"I never asked you to watch me. I don't need you to—"
Stitts surprised her by reaching out and grabbing her shoulder tightly.
She tried to squirm away, but the hospital bed on which she lay was too small and the best she could do was deepen her scowl.
"You do need me, Chase. You need me, and I need you. And there are others out there, others that need you, too, Chase. Others who don't want to see you dead."
Chase closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Stitts relaxed his grip on her shoulder.
Her memories since fleeing her apartment in Virginia were foggy at best.
She recalled returning to the trap house that Louisa had nearly overdosed in, and she remembered shooting up.
But everything after that was a blur.
At some point, Chase thought she saw people she knew, the faces of people that she’d come across over the years, but that could have just as easily been a drug-induced dream.
Or nightmare.
She shuddered.
"This self-destructive streak has to end, Chase," Stitts said in a quiet voice. She opened her eyes. There was a deep sadness in her partner’s face. A brooding pain that ran deep.
As there should be, she thought. He lied to me. He’s been lying to me since the moment he met me in New York City. He lied to me, and he can't be trusted.
"This isn't going to be like before; this isn’t a simple outpatient procedure. You're going to stay here, Chase. You’re going to stay here until you get better. And you’re going to do everything and anything that Dr. Matteo tells you to do. He wants you to walk on water? You're going to do it. He wants to call you Ma’am and be your protector? You're going to let him. He wants you to go to NA meetings for the rest of your life? You'll be there."
Chase's scowl returned.
Who is this man standing before me? It most definitely isn't the handsome, introspective man who profiled for the FBI. This guy… this guy is an asshole.
A grade A asshole.
"Or what, Stitts?" she responded reflexively. "You gonna call my mommy? My pops? Get me in trouble? Put me in time-out?"
All of a sudden, Stitts’s hardened expression softened and he looked away.
There he is. That's Stitts. That’s the man I remember. Not the other one, the greasy, leathery Cheerio of an asshole.
"What? You already called my daddy? Is he on his way?"
She was prodding him, deliberately trying to get a response, but Stitts wasn’t biting. Either he had more resolve than she remembered, or—
All of the scorn suddenly left her voice, and Chase reached out and touched his arm.
"What, Stitts? What is it?"
A deep, body-wracking sigh, and then he finally looked at her.
"The doctor said not to tell you, but I won't lie to you again, Chase. I made a promise to myself, that I’d never lie to you again. What I did—"
Chase dug her nails into the man's forearm.
"Get to the fucking point, Stitts. What doesn’t the doc want you to tell me?"
Stitts took another deep breath.
"Your dad… your dad's dead, Chase."
Chase's eyes bulged.
"He's… what?"
She’d heard what he said, of course. Only, she couldn’t believe it.
Chase pictured her father in her mind, not the way he was now—overweight with gray and thinning hair—but the way he'd been back then. Ruggedly handsome, devoutly religious, but a man who liked his beer.
It had been some time since she'd seen him. In fact, after Chase had gone her own way in Seattle, her contact with both her father and mother had been sporadic at best.
She knew that every time they heard her voice, they were reminded of Georgina. And it stung them; it stung them deeply.
So, she'd shut them out, just like she shut out everyone.
Tears unexpectedly welled, and Chase looked away from Stitts. She stared into the distance, her eyes not registering the myriad of medical equipment that surrounded her or the tubes that seemed to protrude from every one of her orifices.
"He can't be dead," Chase whispered. Tears flowed down her cheeks.
"I'm sorry, Chase. I'm really sorry."
She turned her eyes back to his and saw that he too was crying.
"Was it his heart?" she asked softly.
Stitts looked down and stared at his nicotine-stained fingers.
When he didn't answer, Chase asked him again, more aggressively this time.
"You said you never—"
Stitts’s eyes suddenly shot up.
"It wasn’t his heart, Chase. Your father… he… your dad committed suicide."
Chapter 4
"I have to get out of here," Chase said angrily. "I need to get out of here, now!"
"Chase, you—"
Chase's face suddenly turned red and she felt her blood start to boil. She tried to sit up but was too weak.
"I need to go to the funeral… I need to see my mother… I need to—"
With every ounce of strength she had left, Chase rolled onto her side and tried once more to force herself into a seated position. She failed again, but this time it wasn't because of a lack of energy, but due to the chain that ran from her wrist to the metal frame of the hospital bed.
“What the fuck, Stitts?”
"Chase, your father died six months ago."
Chase was in the process of trying to slide the metal cuff all the way down to the end where there was a break in the guardrail when Stitts said this.
“What?” she gasped, turning slowly back to Stitts. Her head was starting to spin, and she could feel the all too familiar itching sensation again.
"Six months? Six months?"
Stitts nodded and then, with a subtle gesture that Chase only just picked up on, motioned with his right hand in the direction of the door.
"When we found you, you were barely alive, Chase. And since then, it's been an up-and-down battle trying to keep you that way. You’ve been here for almost four months, passing in and out of consciousness. You don't remember talking to me during this time?"
Chase's eyes narrowed.
She had newfound skepticism for everything that Stitts said, especially given her surroundings. It seemed to her that all the things she had once considered as solid as a rock, were more like waves in a pond. Look down one moment, and you're likely to see a trough. A second later, however, and the trough had become something completely different: a hillock.
And that's what her mind and memories had become; instead of permanent invaginations in her gray matter, her brain was just a series of troughs and hillocks. Things were malleable, things changed, things that she had once considered concrete were now transient.
Exhausted, Chase collapsed onto the bed and closed her eyes. Sweat had broken out on her forehead and her entire body suddenly felt clammy.
Six months, six fucking months? Dad died six months ago?
She heard the sound of a door opening, but her eyes remained closed.
"I missed the funeral," she whispered. "Shit… my mom. How's my mom?"
There was a pause and, even though Chase's eyes were still closed, she imagined Stitts’s face contorting.
"She's in a home, Chase. She's been… she's been sick for a while. And after everything that happened… she couldn't handle it anymore. Dementia, they say."
Chase shook her head.
It wasn’t fair. None of it was fair. It was no secret that her and her mother’s relationship had become strained when Georgina never made it home. Her mother hadn’t overtly blamed Chase, but the insinuation was always there. As was the guilt.
Chase imagined her mother who once had long, tanned legs that sent men into a frenzy. Now they were pasty and covered in a network of varicose veins, her thickened ankles jammed into the stirrups of a wheelchair.
She'd seen people with broken minds before, of course. She'd seen them in the trap houses when she was undercover, when Tyler Tisdale was still running the show.
Drugs couldn't warp your mind, not on their own. But they excelled at taking a warped mind and pushing it over the edge.
Chase wondered briefly what her mother’s drug of choice was, but she didn’t have to think that hard. It was a toxic combination of guilt and self-loathing.
There was a tug on her left hand and Chase opened her eyes. At first blush, she thought that the doctor who was fiddling with her IV was Dr. Patterson from all those years ago.
But it wasn’t him. The man was probably dead now.
The man injected something into the port on her IV bag without saying a word. It was almost as if he wasn’t even there.
Chase tugged her wrist once more and the metal handcuff clanged off the bed frame.
"How long do I have to stay here, Stitts?" she asked.
FBI Special Agent Jeremy Stitts sighed heavily and got to his feet.
"Until you get well, Chase. You're not leaving here until you’re well."
Chapter 5
Stitts stepped out of Chase’s hospital room and then rubbed his eyes. He knew that she was staring at him through the glass as the sedative took hold, but he fought the urge to look back at her.
The right thing to do used to be so cut and dry with him. Now, Stitts found himself second-guessing nearly every decision he made. TBI Director Conway might have been convinced that Stitts had done the right thing by telling Chase the truth about what had happened to her thirty years ago, but he had more doubts than nicotine coursing through his veins.
With a heavy sigh, he started down the hallway. A large orderly who stood just out of sight of Chase’s room, arms crossed over his substantial chest, nodded as Stitts passed.
Stitts nodded back.
One thing was for certain; Chase wasn’t going anywhere this time.
He was nearly at the front doors when Floyd approached him, a desperate expression on his young face.
"Sh-sh-she g-g-gonna be okay?"
Again, Stitts hesitated. He wanted to say yes, to say, yeah, Chase’ll be fine, she’ll recover, she’ll be up on her feet in no time, but he wasn’t sure. And he was tired of lying.
Instead, Stitts just shrugged.
Floyd stared at him for a moment but didn't say anything. Two other men suddenly appeared at his side and, for a fleeting moment, Stitts thought they looked a little like a degenerate Boy Band.
"Is she stable?" Screech asked.
Stitts nodded.
"Yeah, she's been sedated again. I think… I think she's starting to come around, though. Remembering things."
"Can we visit?” the man in the suit asked.
Stitts shook his head.
"No, Stu, I don't think so." His eyes darted to Floyd, and then to Screech. "In fact, I honestly don't think there's much more any of you can do here. To be honest, while I want to say that she’s incredibly grateful for all you guys have done, all you’ve sacrificed on her behalf, I don’t know if she feels that way. What I do know, is that the doctor thinks that she should be eased back into the present. Seeing all of you guys…”
Stitts held his hands out at his sides and let the sentence trail off.
Floyd exchanged a nervous glance with his bandmates before addressing Stitts.
"I'm going to stay," he said. “I won’t see her, though. Not unless you say it’s okay.”
The fact that Floyd didn't stutter surprised Stitts and he found himself nodding. He figured that this might be okay; he was, after all, the least likely to bring up bad memories. So far as Stitts knew, Chase hadn’t hurt Floyd the way she’d hurt the others.
Not yet, at least.
Fearing that the others would fall in line, Stitts took a pro-active approach.
“When she’s better, I’ll tell her what you guys did.”
Stu took the hint and nodded.
"I have business I need to attend to back in the desert," he said as he shook Stitts's hand. "If you need anything—including anything with the Bureau, let me know."
"Thank you. And I will.”
Screech spoke up next.
"And I have one hell of a mess to clean up in New York. A clusterfuck,” he said. Stitts had a sneaking suspicion that this had to do with Drake's absence, and the lame excuse that his partner had offered up for him, but he didn't have the time or the energy to get into it. Stitts knew that Drake had his own problems, not the least of which was the bullshit lie that he’d spun about needing some of Chase’s possessions a couple months back.
Her hair, her blood.
After another round of thank yous, Screech hurried after Stu.
"I can take you wherever you want to go," Floyd said when they were finally alone. Stitts was about to politely decline, but then reconsidered; after all, this was what the man did.
He was a driver, and while Stitts couldn’t pay him, Chase could. He was about to take him up on the offer, when another man approached, a serious expression on his face.
"Stitts, can I talk to you for a second?" the man asked, running his hand through his blond hair.
Stitts looked over at the doctor and nodded. Then he turned back to Floyd.
"Give me a second, Floyd, then I’ll take that ride," then to Beckett, he said, "What? What is it?"
Dr. Beckett Campbell frowned.
"I think we need to speak to Chase’s doctor. In private."
Chapter 6
Beckett led Stitts into a private room. Waiting inside was one of the doctors who had spent considerable time with Chase since her half-dead body was dragged in. He’d saved her life on multiple occasions, including when her heart had stopped from endocarditis.
"Dr. Calderon," Stitts said with a nod. The doctor nodded back but offered nothing in terms of response. This silence made Stitts uneasy.
“What is it? What’s going on?”
"We found some anomalies—"
Stitts didn’t even hear the rest of the man’s sentence.
"No," he moaned.
After everything… after everything she's been through, this is it, he thought miserably. This is the end. They’re gonna tell me that Chase has multiple system organ failures and that she’s going to die.
Beckett reached out and gripped Stitts's shoulder and then shot a scornful glare at Dr. Calderon.
"What Dr. No-Bedside-Manner means to say is that we’ve found something on her MRI. But it's not fatal, Stitts. Nothing like that. Dr. House, why don’t you switch on the monitors instead of giving him a fucking heart attack?”
"What?" Stitts said, confused. "What’d you find on her MRI scan? Beckett, what the fuck is going on?"
His hands were shaking again, and he instinctively reached into his pocket and fondled his pack of cigarettes.
"One sec, it’s easier to explain when looking at the scans."
A black and white image of a brain appeared on-screen.
"You can see here, in the amygdala, heightened—" Dr. Calderon began, but Beckett cut him off once more.
"Parlez-vous Anglais?"
“Pardon.”
“Just fucking speak English, man, this isn’t a neuroimaging conference, for Christ’s sake.”
"All right, all right. Sorry. So, you know that we gave Chase an MRI when first she came here, right? Well, we actually gave her several during her time here in the hospital to monitor how the parts of her brain that were damaged from her drug use and dehydration were recovering."
Stitts nodded and the doctor continued.
"Well, at first we didn't notice anything dramatic, but then… this.”
Dr. Calderon pulled up another image of Chase’s brain, this time in a quasi-3D format that Stitts recognized.
He’d seen dozens of these scans on his mother’s brain before she’d died.
”So, this is from the first MRI, when Chase first arrived and was barely conscious.” He tapped the screen and the program zoomed into an area just behind the forehead. "You can immediately notice that her subcortex—" he cast a furtive glance at Beckett before backtracking—
"the, uhh, the area that is more ancient, uhh, from, uh, uh, evolution—fuck—the part responsible for the subconscious, for reactions and feelings and things like that. The less ordered structures.”
Dirty Money (A Chase Adams FBI Thriller Book 5) Page 2
