Second Shot

Restless, I shifted my position again, rolling a little towards her. Mistake. When I kept still, the pain had been little more than a background ache and I’d grown hardened enough to it to forget the damage that lurked under the surface.

The pain the careless movement caused was a vicious spike in my chest, which was nasty in itself, but followed by a terrible feeling of something tearing inside. I pictured that bloody bullet again, rending its way through my internal organs with a dreadful inevitability about it. I thought of the careful repair work to the damaged tissue that the surgeon with the beautiful teeth had put into saving me. For a moment I could only lie there, motionless, breathing fast and shallow, horribly afraid that in one thoughtless moment I’d just undone everything he’d tried to achieve.

The pain washed up over me and then, at last, began to recede. I re-focused out into the room again and found Neagley was out of her chair and bending over me, frowning with concern. “Charlie, are you OK?” she demanded. “My God, I’ve never seen anybody lose color like that. You want I should go fetch a doctor?”

I gave the slightest shake of my head, as small a gesture as I could get away with. “No,” I said when I could speak again. I could feel the sweat in my hair between the back of my head and the pillow, the fire in my chest. “I’m fine. Sorry-catches up with me occasionally.”

“No shit,” she muttered, shaking her head slowly as she sat down. “You shouldn’t be talking about this,” she said with a flash of anger. “You shouldn’t even be thinking about this. You should be sleeping and watching mindless TV and recovering.”

“Yes, but try telling her that,” said Sean’s voice from the doorway.

Neagley’s head snapped up and I saw her expression close in as she regarded him with a cool flat gaze. Maybe she was always wary when she was first introduced to people, or maybe the part of her-the instinct- that was still a cop recognized the inherently lawless element in Sean’s makeup.

“You must be Mr. Meyer,” she said at last, and waited for Sean to cross the room before she offered a handshake. “Frances Neagley-we’ve spoken on the phone.”

“Ms. Neagley,” Sean said, matching his tone to hers. After a moment she gave a flicker of a smile, as though acknowledging she’d been subjected to the same careful scrutiny.

He came round and sat in one of the chairs by the bed and I saw his eyes narrow as they swept over me.

“Any news?” I asked quickly, heading off any queries about my state of health.

“We’ve been digging around some more on Greg Lucas,” he said. “Lucas had a nasty reputation in the army, as we already know. He had a temper on him-used to go out and pick fights with the locals wherever he was posted. He was also one hell of a jealous husband. Made his wife’s life hell and after Simone was born he got a whole lot worse.”

“Worse?” I said, frowning. “No wonder Simone’s mother didn’t want her to contact him.”

“That’s not the whole story,” Sean said. “It seems that not only did he not trust his wife to behave herself while he was overseas, more often than not he took his anger out on the child.”

“On Simone?” It was Neagley who broke in this time.

Sean nodded. “It seems that she made a lot of trips to the hospital as a baby-bumps, bruises, a broken wrist,” he said. I thought of his own childhood, what I knew of it, and could understand the faint trace of bitterness in his voice.

“And nobody noticed?” Neagley said. “Nobody picked up on any of this?”

“Overworked staff and a convincingly concerned mother.” Sean shrugged. “It happens.”

“But if he beat her as a kid, why was Simone so desperate to track him down again?” Neagley asked. She glanced at me. “Did she have some kind of score to settle?”

I shook my head slowly. “No, I don’t think so,” I said. “Before we left London she said she couldn’t really remember anything about him and I believed her. Could have blocked it out, I suppose.”

I was starting to slur my words a little, I noted. It was catching up with me again. Every breath scraped my lungs, my mouth was arid, and my thigh was throbbing so hard it was making the whole of my lower leg ache. I wondered what time I was due some extra pain medication and hoped fervently that it was soon.

I heard the murmur of Sean’s voice and Neagley saying something in reply, but they seemed to be coming from a long way away, hazy and indistinct. Stay with it, Fox. Come on….

I don’t remember closing my eyes, but I must have fallen into a doze. Next thing I knew, I woke to hear my father’s voice, quietly furious, at the end of the bed. I opened my eyes a fraction and found that Neagley’s chair was empty, but I had no idea how long she’d been gone.