Page 143 of Antihero

Scrape, rattle, scrape.

She walked toward him. She had never seen a face as damaged as his, not even her own after the assault.

His teeth were bared, mouth stretched wide, an hourglass set on its side. Strands of gummy blood spiderwebbed the tangle of beard and lacerated flesh that was his mouth.

He kept on.

Dragging an anchor.

A leviathan freed from the deep.

As she neared, he torqued his head, that Cyclops eye staring up at her. “Fucking cunt. You’d better cut this anchor off my leg. Or you have no idea what kind of holes we’ll tear into you so we can f—”

She kicked him just beneath the hinge of his jaw. Hard.

He spasmed once in the mud, legs contorted, a dead beetle.

Out cold.

Turning her back, she walked over to Evan once more to sit with him until he awakened.

She knew all too well what it felt like to come to alone.

“The prosecution team is pleased with the statement.” Naomi Templeton’s voice came clearly through the Mercedes’s elaborate infotainment system.

Gripping the steering wheel, Evan did his best to draw full breaths, but the pain in his upper left lung refused to diminish, tightening its claws across his rib cage. Everything hurt. The arches of his feet hurt and his hamstrings hurt and his right patella hurt and both elbows hurt and his trapezius hurt and his hip flexors hurt and his forehead hurt and of course his left groin muscle hurt too because it was the weakest link in his body. The hours he spent every week—and usually every day—to hold his pain at bay and his bones in proper alignment had saved him now from being entirely debilitated.

He’d woken up in Anca’s arms, the three Vikings sprawled unconscious across the road. The kid had pissed himself. As they’d pulled out, he’d cursed a blue streak at them. Anca had referred to him as a foulmouthed little creature, which had coaxed the first pained smile from Evan’s bruised face.

“If we can get IDs, we have the four dead to rights,” Naomi continued. “Kidnapping, aggravated sexual abuse, assault with a dangerous weapon, possession of a controlled substance, unlawful administration of a controlled substance, and a host of Wiretap Act stuff. We’ll liaise with state on nonconsensual pornography, image-based abuse, unauthorized dissemination.” She paused to draw a breath. “From the video you sent we can match tattoos and pull biometrics—gait, iris prints, hand geometry, voice recognition, even dental through the ski mask slits. We can bury them.” A tapping sound—a pen striking a pad. “We just have to know who they are.”

They zipped along the Long Island Expressway, the Mercedes shedding mud in the light rain. Evan and Anca were drenched but surprisingly clean. The downpour had bathed them.

“Working on it,” Evan said. “In the meantime, I left you three more.”

“What? How? Where?”

He told her. It took some time. The shortness of breath intensified and he had to take frequent pauses.

“You can charge the little delinquent, too,” he said. “He stabbed me with a hypo needle brimming with fentanyl.”

“Stabbed who?”

“Good point. Never mind.”

Opioid warmth was still leaching from his system, his head starting to throb. His stomach was a pot of acid. He dug in the console, came up with the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup Templeton had thrown at him. He rarely ate dessert, but when he did, he preferred 80 percent cocoa with almonds, maybe a sprinkle of sea salt.

He extracted the cup from its foil, chewed. It was disgusting. It was delicious.

“There’s a van parked right behind the upended tree.” The pain in his left lung amped up with every inhalation. Even to his own ears, his voice sounded wheezy. “There’re two more syringes in the console, probably fentanyl, driver’s license beneath the visor, and a .357 in the glove box. Driver’s license identifies the big one as Peter Macmanus. Gum ’em up on charges. Can you keep them from making any calls?”

“We can temporarily restrict access if there’s an ongoing investigation that could be compromised by immediate communication. Let me talk to Barton, make sure we’re squeaky clean on it so we don’t jam up the case.”

“Copy that.” He disconnected the call.

His clutch around the steering wheel had tightened, his knuckles bloodless. Each breath tightened the left side of his torso, pressure mounting, a particular kind of claustrophobic pain he wished he was not familiar with.

For the first time, he acknowledged he had a problem. Feeling beneath his clavicle, he pressed the top rib, biting back a bark of pain.