Serial Uncut - J. A. Konrath [66]
Donaldson tried wiggling his toes, and that ignited his legs. He felt like he was lying on a hot skillet with the flames growing larger. Skin abrasions covering thirty percent of his body. That was the clinical explanation. Fucking agony was a much more appropriate description.
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