The Pain Hunter (The Broken Doll Book 1)

Thursday, April 20, 6:52 p.m.

“Find the nearest hospital,” Dr. Stuart Collier called out. “Now. If you don’t, he’s going to die.”

The driver of the van, in his midthirties, with a mass of impossibly thick black hair, glanced toward the stalk-mounted GPS. The man in the passenger seat, slimmer and with trim blond hair, typed in a search.

A moment later a selection came up. The driver glanced at the screen. “Seven minutes.”

“Go” was Collier’s response.

The driver punched the accelerator and the cumbersome vehicle sped up. He was hunched over the wheel. In their haste to get on the road, he had not put his belt on. The van dated to an earlier era and while a light glowed out the infraction there was no mosquito-itch of a repeating beep.

Different hair, different builds, the men wore related clothing. The driver was in jeans and a faded gray tee. The passenger—who was clipped in—was in a blue work shirt and gray dungarees, stained. Maybe grease, Collier guessed; his rugged hands and prominent knuckles gave the impression he could be an automotive mechanic. Both of the men in the front wore black jackets.

The doctor glanced at the aftermarket navigation system. Five minutes.

In the back, where a dozen backpacks and gym bags rested, were Collier and the injured man. There were no seats—the van was a delivery model—and the kneeling doctor was gripping a tie-down bar with one hand and keeping pressure on the impromptu dressing of a wad of paper towels halfway between groin and knee. A tourniquet on the man’s thigh was also slowing the ooze.

At one sharp turn, Collier nearly fell backward, though he managed to remain upright. Then they were on a winding and badly maintained southern Wisconsin rural road going double the limit.

The MD wore after-work casual—dark-brown slacks and a tan polo shirt under a navy-blue windbreaker.

The patient, a fortyish-year-old named Paul Offenbach, wiped his forehead sweat with his shirtsleeve. He was handsome, with a well-proportioned face, presently paler than it had been earlier in the day. The thick beard, also dark, accentuated the ashen shade. He’d discarded his jacket, and Collier had removed the man’s shoes, socks and slacks.

His head pressed back, and a grimace of pain washed over his face. A deep inhalation. Then he looked once more at Collier.

“And this?” Offenbach pointed to his cheek, where there was a deep, jagged cut. Had he turned his head just a few inches to the right when the injury was sustained, he’d be blind in that eye.

“We won’t worry about it for now.” Collier’s response was assured.

At the GPS’s female monotone of directions, the driver made a turn onto an even rougher road. The vehicle bounced. Offenbach moaned, closed his eyes.

The hump of wide sun was melting into the horizon, igniting low clouds, orange above the van. They paced the vehicle in the streaming breeze. Leaves tumbled and danced in the wake and in the wind.

The doctor released the tourniquet. He had never used the device in his practice. But like many physicians summoned by fate to treat an unexpected patient, he could draw on training from a distant past. He recalled that the tension had to be released every so often to allow blood to flow, despite the wound, to keep the limb vital.

The coursing blood brought with it more pain to the man’s leg. Offenbach gasped and stretched his head back once more, unsuccessfully dodging the agony.

Now, for the first time, Collier noted two other injuries. The little and ring fingers of his patient’s left hand were taped together and swollen. And there was a dark bruise on his jaw. Neither of these had happened during the incident today.

The man was in fit shape. This would work to his advantage. Trim, athletic people, Collier recalled a professor in medical school telling the class, were easier to treat, had a better chance of survival and a faster recovery.

Collier himself was slim as well. His six-foot, three-inch frame bordered on gangly. He had a long face in a head crowned with straight, sandy hair, a comma of which dipped toward his right eye. He too was fit; after work every day he bicycled five miles home and on weekends might pedal twenty miles through the countryside.

“What’s your . . .” Offenbach’s jaw clamped shut. A deep breath. He tried again: “What’s your thing, your specialty?”

“Emergency room.”

Offenbach said nothing, not registering his good fortune that an ER doctor was present in a situation like this. His dark, still eyes looked over his unexpected clinician.

“We’re here,” the driver said, at the same time the GPS lady said essentially the same, though in the second person voice. He pulled into the entryway of the hospital, which was deep in the hinterland of Harbinger County.

They rolled into the back parking lot, where five cars—a Mercedes and four low-end sedans—sat, beside two ambulances. Here, the building was windowless for three stories; patients’ rooms began above that.

The engine shut off. Offenbach struggled to sit up. He gasped from the effort and the pain and he blotted sweat. With a grunt, he pulled his large silver pistol from beneath him, where he’d stashed it after they’d gotten into the van.

He aimed at Collier’s chest.

“Back there in Upper Falls? You saw what I did to that woman.”

A nod.

“What did I do?”

Collier swallowed and inhaled deeply. He controlled himself. “You shot her in the neck. You killed her.”

The scene reeled through the doctor’s mind for the tenth time since it had unfolded.

He was seeing the bullet from Offenbach’s pistol, this same pistol, ripping open the jugular, spraying blood into the air, like the turquoise water reaching for the sky from the fountain at Maple Street Park, the site of many a family Sunday afternoon.

Seeing blood on the long blonde strands of hair, splayed out in a soft disk on the sidewalk.

Hearing the scream, piercingly loud, though it was coming from the throat of a young girl.

“So you understand the stakes for you.”

Collier’s stare was the acknowledgment.

Offenbach managed to find breath. “Go. He’ll”—he pointed to the slim, somber passenger in the front—“be right beside you every step of the way.”

Lucky.

Harbinger County Sheriff’s Office deputy Peter Jacobson was in a profession where superstitions abounded. Not unusual when you considered that on any particular day you could be run off the road, punched, knifed, shot.

And so the solid man, 210 pounds and six two, believed that there existed certain forces—God, whoever or whatever—that were looking out for you.

This might just be one of those situations.

Lucky . . .

He was at a gas station on Sycamore Valley Highway, sitting in the back office, scrubbing through security video that had been shot over the past half hour. The small room smelled of cigarette smoke, despite the big sign of prohibition above the computer.

“Anything, Deputy?”

“May . . . be.” The word stretched out as he concentrated. He was speaking to Derek, who managed the station. His uniform offered ample evidence as to who the tobacco violator was.

Jacobson was interested in one particular two-second clip. He scrubbed once more, back and forth.

The entire county was electric, after the nightmare in Upper Falls just thirty minutes ago, a daring jailbreak that had spilled into the middle of a street fair, resulting in a bloody, fatal shooting and a kidnapping. Dozens of bullets fired.