting. He lifted his right hand up, the one less mangled, and gestured in the air like he was writing with a pen.
“You want something to write on?” I asked him.
He grunted again, a long grunt like he was saying: Finally. He nodded vehemently, still breathing heavily out of his nostrils, snorting like a horse after a run. He looked excited, but also groggy, like he was doing his best to stay awake.
“Here,” Alicia said to me. She’d taken the notepad Stan had bought yesterday out of her purse, tearing out the page she’d written down contact information for lawyers and representatives, folding that page up and shoving it down into her purse. She found a pen and handed it and the notepad to me.
I gave the pen to Stan, slipping it into his shaking fingers. I held the notepad for him with both of my hands so he could write on the pad.
Carol was watching me, and I could tell that she didn’t think this was a good idea, like it was too taxing on Stan at this moment. But I could also see that she was intrigued, wanting to know what her son wanted to say so badly.
Stan scrawled on the paper, pushing down hard on the pad as I held it, his one eye focused on his task, his head lifted up a little.
I pulled the notepad away when he was done, his arm dropping back down to his bed with the pen still clutched in his fingers, his good eye closing. Just the simple act of writing two words on the notepad seemed to have exhausted him, but I had a feeling the painkillers and other medicines were also exhausting him.
I looked at the pad. Two words were written there: Stop Digging.
The words hit me like a hammer in the middle of my chest.
“What’s that mean?” Carol asked.
I hadn’t even seen her get up from her chair. She leaned over her son’s body and stared at the words he had scrawled on the paper. The words were shaky, almost like a child had written them, but they were easily legible from across the bed.
Michelle’s voice echoed in my mind, her call to my cell phone last night warning me to stop digging.
“Stop digging?” Carol asked. “What’s that mean?”
“I don’t know,” I lied.
She glared at me from the other side of the bed. “Stan was at your house the last few nights.” It sounded like an accusation. “He’d been spending a lot of time with you.”
I didn’t say anything—I couldn’t lie about that.
“What were you two doing?” Her ey
es flicked to Alicia like she might find an answer from her.
But Alicia was quiet, and I still hadn’t answered Carol’s question.
“What were you two doing?” Carol asked again. “Something that led to this?” She pointed down at what her son was now.
I still didn’t have an answer for her. I knew she wasn’t going to let this go—she wanted someone to blame for what had happened to her son, someone to punish, and she had latched on to me. But I couldn’t tell her anything. Only a few people knew anything about what had been happening to me, and now two of them were dead and one was maimed.
“He said he’d gone over to your house because you were upset about your wife leaving you,” Carol said. “A shoulder to lean on, and all that.”
I watched Carol. I’d known her for years. I’d been to her house so many times to play video games in the living room with Stan. She’d always been so nice and gentle, always offering iced tea or lemonade, snacks ready for us on the counter in the kitchen. Now she had turned into a fierce mama bear defending her cub.
Stan grunted, grabbing both of our attention. He still had the pen in his hand, gripping it tight, raising it up in the air. He made a gesture with it—he had more to say.
I held the notepad for him so he could write, his one eye focused, his head lifted up again, trembling with effort as I held the notepad with both hands like an assistant holding a board to be broken by a martial arts master.
Stan was done writing a few seconds later—he’d only written one short word, just three capital letters: RUN.
“Run from what?” Carol screeched. She looked at Stan for just a second like he might answer her question, but his eye was focused on me.
Carol looked back at me with horror in her eyes. “What did you do?”
I could imagine what was going through Carol’s mind, thoughts of drug dealers or cartels, the two of us mixed up with some very bad characters who liked to make examples out of people. And she didn’t know how close she was to the truth; we were involved with some terrible people, a cartel, a cabal, only these people were much more powerful than drug lords.
“I’m sorry,” I told Carol. I couldn’t tell her anything. I couldn’t involve her in this, too. I could see that Stan wasn’t going to put her in danger, that maybe he hadn’t told her much about what had been happening. She needed to remain innocent of this.
I looked at Stan. “I have to go.”
He nodded. He understood. He closed his one eye, still breathing heavily through his nostrils.
“What did you do?” Carol screeched at me.
I hoped Stan would at least tell his mother that this wasn’t my fault, but in a way I felt like it was, like I had dragged Stan and others into this too far. I hadn’t even told Stan about Adam and Joel, and that maybe he was lucky to still be alive. But I was sure he didn’t feel very lucky right now.
Alicia was already heading for the door. I was right behind her.
“I’m calling the police!” Carol yelled. “You know something about this. You know who did this!”
I was sure Carol was going to run after me, grab me, slap me, hit me. And I knew I would not fight back.
A nurse met us at the door. She looked alarmed. “Is everything okay?”
Stan grunted again, the loudest so far, like he was screaming through his closed mouth, his vocal chords straining. The sound stopped Carol, turned her around and brought her back to his bedside.
The nurse shot past us, seeming to forget about us for a moment.
We needed to go. Stan was helping us, causing a distraction so we could get out of there. Even after all he’d gone through, he was still helping us.
A moment later we were hurrying down the hall, not running, but walking so fast it was nearly a jog. I felt that once we were on the elevators, we would be safe. My mind was whirling as I thought of Stan, my skin crawling as I imagined what he had gone through, his body expertly tortured, fear embedded into every fiber of his being, a certainty of suffering in his future. My stomach twisted and turned at the thought of the shadowy cabal out there, intermingled with us, a part of our reality, familiar faces who could be their agents.
I felt Alicia come to a stop beside me in the hall. The elevators were down at the end. I froze beside her, and then I saw what had paralyzed her—two men in dark suits and ties and sunglasses were waiting by the elevator doors.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Were the two men in dark suits guarding the elevator doors cops? Were they detectives? FBI? Some other alphabet agency, as the late Adam and Joel had called them? Or worse . . . assassins. The same men who had tortured and maimed Stan.
For just a split second we stared at the two men. And there was no doubt their eyes behind the dark lenses of their glasses were watching us. We were the prey frozen in the woods, waiting the milliseconds to see if our predators had spotted us, waiting to see if we needed to bolt, and which way to run.
The two men didn’t yell at us to freeze or surrender. They didn’t draw weapons or badges; they just started running right at us.
“This way,” Alicia hissed at me.
She was off and running. I was right behind her. She bolted past the nurse’s station, the two nurses there watching us with eyes of shock. We were down another hallway a moment later, then down another one.
I wanted to look behind me, but I didn’t want to break the rhythm of my running to do so. I had hoped we’d had enough distance between us to begin with, but I could imagine them right on our heels, only a few feet away, arms out and ready to grab us.
Alicia was at a door, pulling it open. I just had time to see a sign above it that read: Stairs.
We shuffled down the steps as fast as we could, our footfalls on the concrete steps echoing all around us, sounding so loud. I still didn’t want to look back or even up at the stairs above us. I tried to listen to the echoes, trying to tell if there were two more sets of footsteps shuffling down toward us, hard shoes clacking on the concrete. But I couldn’t tell.
Time seemed to stretch out, but it also seemed like we were on the ground floor within seconds. Alicia pushed the door open, glancing back at me with wild eyes. “Follow me,” she said.
I did. I followed her down more corridors, more hallways. It wasn’t the lobby, but the back part of the hospital. And soon she pushed open a door that led outside, the sunlight blasting us, brighter and more real than the fluorescent lights of the halls had been.
The heat hit us like a blast from a furnace, but it didn’t slow us down. Alicia seemed to know exactly where she was going. We hugged the side of the massive building, running past hedges and border plants, the beds freshly mulched. Around the next corner, I saw part of the parking lot.
Alicia wasn’t slowing down. She ran through the maze of cars and trucks, out toward the edge of them. I could tell we were going around the building, out to the far end of the rear parking lot.
“Where are we going?” I asked, almost out of breath. “Isn’t your car that way?”
She just glanced back at me, and I saw the answer in her eyes. I wasn’t thinking straight. The men in the dark suits, the agents of the cabal, they would be at her car. They would be waiting for us to return. At least we had the most important stuff on us; I had the packet of money I’d gotten from the bank stuffed down into my pants pocket, another envelope stuffed down into my sock, along with the bank receipts and notecards, holding onto that evidence like it would be of any use someday. Alicia had her keys, the small video camera I’d bought a few days ago, along with the charger, and packs of the money in her purse. Anything else left in her car was going to be taken by them.
We ran across the street and into some neighborhoods. My lungs were heaving and my legs were already beginning to burn, but I kept up with Alicia. She seemed to know where she was going—at least I hoped she did.
After another block, she turned down a side street which led to some businesses. We ducked in behind a strip plaza, hurrying over to a dumpster
filled with broken-down cardboard boxes and hid behind it, both of us catching our breath.
Run. That’s what Stan had told me to do, us to do. Had he meant right then? Had the men in the dark suits been in to see him in his room while his mother had been at home packing a bag for him, while she’d been on the phone with me? I wondered what they had said to him, what future tortures they had promised. I wondered if they had meant for him to die after they had beaten him up last night, like he’d been left for dead after his truck had been stolen. Maybe they figured he would die, but then someone had found him. Maybe he was a loose end right now, but still of some use, something to draw me and Alicia to him.
And it had worked. We’d been here at the hospital to see him. How close had we been to being apprehended by some arm of the cabal, some dirty cops who flashed badges and snapped handcuffs on us, marching us to their black SUVs, taking us to some warehouse for interrogation, then to a field where our graves were already dug, or an incinerator to get rid of our bodies?
I was trembling. I couldn’t stop shaking.
Run. That’s what Stan had told us to do, and that’s what we had done. Now we were behind a strip of stores, hiding next to a dumpster while an army of people searched for us. We were lost. We were as good as dead.
I looked at Alicia. She was scared. I figured the adrenaline of fleeing was waning now and the reality of our situation was weighing on her. We had nowhere to go. Even if we turned ourselves in, nobody would believe us. And we would be eventually turned over to the authorities. But we wouldn’t be safe there. Accidents were going to happen to us, or perhaps suicide.
“Alicia,” I said. I shook my head. I was trembling like I was freezing. I couldn’t stop shaking. I wanted to stop shaking, but I couldn’t control it—adrenaline and other hormones running crazy through my body. My mind felt like it was on fire, like my senses were buzzing with a warning. It felt like the SUVs were going to roar down this back alley at any moment, men jumping out to take us away.