Lover Unleashed bdb-9

by J. R. Ward

  He’d been convinced he was going to find a dead body on the other side. Hanging from the showerhead by a belt . . . or maybe lying in the tub soaking in blood instead of bubble bath.

  Butch O’Neal had made hard living as much of a professional pursuit as his job in the homicide department. He’d been a late-night drinker, and not just a relationship-phobe, but completely incapable of forming attachments.

  Except he and José had been tight. As tight as Butch had ever gotten with anyone.

  No suicide, though. No body. Nothing. One night he’d been around; the next . . . gone.

  For the first month or two, José had expected to hear something—either from the guy himself or because a corpse with a busted nose and a badly capped front tooth turned up somewhere.

  Days had slid into weeks, however, and in turn had dumped into seasons of the year. And he supposed he became something like a doctor who had a terminal disease: He finally knew firsthand how the families of missing persons felt. And God, that dreaded, cold stretch of Not Knowing was nothing he’d ever expected to wander down . . . but with his old partner’s disappearance, he didn’t just walk it; he bought a lot, put up a house, and moved the fuck in.

  Now, though, after he’d given up all hope, after he no longer woke up in the middle of the night with the wonders . . . now this recording.

  Sure, millions of people had Southie accents. But O’Neal had had a telltale hoarseness in his voice that couldn’t be replicated.

  Abruptly, José didn’t feel like going to the twenty-four, and he didn’t want anything to eat. But he put his unmarked in drive and hit the gas.

  The moment he’d looked into the Dumpster and seen those missing eyes and that dental job, he’d known that he was going in search of a serial killer. But he couldn’t have guessed he’d be on another search.

  Time to find Butch O’Neal.

  If he could.

  SIXTEEN

  Done week later, Manny woke up in his own bed with a stinger of a hangover. The good news was that at least this headache could be explained: When he’d come home, he’d hit the Lag like a punching bag and it had done its job, smacking him back and knocking him flat on his ass.

  The first thing he did was reach over and get his phone. With blurry eyes, he called the vet’s cell. The pair of them had a little early-morning ritual going, and he thanked God that the guy was also an insomniac.

  The vet answered on the second ring. “Hello?”

  “How’s my girl?” The pause told him everything he had to know. “That bad?”

  “Well, her vitals remain good, and she remains as comfortable as she can be in her suspension, but I’m worried about the foundering. We’ll see.”

  “Keep me posted.”

  “Always.”

  At that point, hanging up was the only thing he could do. The conversation was over, and it wasn’t like he was a shoot-the-shit kind of guy—although even if he had been, chitchat wasn’t going to get him what he wanted, which was a healthy fucking horse.

  Before his alarm went off at six thirty and put paid on the shot-through-the-head routine, he slapped his radio clock into permasilence and thought, Workout. Coffee. Back to the hospital.

  Wait. Coffee, workout, hospital.

  He definitely needed caffeine first. He wasn’t fit to run or lift weights in this condition—and shouldn’t be operating heavy machinery like an elevator, either.

  As he shifted his feet to the floor and went vertical, his head had a heartbeat of its own, but he revolted against the idea that maybe, just maybe, the pain wasn’t about the liquor: He was not sick, and he wasn’t cooking up a brain tumor—although if he was, he’d still go in to St. Francis. It was in his nature. Hell, when he’d been young, he’d fought to go to school when he was ill—even when he’d had the chicken pox and had looked like a connect-the-dots canvas, he’d insisted on heading for the bus.

  His mother had won that particular one. And bitched that he was just like his father.

  Not a compliment, and something he’d heard all his life—also something that didn’t mean shit because he’d never met the guy. All he had was a faded picture that was the only thing he’d ever put in a frame—

  Why the hell was he thinking about that this morning?

  Coffee was Starbucks Breakfast Blend. Workout clothes went on while it was brewing, and two mugs were downed over the sink as he watched the superearly traffic snake around the Northway’s curves in the dim light of dawn. The last thing he did was grab his iPod and put it in his ears. He was not a chatter to begin with, but Lord help some chipper chick with a motormouth today.

  Downstairs in the workout room, the place was fairly empty, which was a huge relief, but not something that was going to last. Hopping on the treadmill closest to the door, he turned off the CNBC newscast on the overhead TV and got huffing.

  Judas Priest carried his feet, and his mind unplugged, and his stiff, aching body got what it needed. All things considered, he was better than he had been coming out of the previous weekend. The headaches were still hanging in, but he was keeping up with his work and patient load, and functioning all right.

  It made him wonder, though. Right before Jane had hit that tree, she’d had headaches, too. So if they’d been able to do an autopsy on the body, would they have found an aneurysm? Then again, what were the chances of the two of them both having one within—

  Why did you do it, Jane? Why fake your death?

  I don’t have time to explain now. Please. I know this is asking a lot. But there’s a patient who needs you, desperately, and I’ve been looking for you for over an hour, so I’m out of time—

  “Fuck—” Manny quickly popped his feet off onto the side gunwales and gritted his teeth against the agony. Draping his upper body over the machine’s instrument panel, he breathed slow and steady—or as much as someone who’d been running a six-minute-mile pace could.

  Over the last seven days, he’d learned through trial and error that when the pain struck, the best call was to blank out his mind and focus on nothing at all. And the fact that the simple cognitive trick worked was reassuring on the whole aneurysm front: If something was going to blow a hole in the wall of a cerebral artery, ain’t no yoga-two-part-breath shit going to make a difference.

  There was a pattern, however. The onset seemed to follow thoughts either about Jane . . . or that wet dream he kept having.

  Fucking hell, he’d had enough orgasms in his sleep to lame out even his libido. And, sick bastard that he was, the near-guarantee of being back with that female in his fantasies made him look forward to hitting the pillow for the first time in his life.

  Although he couldn’t explain why certain cognitions would bring on the headaches, the good news was that he was getting better. Each day after that bizarre black hole of a weekend, he felt a bit more like himself.

  When there was little but a dull ache remaining, Manny got back on the treadmill and finished the workout. On his way to the exit, he nodded to the early-morning stragglers who’d come in, but took off before anyone could Oh-my-God-are-you-okay him if they’d seen him take his breather.

  Up in his place, he showered, changed into clean scrubs and his white jacket, and then grabbed his briefcase and hit the elevators. To beat the traffic, he took the surface roads through the city. The Northway was invariably jammed this time of day, and he made great time while he listened to old-school My Chemical Romance.

  “I’m Not Okay” was a tune he couldn’t get enough of for some reason.

  As he turned into the St. Francis Hospital complex, dawn’s early light had yet to break through fully, which suggested they were going to have clouds. Not that it mattered to him. Once he was inside the belly of the beast, short of a tornado, which had never happened in Caldwell, the weather didn’t affect him in the slightest. Hell, a lot of days, he came to work when it was dark and left when it was dark—but he’d never felt like he was missing out on life just because he wasn’t all I’ve seen suns
hine, I’ve seen rain. . . .

  Funny. He felt out of the loop now, though.

  He’d come here from Yale Medical School after his surgical residency, and he’d meant to go on to Boston, or Manhattan, or Chicago. Instead, he’d made his mark here, and now it was over ten years later and he was still where he’d started. Granted, he was at the top of the heap, so to speak, and he’d saved and improved lives, and he’d taught the next generation of surgeons.

  The trouble was, as he went down the ramp into the parking garage, all that seemed hollow, somehow.

  He was forty-five years old, with at least half of his useful life in the bin, and what did he have to show for it? A condo full of Nike shit and a job that had taken over all his nooks and crannies. No wife. No kids. Christmases and New Years and Fourths of July were spent at the hospital—with his mother finding her own way for the holidays and no doubt pining for grandchildren she’d better not be holding her breath for.

  Christ, how many random women had he fucked over the years? Hundreds. Had to be.

  His mother’s voice shot through his head: You’re just like your father.

  Too true. His dad had also been a surgeon. With a wandering streak.

  It was actually why Manny had picked Caldwell. His mother had been here at St. Francis as an ICU nurse, working to put him through his years and years of schooling. And when he’d graduated from med school? Instead of pride, there had been distance and reserve in her face.... The closer he’d become to what his father had been, the more often she’d gotten that faraway look in her eye. His idea had been that if they were in the same city, they’d start relating or some shit. Hadn’t worked out that way, though.

  But she was okay. She was down in Florida now in a house on a golf course that he’d paid for, playing rounds of scramble with ladies her age, having dinner with the bridge brigade and arguing over who snubbed who on the party circuit. He was more than happy to support her, and that was the extent of their relationship.

  Dads was in a grave in Pine Grove Cemetery. He’d died in 1983 in a car accident.

  Dangerous things, cars.

  Parking the Porsche, he got out and took the stairs instead of the elevators for the exercise; then he used the pedestrian walkway to enter the hospital on the third floor. As he passed by doctors and nurses and staff, he just nodded at them and kept going. Usually, he went to his office first, but no matter what he told his feet to do, that was not where he ended up today.

  He was heading for the recovery suites.

  He told himself it was to check on patients, but that was a lie. And as his head became fuzzier and fuzzier, he studiously ignored the fog. Hell, it was better than the pain—and he was probably just hypoglycemic from working out and not eating anything afterward.

  Patient . . . he was looking for his patient. . . . No name. He had no name, but he knew the room.

  As he came up to the suite closest to the fire escape at the end of the hall, a flush shot through his body and he found himself making sure his white coat was hanging smoothly from his shoulders and then doing a hand-pass through his hair to neaten it up.

  Clearing his throat, he braced himself, stepped inside, and—

  The eighty-year-old man in the bed was asleep, but not at rest, tubes going in and out of him like he was a car in the process of being jump-started.

  Dull pain thumped in Manny’s head as he stood there staring at the guy.

  “Dr. Manello?”

  Goldberg’s voice from behind him was a relief, because it gave him something concrete to grab onto . . . the lip of the pool, so to speak.

  He turned around. “Hey. Good morning.”

  The guy’s brows popped and then he frowned. “Ah . . . what are you doing here?”

  “What do you think. Checking on a patient.” Jesus, maybe everyone was losing their minds.

  “I thought you were going to take a week off.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “That’s . . . ah . . . that’s what you told me when you left this morning. After we . . . found you in here.”

  “What are you talking about?” But then Manny waved a hand in dismissal. “Listen, let me get some breakfast first—”

  “It’s dinnertime, Dr. Manello. Six o’clock at night? You left here twelve hours ago.”

  The flush that had heated him up whirlpooled out of him and was instantly replaced by a cold wash of something he never, ever felt.

  Icy fear bowled him over and sent his pins spinning.

  The awkward silence that followed was broken by the hustle and bustle out in the corridor, people rushing by in soft-soled shoes, hurrying to patients or rolling bins of laundry along or taking meals . . . dinner, natch . . . from room to room.

  “I’m . . . going to go home now,” Manny said.

  His voice was still as strong as ever, but the expression on his colleague’s face revealed the truth in and around him: No matter what he told himself about feeling better, he was not what he once had been. He looked the same. He sounded the same. He walked the same.

  He even tried to convince himself he was the same.

  But something had changed that weekend, and he feared that there was no going back from it.

  “Would you like someone to drive you?” Goldberg asked tentatively.

  “No. I’m fine.”

  It took all the pride he had not to start running as he turned to leave: By force of will, he kicked back his head and straightened his spine and put one foot calmly in front of the other.

  Oddly, as he went out the way he’d come in, he thought of his old surgery professor . . . the one who’d been “retired” by the school admin when he’d turned seventy. Manny had been a second-year med student at the time.

  Dr. Theodore Benedict Standford III.

  The guy had been a straight-up hard-ass prick in class, the kind of fucker who liked it best when the students gave the wrong answer, because it provided him with an opportunity to dress people down. When the school had announced his departure at the end of the year, Manny and his classmates had thrown a going-away party for the sorry bastard, all of them getting drunk in celebration that they were the last generation to be subjected to his bullshit.

  Manny had been working as a custodian at the school that summer for cash, and he’d been mopping the hallway when the last of the movers had taken the final boxes from Standford’s office . . . and then the old man himself had turned the corner and wing-tipped it out for the last time.

  He’d left with his head high, walking down the marble stairs and leaving through the majestic front entrance with his chin up.

  Manny had laughed at the arrogance of the man, undying even in the face of age and obsolescence.

  Now, walking that same way, he wondered if that had been true.

  More likely, Standford had felt as Manny did now.

  Discarded.

  SEVENTEEN

  Jane heard the tearing sound all the way down in the training center’s office. The ripping woke her up, yanking her head off the pillow of her forearms and snapping her spine straight from its curl over the desk.

  Ripping . . . and flapping . . .

  At first, she thought it was a gust of wind, but then her brain clicked on. No windows here underground. And it would take a damn thunderstorm to create that much of a disturbance.

  Bolting up from the chair and scrambling around the desk, she hit the corridor outside in a run as she gunned for Payne’s room. All doors were open for precisely this reason: She had only one patient, and although Payne was mostly quiet, if something happened—

  What the hell was all that noise? There was grunting, too—

  Jane skidded around the doorjamb of the recovery room and just about screamed. Oh, God . . . the blood.

  “Payne!” She rushed for the bed.

  V’s twin was going wild, her arms flailing around, her fingers clawing at the sheets and also at herself, her sharp nails biting into the skin of her upper arms and shoulders and collarbones
.

  “I can’t feel it!” the female yelled, her fangs flashing, her eyes so wide there was white all around them. “I can’t feel anything!”

  Jane lunged forward and grabbed one of those arms, but her grip slipped the instant contact was made, snapping off all those slick scratches. “Payne! Stop it!”

  As Jane fought to still her patient, bright red blood spackled her face and white coat.

  “Payne!” If this kept up, those wounds were going to be deep enough to show bone. “Stop—”

  “I can’t feel it!”

  The Bic pen appeared in Payne’s hand from out of nowhere—except, no, it wasn’t magical. . . . The thing was Jane’s, the one she kept in the side pocket of her white coat. The instant she saw it, all the furious flapping morphed into a surreal slow-mo as Payne’s hand lifted up.

  Her stabbing swipe was so strong and sure that there was no stopping it.

  The sharp point pierced through the female’s heart, dead on, and her torso jerked upward, a death gasp shooting in through her open mouth.

  Jane screamed, “Noooooo—”

  “Jane—wake up!”

  The sound of Vishous’s voice made no sense. Except then she opened her eyes . . . to complete darkness. The clinic and the blood and Payne’s hoarse breathing were replaced by a black visual shroud that—

  Candles flared to life, and the first thing she saw properly was Vishous’s hard face. He was right beside her, even though they hadn’t gone to bed at the same time.

  “Jane, it was only a dream. . . .”

  “I’m okay,” she blurted, shoving her hair out of her face. “I’m . . .”

  While she propped herself up on her arms and panted, she wasn’t sure what was dream and what was real. Especially given that Vishous was next to her. Not only had they not been going to bed together; they hadn’t been waking up together either. She assumed he was sleeping down in his forge, but maybe that hadn’t been the case.