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Whatever.She needed to get out of here for a while. To think. She wasn’t going to learn anything until McGill closed up. Maybe she should go home with her. Find out her secrets. Dig up a little evidence to support the conclusions about McGill.
But then, Sadie had walked into a trap once too often. Whatever she decided, caution would be her watchword.
She had no desire to repeat past mistakes.
Eighteenth Street and Morris Avenue
Birmingham, 9:30 p.m.
Sadie sat down on the grimy concrete. She’d left her car parked at the Greyhound station, then walked around the corner to Eighteenth and found the exact spot under the overpass.
This was where she had been found in late November three and a half years ago, three years and seven months, to be exact. Unconscious. Broken. Loaded with drugs. The homeless guy who’d found her had thought she was dead. But she had been alive. Barely. Her right leg hadbeen broken. The weeks-old injury had healed, but the bones hadn’t properly aligned. The correction had required surgery. Left shoulder had been dislocated, the humeral head fractured. Weeks in a sling and months of physical therapy had salvaged most of the use of that arm. Her nose had been broken at some point, but it, too, had healed—not as straight as it had once been. An MRI showed evidence of recent and repeated head trauma. So many bruises and scars. Whoever had tortured her had been damned good at his work.
There were other things ... things she didn’t like to think about.
Do not go there.
The doctors had all agreed that the memory loss was a result of a combination of the head trauma and the extended overuse of hallucinogens, among other drugs.
Sometimes she had the most bizarre episodes. Possibly flashbacks but she couldn’t be sure what was real and what was imagined. Dr.Holden had suggested that whoever had done this might have used video footage along with the drugs to imprint false memories.
Basically, she was seriously fucked up.
Ignoring the people just yards away, tucked into cardboard boxes for the night, she closed her eyes and let her mind go back.
“Hey! Hey, you okay?”
The man crouched over her that night had looked about as much like hell as she had. He’d worn dirty, torn clothes. His beard had been long, his face wrinkled and leathered. But his eyes had been keen, watchful.
It had hurt to move. Oddly, she’d grown accustomed to the pain. Probably from all those months of torture she couldn’t really recall. She remembered opening her eyes to the old guy.
She hadn’t been happy about it. The one thing she’d known for sure was that she hadn’t wanted to wake up. Being dead would have been preferable. The realization wasn’t actually a memory, just a knowing.
“What’s your name?”
Sadie had lain there for about a minute, trying to figure out how to answer him.
“I’ll get help.”
He’d apparently realized she didn’t know her name or couldn’t speak, so he’d gone to the bus station to get someone to make the call, but there had been no need. A BPD cruiser had been at the bus station, so the old man had led the two uniforms to her.
An ambulance had arrived and whisked her away to the hospital. A few hours later her father had arrived and identified her. Most of the other stuff that had occurred those first few days was yet another blur in her life.
The concrete felt cold beneath her now. She remembered that cold ... it had seeped so deep into her bones that night it had taken days before she felt warm again. She’d lost weight while she was missing. Nothing but skin and bones. They’d all said it was a miracle she was alive.
But it wasn’t.
Very recently, maybe with Asher’s help, she’d realized that she had survived by sheer force of will. Subconsciously she had determined to survive, possibly for nothing more than revenge. But years of recovery had been required to come to that understanding.
She laughed, the sound echoing in the night. The sad part was she couldn’t remember precisely who the target of her revenge was. Yeah, yeah, the Osorio family for sure. The old man would have ordered whatever was done to her. But she wanted the others involved too. The ones who’d beaten her, cut her, and worse. So much worse.
She pushed away the thought.
Of course, she wanted to get Carlos, first and foremost. But there was something about the person or persons who’d inflicted the torture that made her want them even more. Faces she couldn’t remember. Voices that were unfamiliar and unclear and came to her only in bits and pieces.
Nailing down the identities should be a piece of cake.
“Right,” she muttered.
