In the Heart of the Wind Book 1 in the WindTorn Trilogy (17 page)

“Are you listening, James?” he finally asked.

He felt the man on the bed trying to withdraw, to escape. He looked down as his son’s fingers dug into the sheet, snatching it up from the mattress to twist it into his hand.

Liam Tremayne smiled.

“I see you are.” He leaned forward in the chair. “How do you feel, James?”

James knew his father hadn’t asked the question of his physical state. His father didn’t care if he was in pain. If anything, Liam Tremayne would relish that knowledge. The old bastard wanted to know his mental condition, his state of mind.

How did the man expect him to feel? James wondered. He had been kidnapped, taken from the only love and warmth he had ever known, brought here against his will, had his face altered to only God knew what, and been kept strapped helplessly to a bed, tubes controlling his body. Was he supposed to feel good about that?

“Do you remember me once telling you I’d bring you down to a manageable level, James?” his father asked. “And do you remember me saying that when I did, it would be down hard enough to break you?”

He remembered. And he remembered the fist that had plowed into his young face when the words had been flung at him. He remembered feeling so totally alone, so adrift, cast off from his family—an alien whose very existence his family despised.

“I promised Griffin Connors I’d take care of the problem you were causing him in Pensacola. Do you think I handled the problem efficiently, James?” Liam watched as the bandaged face turned slowly toward his voice, the hands still on the twisting sheets. “Yes,” he confirmed the fear staring blindly from the bandages. “It was me, James. I’m the one who ordered those men to snatch you.”

Not once, not ever, had James thought his father loved him. Just the opposite, he thought with bitter irony. His father hated him. Had always known that. A father doesn’t abuse his child and care what happens to the child. James had come to rely on that hate, on the absence of any feeling on his father’s part. But the knowledge it had been his own flesh and blood who had ordered the torture that had almost driven him mad was not to be borne. A keening sound of pure grief came from James Tremayne’s soul.

“Are you surprised?” his father sneered, leaning so close to him he could almost feel the man’s breath against his bandaged flesh. “I had every intention of making you regret ever having rebelled against me, James.” There was a vicious smirk in the old man’s voice as he put his lips to James’ ear. “You won’t escape this time, James.”

He lowered his voice to a low, insidious whisper. “There won’t be anyone who will help you. But should you try to run away again, I promise you this. I will cripple you, James. I’ll have Patrick insert his scalpel in just the right place, and have him sever your spinal cord. Do you understand me?”

A primal terror, sure and swift, settled in James’ heart and there was no doubt in his mind that his father meant exactly what he said. Outside of killing him, and he didn’t think his father would order that no matter what he did, crippling him would serve the depraved need Liam Tremayne seemed to have to hurt him. And it would insure he never escaped again. He would become what his father had also wanted—helpless.

“Do you understand me, James?” Liam repeated in that strange, sinister whisper. “Have I explained it to you in terms even a simpleton like yourself can understand?”

Jamie felt tears of humiliation forming in his eyes. What was there to understand? He was trapped—a prisoner. There would be no running away from his family now. Where was there to go? By now, Annie must know of his past. If she didn’t, she would. His bridges had all been burned for him and there was no crossing back over the river that had separated him from his past and the future he had hoped to build.

“I’m waiting, James,” his father said.

When Jamie still did not acknowledge the question, he felt his fingers grabbed, pulled up from the sheet, twisted back toward his wrist with cruel, vicious strength. He groaned, knowing Liam Tremayne would break his wrist if he did not answer.

Liam watched his son frantically nod, but he kept the pressure on the fingers in his hand, holding it tightly in his own, bending the wrist back almost to the point of breaking it, then letting it go and patting his son’s hand as he pressed it to the sheet.

“Good,” Liam said in an encouraging voice. He sat back in his chair, smiling as James tried to flex his wrist. “Good,” he said again. “It’s good to see we agree on something for a change.”

There was a long, horrible silence. James could hear the man beside him breathing, could feel his eyes crawling over him. He had never felt so helpless in his entire life. Nor had he ever known this terror as he waited for his father to bring up the subject he knew would forever seal his fate.

If he had been capable of speech, he would have been begging, and he understood that would eventually to be required of him. If words could have come from his injured vocal cords, he would have sought the reassurance that his good conduct would insure. He would have swallowed what pride he had left and put the past behind him, looking, if not to the future, at least to facing it with some semblance of masculine honor intact.

“As to the matter in Iowa...”

James tensed.

“Kristen Marie does not want the whore eliminated. I, on the other hand, feel she should be—”

“Please!”
The force of the word tore at his throat and he tasted blood. He gagged, pain rocketing through his whole face, especially his nose. His second plea was not as strained, not as loud, but it hurt just the same. “Please.”

“You don’t want me to have her killed?”

“Please.” It was a mere whisper, a pleading so pitiful it even managed to wipe the smirk from Liam’s face. He stared at his son. “Papa, please.”

The lips had moved. Liam had understood the words, but no sound had come forth. He watched his son’s lips trembling and knew he had, at last, achieved his goal. He had broken the young man’s will. He had found the tool with which to do it.

“All right, James,” he said. “As long as you do as you’re told and cause no problems, she’ll be safe. So long as you understand I can send Johnny O. after her anytime you
don’t
do as you’re told.” He saw his son’s chest heave with emotion. “I don’t think you’d want Johnny O. to go after her, would you?”

Again the frantic shake of his son’s head brought a smile to Liam’s face. “Well, then, we’ll leave her alone and won’t discuss this sorry chapter in your life again, will we?” He nodded as his son slowly shook his head in denial.

“Danny?” Liam called out and the door opened immediately.

“Yes, sir?”

“Find that nurse and have her bring him the shot Lassiter ordered. You see, James Gabriel? I’m not such a terrible person. I’m going to let you have the dreams that’ll wipe out all your pain and suffering. I’m going to allow you to drift off into never-never land where I intend you stay.”

James felt the touch of his father’s hand on the side of his face and gasped as the bruised flesh rebelled at the contact.

“You’re so unhappy, aren’t you, James?” his father cooed to him in a commiserating voice. “You’re so profoundly miserable I almost feel sorry for you. You had a taste of happiness, but like a starving man you devoured it, never dreaming the banquet wouldn’t last. And now that it’s gone, you’re suffering. Your hunger for what you will never be allowed to have again is making you waste away.”

His hand on his son’s face pressed cruelly. “But don’t worry, James. I intend to see that your hunger doesn’t go unsatisfied.”

Liam looked around as Daniel O’Callahan brought the nurse into the room. He looked at the syringe in her hand. “Is that the injection Dr. Lassiter prepared himself?”

Angela Palmer nodded.

“Give it to me.”

Her eyes grew wide. “But...”

“Give...it...to...me,” Liam Tremayne ordered, his eyes steady on the nurse’s pale face. He held out his hand. The nurse handed over the shot. “You may leave,” he told her as he walked around to the other side of the bed.

Angela took one last look at her patient and hurried from the room. What was it to her if the man’s father wanted to give him the sedative? It was against regulations, but around the clinic, regulations were broken every day. Somehow, she didn’t think Dr. Lassiter would care. She didn’t think anyone at the clinic would care.

Liam held up the syringe, thumped the air bubbles to the top, pushed some of the liquid through the needle, then laid the syringe on the bedside table. He held out his hand to Daniel O’Callahan and was given a strip of rubber tubing.

“I wanted to be the one to give you the first injection, James,” Liam told his son. He smiled at the whimper that came from the bed. He ran the tubing under James’ forearm, tugged it above his elbow and tied it tightly in place. He picked up his son’s arm as much as the restraints would allow and began to tap his fingers smartly on the underside of James’ elbow.

A vein popped up on James Tremayne’s arm. Liam picked up the syringe and thrust the needle into the distended vein.

Jamie felt liquid fire traveling through his veins, felt the lethargy setting in, and only vaguely wondered what he had been injected with. His mind began to shut down almost simultaneously as the drug sped throughout his brain and spinal column. The room tilted, his father’s voice seemed to be coming to him from the coldest regions of space.

“And now you know what life is going to be like from here on, don’t you, James?” his father asked. “You’re going to spend the rest of what little time you have left in a stupor.”

Mark Sadler’s lunch
was growing cold as he listened to the agent from Florida telling him how cold the trail had become on James Gabriel Tremayne.

“We’ve got tails on the entire Tremayne family, but other than that one trip they all made to New Orleans for the Grand Opening of Patrick Tremayne’s clinic, they’ve stayed in their neck of the woods.”

“And you thoroughly checked out the clinic in New Orleans?” Sadler asked, looking at the congealed mass that had been mashed potatoes and gravy.

“We even put a man in there. No one’s seen Gabe James or anyone who even remotely looked like him come through the clinic.”

“What about the clinics in Louisiana? Did you check them out?” Sadler picked up his fork and moved one section of roast beef to the opposite side of his plate.

“All nine of them,” came the somewhat peevish reply. “I’ll stake my pension on Tremayne not being anywhere in Louisiana.”

Sadler sighed. He shoved his plate away. “So what now? Are there taps on the Tremaynes’ phones down there?”

There was a slight pause, then the Florida agent’s voice came across the line with a hard, uncompromising staccato snap. “Agent Sadler, we are doing everything according to Bureau guidelines. If we can find Tremayne, we will.”

“Sorry,” Mark Sadler drawled. “It’s just that it’s been three weeks since he disappeared and the trail is getting colder by the day.”

“Yeah, well, we’ll keep in touch.” The agent in Tallahassee hung up, the action leaving no doubt in Sadler’s mind that the man in Florida wasn’t happy.

He hadn’t meant to tick the guy off. Nerves were fraying in this case, especially the civilians who waited to hear something from him. What did you tell people who were desperate to hear good news and all you had to give them was you hadn’t found their friend’s body yet?

“A tough one, huh, Dad?”

Mark Sadler glanced up at his son. A rare smile stretched over the FBI agent’s face. “A really tough one, Cary.”

The seventeen-year-old hoisted his school books closer up his hip. “Do you think you’ll ever find Mr. Tremayne?”

Sadler shook his head. “I don’t know, son. The longer it takes, the harder it becomes.”

“I hope you find him, Dad,” Cary said, his young face earnest.

“Me, too, Cary.”

Sitting alone at the dinner table, Mark Sadler couldn’t help but think they had missed something. His sixth sense told him there was something just beneath the surface, tugging gently at his mind, that would solve the matter of how a man whose face had been plastered all over the South could just simply disappear off the face of the earth.

“Where are you, Gabe?” Sadler asked as he stared out his dining room window at the bright gleam of snow.

“I told Sadler
just what we agreed upon, Mr. Tremayne.”

“Good.” As he spoke to one of his men on the phone, Andrew signed a paper his secretary slid onto his desk. “Anything else to report?”

“No, sir. You’re already aware your brother is flying to New Orleans tonight. I’ll make sure one of my men tags along for appearance’s sake.”

Andrew handed the paper to his secretary then leaned back in his chair. “When you fill out your report, make sure there’s no mention of Patrick going to Dr. Lassiter’s.”

“Of course not, sir. It’ll be handled in the usual way.”

“And you’ll find your usual payment in the usual place,” Andrew sneered before hanging up.

Cops were all alike, Andrew thought as he swiveled around to stare out the window. If you kept them in line, you could control the world.