Mike caught the arm, twisted until it cracked, and drove the man’s head into a metal door. He searched the groaning thug and pulled a handheld radio from his pocket.
“Tell your boss something for me,” Mike said into the radio, his voice flat and cold. “Dead men come home sometimes. And they don’t like what they find.”
He crushed the radio under his boot and vanished into the dark.
He couldn’t go back to the boarding house now. It was time to get to the capital with the evidence. But before he left, he had to see his wife with his own eyes.
The clinic outside town had long since stopped being a hospital. It was a warehouse for the living, wrapped in double fencing and barbed wire. In practice, it was a private prison run for the benefit of the mob.
A frontal assault would have been suicide. So Mike studied the staff routine. Every night at midnight, one orderly stepped outside near the trash bins for a cigarette.
At 12:15, he opened the service gate for kitchen waste pickup. That gave Mike a window of about thirty seconds. He lay still in the shadow of an old tree, his breathing steady.
In the distance came the click of a lighter and the faint glow of a cigarette. Then the rusty squeal of the gate.
Mike moved. He slipped past while the orderly turned to spit. A quick roll, and he was inside the laundry block.
The place smelled of sour linens and harsh chemicals. He moved through the service corridors using the floor plan he had photographed in the doctor’s office. Soon he reached the special ward where the “difficult” patients were kept.
The nurse at the station was asleep over an open logbook. Mike passed her without a sound.
The door to the isolation block was heavy, with a tiny viewing slot. Blue bulbs burned dimly in the hallway, and the air was thick with medication. No one screamed here. Patients only rasped and shifted in drugged silence.
Room Four was at the far end. The lock gave way in five seconds. Mike stepped inside and pulled the door nearly shut behind him.
Ellen sat motionless on a narrow bed, her back against a scuffed wall. She wore an oversized gray gown, and her once-thick hair had been cut short and rough. Her eyes were open, but there was no life in them.
Her pupils were blown wide from the drugs. “Ellen,” he whispered, kneeling in front of her.
She didn’t react.
“Quiet,” she murmured through dry, cracked lips. “The bad doctors will come back. They keep asking about my Mike. They said he died in the mountains.”
Mike took her cold, weightless hands in his. A tremor went through him at the sight of what had been done to her. Rage rose so hard inside him he nearly lost control…
