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.”
“We need to prep him for surgery, sheriff.”
The sheriff nodded at the nurse who had just entered. “Just make sure you count your scalpels when you’re finished,” he said before he left.
“The procedure went well.” Lanz again, standing over Donaldson with that sanctimonious frown. “It’ll be a few days before we know if the skin grafts take. You need to stay still, or they’ll slough off. I’ve given permission for the authorities to question you.”
Donaldson glanced at the other side of the bed. Two men in suits. Feds.
“I have nothing to say until I talk to a lawyer,” Donaldson said. His words were heavy, his entire body delightfully numb.
“We found the pictures hidden in your car, Mr. Donaldson.” The taller of the two had a voice like a radio jock. “In several of them you even posed with your victims.”
“Alleged victims,” Donaldson said, cracking a small, private smile.