Fugue State (28 page)

With some difficulty, she managed to put her fingers on the source of the pain in her throat. She traced the mid portion of her neck with her right index and middle fingers. She came across a sharp jutting bone in the middle of her neck. Another shockwave of pain ran through her.
Another broken bone — my hyoid bone
.
That son-of-a-bitch broke my hyoid bone trying to strangle me
.

During her first year of radiology training, Alexa had encountered a case of a hyoid bone fracture on a CT of the cervical spine. The physician ordering the study had asked her about the clinical relevance of a hyoid bone fracture, and she informed him that hyoid bone fractures are infrequently seen motor vehicle accidents, blunt trauma to the neck, and strangulation attempts. The associated soft tissue swelling could lead to airway constriction and asphyxia.

Alexa concentrated hard on her breathing. She pushed each breath in and out of the small airway as if breathing through a straw.
Asphyxia.
The process was labor intensive. She wasn’t sure how much longer she could keep it up. Her airway was too swollen to provide adequate oxygenation.

Mike shook Alexa’s shoulder. The movement made her broken clavicle throb. “Poppy. Open your eyes. I need to see your eyes. You’re not out of the woods yet.”

Asphyxia.
Alexa opened her eyes.
I can’t breathe!
She reached a panicked arm toward Mike. Her hand flailed about.

“Shit!” He yelled as her world turned dark once more.

Fuck you, Ivan Verden. I hope you rot in Hell. . . .
Her thoughts blurred, and her world fell silent.

CHAPTER 34

D
uring the prolonged silence, she didn’t open her eyes. She didn’t talk. She didn’t dream. She didn’t breathe. Mike was at her bedside when she awoke. Her neurons began firing all at once; the sensation was jarring.
I’m supposed to be dead.
She couldn’t remember the details of the preceding events. She looked around with hesitation. She saw Mike’s face, but it took a long, thorough gaze before she found his features familiar. She didn’t recognize anything else.

A current of air moved in and out of an orifice in the center of her throat, startling her. She reached up to investigate the phenomenon. One of her fingers passed into the orifice, shocking her to the core. Alexa’s bottom lip quivered spasmodically, and her eyes instantly filled with tears.

Mike grabbed her shaking hand and forced it down to the bed. “None of that, now. You hear me?” His voice was authoritative and patriarchal.

She frowned at his tone. She didn’t allow the pools of saltwater to roll down her cheeks. He watched her fight back the tears, and slowly her vision cleared.

He continued. “You stopped breathing on me. I had no choice but to take you here.”

Here
meant the hospital.

“After a couple of failed intubation attempts, a surgeon cut that hole in your neck and put a tube down your throat to help you breathe. A ventilator kept you alive the last two days. I came by a few times. You just mumbled in you sleep, mostly. They pulled that tube about an hour ago, once you could breathe on your own again.” He released her hand.

“Ivan beat you up pretty bad — worse than I thought. But you got the best of him.” He winked and grinned down at her.

Ivan.
She remembered now. She remembered struggling to breathe in the van. She remembered the empty body bag in the back of the vehicle.
Empty body bag
— Alexa perseverated on the words.
Ivan was dead, but the bag was empty.
A thought suddenly occurred to her:
The bag wasn’t meant for Ivan. It was meant for me!

“You’ve been here two days, Alexa,” he murmured. “Can you talk?”

She was afraid to speak. She couldn’t get used to the feeling of her breath moving in and out of the hole in her neck. She ignored his question and looked down at her left clavicle.
Still deformed
.
Wow. I’m unconscious for two days, and they can’t even fix my deformed collarbone?
She rolled her eyes to herself.

“I need to hear you try to talk. Doc said your voice should be okay. You broke some little bone in your neck, but he put a pin in it. Can you try to talk?”

No. Ivan broke a bone in my neck — my hyoid bone. He broke my hyoid bone.
Her eyes made another exaggerated roll. The situation irritated her. She sighed deeply, but the air coming out the tracheostomy in her neck made an even more irritating whistling sound as it passed.
Wow. This is sexy. I have a deformed shoulder and a hole in my throat.

With those thoughts of vanity, Alexa realized she still cared greatly for her own well-being. She cared for her appearance and her safety.
What the fuck was I thinking by getting myself into this mess?

“Poppy, please say something. . . .”

Alexa sighed again.
Damn that whistling.
She scolded herself for forgetting so quickly. She looked up at Mike and opened her mouth with hesitation. “Mi-ke.” Her voice cracked, and didn’t sound like her own. The words resonated low in her throat rather than her nasopharynx, and exited both her mouth and the tracheostomy. The sensation was even more peculiar than merely breathing through the tracheostomy. Beyond that, it was painful; not excruciatingly painful, but there was a dull soreness that accompanied her attempt.

“All right, that’s more like it.” He grinned.

She forced a meager smile. “Wh-er-e’s Iv-a-n?” She tried to make the words come out her mouth only, but it was useless trying to stop the air from flowing out of her neck. This time the “s” sound made little droplets of saliva spray out of the tracheostomy hole. She stared at Mike, willing him to answer her and ignore her spitting.

He looked puzzled by her question. “He’s dead,” he whispered.

She waited to hear more. But it was all he said. “His b-o-dy?” she asked. It hurt to get the words out, but she needed to know where they put him.

Mike dropped his voice even lower and neared her ear. “We needed to leave Ivan in the hostel. He has to be found dead in his room. I know that might not make a lot of sense to you, but it’s the message we needed to make. We needed to kill him quietly, remember, without a signature, and let him be found by his cohorts. We took pictures of his body, sent them to our allies. His body may not be found for a couple of days. It’s probably better that way.” His focus turned to a window in the corner of the room.

Alexa nodded to herself.
The body bag was indeed for me
.
They never planned on moving Ivan’s body from the hostel.
She wanted to sigh, but she stopped herself this time.

His face turned back to her. “You remember it all?”

The events flashed through her head, and she nodded.
Yes.
She remembered the second night she almost let a man kill her, and she remembered struggling to push the plunger on the syringe.
Yes. I did push the plunger, and that syringe saved my life
. For a moment, she felt proud of herself. Her plan B succeeded when their plan failed.

As if reading her mind, Mike scratched his head and asked, “Can you tell me how you killed him? Looks like you stabbed him. I grabbed a syringe from the floor. I had the lab run it for tests. They didn’t find any poison.”

She took pleasure in his confusion. Bursting with pride at this point, she muttered, “Air em-bol-ism.”

His forehead became a maze of wrinkles, resulting in an even more dumbfounded expression. She swallowed hard, saliva gurgling out of her tracheostomy site. She tried again, this time covering the hole with her hand. “I in-ject-ed air in-to the blood to his br-ain.”

“That’s what killed him?”

She nodded. “Slow-ly,” she stammered. She imagined what Ivan was doing to her as he was dying. She pictured his arms wrapped around her neck, her bones breaking under the pressure.
He could have broken my neck. I could be paralyzed. Or I could be in that body bag.

“Gotcha. Hell, whatever works. I could have sworn you poisoned the bastard.” Mike turned to her accusingly. “You know, that wasn’t part of the plan.” He raised an eyebrow.

“I kno-w,” she murmured. She didn’t feel up to a lecture from him right now. “I want to wa-lk.” Her body needed to move. She tried to sit up. Moving felt exhausting and liberating all at once. She felt the catheter tubing that led to her bladder shuffle against her legs, and she peered at the compression devices attached to her legs to prevent blood clots. Mike reached over to help her just as a nurse walked into the room. She helped Alexa sit up.

“I best let you be now,” Mike said. “I’ll swing by tomorrow and check in on you.”

Alexa nodded as the nurse helped her to her feet. Disoriented, Alexa shuffle-stepped down the hall like the old lady from the apothecary shop. Her gait improved on the return to her room, and at the end of the walk, the nurse offered to remove the urinary catheter.
A step toward freedom.

An hour later, the surgeon who had performed the emergent tracheostomy dropped by to inspect her airway. The doctor was an older American gentleman. “Glad to see you’re awake. We should be able to close this up in a day or two.”

Her head bounced up and down excitedly. “To-mo-rrow,” she stammered.

He narrowed his eyes in contemplation. “I suppose we can arrange, that Miss.” She pointed to the clavicle. “That one will have to wait for another day; I’m afraid I can’t intubate you until your throat is fully healed.”

She sensed judgment in his narrowed glance. Realizing this man must have seen her in her dominatrix outfit, he probably thought she was a hooker.
Oh no! Everyone at the hospital probably thinks I’m a prostitute, half-strangled by my pimp.
It was a rerun of the bouncer from the club the night Jamar died. The nurse probably felt sorry for her. She imagined how embarrassed Mike must have felt visiting.

After a couple more days of recovery, Alexa could walk, talk, and eat without assistance. Her clavicle remained deformed, and it still hurt to talk and swallow. On the morning of her fifth hospital day, the nurse pulled her IV, and she was discharged by noon. Mike met her at the hospital with a bouquet of flowers — poppy flowers.
How fitting.

He drove her to an upscale hotel in Paris, where she settled in for the night. Her stuff was already inside the extensive suite when she arrived. She put the poppy bouquet on a side table and sprawled out on the sofa in the living area. She had a prescription for pain pills and an antibiotic to prevent infection in her neck. She took the antibiotic and ripped the pain pill script into pieces.

She spent her first evening out of the hospital in a daze, which continued into the next morning. She felt lost. She forgot to eat, and her sleep was inconsistent throughout the night. She needed direction, but she wasn’t sure where she would find it.

The ring of the Crackerjack phone interrupted her prolonged meditation. She had forgotten about it altogether, and the sound surprised her. She tried ignoring its cruel ring, but the caller was persistent, and Alexa was forced to locate it if she ever wanted the ringing to stop.

She found it plugged into a charger perched on the bedroom nightstand. She stared at it with hesitation, knowing it was either Charles or Mike. She groaned internally and answered the phone.

“Elizabeth?”

Damn.
She shuddered. “Hello, Charles.” Her voice quivered. Her throat still ached.

“I’m glad to hear you’re recuperating.” His voice was unrightfully cheery.

“I should congratulate you on your work with Ivan. Not what I expected, but whatever works, Miss Fuguay.”

His determination to use her alias made her skin crawl. She lost her patience with him. “Do you need something, Charles, or is this your futile attempt to cheer me up?”

“Do you need cheering, Miss Fuguay?”

What an antagonizing tone!

Charles continued without waiting for a response. “I need to meet with you. We need to discuss your future and new possibilities for you.”

Alexa’s throat itched, a side effect of healing. She needed to clear her throat to speak comfortably, but she couldn’t do that without pain. She forced a few short, dry coughs.

“When do you plan to meet, Charles?”

“This evening. I’ll send a car for you. It will be there at six. I’ll see you then.”

He hung up without waiting for her reply. Her shoulders slumped. She was expected to attend; the invitation wasn’t optional. A glance at the clock on the wall told her she had three hours of freedom until the fated meeting. She decided to drag her carcass off the couch and attempt a run.

CHAPTER 35

T
he run didn’t last long. Her body gave out after a paltry half mile. The tightness in her throat made tedious work trying to suck air in and out. She settled for a walk in the fashion district. Paris had lost a degree of its luster. Yet, her hotel was in one of the more luxurious neighborhoods, and each esteemed step was surrounded by grandeur. The buildings were glorious, the architecture and history lining the street surreal. Alexa slowly inhaled the beautiful scenery; it was intoxicating. She wandered past designer clothing boutiques. Exquisite leather handbags and pristine wool jackets filled the windows.
Perfect little pieces of art.
Her fingers traced the outline of a jacket she admired.
Why can’t my hands create such things?

She became distracted by a glimpse of her own reflection in the store window. The juxtaposition of the beautiful accessories hanging in the storefront and her own dreadful reflection disturbed her. She frowned at the sight. Her eyes fell to her hands on the glass.
Instruments of death.
She shuddered without understanding why. Regret? Remorse?

Her ability to discern right from wrong was fading. Every act she had performed within the past year seemed muddled in a sea of gray somewhere on a spectrum in between right and wrong. She evaluated her actions, her decisions, every move, and found herself in a quandary. She wrung her hands, tangling her fingers in knots.
The things I’ve done. Why?
She couldn’t remember. Did she ever really know? How could she move forward if she wasn’t sure she’d chosen correctly in the past?