The Specter (25 page)

Chapter 28

Aaron woke to a bright light. He kept his eyes closed, but the light invaded his eyelids. He tried to turn his head, but was rewarded with shouting.

Numerous people surrounded him. He could feel it. He could also feel pain.

“… more anesthetic, get me more anesthetic …” a man’s voice shouted from far away.

Aaron faded, losing the light, losing the sounds of the people.

He faded.

Then he was gone.

Movement close. Aaron detected someone close.

Defense mechanisms forced his eyes open fast. He slammed them shut as the light stung.

He moaned. He couldn’t move. Every slight adjustment caused pain.

Someone spoke, but he hadn’t paid attention. He listened again.

“How are you feeling?”

Aaron tried to open his eyes to a slit. The room came into focus slowly.

A hospital room. Dark blue walls. Concrete. Not modern. Tubes and wires hung over his head.

A man in a lab coat appeared.

“How are you feeling?”

Aaron tried to answer, but his throat was parched. The man in the lab coat disappeared. He heard water running or being poured. The man came back into view, a glass of water in his hands, a straw bent toward Aaron’s mouth.

“Here, try some of this …”

Aaron opened his cracked lips and winced.

How long have I been out?

He sipped the water and almost choked. After getting the first few sips down, it became easier.

The man didn’t answer him. He must’ve said it in his head.

“How long …” he stopped. His voice was huskier, darker. He didn’t recognize it.

“Take it easy.” The man placed the water out of sight. “We have plenty of time to talk. You’ve been beat up pretty bad, but you’re on the mend now.” He smiled. “You’re a fighter, you know that?”

“Where … am I?”

“In a hospital in Nafplio, Greece.”

A beeping increased from somewhere in the room as his heart rate sped up.

“Stay calm. It’s all okay now. There’s no threat here.”

The beeping leveled after a moment and slowed again.

Aaron’s eyes adjusted to the light. He tried to take more of the room in but his chest was secured to the bed in some way. None of his limbs responded except for his right leg which wasn’t tied down.

“What happened?”

“You’re going to be all right, but it’ll take time. Your hands will heal well. We fixed both breaks in the wrists and wired and casted them. In a few months, they’ll be back to 99 percent. Your left foot has also been repaired and casted, but I don’t see you walking on it for a few months.”

The doctor paused, a grim expression crossing his face.

“What?” Aaron asked.

“It wasn’t the breaks that concerned me. It was the two gunshot wounds.”

Aaron blinked slow and deep, tired of talking already.

The doctor continued. “One of the bullets entered through your pectoral muscle, passed through your rib cage, missed everything important and exited out your back, south of your shoulder blade. The exit wound took some patching, but you won’t be pitching any baseball games for a year at least.”

Aaron closed his eyes. He’d never had wounds so extensive before. The worst were a few broken fingers in competitions years ago when he was still learning the martial arts, but that was it.

“The other bullet was just under your ribcage. The problem with that one is it grazed your stomach and ruptured your spleen. The spleen helps rid your body of bacterial infections. We’re monitoring every few hours.” The doctor stopped and grabbed a clipboard from somewhere at the end of the bed. “Other than that, you’re a specimen of perfect health,” he announced.

Aaron opened and closed his heavy eyelids. Sleep called him. He didn’t have the energy to ask any more questions even though he wanted to know what happened on Palamidi, and what happened to Clive Baron. Were the police looking for Aaron, showing up in a foreign hospital without a passport, beaten up, broken and shot?

The doctor spoke as Aaron faded in and out.

“Your friends are here. They just went out for lunch. I’ll have them come by and tell you what they know …”

Friends? What friends? The police? Clive’s men?

Aaron fought sleep. He needed to know who his friends were. But there was nothing he could do. Sleep enveloped him, wrapped his wounded body in a tight blanket and drifted him off to nothingness for ten more hours.

Alex’s voice. Then Benjamin’s and finally Daniel’s. They were talking money. Who would pay back who and when.

Aaron came back to consciousness listening to them debate the point.

“I’ll pay it,” Aaron said. “Just be quiet …”

He opened his eyes, squinted until his three friends came into focus. “Water?”

“Here, drink this,” Daniel said.

After he got some moisture in his throat again, the doctor visited for a brief moment, asked a few routine questions, and then left the four of them to talk.

Aaron adjusted the bed as high as it would go without causing too much pain.

“Why were you arguing … about money?” Aaron asked.

Benjamin glanced at his friends and gave Aaron a sheepish grin. “Alex lent us the money to fly here. We were talking about how to pay it back.”

“Why are you guys … here?” Aaron asked, surprised at how raspy his voice was. “How did you know?”

“I’ll tell you.” Daniel cleared his throat and crossed his legs like he was getting settled to make a speech. “It all started at the hotel. When you told me to research Clive Baron, I found out a lot of stuff, most of it bad. When these guys showed up, we talked, but we couldn’t agree on anything.” He leaned forward and gestured with his hands. “You have to understand, we were scared. Your sister had been murdered, and you were going up against a billionaire. We thought that if we said we wouldn’t help, you would go to the police and seek protection or something.” He looked at the brothers for support and then back at Aaron. “We didn’t think you’d continue alone.” He paused and swallowed hard, fidgeting with the cuff of his pant leg.

Aaron waited for him to continue.

“We decided at the last minute that we had to help. Alex and I stuck our heads out the window of the hotel to yell at you to come back to the room. As you got to your car we saw some guy jump up and club you over the head and then shove you into your own car. We yelled at him, but he got in your car and drove off. As we tried to leave the room, a man with a large bandage over one eye was standing in the hall with a gun aimed at us.”

Daniel high-fived Alex.

“What was that for?” Aaron asked.

“Alex snuck around me and snapped the guy’s wrist in half while shoving the barrel of the gun up. It happened so fast even I didn’t see Alex coming.”

Aaron smiled. It was his first smile in days.

“Anyway,” Daniel continued, “we figured this bandaged guy would know something about where the other guy was taking you. It didn’t take too much persuasion—although he ended up with seven broken fingers before he told us all the details—and then we drove across to Toronto’s main airport and bought tickets for the next flight to Athens. When we landed in Greece, we took a bus to Nafplio the same day. It was the day they started your interrogation. Boy, were we happy we weren’t late for the party.”

“What happened to the bandaged guy?” Aaron asked, remembering something from Clive’s cell phone call in the prison room.

“We gave him an option. We would break all his toes so he couldn’t run when the police came to the hotel, or he could jump from the hotel window and take his chances. We thought he’d break an ankle or a leg if he jumped. Well, the guy decided to jump. Who knew he’d land wrong and snap his neck.”

“How did you get into the fortress?”

“We waited until the sun dropped, scaled a small wall at the far end of Palamidi, it was only about ten feet high, and used all our ninja skills,” the three of them snickered like little kids, “to take out the guys who had weapons. Clive proved the trickiest. Once we had taken out the guards, we heard a car coming up the road. I asked Alex to stay at the main gate to see who it was and to stop Clive if he was trying to leave. Benjamin and I found you unconscious and bleeding. Somehow Clive got past us on our way to you. We called for an ambulance and then we heard a horrific crash.” He looked over at Alex. “You can continue from here.”

Alex nodded, cracked his knuckles, tilted his head back and forth and said, “I saw Clive get in a Mercedes. I had no way of stopping him, so I threw a big rock at the windshield and ran out in front of the car. It swerved and went off the road. I had no idea it would catch fire and explode halfway down the hill. I think the fire at that hour helped emergency services get to us faster. It’s pretty dry here in Greece this time of year and with a fire that close to the city … well, let’s just say, they were true to their Olympian form in handling the fire like Spartans.”

Always the gamer,
Aaron thought.

Daniel jumped back in. “We didn’t kill any guards, just put them to sleep. When the police arrived, they arrested everyone but us. As far as I know, they’ve all been charged with kidnapping, assault and attempted murder. Clive’s accident has been classified as just that, an accident.”

Aaron couldn’t believe it. His sister’s murderer was dead and it was with the help of his students, his friends.

He looked away to hide the tears that crept past his eyes. An uncomfortable silence filled the room.

Alex broke it. “You okay?”

Aaron nodded. “Just give me a moment.”

He heard one of them move away. Someone cleared their throat. Aaron wiped at the tears and looked back at them.

“I’m sorry, I should be more grateful. It’s just …”

“What?” Benjamin asked.

“It’s just, I’ve lost Joanne. I wanted to make her killer pay. I wanted to hunt Clive down and make him feel it,” he stopped to collect himself. The pain was returning in his chest near his bullet wounds. He wondered if talking had re-opened the wounds. “It’s just, I failed her. When I needed to stand up, I fell down.”

“You know the proverb,” Daniel said. “Fall seven times, stand eight.”

Aaron nodded. “When these guys took me, I knew I was finished. I gave up. If it wasn’t for you guys, I would be dead right now.” He winced. “Although with the pain I’m in, maybe dead is a good option. At least I’d be with my sister.”

“I’ll get the doctor.” Alex jumped to his feet.

“Hold up,” Aaron said. He clenched his teeth and waited for the pain to subside. Alex made it to the hospital room door and held the handle, waiting for Aaron to speak.

“I want you guys to know that,” Aaron started, “that you’re my family now. You guys are my brothers. What you did for me, even family members wouldn’t do. Who needs family when I have people like you in my life?”

Alex opened the door.

“When my parents walked away all those years ago, I was alone. But now I’m walking away from them, I’m letting it go. There’s solitude and comfort there. Thank you for allowing me to see that.”

The pain took over, and Alex slipped out the door. Aaron looked at his casts as his eyes watered. He knew he would walk again. He would fight again. He would live. If not for himself, for Joanne.

Clive was dead, the nightmare over.

Aaron wondered if Clive’s secret died with him.

Chapter 29

Four months later …

Alex insisted on pushing the wheelchair. Benjamin and Daniel followed in their oversized suits, trying to look respectable.

The courtroom was packed. Dozens of people had come to see what would happen.

John Ashcroft, the man Aaron had beat up and put in a coma, had awakened six weeks ago. He had called for his wife and asked for her forgiveness and a divorce. Aaron heard that the man didn’t feel worthy of marriage anymore. He called to see his daughter, but she still refused to see him.

John asked to see Aaron Stevens, but that request was denied by his lawyer.

Then John Ashcroft waived all charges. He claimed he wouldn’t show up in court as the complainant. He did not want to press charges.

When his lawyer tried to convince him otherwise, John said he would show up in court and tell the judge that he had asked his Shotokan karate teacher, Aaron Stevens, for private lessons. They had been sparring, which was usual in the dojo and John had willingly pushed Aaron to spar as if they were street fighting. Things got out of hand, but that was it. He would claim that Aaron was his friend and that he forgave him. It was over. Let it go.