Her face was smashed. Dear God, what had happened? But all he could think of was the eighteen-year-old Lindsay in Paris, hurt and scared and beaten. And none of it her fault. Just as none of it this time was her fault. And he’d been unable to help her this time, just as he’d been unable then… .
6
Taylor
He heard her screams and reacted immediately because he was a cop. He tried to get up, tried his damnedest to go to her and help her, but he couldn’t. He staggered to his feet, then fell back against the examining table, clutching his broken left arm. He felt nauseous and dizzy from the concussion, and the pain in his arm was becoming more than he could handle.
He was in the emergency-room cubicle next to hers and he’d seen a policeman carry her in a few minutes before, a young girl wrapped in a blanket, her hair disheveled, her face terribly bruised, her eyes wild and vague. She was deeply in shock. He recognized it for what it was. She’d been raped, he’d heard them saying.
Okay, so she’d been raped. Why was she screaming now? What were they doing to her? He gleaned quickly enough that she was American and didn’t speak French or understand it. Taylor spoke French fluently. He was a Francophile; he had flown to France at least twice a year since he’d turned eighteen. This time he’d spent two weeks riding his motorcycle through the Loire Valley, then back to Paris for three days. And now this. What the hell were they doing to her?
She screamed again and again, deep tearing cries that were liquid with pain and fear and hopelessness, and he could hear the doctors clearly now because they had to talk over her. They were pissed that she couldn’t understand them, pissed that she was giving them trouble, pissed that she was fighting them and the girl was so strong to boot and they couldn’t hold her down. They were impatient and hassled and they wanted her to shut up so they could get it over with. He should go in there and help her, he thought again, at least translate for her, but he knew that if he moved he would fall on his face. He listened now, for they were speaking even more loudly over her cries.
“. . . raped by her brother-in-law, the cop said. Look at her face—the man’s an animal.”
“Help me get this blanket off her. No, stop fighting. Damnation, she can’t understand a word. Hold her, Giselle! Jacques, would you look at the mess here. She was a virgin, just look at all that blood. The guy reamed her good. Dammit, hold her still!”
“Get her legs wider, I’ve got to get my fingers in there. That’s it, press her legs back to her chest. Stop it, no, hold her! Damn, she can’t understand me! Ow! Jesus!”
She’d struck the doctor. Hard, from the sound of it. Taylor could hear him lurching around, heard an instrument tray fall to the linoleum floor. He smiled. Good for her. He saw another doctor run into the cubicle. The girl had been raped and they were stripping her and prodding her about like she was a slab of meat. She was quite probably terrified, hysterical, and in pain. There’d been a three-car pileup, he’d heard, which was why he was lying here unattended. At least they were seeing to her.
But couldn’t they go a bit easier with her?
He could hear her crying, gasping for breath. He heard the nurse, Giselle, tell the doctors to stop being pigs, she was just a young girl and afraid of them because they were men and she’d just been raped, for God’s sake. And one of the doctors said, “Not all that little, Giselle. Hold her down, will you?”
“Yeah,” another one of the doctors said, “not little at all, and her body doesn’t look all that young either.”
The third doctor didn’t say anything, he was breathing too hard to catch his breath.
Taylor wished he could hit the bastards. But he just lay there listening to the doctors talk about her, listening to them curse because she wasn’t cooperating with them. He listened to the girl’s cries, his own pain washing over him. He closed his eyes, but it didn’t really help, and he knew he wouldn’t forget her screams for a very long time.
“. . . Two fingers, dammit, you’ve got to go deeper and clean her out good. The cops want all the guy’s sperm and you need to feel for torn tissue. She’s probably torn inside.”
She was crying helplessly now. He saw the third man finally emerge from the cubicle, wipe his hands on his pants, and come into Taylor’s small enclosure. He nodded to him, then asked him a question in French, speaking very, very slowly. Like Americans did, to make themselves understood to stupid foreigners. Taylor answered him quickly in French, fluently and with no accent, saying without preamble, “The girl who was raped, how is she? Will she be all right?”
The doctor muttered something about Americans minding their own business, to which Taylor looked hard at him and repeated his question. The doctor shrugged as he bent over Taylor’s arm. “She’s eighteen, an American, and her brother-in-law, a damned Italian prince of all things, split her up really good. He bashed up her face, tore her a bit internally, and she’s bleeding like there’s no tomorrow. But she’ll be all right, at least her body will heal in time. I heard the girl’s sister shot him and he’s upstairs in surgery. Jesus, what a mess.” Then he shrugged, a typical French reaction, as if to say: What do you expect from foreigners except endless stupidities?
Then the doctor was talking about his broken arm, Taylor realized, clucking, turning it and making him grit his teeth, punishment, Taylor assumed, for being pushy. Taylor said in a stony voice that did little to mask his pain, “I’m a cop with the NYPD. How long will it take to heal? I’ve got to get home and back to work.”
The doctor raised his head and smiled, and shot off in his fastest French, “Give it six weeks and stay off your motorcycle. As for your head, you’re lucky you were wearing a helmet. Damned machines will kill you.”
“Not a scrap of luck to it,” Taylor said easily. “I’m not stupid.”
The doctor did a sudden about-face. “Say, you’re French, aren’t you? You just moved to the United States?”
“Nary a bit,” Taylor said with a big smile. “Born and bred in Pennsylvania.” He paused and added, “I’m just good at languages and, truth be told, French is pretty easy.”
He wished he hadn’t said anything, because in the next instant he sucked in his breath.
“Sorry. I’m sending you to be X-rayed now. No drugs yet, not with that concussion. Wait here a minute and I’ll send someone for you. Oh, yeah, I could tell you weren’t really French.”
Taylor sighed, closed his eyes, and heard the girl sobbing low now. Her throat must hurt badly, for the cries were hoarse and raw. He waited another five minutes. He was still there when she was wheeled out on a gurney. He saw her briefly again—hair in thick tangles around her face, and God, her face, all bruised, one eye puffed shut, her upper lip swelled and bleeding, a lot worse now than when she’d been brought in. She was unconscious, probably drugged. She looked very young. She looked helpless, utterly vulnerable. At least her sister had shot the bastard.
He didn’t understand what would make a man do such a thing, but the good Lord knew he’d seen enough of it his past two years on the force, at his home in the Twelfth Precinct.
A bloody Italian prince. Nothing figured anymore. Taylor sighed again, wishing someone would come and just get all the pain over with.
He was discharged two days later, his arm in a cast. He still suffered nagging headaches. He’d paid out eight hundred dollars in cash for all the hospital services. He had just enough to go home to New York. As for his motorcycle, he’d insured the Harley since he’d rented it here in Paris, so he was only out a hundred bucks for the deductible.
He was tired and felt sorry for himself, even though he knew, objectively, that he was lucky to be alive. The guy had gunned his white Peugeot from a narrow side street and smacked him hard, sending him flying, not onto the pavement, thank God, but into a stand of thick bushes. Those bushes had saved his life. The guy had driven away, leaving him there to curse and hold his arm and wait for the cops to come. And they had. They’d brought him to St. Catherine’s Hospital and he’d lain there listening to that poor girl screaming and screaming. He was a cop; he should have just endured it with a shrug. But he couldn’t, somehow.