Page 57 of Every Which Way

Bruce stepped inside. She heard the exclamation from his lips, almost silent but not quite.

She stepped around him, and he didn’t move. “What…” Her words disappeared as she took in the room.

A cell, the walls lined with stone that had been carved into over the years. Scratches and markings made by people over the better part of a century. In the center was a hospital bed with a patient hooked up to machines on both sides. IV tubes on both arms, and another in his neck. If it was a man—she found it difficult to tell either way.

Bruce let out a curse. “There isn’t much left.”

Her phone chirped from the walkie-talkie app. “Nothing on the second floor. Going to the first now.”

Bruce slid his phone out. “Copy that.”

Kenna just stared at the patient, her mind not quite able to process what she was seeing. The head seemed intact, but he had a bandage over his eyes. The chest had been cut open, splayed out, and instead of lungs, a machine beside the bed pumped up and down, delivering oxygen to his body. “Is there a heart?”

“Don’t throw up. I’ll be disappointed.” Bruce strode to the far side of the bed and looked into the open chest cavity. “Heart is still here. Not sure it should be exposed to the air, but what do I know? Maybe they didn’t need one of those. Though, apparently, they needed the lungs, his liver, and one of his kidneys.”

Kenna let out a breath. “I don’t want to know if he has eyes under those bandages.”

“Or a brain left in his head.” Bruce straightened, shaking his head. “He won’t survive either way. Being kept alive artificially like this, the machines are maintaining basic functions. Keeping his heart pumping.”

Kenna had a lot of questions. “I don’t know where to start.”

“How about ID?” Bruce pulled out his phone and took a photo of the man’s face. Then a photo of the fingertips on his hand.

“You can get a print?”

“I can do a lot of things,” he said.

“I already knew that.” They had to keep Maizie out of here. She didn’t need to see this. “What are we going to?—”

Before she even finished, Bruce reached over and literally pulled the plug out of the wall. Then another plug, and another.

“You’re gonna?—”

Bruce stepped away from the wall and walked past the now-dying man.

“He’s going to die! You killed him!”

Bruce grabbed her arm and tugged her toward the door. “He’s already dead. He’s gone, and there’s nothing you can do.”

Kenna sputtered, tripping along with him. Being dragged out. “We can’t just leave him here!”

“That’s why you hired me. To do the hard things.” Bruce wasn’t dragging her exactly, but he also wasn’t giving her the chance to do anything but go with him. “They left him to prove a point. That there’s nothing you can do to stop them. But they also left him to slow you down—or to stopyou.”

He nudged her ahead of him up the stairs and said, “Everyone out.”

She figured that wasn’t only to her when it echoed from her phone. “Why do we need to?—”

“We triggered something, obviously. It’s what I would’ve done.”

How could he possibly know… “Bruce?—”

“Time to run.”

Kenna didn’t wait around to find out if he was right or wrong. She pounded up the stairs, taking them two at a time.

When they were in the ground floor hallway, Stairns appeared in the lobby. “Come on.”

She raced over to him. “Is this place going to blow or something?”

---