Taxi (Take It Off #11) Page 3

  But I had to lie here so he wouldn’t know I was awake. I needed to buy myself some time.

  Besides, I wasn’t speaking literally. It was figuratively.

  “She’s still out!” someone hissed from a distance away.

  It took everything inside me not to cower or flinch away from that voice.

  “How much goddamn gas did you give her!” he demanded.

  I listened intently, thankful they weren’t right beside me but wishing they were just a little closer so I could be certain to hear everything. Knowledge was power after all.

  “Not that much,” another voice replied. “She’s probably just faking.”

  Well, shit.

  Shit for two reasons:

  1.) I was hoping my kidnapper was stupid and wouldn’t think about me “faking” being asleep. I was hoping he’d just let me lie here as long as I pretended.

  And

  2.) There was more than one kidnapper. I’d just heard two different voices.

  “She’s not very big. You could have overdosed her. Then she’ll be useless to us!” the man snapped back.

  I was pretty sure the one doing most of the talking wasn’t the one from the taxi, but it sounded like he was in charge. Made sense (if kidnapping ever made sense). If I was going to be a dirty criminal, I’d get someone to do all my dirty work (i.e. the actual abducting) and sit back and call the shots. That way I could have some deniability.

  That meant the guy who was driving was probably a lackey.

  It gave me low self-esteem and pretty much kicked me when I was already so down to know I couldn’t even get away from a lackey.

  You were taken off guard. I reminded myself. They don’t have the element of surprise anymore.

  “I didn’t OD her,” the one who I was pretty sure was in the taxi muttered. “I’ll wake her up.”

  The sound of a ringing phone made my breath catch. I wanted to call out. I wanted to whimper. That telephone represented a lot to me in the moment. It was my salvation, a lifeline. My phone was long gone… but if I could get ahold of that one…

  “It’s them,” the boss said. “Deal with her.”

  He answered with a generic greeting, and then his voice faded away, like he was leaving. If it wasn’t for this stupid chain, I’d rush them both and take my chances in a physical battle for that phone.

  There was some brief movement, then silence. A few seconds later, I heard what sounded like the whisper of running water, but I couldn’t be sure. I took a chance, cracked one eye open, and peered around. I was alone again.

  Fear rendered me useless. I felt my limbs begin to shake. Not the timid little shakes either, the kind that felt violent, the kind that jerked your whole body. I fought the urge to meltdown right there.

  In my mind, I envisioned a line, maybe one drawn with chalk or paint. On one side was a dark, black well of endless terror. If stepped over there, I would fall deep into that hole of inky horror, and I might not find my way out. On the other side was a well of resolve. There was solid ground here, maybe a little cracked but still strong enough to stand on. Even though the line between the two was thin, even though it appeared tenuous at best, I still had to maintain my grip.

  My life literally depended on it.

  The scuffle of feet announced he was back. My fingernails bit into my palms as I worked for calm, working to relax my limbs against the cold, unforgiving floor, and tilted my head just slightly away from my captor, as if it had naturally fallen that way in sleep.

  I felt his presence more than heard it. Some people just gave off an ugly energy. Their vibes disrupted the very air. It was like that now, like there were ripples in the atmosphere around me because he was approaching.

  I just wanted him to go away.

  I wanted to go home.

  The sound of something metal clanging had me on high alert. Was he going to chain me up more? What was he doing?

  A heavy downpour of freezing-cold water assuaged me. I’d never jumped off a high-dive before. But I imagined the feeling you got when your skin slapped into a wall of water was a lot like what this felt like right now.

  It never occurred to me water could be violent, yet that was the only way I could describe this.

  The blast of freezing liquid, flung down on my prone form, stunned my body but at the same time put it in flight mode. My lungs seized the second I was hit. The water hit me as one solid form on first contact. The second it slammed into me, it shattered into a million tiny drops that felt like shards of ice cutting into my skin.

  I gasped and bolted up. The only thought my shocked body and mind could form was, Run!

  In a way, it was like waking from the worst dream you could ever have. Only I’d never had a dream this horrible before—like even my subconscious couldn’t have imagined this.

  My chest burned when I sucked in gulps of air and tried to catch my breath. Water soaked me, sliding over my skin, dragging at my hair and plastering my clothes against me. My fingers stung with cold. Having already been chilled, the frigid temp of the water only magnified the lack of heat.

  Gooseflesh erupted across my body, and I shuddered. I scrambled backward, dragging the chain around my wrist with me. It was heavy, like an anvil around my ankle, dragging me down into a pitch-black body of water just waiting to swallow me whole. I fought the weight, wanting as much space between me and the man as humanly possible.

  As I rushed back, I blinked furiously, trying to get the water out of my vision so I could see clearly. When it didn’t work, I swiped at my face and hair with my hands.

  It was him. The taxi driver.

  The mask he wore was gone, and he was facing me. It was the first full-on view I got of him since he took me. He was dressed in a pair of grey slacks and a white polo tucked in. His waist was soft and a little pudgy, his face round, and his eyes brown. The hair on his head was brown, sort of thin at the top and cut into a short, ordinary men’s style.

  He didn’t have a beard or any visible tattoos.

  If I saw him on the street, I’d not think twice about him. That’s what made him so incredibly scary. How many times had I passed by someone just as evil as him on the street and not known?

  How many “ordinary” depraved people like him walked around every single day and no one knew?

  My stomach heaved, and I fought the urge to vomit right there. I lurched back, up off my knees, and into a crouching position. The chained wrist was still heavy and dragged my arm down. I left it hanging, there was no point in wasting my strength trying to hold it up when it wasn’t absolutely necessary.

  My free arm wrapped around my middle, an automatic and protective gesture. Cold water dripped down my cheeks and over my lips. I parted them ever so slightly because the beckoning of water was just a little too strong. My God, I was thirsty. So much so I had a brief thought of pulling the drenched strands of my hair into my mouth to ring out the water.

  He dropped the metal bucket at his feet, the handle clanging against the side. “That’s what you get for faking.”

  I wasn’t admitting to anything. I stared at him warily, willing my brain to come up with something, anything I could do to get the hell out of here.

  “Nothing to say?” he asked, raking his eyes over me in a way that made me feel like I’d never be clean again. “You sure did plenty of yelling and screaming last night.”

  It’s morning? “Would anyone hear me if I screamed?” I asked. The husky, low tone of my voice alarmed me.

  He smirked. “Nope. But you’re welcome to try.”

  He was a liar and a criminal. I didn’t believe a word out of his mouth, but I knew screaming right now would be useless. That, too, seemed like a waste of energy.

  “What do you want with me?” I asked, moving until my back hit the pole I was chained to.

  “Lots of things,” he replied, looking down my body and then back up.

  I bit down on my lower lip so I wouldn’t cry. I’d never give this animal the satisfaction.
<
br />   Besides, if all he wanted was to rape me, he would have done it by now.

  He took a step forward, and my body locked up, ready to fight. But that’s as far as he got because the man I assumed was his boss appeared, tucking a cell into his pocket.

  “There’s been a new development,” he said.

  The taxi driver glanced over his shoulder. “What is it?”

  He gestured with his head to come away from me. With a lingering look that made my skin crawl, my captor swiveled around and walked across the large area toward his partner.

  The other man grabbed him by his elbow and towed him a little farther away. “…opportunity for more…”

  I strained to hear, not even pretending not to listen. They knew I was awake. I glanced down at my soaked clothing. Hell, they made sure I was awake. If they didn’t want me listening, they shouldn’t have kidnapped me.

  I only caught snippets of the hushed conversation, which was extremely frustrating.

  “What!” the taxi man exclaimed loudly. Then he started shaking his head insistently, like he didn’t like what the other man was telling him.

  That earned him a stealthy jab to his chest with a thick, stubby finger. His lips moved, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying. “…Tonight…” he finished before stepping back.

  “That wasn’t part of the deal,” Taxi Man argued.

  “The deal changed,” his boss intoned.

  “How much?”

  The boss glanced at me, and our eyes locked. He looked back and stepped closer and whispered something.

  Taxi Man’s eyes widened. “Fine.”

  “Let’s go.” The boss clapped him on the back, and they turned away from me. “We have plans to make.”

  “What about her?” Taxi Man motioned behind him at me.

  Was it so much to ask I just be forgotten about?

  “Leave her. She’s not our problem right now. She’s his.”

  Whose?

  Taxi Man glanced back at me before they turned out of sight. “See ya soon.”

  I shuddered.

  They left, the heavy scraping of metal against metal their departing sound. It looked like some huge sliding door at the front of the building. When they were gone, I collapsed back against the pole in relief.

  It seemed as though I was granted some kind of reprieve. Still, it didn’t feel like much of a gift—more of a prolonging of torture.

  Or maybe… just maybe it was an opportunity to figure out a way the hell out of here.

  3

  Derek

  It’s a damn good thing I liked my job.

  Because some days it really sucked donkey balls.

  Sometimes it was a fine balance between passion and exhaustion. Some days I forget why I did what I did. Some days I wondered what kept me going.

  I lost a patient today.

  A patient I’d been fighting with for a very long time. We felt like a team, this patient and I. It was hard not to get invested in patients—in people—when you saw them on such a regular basis. When she first started coming to see me, there was a lot of hope. Her case wasn’t that severe, and I thought we’d be able to beat it. I’d bought her a lot of time over the past several years.

  Unfortunately, her condition deteriorated faster than I’d wanted.

  We slowed it as much as humanly possible.

  That’s the thing about being human.

  Humanity has its limits. There’s only so much a man can do before it all rests on fate and a higher power.

  This wasn’t the first time I’d seen a patient die. It wasn’t going to be the last.

  I saved far more than I lost.

  But that didn’t matter to the ones I failed. To the ones I wasn’t able to save, my successes probably felt like a gross amount of luck I’d stumbled into.

  I couldn’t even blame them for that. Hell, sometimes I found myself wallowing in agreement. When I would walk into their room for rounds to ask invasive questions and ascertain how things were progressing, sometimes I would see the acceptance in their eyes.

  I would see the death. It had a filmy kind of existence in their stare, like a layer of fat that needed skimmed off a container of gravy.

  Sometimes I was haunted by that look. By the accusation accompanying it.

  You’re letting me die.

  Why can’t you do something?

  Help me.

  So yeah, sometimes I really fucking hated my career choice.

  I wasn’t equipped to play God, though I admit sometimes that’s what I felt like I was doing.

  A lot of people often said doctors had God complexes. Well, I wasn’t one of those doctors. To me, the life and death of a patient was something I wished I had no control over at all.

  It was days like this when I felt like I was dumb for wishing that.

  In truth, I did have some control over it. I had the ability to add years, decades even, to people’s time on this earth. I had the ability to drastically change the quality of a person’s life.

  Medicine wasn’t a miracle, though. It was a science. Not even an exact one. Maybe some would disagree, but I begged to differ. The thing about medicine—specifically the kind I practiced— was it depended a lot on the person. The body. The subject. Sure, there was a damn good baseline on how to treat illness and disease. There were surefire ways to prolong the life and use of organs in a person’s body.

  But nothing was absolute.

  The only thing in this entire world that I knew of as absolute was death.

  So while I could fight it as valiantly and aggressively as I could, sometimes death won. The hard truth was there just weren’t enough viable organs for people who needed them.

  Currently, in the United States, more than one hundred and twenty-three thousand people needed an organ transplant. Over one hundred thousand of those were people who needed kidneys.

  Though I did many different kind of transplants, I specialized in kidneys.

  To put those numbers into a little perspective, roughly only twenty-eight thousand people get the transplant they need to survive every year.

  That’s a lot of people who don’t get what they need.

  That’s a lot of death.

  Eighteen people die every day in this country, waiting for a transplant.

  Today, one of those eighteen people was mine.

  Watching a patient covered somberly by a sheet as the time of death is being called and knowing it could have been avoided if only they’d gotten what they needed was… difficult.

  I tried to remain detached as much as possible, but the thing that made a man a good doctor was his humanity. His empathy. Not being a robot. Not looking through a patient instead of at them.

  I was a good doctor.

  So days like today made me feel like a failure.

  I pushed into the doctors’ lounge as I rubbed a hand over the back of my neck. God, today had been fucking endless. I felt like I’d aged about ten years, and if I were a cat, I’d only have seven lives left.

  The room was empty and quiet, thank fuck.

  I needed a few minutes of breather time. Even the sound of my scrubs rubbing together annoyed me as I walked.

  I dropped onto the brown leather couch and slumped into the cushions, whipping off my stethoscope and dropping it beside me. The cool temperature of the leather pressed into the back of my neck when I rested my head against it.

  My eyes closed, and I went about the usual “talking to” I think most doctors probably had to give themselves in some form on a regular basis. This wasn’t your fault. There is only so much you can do. You aren’t a miracle worker. If there isn’t an organ available, there just isn’t one available.

  I knew all those statements were true.

  Knowing something and allowing yourself to believe it were two different things. It was hard to fight against the heavy weight of death. Especially after a helluva long day at the hospital.

  I’d earned the right to sit here in private and be sad for a
few minutes. I’d even earned the pissed-off frustration that was giving the sadness quite an ass kicking.

  Sometimes it was hard to accept being just a man.

  Sometimes it was hard to know I couldn’t save them all.

  I wanted to.

  I’m not sure how long I sat there with my eyes closed, but they opened when someone pushed into the lounge behind me.

  “Ah, Dr. Kelley,” spoke a familiar voice.

  “Hey, Reggie, how’s it going?”

  A tall blonde with her hair pinned neatly behind her head stopped beside the couch and looked down. “I heard.”

  News traveled fast in a hospital. It was like its own contained soap opera. I couldn’t even say I didn’t understand. I did. Doctors worked a lot of hours. We spent lots and lots of time at this hospital. Our co-workers saw more of us than our families. Gossip was kind of like the icing on a long-day cupcake.

  Not that I liked gossip.

  Unless it was when someone was whispering about a nurse and doctor getting it on in the janitor’s closet.

  Oh yeah, that shit happened. And it was entertaining as hell.

  Note: I’d never done it. I’d thought about it, though.

  I grunted. “Can’t save them all.” Pushing up from the couch, I grabbed the stethoscope and flung it around the back of my neck.

  “That’s true.” Reggie agreed, reaching for my wrist and encircling it lightly with her fingers. “Still sucks.”

  I half smiled and turned back. “Yeah.”

  I knew she understood. She’d been there.

  She released my wrist to step close and hug me. Her arms looped up around my neck as her body pressed close. She had a nice rack. I liked the way it kind of squished against my chest.

  I’m a guy. Did you really think I wouldn’t notice the way it felt when a woman’s breasts rubbed against me?

  Fine. She wasn’t rubbing them against me, but I felt them. Same difference.

  Reggie was tall, not much shorter than me, and I was six feet. She had an athletic body. It was obvious she took care of herself. She was single, like me, and I knew it was likely because of her job. Both of us were fairly young and dedicated to our careers, which didn’t leave much time for anything else.