Monk Addison slept so deeply that there weren’t even dreams down there.
He was asleep when they wheeled him to the room and only vaguely aware when orderlies helped him into the bed. He immediately dropped back down into that lightless, soundless place where even his ghosts couldn’t follow. He had not been aware when Patty left.
Nor was he aware that a man in a wheelchair sat watching him.
“You are one strange cat,” said Malcolm Crow. He was hooked up to an IV stand and had a bottle of Yoo-hoo resting on his thigh. A gift from Val. There was a cooler with more of them, and if anyone at the hospital had an issue with it, the hospital administrator was Val’s best friend. So they could go piss up a rope.
Crow had an aluminum frame around his shattered nose and his face was already beginning to look like a tropical sunset. And it hurt. A lot.
Karen, the shift nurse, came in and checked the readout on machines but did not try to wake Monk. She nodded to Crow, smiled, and left without saying a word. Crow wasn’t sure why Monk had come here, but it felt right. Monk was strange, sure, but he was a good man, and Crow felt a kinship with him.
But the meds in his own system began to wear on him and he was dozing when another nurse came in. Not Karen. This one looked like a nursing assistant who might still be in school. Slim, pretty, but with zero personality.
“He’s asleep,” said Crow. “If you don’t mind, can you get an orderly to help me back to my room?”
The nurse didn’t answer. She bent over the side of Monk’s bed and stared down at the sleeping man’s face, her hands in the pockets of her scrubs. Crow frowned because she wasn’t looking at the chart or the machines. Then he saw it.
The fly.
It was crawling on the back of her neck.
No. Crawling inside her skin.
“No!” cried Crow as she pulled her hand from her pocket. He saw light glint on the blade of an oyster knife and lunged for her.
One second too late.