Resonance, J. B. Everett [the top 100 crime novels of all time txt] 📗

certain.

 

Twenty-five minutes later she pulled into the lot at the high school. The tent town was ghostly white, moving slightly in the breeze. A few of the tents were lit up from the inside, like Japanese paper lanterns. But David didn’t see any of it.

 

He had fallen sound asleep on the ride back, having reclined his seat and wedged his head against the door jamb.

 

“David.” She kept her voice soft, as though maybe it weren’t her intention to wake him.

 

But he didn’t respond.

 

A seed of thought began forming at the back of her brain, and she decided that she didn’t care if she startled the hell out of him. She grabbed his shoulder and shook him for all she could.

 

“David! David! ”

Chapter 21

“David! David!”

 

The voice seemed muffled, and at a distance. It was a wonder he could make out his own name it was so murky. And he was tired. Why couldn’t Becky let him sleep? It seemed like he had just slid away. Finally, peacefully getting the rest he needed. The seat of the Mercedes was warm and soothing, because he’d turned on the ass-warmer.

 

The salesman had a better name for it than that, but David didn’t care. It made everything else about the car worthwhile. Even the pricetag. So David wrote yet another check out of his trust fund. He’d sworn never to touch the account, but lately it seemed that was all he had done.

 

He started to roll sideways, away from the sound of her voice, but the sheets were cool, and her voice was receding. Good. She was going to let him sleep.

 

He slid away, letting the recesses of dreams come close and fold him into a place where he simply didn’t care that he was in a car, sleeping in the parking lot. A thought about hubcaps slipped through his head and he could see the parking lot filled with rows of little black Mercedes.

 

“David.”

 

Damn, her voice had gotten—

 

It was a man. A male voice. And he remembered that she had left, that he had heard her skittering out of the-… the car?

 

“David.” A hand clasped his shoulder, the grip commanding rather than soothing. “I can see that you’re coming around. Watch that arm.”

 

Arm?

 

Son of a bitch. They weren’t going to let him sleep. He sighed and rolled toward the sound, trying to force open his eyes, but it wasn’t working. He rubbed at his face.

 

His arm was ripped from his body. For just a moment causing a blinding pain, then the feeling rescinded to a bright burn.

 

“Aaaaagggh!”

 

He barely registered that it was his own voice through the haze. Even though he didn’t move it again, his shoulder punished him with a throbbing sear that onset with every heartbeat. He opened his eyes even as he chewed the inside of his lip in an effort to create a controllable pain that would overshadow the uncontrollable one.

 

Finally his vision settled on the man in front of him. Forcing his eyes to follow the clean lines of the scrubs, he looked up into Jordan Abellard’s too-blue eyes.

 

He screamed again. And scrambled for the head of the bed, hoping to get away from the face he had seen cold on the slab just that morning. But again his shoulder punished him with a tearing feeling, followed by a sharp burn that permeated the whole area.

 

David would have let out another yell, but as the doctor leaned closer David pushed with his legs, and was rewarded by the hot certainty that the limb had been sawed off and left open about halfway down his calf.

 

Something stabbed, swordlike, through his hip up into his abdomen.

 

His left arm held. His left leg didn’t feel like it had been severed, and so he used those to right himself. Holding one hand in front of him, he warded off the dead hands reaching toward him.

 

“Back off, you son of a bitch!”

 

Finally he was able to feel his throat, and it too was mad at him. Sandpaper rubbed on every exposed surface, creating an intense, raw, seeping pain that clouded his vision further.

 

“It’s me, Dr. Abellard.” The head tilted, the chocolate hair sliding and falling a little too long, as the eyes focused on his face.

 

“No shit. Get back.” He held his palm out, as though the sight of the soft side of a hand would keep anything at bay besides a gnat.

 

But the Jordan-thing did as it was told.

 

“David?”

 

It was a kind, soothing voice. But that was all it said.

 

David started running at the mouth. Although he wasn’t sure why. “You’re dead! I saw you this morning dead-. . cold-. . at the coroner’s.”

 

“Huh?”

 

It wasn’t Jordan. Jordan was more eloquent than that. Every bad zombie movie he had ever seen flashed through his brain. Becky was complaining about extinct species. The techs and doctors droned about all the deaths. There was no reason that the walking dead couldn’t be a part of all this.

 

The Jordan-thing stared back at him; its mouth moved asking something about the morgue. But David ignored it. He was frowning at his arm, and a horror worse than the dead man standing and talking to him poured over him. The pain that had receded to a dull rhythmic ache was in his right arm. At the shoulder. The shoulder that was in a blue standard issue immobility sling. With the Velcro strap around his chest. Just where he had remembered it. “My shoulder was dislocated?”

 

“Yes.” Jordan nodded.

 

“When I fell down the last flight of stairs?”

 

“Yes.” His expression clearly telling that he thought David might have injured his brain in the fall as well.

 

“But I healed… . my leg healed.” Again the words stumbled out of his mouth, along with some weird belief that if he just explained, things would right themselves. “I was walking. Becky took us to the coroner’s. Jillian can show you the x-rays. I-” He wasn’t making any sense and he knew it.

 

Jordan pulled up a chair and a notebook, before pulling a sleek, expensive pen from the unassuming pocket stitched on the front of his scrubs. “I’m going to ask a few questions and take some notes, okay?”

 

David gritted his teeth and remembered from two days ago. “Can I have a Percocet?”

 

Jordan nodded, but his words didn’t quite match. “When we finish, okay?”

 

Again his teeth ground - one of the few body parts he could work without instantaneous punishment in the form of rending pain.

 

Jordan dove into the thick of it. “I’m dead?”

 

“Well, you don’t look very dead.” He could feel the sarcasm flowing through his veins.

 

“You got a twin?”

 

He shook his head. Looking far too like Jordan for David’s stomach to stop clenching.

 

“Well, there’s a body at the morgue that had your name on the toe-tag, and your name on the ‘deceased’ list. And from the looks of it, I can see why they got you confused. You should check into having a brother you don’t know about.”

 

Jordan nodded.

 

“When did you see it?”

 

“This morning. Maybe eleven a.m.” It felt like an interrogation, but he let the doc go. The sooner this crap was over, the sooner he got his Percocet.

 

“Who was there with you?”

 

“Jillian Brookwood, Dr. Rebecca Sorenson, and the coroner, Dr. Whitfield, Whitson, something.” He stated each name clearly for the record, mentally pushing back the feeling of having his hip ripped open.

 

“Becky’s dead.” Jordan leaned forward trying to see how David would react.

 

Was this one of those horrid mental studies? “Hey doc, I thought they banned this type of psychological research years ago.”

 

“What are you talking about?”

 

David shook his head. “You know, where you tell people their family is dead just to see how they react … this ain’t right.”

 

Jordan breathed deep and shook his head. “I’ll explain it all as soon as I can, but Jillian’s telling us some pretty weird tales, and she says you’ll corroborate them. She ran to get me when she saw you coming around.”

 

Jillian! She would get him Percocet. “Bring the doc around then.”

 

“I can’t. Not until we’re finished.”

 

Anger burst through him, washing past in a hot rush. “I’m in pain here. While you pussyfoot around. And I don’t even know why the hell I’m re-injured. So get the hell on with it.”

 

“Why don’t you believe Becky Sorenson is dead?”

 

“Because I was just with her.” He looked at his watch. The time and date matched. “I was in the car. My black Mercedes I bought this afternoon. I fell asleep. About twenty minutes ago maybe.”

 

“You saw her twenty minutes ago?” Jordan leaned forward, his face a mask of incredulousness.

 

“That’s what I just said.” He forced his breathing to stay steady. Percocet was coming. Just ignore the pain and the fact that you are at the mercy of this sadistic doctor. He almost admired Jordan for having the balls to hold him hostage in his bed.

 

“And Jillian was there?”

 

“No. She passed out when she saw your body at the morgue. Screamed like a banshee and dropped like a stone. She went comatose. Becky and I brought her back. One of the docs had checked her out and said her heart rate was low and her breathing shallow.” He watched while Abellard’s face gave away everything he felt for the pretty little brunette. Whether he admitted it to himself or not, it was there in plain writing for all the rest of the world to read. But David kept talking. “They hooked her up to monitors and watched her. Becky and I went out to gather some data.”

 

“You left her?”

 

“I wasn’t going to sit around and watch her not move. Not much I can do to help anyway.”

 

Yup, Abellard was in a bad way.

 

“You walked?” He motioned with his pretty pen to all the breaks that would clearly prevent any of David’s story. David ate a sigh. None of it made sense. And if Jillian was awake then where was she anyway?

 

“I healed. No marks on the x-rays that there ever was a break on any of the bones. Hip in the socket, girdle unfractured. I don’t know what this is about,” He gestured to all the casting and bindings he wore, “but it hurts like a motherfucker.”

 

Jordan muttered under his breath. David heard the words son of a bitch, but it was hard to believe that phrase had come from Jordan’s mouth. David knew he must have simply heard the words he would have said.

 

Abellard stood and stretched, long lean lines that made David ache with jealousy and wonder where the hell his good health had escaped to.

 

“I’ll send Jillian in with that Percocet. You can talk to her.”

 

He straightened where he sat, propped against the pillows, his hip burned, reminding him not to bend. His arm twitched, and his leg sent pulses of pain to every part of him. He ignored it.

 

“When did Jillian wake up?”

 

“As of about noon.”

 

“But she was still under when Becky and I left this evening, around six.”

 

Jordan nodded, “She’ll explain. She was awake here.”

 

Jordan walked calmly from the tent, making certain he was well beyond the flap before he bent over and put his hands on his knees, finally allowing himself the deep gulping breaths that his body had been fighting for.

 

Oxygen seeped into his system like a drug, reassuring him about everything in the world