Hangman (Jason Trapp: Origin Story Book 1) Page 15

  12 rounds left.

  The fight was essentially unwinnable. Trapp knew that. His enemy was both more heavily armed and more numerous. And he guessed they wouldn’t be nursing their ammunition either.

  The only advantage he had was time. It had to be 60 seconds now since Shea had made the call to her father. They were a few miles away from the Graysons’ house, and he guessed that the sheriff’s cruiser would already be rocketing through the rain-drenched roads.

  “Five minutes,” he said to himself. “That’s all you need to last.”

  That was when the pain hit him: burning like a whiplash across the left side of his torso. Taking advantage of a break in the sound of gunfire, Trapp looked down and saw a diluted streak of red blood dripping from his side. He pulled up his jacket and saw that a bullet had scored deeply across his ribs. The blood was flowing freely out.

  He pressed his left hand down against it to stem the blood flow. The wound was two hands wide, and he had only one to spare. Another losing battle. And the pain, fuck it hurt.

  Keep moving. Just move and fire.

  Trapp crawled backward on his belly, wincing as his wound dragged against the ground. He made it 15 feet before he spared a look over his shoulder. Shea was deep into the gully now, filthy with mud just like he was, but almost at the protection afforded by the rocky outcropping. If he could just join her there, they would have all the time in the world.

  Slowly, he poked his head up behind the cover of a bush, stopping just before he might become visible from the other side. The rain was falling heavy and now closing his visibility to just a few yards. He peered through the dead shrub, scanning left and right. This time he could see Red Beard’s acquaintance, but not the man himself.

  “Great,” he mumbled, breathing hard. It felt stupid to talk, but the alternative was to accept that he was on his own, and that wouldn’t do either.

  Don’t say it, don’t say it…

  “Here goes nothing.”

  Trapp popped up from cover, squeezing the trigger as soon as he started moving. The first couple of shots were wayward, and his target was too far away for anything other than blind luck to play any part, but finally he received a dose of exactly that. One of his five—or was it six—shots winged the man in the shoulder, dropping him before he had a chance to return fire. Trapp took the opportunity offered and dived to the ground before Red Beard had the opportunity to take his revenge.

  “Fuck,” a man’s voice grunted once the incoming wall of lead momentarily ceased scything through the brush around Trapp. The words came out low, almost in a groan, and carried over the sudden stillness in the air.

  Six shots left, Trapp reminded himself. Maybe seven.

  Maybe. But he had to count on six.

  Suspecting that one of his assailants was at least wounded, Trapp seized on the opportunity to pull back. Even with the advantage of firepower, he might well have evened his odds. It would be impossible for Red Beard to flank him alone.

  “I’m hit!” The voice called out, curt with pain. “Did you get him?”

  Trapp didn’t quite catch the reply, but he was pretty sure Red Beard hissed something like, “Shut your damn mouth.”

  Some good news, finally.

  He inched toward the gully, careful not to rustle the bushes around him. A single lucky shot could end this right here and now. He made it a minute later, crawling slowly on his elbows and knees, straining with his hearing to detect anyone approaching.

  The journey to the rock face felt hours long as the raindrops pounded against his back, though it could only have been a fraction of that. He left a trail of droplets of blood in his wake, instantly washed away by the deluge.

  The rocky gully ended in a bank of once-dried dirt a couple of feet high at the base of the enormous boulder that jutted out of the desert floor, spotted with man-sized stones that seemed tiny in comparison. Rivulets of water ran off every surface, some falling tens of feet and becoming tiny waterfalls.

  Trapp suspected that the bank of earth would be washed away by the winter rains. Heck, maybe even a couple more hours of this would do the job. But he didn’t have a couple of hours. Five full yards of empty ground separated his present position from cover. He couldn’t stay where he was—it was too exposed. But the sprint to the boulder would be even more so. He already felt weak from blood loss. Any half-competent shooter would cut him in two long before he made it to safety.

  He looked up, searching for a way through—and finding only Shea’s eyes instead. She was crouched behind an ocher rock twice her size, her body pressed fearfully against it.

  “You’re hurt!” she yelped, soaked strands of hair sticking to her face.

  “I’m fine,” Trapp called out. “Stay where—”

  It was too late. Shea threw herself toward him, reaching out her arm.

  A bolt of lightning flashed overhead, but it wasn’t the crack of thunder Trapp heard.

  It was gunfire.

  22

  The tiger was chasing him.

  Except when it wasn’t.

  It was a tiger, he was at least certain of that.

  Except when he wasn’t.

  The entire world was a blur, shades of green and brown and fluorescent color kaleidoscoping as he sprinted through what smelled like a jungle: pungent and rich. It was hot, too, sweat forming like gemstones on the crucible of his skin, bursting and glinting in the light as he dropped his gaze.

  The tiger roared. Except it wasn’t a roar, not really. More like the mewling of kittens: house cats, not tiger cubs. And it didn’t stop, endless bleating and whining and beeping.

  But he was being chased, he knew that. They were after him.

  They?

  Trapp stopped dead, his bare feet kicking up a pile of freshly fallen leaves on the ground underneath. They felt wrong, cold and bare, not fresh and warm.

  Where was he?

  It wasn’t a jungle, he knew that now. Sure, he could see the tree trunks rising from the ground, but only to a little above the eye line. Then they disappeared into emptiness, supporting no canopy.

  Supporting nothing.

  There was just blackness.

  Where am I?

  The question repeated itself, more insistent now as Trapp began to perceive the essential wrongness of his present situation. The tiger was gone, if it had ever existed, though his heart was still thudding in his chest like a rock fall tumbling down the side of a mountain: a boulder tumbling end over end, each contact with the ground exploding in a minor earthquake.

  That was real, if nothing else.

  But this was no jungle. He had been in jungles, trained in jungles, trekked for two weeks with a pack on his back and a rifle in his hands in the jungle. He’d gone to sleep breathing in the scent of the rich, fresh loam through his nostrils in the jungle.

  This smell wasn’t…that. It was acrid, like hospital disinfectant.

  The back of his hand began to itch, and he looked down, only to see a length of plastic cabling that emerged from a patch of white bandage attached to his skin with a small length of pink tape. His eyes widened, and yet the rest of his vision blurred. The greens and browns and pinks and yellows of the jungle fell away into a monotonous beige. The nearest tree trunk was a metal rod, its canopy a nest of IV bags. The next was a heart rate monitor, and after that a machine he didn’t recognize.

  His mouth was a desert.

  “Where–?” he started, but the words wouldn’t form.

  “He’s awake,” came a woman’s voice.

  Shea?

  No, it wasn’t her. Harsher and more businesslike.

  She spoke again, more softly now, though the tone was still professional. “Here, Jason. Drink this.”

  Something pressed into his mouth. A thin cylinder: a straw.

  He sucked greedily at the liquid, washing the dust from his mouth, and tried again. “Where am I? What happened?”

  As his mind began to parse the difference between the delirious world of
his dreams and the actual one he now found himself in, a familiar face hove into view over his hospital bed. It was Sheriff Grayson. “I was sort of hoping you could tell me that, son…”

  Trapp squeezed his eyes shut, suffused instantly with shame. His cheeks burned, and though his lips moved, he couldn’t bring himself to ask the question that was on them, for fear of the answer.

  “Sheriff, you’re in here as a personal favor. I need you to keep the patient calm, okay? He’s in shock, and he’s been through a lot. If that’s not gonna work for you, I need you to tell me now.”

  “It’s okay, Katie,” Ron Grayson replied softly. “I know the line. You can trust me not to cross it.”

  “Thank you, sir,” came the reply. The relief in her voice was evident.

  Through it all, Trapp strained to read the sheriff’s tone. Was he grieving? Had –?

  “Son,” the man himself asked. “How you doing?”

  Trapp attempted to raise his head from what he now understood was his hospital bed, but the movement ignited a wave of fire down his left side, like napalm singeing flesh from bone. “Sir, I–”

  “Don’t move,” the sheriff instructed. “You’re not badly hurt. Just winged some. Doc didn’t even put in proper stitches. Just those ones that dissolve once they are done. You’ll be out of here in no time.”

  “Shea?”

  The single word was about all Trapp was capable of uttering in this condition, still groggy from whatever sedative was coursing through his body. The drug didn’t stop his eyes burning with tears, and though he attempted to bar their passage by squeezing his lids shut, the stinging saltwater found a way through. A silence hung in the air between the two men as he waited for a reply, thick as molasses and punctuated only by the beeping of the machines attached to his body.

  “She’s alive.”

  The statement hit Trapp with the force of what was left unsaid. Alive, yes – but in what condition? The last thing he remembered was her blood on his fingers, sticky and warm. And so much of it. What kind of shape would she be in?

  In the background, drowned out by the growing insistence of cries of the machinery attached to his body he heard raised voices. Were they doctors discussing Shea’s case? What were they hiding from him?

  “Sheriff…” the nurse warned.

  “She’s alive, Jason. And we hope she’ll get better.” The old man’s voice cracked a little at that, emotion finally breaking through whatever barriers he’d erected inside himself to get through this madness. “You just do the same, okay? Shea’s a tough kid. She’ll pull through.”

  “It was a red Jeep Cherokee, sir. I didn’t catch the whole license plate, but it started JXM. I winged the mirror with a round. You gotta tell that to whoever’s searching.”

  “We found it –”

  “And the gun,” Trapp continued, riding roughshod over the sheriff’s admission. “You bagged that, right? It’ll have prints on it. More than mine, I mean. I took it off the guy in the Ford.”

  “Sheriff – that’s enough!” the nurse hissed. “This. Is. A. Hospital. I cannot allow you to disturb my patients like this, is that clear?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Sheriff Grayson acknowledged curtly. Trapp could sense that he very much wanted to continue the conversation, but he was a real Texas gent – and he respected this woman’s authority more than that.

  But the decision wasn’t entirely his to make.

  Trapp forced his eyes open, blinking as they filled once more with water, turning the lights overhead into a fractal rainbow pattern.

  “Nurse,” he said, throat still raspy with disuse at a slim, blond woman in her mid-40s. “What’s your name?”

  “Call me Katie,” she replied. He suspected it was as much to distract him from what had happened as anything else, but that was just fine by him.

  “Okay, Katie,” he said, gritting his teeth. “What happened to me?”

  “You were shot, Jason.”

  “How bad?”

  “You’ll be fine in a few weeks. The bullet just clipped your torso, didn’t fracture, and didn’t hit any major blood vessels. Our team’s more used to fixing up mishaps with farm machinery, but you’re lucky – the mechanics are pretty similar, when it comes down to it. If you rest up properly, it probably won’t even leave much of a scar.”

  Trapp had no medical experience to speak of, but he’d seen men get shot in combat. Been in Humvees with IEDs exploding outside and dealt with the aftermath. He knew what human flesh could look like once hot metal got done flying through the air. So he knew the kind of questions that needed to be asked. “Any muscle damage?”

  “Nothing you need to worry about.”

  “Anything else happen to me?”

  “Just a bit of shock. We’ve got a fluid line running into you, so –”

  That was all Trapp needed to hear. With his right hand – the one presently unencumbered by IV lines and extraneous medical machinery – he pulled the blankets off his torso and legs before thrusting himself upright and swinging his feet off the bed.

  The heart rate meter exploded nearby. He ignored it, as well as the reproachful gaze of the sheriff, standing by the wall with his arms crossed and exhausted lines etched into his sagging face.

  Nurse Katie said, “Exactly what do you think you are doing?”

  Trapp ignored her too, though he at least felt a little bad for that. His left side throbbed with pain, but it wasn’t the acute barrage of nerve endings burning that it had been earlier – instead diminished into something more like being slow roasted over a dying fire. He could handle that. And so what if it left a scar? His body was already far from a pristine canvas…

  The beeping didn’t stop until he unclipped the pulse meter attached to his index finger and let it dangle from its cable by the side of the bed. Well – more accurately, the angry, intermittent beeps melted into one, unbroken howl as the machine decided that its patient had flatlined and cried out in despair. It was a little better, but not much.

  Katie tried pushing him back, but he gently batted away her arm. “Mr. Trapp, I am going to have to sedate you.”

  “I refuse treatment,” he replied simply, biting his lip as he began peeling the tape on the back of his left hand away from the skin. It came apart from the four corners of the bandage, and he removed the cannula sitting in his vein. A little fluid spilled out – more saline than blood, though it was as pink as the soup that had sloshed at the bottom of the Ford’s footwell.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” Nurse Katie tried a second time, a tinge of anger mixing with recognition of impotence in her tone.

  “To see Shea.”

  The hospital was a small, rural one. Trapp was situated in a curtained-off section of a regular inpatient ward, and when he pulled back the off-green wall of cloth, he found that it was empty. He guessed that this was probably the most exciting thing they’d seen all year. Several medical personnel dressed in blue scrubs stood behind a low nurse’s station, attention drawn to the commotion like meerkats to danger.

  “Jason…”

  The voice belonged to Sheriff Grayson this time, and that pulled him up short. Ron was Shea’s father, and Trapp was the reason his daughter was currently in the hospital. The reason she’d almost died. So he couldn’t storm away from this man like he could the impertinent nurse.

  He owed the sheriff more than that. He stopped, letting his head sink a little as he closed his eyes and prayed for strength. When he was done, he half-turned and said, “Yes, sir?”

  “Your ass is showing,” the man said bluntly.

  Trapp blinked stupidly. Were his ears working right? “I’m sorry, Sheriff?”

  “My wife is in there, son. In the hospital room with my daughter. She’s been married to me for 30 long years, and then some. And you’ve met my wife, haven’t you, Jason?”

  “Um…” Trapp stammered.

  “And wouldn’t you say she’s a real honest, religious kind of woman?”

  That,
at least, was a simple factual question that he could answer – and the kind of question that demanded only one kind of response. Trapp nodded, because it was the only thing he could do. “Of course.”

  It was also, the younger man instantly understood, a trap.

  “Then you wouldn’t be planning on marching in there with your buttocks showing, would you Jason?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Then if you don’t mind, I’ll make a suggestion.”

  Trapp nodded, knowing he was beaten.

  “I’ll get you some clothes, and then you and I can go take a look at my daughter. Through the glass, mind. She’ll live, but she’s in no state for visitors. After that one of my men will give you a ride home. You can get cleaned up. Then I’ll be taking your statement, you understand?”

  23

  The sheriff’s deputy pulled his cruiser to a halt outside the Graysons’ house in silence, in keeping with the rest of the journey. The intrigue in the man’s demeanor was palpable – Trapp sensed he was desperate to ask exactly what the hell had happened but was restraining himself manfully.

  “Sheriff told me to let you know your bike’s in the evidence locker,” he said after a few moments. “You might get it back, but I wouldn’t count on it being soon.”

  Trapp unclipped his seatbelt, and a sigh of relief slipped free of his lips as the pressure on the bandaged bullet wound on the side of his torso lifted. It hurt like hell, but he knew the nurse was right; it wouldn’t take too long to heal. “Thanks.”

  “You need anything else?” the deputy asked.

  “I’m good.”

  “Well, all right then,” the deputy said, fishing for something on the dashboard. He clicked his tongue, then leaned over and handed it to Trapp. It was a business card. “Here’s my number. If you need anything, don’t hesitate to give me a call.”

  Trapp accepted the offer dispassionately. He supposed it was muscle memory for the cop, but he had no intention of doing anything other than dropping it in the trashcan. If he needed to speak to law enforcement, well, he was living with the sheriff, wasn’t he?