She collapsed onto the toilet and took a moment to let this new blast of agony embrace her, trying to really savor it.

  The pain was radiant, but at least she could think, and she could even stand and, she suspected, walk.

  Lucy turned her arm over and pulled the IV needle out of the vein.

  “Denise!” she called. “I could use a little help!”

  The bathroom door opened and the nurse peeked in.

  “What’s wrong, Lucy?”

  “Come here,” Lucy whispered.

  The nurse stepped in.

  “Close the door,” Lucy said. “It’s embarrassing. Kind of a girl problem. I don’t want the boys to see.”

  The nurse shut the door, stood staring down at Lucy.

  “What is it?”

  “Look,” Lucy said.

  She had tears in her eyes.

  Happy tears.

  She pointed at her crotch.

  The nurse knelt down, and when she leaned in for a closer look, Lucy thrust the heel of her hand up into Denise’s nose.

  Denise dropped onto her butt, and Lucy pitched forward and grabbed the woman’s hair. She slid the needle into the nurse’s throat, just far enough to draw a bead of blood.

  “Now listen carefully, Denise,” Lucy said. The burst of exhilaration had momentarily dulled her pain. “I will run this needle straight through your neck if you make so much as a whisper. Got it? Nod, bitch!”

  The nurse nodded.

  “You want to live through this?”

  More frantic nodding.

  “Okay, here’s what you’re going to do. What floor are we on?”

  “Four.”

  “Is there a basement in this hospital?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s down there?”

  “Um…”

  Lucy pushed the needle in a tad farther. This was the best she’d felt all day. What she lived for.

  “I’m thinking…the lab…radiology…the blood bank.”

  “There you go. Tell the orderly I’m bleeding and send him down to the basement for several units of blood.”

  “Okay.”

  “I swear to God if you fuck this up I’m going to use your neck for a pin cushion.”

  “Now?”

  “What?”

  “You want me to tell Benjamin now?”

  “No, let’s wait another twenty minutes. Yes, now!”

  The nurse cleared her throat as Lucy edged her toward the door.

  “Benjamin?” she said.

  “Everything okay, Denise?”

  “Lucy’s having some heavy blood loss. I want you to head down to the blood bank and bring up three units of AB.”

  “Should I page Dr. Lanz?”

  “I’ll take care of that. Go now.”

  Lucy heard the orderly padding away.

  “You did well, Denise. You did really well.”

  Lucy tightened her grip and jammed the needle twenty times into the nurse’s throat, numerous lines of blood branching and intersecting and running over her fingers as the nurse gurgled and fought to throw her off.

  Outside the door, Lucy heard the deputy say, “Denise?”

  Lucy dragged her back into the shower and her thirty-third puncture hit home because Lucy felt something swelling in the side of the nurse’s neck.

  When the bulge reached the size of a golf ball Lucy gave it a prick and it exploded in a burst of bright red arterial spray that splattered across the shower tile.

  Lucy felt the woman’s legs give out and she eased her down onto the floor of the shower.

  The deputy knocked on the door.

  “Denise, what’s going on?”

  The physical exertion had brought on a wave of agony, and Lucy wanted to scream it was so fierce. Instead, she tugged Denise out of the shower and draped her across the toilet.

  Lucy returned to the shower stall, pulled the curtain and backed up against the tile, her heart rocketing along, a smile spreading across her face.

  So good to be alive.

  In the space between the curtain and the wall, she saw the doorknob begin to turn.

  The door swung open.

  The deputy said, “Oh, shit.”

  He took a step toward the nurse, who was still twitching.

  “Denise?”

  Lucy came through the shower curtain like a wildcat and swung the needle at the deputy’s face.

  It glanced off the bridge of his nose and slipped through the corner of his eye.

  He howled.

  Lucy kicked the door shut and unsheathed his baton and brought it down with a smashing blow to the back of his head.

  His knees hit the tile and she struck him again, felt a scrumptious crack.

  The deputy was moaning, trying to crawl into the corner between the toilet and the wall.

  When he reached the impasse, he stared up at Lucy and whimpered, “Don’t hurt me! Please!”

  Lucy wiped the tears from her eyes and beat him to death with his own baton.

  At 2:29 a.m., Lucy rolled out of her room in the wheelchair.

  The corridor was silent.

  A little ways down, three nurses occupied the station, catching up on their charts. Apparently, no one had heard the commotion in the bathroom.

  She turned left and rolled along, each turn of the wheel a new level of pain, but one thing kept her going.

  Donaldson.

  He had to be on this floor, in the ICU.

  Probably had a guard outside of his room as well.

  But now that she was wearing Nurse Denise’s scrubs and had a few goodies up her sleeve, she liked her chances of getting past the guard.

  She’d taken the handcuffs (key stored safe and sound up her ass), scalpel, surgical scissors, and pepper spray (safe and sound elsewhere). Even though she never used them, the gun had been tempting. But she didn’t trust herself with it. Accidentally killing Donaldson and ruining their fun prematurely would have been devastating.

  Best case scenario, Donaldson had two broken legs and two broken arms, but was conscious.

  She’d sweet-talk the deputy, or kill him, and get inside Donaldson’s room.

  Barricade the door.

  She wouldn’t have much time.

  When Benjamin returned with her units of blood, he’d find Denise and the deputy.

  The hospital would go on lockdown.

  The cavalry would come running.

  But that was still ten minutes away at most.

  And Lucy could make ten minutes feel like ten years.

  Because it wasn’t the quantity of time she had with dear old Donaldson.

  It was all about the quality.

  Donaldson

  “…multiple fractures of the clavicle, humerus, radius and ulna, a dislocated shoulder, a dislocated elbow, multiple contusions and lacerations, including skin abrasions covering about thirty percent of his body. A concussion. Plus the son of a bitch lost six teeth and an ear.”

  The man speaking had a high-pitched voice, with a slight southern lilt.

  “How’d it happen?” This voice was Latino, probably Mexican.

  “Chained to the back of his own car, which went down the side of a goddamn mountain.”

  “Poor guy.”

  “Don’t waste any tears on this one. See the deputy outside? Soon as this bastard wakes up, he’s getting arrested. This dude is a serial killer. Name is Gregory Donaldson. Likes to cut up hitchhikers. Did all kinds of crazy, sick shit to them. Hear tell, he murdered more than fifty people.”

  Low whistle from the Mexican. “Goddamn. Looks like he got what was coming to him.”

  “You said it, brother. There’s a special room in hell for people like this.”

  Donaldson peeked his eyes open. The men in his hospital room wore scrubs, the kind with novelty print patterns that were supposed to cheer up patients. One of them was chubby, early thirties, in need of a shave. The other was short, Hispanic, and even from ten feet away Donaldson could smell his armpit stains.

  Donaldson figured they were orderlies. Beyond them, through the doorway, he saw the sheriff’s deputy the white guy had mentioned, a portly man in a khaki uniform. He sat in a wooden chair reading a magazine called Handgun Enthusiast. The gun on his belt had a snap over the holster.

  Donaldson had been awake for a few hours, faking unconsciousness to avoid being asked questions, biding his time until he figured out a plan.

  As situations went, this one was dire. Even in the grip of the morphine haze courtesy of his IV, Donaldson hurt. He hurt bad. His left arm felt like it had been yanked out, chewed up, and sewn back on upside-down. The neck brace was cruel stainless steel, screwed onto his scalp and shoulders, making it impossible to turn his head.

  Donaldson peered down at the substantial girth of his body. A thin blanket covered his protruding gut. His arm was a mess, swollen to twice its normal size, purple and scabby with surgical pins and clamps holding his shattered bones in place. The pins poked through the flesh in half a dozen places.

  He touched the side of his head, felt a bandage on his cheek and another that went up over his ear. Correction—one that went up over where his ear used to be.

  Donaldson tried wiggling his toes, and that ignited his legs. He felt like he was lying on a hot skillet with the flames growing larger. Skin abrasions covering thirty percent of his body. That was the clinical explanation. Fucking agony was a much more appropriate description.

  Stronger than the pain was a slithering, palpable fear. Donaldson couldn’t go to prison. He was too old for that and cherished his freedom. He wondered how the authorities knew who he was, what he was. Probably that damn female cop from the truck stop a week ago.

  Lieutenant Jacqueline Fucking Daniels. How he’d love to have another go at her.

  But she wasn’t the one who incensed him to the point where the pain and the fear became secondary. She wasn’t the true object of his hate. The one who made him twitch with rage and need.

  That particular emotion was reserved for the one who put him in this hospital. The one who mangled his body by handcuffing him to the back of his own car. The one who put an end to a murder spree which had lasted almost thirty years, and delivered him right into the hands of the authorities.

  Lucy.

  Thinking about Lucy filled Donaldson with something more than fear. Something that transcended the pain. He absolutely ached for revenge. The thought of having Lucy all to himself, of doing things to her that made his past indiscretions seem tame by comparison, was so powerful it made him salivate.

  He had a fuzzy, final memory of her. The two of them tangled up in each other once the car had mercifully hit a tree. The blood on each so thick it turned the dirt they’d been dragged through into mud. Twisted limbs. Broken bodies. Donaldson peeking open an eye, staring at her, watching her chest rise and fall.

  Donaldson clenched his jaw, his few remaining teeth still loose in their sockets.

  Please, please, please let her still be alive.

  He glanced down at his good hand, saw the push button mechanism for the morphine drip, and gave himself a dose.

  It helped with the pain.

  It even helped with the fear.

  But it didn’t help with the need.

  Donaldson closed his eyes. But he wasn’t sleeping. He was plotting.

  Plotting on how to get out of there and find Lucy.

  The first step was getting rid of the fucking pig by the door.

  “I know you aren’t asleep. Your breathing isn’t deep enough.”

  Donaldson opened his eyes and stared at the doctor standing next to the bed. The man was tall, wide shouldered, sneer lines on his face. He looked like a fucking Ken doll. The name tag pinned to his lab coat read Lanz.

  “Where am I?” Donaldson asked. His throat hurt. Raw from all the screaming he’d done while being dragged behind the car. His missing teeth made words hard to form.

  “Blessed Crucifixion Hospital. They found you in a ravine, air-evacced you in. I’m performing your first skin graft later today. Doesn’t seem to be much of a reason for it, seeing how the state is going to execute you.”

  “Your bedside manner sucks, Doc.”

  Lanz whipped out a penlight, then roughly pried open Donaldson’s right eyelid with a latex-gloved hand. The bright beam was like being speared in the retina with a knife. After a few seconds, Lanz pulled away and scrawled something onto a clipboard.

  “Was there a girl brought in with me?” Donaldson asked, keeping his voice neutral.

  “I’m not supposed to talk to you about anything other than your injuries.”

  “You don’t strike me as the kind of man who takes orders from lowly cops, Doc.”

  Lanz seemed to consider it. “Yeah, she was brought in.”

  “Alive?”

  “If you could call it that.”

  “Any chance of me seeing her?”

  Lanz offered a sour smile. “Buddy, the only things you’ll be seeing are prison cells and courthouses, right up until they punch your clock.”

  Donaldson narrowed his eyes. “I did a doctor, once.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I had him strapped down on a table…” Donaldson lowered his voice to just above a whisper. “Then I used his own scalpel to cut off small parts of his body. A bit of skin here and there. A finger. An ear. His lips. His penis, in five separate pieces. I used a clotting powder to stop the bleeding so he didn’t die right away. Then I fed the bits to him. One at a time. If he threw up, I made him swallow the parts again. By the time he finally died, he must have eaten almost a quarter of his own body.”

  Lanz didn’t flinch. “I’m going to tell the nursing staff to cut you off morphine. We wouldn’t want a charmer like you accidentally dying during the procedure later.”

  Dr. Lanz shoved the clipboard back into its slot at the foot of the bed, and then turned to leave.

  “See you later, Doc.”

  Donaldson closed his eyes and imagined Lanz tied to a gurney, screaming and begging and choking on his own flesh.

  But the image didn’t last. Just as it was getting good, his thoughts were interrupted by an image of Lucy. Small. Young. Innocent-looking. With her guitar case and her pink Crocs, her hip cocked out as she thumbed a ride.

  In his head, Lucy smiled at Donaldson. The smile quickly escalated into giggling, and then full blown laughter.

  The little bitch was laughing at the pain she had caused him.

  You think you know pain, little girl?

  I’ll show you pain.

  “Do you understand these rights that I just explained to you?”

  The sheriff was pure hick, soft around the middle, neck flab baked lobster red, prone to using the word ain’t. All he needed to complete the stereotype was a stalk of hayseed hanging out of his mouth.

  “Don’t matter,” the lawman continued when Donaldson didn’t answer. “Looks like you’ll have several states fightin’ for custody of you. Likely you’ll be read your rights a few more times.”

  Donaldson closed his eyes, wishing Barney Fife would leave him alone. The sheriff didn’t take the hint.

  “You know, we don’t get too many high-profile crimes around these parts,” he continued. “Truth is, most we ever have to handle is the ‘casional drunk and disorderly. But we’ve taken some precautions with a worldly feller such as yourself. Up to me, you’d be handcuffed to that bed right now, but Doc Lanz says it ain’t needed on account of your serious injuries. I ain’t so sure. See, you remind me of this dog ole Roscoe Sanderson got over at his junkyard. Some mutt, got some St. Bernard in it, some Rot, some Dobie. Damn near the size of a brown bear. Now, the dog seems tame enough. Don’t bark. Don’t leap at you when you get near. But Roscoe keeps it on a big, thick chain. Some things may look harmless, but they need to be chained up just the same. Cuz once they’re unchained, they ain’t harmless no more.”

  Donaldson peeked open his eyes. “Is this how you interrogate suspects ‘round these parts?” Donaldson purposely drawled the last part of his sentence. “Bore them to death with your chatter?”

  The sheriff hitched up his gun belt. “We got a guard on you twenty-four hours a day, Mr. Donaldson. We’ve gone through your room and removed everything that could possibly be used as a weapon. That window over there don’t open, and even if it did, you’re on the fourth floor. You got a problem with my chatter, ain’t a damn thing you can do about it.”