“Yeah, I opened his juvie, Con,” Kiki sniped back. “It’s my damned job. I do things like open files and dig into people’s shit so I can figure out why someone’s killed innocent bystanders, and here’s a news flash, even if they aren’t innocent bystanders, I dig around in the shit anyway, because no one deserves to be murdered, including your friend, Forest.”
“Look, I don’t know what the fuck is going on, Kiki.” He scraped his hands through his hair, suddenly realizing it’d grown out long enough to tug on. “Forest—he hasn’t done anything to get this kind of shit left on his door. Anything he did as a kid? It’s gone, water under the bridge.”
“Really? What the fuck aren’t you telling me, Con? Why the hell are you circling the wagons around this guy?” Height wasn’t the only thing his sister’d inherited from their mother. No one in the family could shake Kiki off something once she’d gotten her teeth into it, and usually it was a quality Connor admired in her. At that exact moment, it wasn’t her most appealing trait.
Stepping in closer to her brother, she whispered hotly, a low hiss only loud enough for the two of them to hear. “Give me one damned good reason why I shouldn’t ask you what you’re doing with a guy who by all accounts is a piece of trash more than a few guys fucked, balled up, then tossed away? Because it doesn’t make sense to me, Con. Not one fucking bit of sense.”
HE HURT everywhere.
Well, Forest amended, not in some places he’d normally hurt after waking up feeling like he’d been beaten half to death, but it was pretty close. No, he thought as he blinked away the sting of tears in his eyes, he felt more like the times he’d been shoved in a dryer and endured the tumble after his foster father turned it on.
But for the life of him, he couldn’t remember which one had done it.
“Can you hear me, Mr. Ackerman?” A man spoke. Then a bright light flashed over his eyes, and Forest tried to shut them, only to find one of his lids was pressed up by someone’s cold finger. “Pupils are responsive. Forest, can you—”
“Yeah, I hear you.” He tried blinking again, wresting away the control of his eyelid from the man’s finger. “Roger, Roger.”
“Do you mind if I call you Forest?” The man continued his examination, probing at Forest’s hips and side.
“Sure,” he said through his chattering teeth. “It’s too fucking cold.”
It took Forest a moment to realize where he was. A hospital. One that didn’t seem to mind also doubling as a meat locker. He didn’t just hurt, it was also cold, and more than a little of the room’s iciness crinkled pain through his bones. Shivering, he tried burying himself under the blankets but found he was lying pretty much bare to the breeze, draped only in a hospital gown that left his naked ass stuck to the sheets.
“I’m sorry. I promise I’ll make this quick,” the man said.
“Yeah, I’ve heard that before,” Forest muttered to himself. “Usually they were the ones doing a dip and dash.”
Forest could make out the man’s face, and then the fuzziness around his vision cleared enough for him to see. A name tag pinned to the balding man’s blue scrubs declared him to be Doctor Wyatt, and Forest nearly jumped out of his skin when the man’s almost too warm hands pressed down into his abdomen. Someone stood to the side, just out of Forest’s cloudy field of view. The grizzled older man flashed a smile at Forest when they made eye contact. Forest couldn’t tell if he was a nurse or another doctor, but it didn’t really matter. He needed to find his clothes and get the hell out before they charged him five hundred dollars for an aspirin he never swallowed.
If he could only get his legs to work.
“I can’t move—” His knee jerked up, and Forest nearly nailed the doctor in the chin. The other man—an attendant according to his hospital badge—moved in to help Forest get his limbs under control. His leg muscles had another spasm, and the older man massaged Forest’s shins, his fingers working to get Forest’s blood flowing.
“I’m almost done. Just making sure nothing’s making Rice Krispie noises,” Wyatt murmured. “You’ve been out for a couple of hours, which is a bit of a concern since you arrived with a linear skull fracture. We’re going to keep you overnight, and we’ve been running tests just to make sure you don’t have internal bleeding. I need to ask you a couple of questions. Is that okay?”
“Sure.” Unless the doctor had a sudden urge to calculate how many apples little Susie had after a hurricane came by at sixty miles an hour. He’d never been able to figure out the whole tossing words in a math problem.
“Do you know what day it is? Do you know where you are?”
“Sunday.” Forest tried to find the date in his memory, but his head began to throb, and he gave up. “And I’m in a hospital freezing my nuts off.”
“Who’s the governor of the state, do you know?” Wyatt left off feeling Forest’s ribs and went back to another pass of his flashlight over Forest’s face.
“I gave up keeping track after John Pepys died in that tragic gardening accident,” he drawled. “Unless the guy comes around and tells me I’ve won the lottery, it doesn’t make much of a difference to me.”