Trapped (Caged 2)

“Asshole,” I shot at him as he left.

“Child!” he called over his shoulder with a smile. “Gonna send you to Children’s Hospital downtown!”

Tria sighed as she cuddled back into my side. She was motionless and quiet for some time, but I still knew exactly what she was thinking about. I wished I could tell her something different, but fighting was all I knew.

“I don’t like it,” she finally whispered into my chest.

“I know.”

*****

I was sick to death of the hospital and the cops.

There had been at least three different detectives who had come in to question me, Tria, and Yolanda at different times. They talked to us separately; they talked to us together, and they asked the same fucking questions over and over again.

Devin had been arrested in a motel outside of the city. The room had been in Keith’s name and not too hard to locate. They took Tria down to the station to identify him, and I had to look at a bunch of pictures and verify which ones were Keith and Devin. Keith had been stabilized enough to be moved to a secure location until he could be formally charged.

Apparently, he had already confessed to stabbing me though he said he wasn’t trying to kill me. The cops said he was going to plead guilty to aggravated assault, and everything else was just going to be a formality.

According to Yolanda, he told them he was trying to show Tria how dangerous my profession was in order to get her to leave me and go back with him. They were giving him a psych evaluation as well, but they weren’t expecting that to have much impact on his sentence.

I didn’t give a shit what happened to him as long as he didn’t cross my path again. If I ever did see him, I’d probably kill him. He wasn’t my main concern anymore anyway—food was.

Solid food was becoming an issue.

I was supposed to be eating it, but when Tria informed the hospital staff that I was a vegetarian, they brought me a Styrofoam plate with mashed potatoes and gravy, which obviously wasn’t vegetarian, a cup of yogurt with gelatin in it, which I wouldn’t eat, and some rice, which Tria found out had been cooked in chicken broth.

She said a few choice words to the orderly and then disappeared out the door, claiming she’d find me something in the cafeteria. She was gone a long time, and as I was about to accept that she had made like Houdini and disappeared altogether, my doctor waltzed through the door to check on me.

“How’s my favorite side-splitting patient?” he asked.

“Just peachy, Doctor Banter.” The nickname had come to me in the middle of the night when Baynor was continuing to verbally spar with me while removing my catheter. Any man who could fiddle around with another man’s bits and still joke about it deserved some sort of nickname. “Seen my lady around?”

“As a matter of fact, I have,” he said. “She was down in the kitchen a while ago, arguing with the staff and yelling at the nutritionist. The last I heard, she was digging out a pan and a spatula so she could start cooking things herself. If security hasn’t thrown her out, I suspect she’s making your lunch now.”

I laughed, which hurt quite a bit but wasn’t as bad as it had been the day before.

“You’re looking much better,” the doctor said.

“Home yet?” I asked. “And if I don’t get a decent answer this time, I might have to go find your Beemer and turn it into scrap metal.”

“I drive a Lexus,” he said. “And you’re getting close. Either late tomorrow or Saturday morning at the latest, assuming I can trust you to take all the antibiotics I prescribe.”

I bitched and groaned.

“Get over it, cry baby,” he said with a grin. “Would you rather end up back here with an infection? Maybe I’ll just give them to Tria. I bet she has her ways of getting you to comply.”

“She’ll have a lot better luck than you will,” I said, agreeing.

We went back and forth as he checked out some of my more minor injuries. They were the kinds of things I never really went to the hospital for anyway, and he was giving me lectures about infections and shit when someone appeared at the door. I looked up, expecting to see Tria, but it wasn’t her.

Long, caramel-colored hair framed the face of the woman in the doorway, and when I looked into her eyes, I saw my own brilliant green color staring back at me. My body stilled, my breathing increased, and I felt beads of sweat starting to form on the back of my neck as my mother, Julianne Teague herself, walked into my room.

“What…” It was the only word I could get out.

“Douglass told me what happened,” she said quietly. She offered a slight smile. “I stopped in to sign the paperwork, and I had to come and see that you were really okay. He thought maybe you would have told them not to let me in, but they didn’t say anything about it.”

My head felt hot. I was looking right at her, but I couldn’t focus on what I was seeing. Instead, all I saw were flashes from inside my mind, starting from my childhood and working their way through the years. I had to make them stop before they got too far along.