The Prisoner - Carlos J. Cortes [93]
The thud wasn’t too loud, perhaps hushed by the Kevlar padding under the ceramic articulations covering Cox’s fist, but blood gushed from Dr. Hulman’s mouth and shattered nose as his head slammed back against the leather executive chair. For a moment, he didn’t move. Then his reading glasses, miraculously dangling from one of his ears, surrendered to gravity and dropped to the floor. Blood traced rivulets to collect under his chin and bloom like poppies on his shirt and lab coat. Then he snorted or sneezed, and a spray of red droplets dewed the desktop, peppering the documents in an open folder with curious marks, as if a child had been let loose with a red marker.
Slowly, Dr. Hulman reached to his mouth with a trembling hand to retrieve a tooth, and he looked at it with the same suspicious intent one has when peering at an unidentified lump found in a meat pie. He then pursed his lips into an almost perfect bloody O and, without transition, started to cry—deep sobs racking his chest.
“Please, Sergeant, there was no need for such violence,” Nikola said in a conversational tone. “So messy. … Restrain yourself. Let us conduct this conversation in a civilized manner.” Nikola pushed his chair back, noting with distaste a tiny drop of blood marring his trousers. He sighed and nodded.
Cox grabbed Dr. Hulman’s hand and slammed it on the desk.
“What a wonderful sight—friends holding hands.” Nikola tried a wolfish grin. “I will pose a few questions and you will answer them truthfully. If you don’t, this officer will break one finger, and then another, then another. Of course, fingers don’t last as long as conversations, but you also have toes, and countless other bones. How many bones?”
Dr. Hulman made a croaking sound and opened his mouth, reddish bubbles foaming over it; the sound grew into a scream punctuated by a sickening snap when Cox folded the doctor’s middle finger against the back of his hand as if turning the page of a book.
“Sergeant! Don’t be so hasty; give the man time. You must excuse him, Doctor, he’s young and eager. How many bones?”
“Two hun—two hundred six,” Hulman moaned.
“Wonderful. Excellent. And more than half that number are in your hands and feet. Amazing, isn’t it? Let’s start again. I suggest you open that safe while you still have some operational fingers and give me the notebook where you wrote about the father. The father of the girl you delivered to Araceli Goldberg.”
chapter 33
22:38
Laurel glanced from her book to Russo’s reclining figure and tried to make out, for the umpteenth time, some familiar line along his nose, jaw, ears, or mouth. After almost twenty-four hours at Tyler’s farm, she’d committed every detail of Russo’s anatomy to memory. He had wasted to an extent that his own mother might have had trouble recognizing him, but still Laurel searched his face for something familiar, with the same intensity that she rooted within herself for a flicker of feeling for the stranger named Eliot Russo. Before the operation, during the long months of preparation and training, she’d been consumed with loathing for the man who had left her real mother at the mercy of the riot police. She’d longed for the moment when she could confront him. Later, his pathetic condition had filled her with pity; no one, regardless of the crime committed, deserved such punishment. Now she felt nothing. Over the bed, where Russo battled to heal bruised synapses and rid his organs of toxins, an array of dated equipment monitored his vitals. Still no change after the more than fifty-two hours since he was raised from the tank. He was alive—at least, a spiky trace on an oscilloscope certified there was electrical activity in his emaciated body—but barely. Fear returned, as it had at ever shorter intervals, and fluttered in her chest like a bird caught in a net struggling for freedom. Springing Russo from the tank had been nightmarish but nothing compared to their future if he didn’t recover coherent consciousness. Which was a long shot, according to Dr. Floyd Carpenter.
Russo