InsaneJournal

Late at night, St Martin's
It had been a really bad few days. First he had missed the girl in the gallery and shot some poor bitch who just happened to be there and then it hadn't taken long for word to reach him that the Orsini kid seemed to be getting her memory back. Of the two things this was the cause for greater concern.

She had looked into his eyes and given him a beaming smile as though asking him to share the joke, silly little bitch, and just as he had raised the gun her eyebrows had twitched into a little quizzical frown and she had opened her mouth.

He was torn. Had she seen the gun and been about to call for help? Or had she taken another look at his face and realised that she knew him? If the former, then it probably wouldn't much matter. His alibi was reasonable - he had credit card records of a cinema ticket. He had bought popcorn. The vendor should remember him because he had dropped the change.

But if she knew him? That possibility had preyed on his mind, eating away at him so he got no rest. In the end there was only way one to be sure and so he entered the hospital by one of the lesser used entrances, drifting in with a shift change.

In a Cubs sweatshirt over grey trousers, with a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes, he knew he looked very different. Just to give potential witnesses something else to remember, rather than his face, he stepped into a rest room cubicle and taped pieces of gauze over one cheek and the bridge of his nose. Traffic accident survivor, mugging victim, who knew? Once inside, like a wasp in a beehive, nobody challenged his right to be there.

At first he kept to the public areas but got bolder as his confidence grew and began to work his way deeper into the complex of wards and treatment rooms. Carrying two cups of coffee from one of the machines - who was going to challenge that? - until he found the ward he needed, he dumped them in a bin and began to look for the right room.

It didn't take long to find but he was disappointed to find a nurse doing some paperwork in the corridor outside. He waited until she got up to answer the phone in the office then strolled casually along the corridor past the rest rooms towards the Orsini girl's door.

A tweak to her IV would be best. Even a pillow to the face. She wouldn't be able to fight her way free.

He was about to reach out to touch the door knob when he heard another door behind him open and footsteps. He kept walking past the nurses station to the end of the corridor, stepped around the corner and peered back from the cover of the wall.

Larry Benedict, that untimely bastard, had closed the mens' room door and was heading for the desk, talking to the nurse who was grinning at him as she replaced the phone on the cradle.

He sighed and looked around for somewhere to hide until he could try again.

There was one room, shadowed and quiet, and he had entered it before he realised where he was. There, in a pool of faint light, lay a young man, a youth, surrounded by monitoring equipment and apparently lifeless. He walked across and looked at his face, feeling his rage bloom and burn.

This - he knew who this was. It would be so easy to finish him. Pay him back as he was trying to pay themall back.

That face. He had dreamed of that face and there it was, flaccid and expressionless, just the glint of eyeballs showing beneath the slack eyelids. He looked at the tubes and wires, reached for a pillow, decided to use his bare hands ....

Then he reconsidered. There was nothing he could do to this boy worse than what was happening to him now - fed through a tube, pissing and shitting into a bag.

No.

He leaned close to the boys face, ripping the gauze away from his own and looking into his eyes. There seemed to be no reaction - no reaction at all bar a faint flickering of the pupils.

"I hope you live for fucking ever," he whispered.

Ten minutes later he was out of the hospital and making his way home, his fears put to rest. Whether the Orsini girl regained her memory or not he didn't care - she could live. It didn't matter.

Nothing mattered.

There were plenty of other options.