Fluorescence: The Complete Tetralogy (83 page)

I glanced over his muscular shoulders at the guard post
in the distance. They weren’t watching us. Herman was still inside somewhere and the other inmates couldn’t have given a shit less about me. They were all going about their business, some of the other joggers even passing us by like we were
having a friendly conversation.

I glanced at the guys surrounding me. One was blind in one eye. The other one looked like he could skin a deer with his bare hands.

Stay calm.

Be faster.

Be smarter.

Splitter made brief eye contact with the guy behind me and nodded. I ducked and spun around, raising my arm to deflect a fist aiming for my ribs. A swift kick to the knee sent the half-blind guy down with a crack and a moan of pain.

“Look, man,” I said to Splitter and his pal. “I’ve been through some shit you can’t even begin to imagine in that tiny brain of yours. I have no idea where the hell my daughter is right now, the girl I thought I had feelings for just sold me out, and I haven’t had a goddamn cigarette in two days. Don’t get on my ass, because I’m not afraid to put you in your place if I need to.”

“Randy, get up,” Splitter yelled at the guy rolling around on the ground holding his knee. He shoved him in the back with his foot.

“I think he shattered his kneecap,” the other guy said with a grimace.

“I was gonna spend the rest of my day picking flowers.”
Splitter laughed. “But if you insist on getting your ass kicked
, I guess I must oblige.”

I planted my feet again and Splitter came at me like a raging bull. A fist swung at my head and I ducked. A second one at my ribs and I dodged backward.

Splitter roared in frustration. “Quit moving around!”

Faster.

He came at me again and I darted out of the way,
leaving
him free to bash his hand into the perimeter wall. He howled
in pain and shook out his hand. Blood flecks splashed onto his uniform.

I backed away.

“My name’s David,” I said, making distance between us. “And I don’t want shit to do with you.”

I veered around and picked up speed to head back inside.

My guard was down for a split second as I ran and
someone blindsided me with a punch from the side. I went hurling to the ground. I shook my head and opened and closed
my jaw. It cracked and popped back into place. Hurt like hell, too.

I came onto my elbows and someone’s arm swung around
my neck and put me into a chokehold from behind. I had no strength or balance with concrete in my face, and I couldn’t get away from the arm squeezing my windpipe.

Dark spots flickered in and out of sight, and I writhed
and jerked to try to get away. Whoever was holding me flipped
me over onto my back, forcing me to watch Splitter throw a punch that landed against my cheek. The impact vibrated through my skull, blurring my vision for an instant.

He straddled my legs and wound up for another swing. Dizzy, I kept fighting, trying to wriggle my way out of their grasp before I blacked out.

“What the hell?” His jaw dropped. “What the hell is that!?”
Splitter shot off me and backed away.

“Woah! My arm’s burning!” The guy who had me in the chokehold let up, dropping me onto my back.

I coughed hard, wheezing to get air in as I sat up.

There was a sensation of heat welling inside my chest
and I looked down to see my fluorescence licking up through
the top button of my orange shirt.

“What is that?” Splitter’s cohort asked, shaking.

“It’s nothing,” I said, slurring the words as I struggled to peel myself up from the ground. My jaw hurt. I swiped the
back of my hand across my cheek and wiped the blood on my pants. A single
step sent a jolt of pain through me. I cringed
and pressed a hand over my lower abdomen where a sharper pain
mounted.

“What the hell are you?” Splitter asked, making space between us as I stumbled past him and his friend.

I spat blood onto the concrete. “You don’t want to know.”

Chapter 23

A
w, damn it! I was bleeding.

In the sanctity of my cell, I unbuttoned my shirt and peeled soggy fabric away from my skin. A jagged gash split
the flesh open just below my rib cage. They’d stabbed me with something
during the struggle. Through all the adrenaline, I hadn’t even noticed.

I wasn’t gushing blood, but it was an unsightly wound.
Muscle tissue looked nicked, but the rest was superficial. It would heal alright on its own. I didn’t feel like crying for help.
I wasn’t the only guy there with a blood stain.

I lay back on my bunk and lifted my arms up to tuck them
behind my head. It hurt to do that; the skin stretched over my ribcage as my arms rose. I changed my mind and dropped
my arms to my sides.

Day one. Already got my ass handed to me.

. . .

This morning, Splitter walked past and didn’t even blink in my direction. Seeing my light earlier had scared him, and that was okay with me. I spent the remainder of the morning resting. Mentally and physically fatigued. I wanted Lucy back. I wanted to know everyone was safe. Even… Kareena.

Damn it, I was pissed off at her for stabbing me in the back, but why couldn’t I keep hating her? Why did I have to
lie there on my bunk in my empty cell and start remembering
what it was like to spend a night with her? Even if it was only
that one time.

She was beautiful. The scent of her skin. Her stunning
green eyes. The silky long hair that shimmered in the sunlight.
Gorgeous full lips, too often slathered with bright red lipstick. It wasn’t like I hadn’t been with other girls like her. I had.

But… they weren’t
her.

Around noon, a guard alerted me that I was to be escorted
to the onsite medical facility.

“What for?” I asked, my heartbeat racing as he clapped cuffs on my ankles again.

“
Something about gathering more test samples,” the guar
d replied.

More?

I was walked halfway across the facility, wrists and ankles
cuffed. Down a long white hallway and then past a series of what appeared to be empty classrooms. At another desk, the
guard took me by the arm and tugged me over to the receptionist, who proceeded to sift through a stack of folders.

She passed one over the top of the desk to me and the guard had me sit on one of the chairs in the waiting room.

The room was surprisingly empty. And quiet.

I glanced over at my escort and looked back down at my hands.

Less than ten minutes later, the receptionist called for me and directed both of us into a tiny room with glass and metal cabinets all along the walls. Each had some kind of electronic lock and keypad attached to its door. A large microscope was set up on one side and a wall of tiny vials and colored Petri dishes were stacked up beside it. There wasn’t a
blood pressure monitor anywhere to be seen. No stethoscope
. No tongue depressors in little jars on the table. It looked more like a lab than a doctor’s office.

“The doctor will be here in a moment,” the receptionist said, then stepped out and closed the door behind her.

Through the frosted glass window in the door, I saw the doctor approach. She knocked and entered.

“Hello, David,” Dr. Cortez said with a small, friendly smile. “Can you sit down, please?” She pointed to the padded
examination table in the center of the room. The guard walked me closer to it and I sat on the edge.

“Why am I here?”

“You can wait outside,” she said to the guard. He acknowledged her request and let himself out. He didn’t go far, though. I could see the side of his head while he waited just outside the door.

“I need to ask you a few questions,” she said.

“I thought you worked in forensics, not as a medical doctor.”

“I do, but that’s also part of why I requested you here. Some of your test results were skewed. It may have been a
bad sample. I’m not sure, but we need to run them again.” She looked me over quickly and her brow furrowed with concern.
“Speaking of blood, where’s all of that coming from?” She pointed at my side. “Your ribs? What happened to you?”

“A scuffle. Nothing to worry about.”

“In my line of work, blood is always something to worry about.”

A forensics joke? I
almost
laughed. Almost.

“Let me take a look at it while you’re here.” She tugged a pair of plastic gloves from a nearby box and put them on.

“It’s nothing.”

“David, please. I’m trying to help. This place is crawling with bacteria. You might have walked in, but with an untreated wound oozing blood like that, you’ll be lucky if you crawl out.”

I huffed a breath, defeated by her nagging. At the same time, she was right about the living conditions.

I unbuttoned my shirt and parted it just below my ribs. With my cuffs still on, I couldn’t actually remove my arm from my sleeve, but at least she could see the gash in my side.

“Wow.” She squinted, peeling the flap of my shirt to the
side. “This is some dirty handiwork. Any idea what the weapon was?”

“I didn’t see.” I shrugged and it hurt. “Probably paperclips and a plastic knife or something. Who knows.”

“When was the last time you had a tetanus booster?”

“A what?”

“I’ll take that as never. I’ll leave a note to make sure they give you one.” She turned to her desk and scribbled something down on a sheet of yellow paper in my folder.

“Again,
forensics
?”

“Yes, but before I got this job, I worked part-time for the city health department giving vaccines. Shingles. Influenza. That type of stuff. But when you work in a place like this, you learn a little of everything. You start making yourself
useful. I don’t like the daily grind. Get samples. Test samples. Compare samples. Fill out paperwork.” She paused. “Mostly fill out paperwork. It might be riskier, but I like working with the inmates when I can. You wouldn’t believe the number of guys put in here for weird crap that turns out to be someone else’s doing, and then they get pinned for
something they hadn’t even been arrested for. And then there are the few ones I’ve gotten out. The wrongly accused.”

“Like… me?”

“Oh, no, David. I don’t think you’ve been wrongly accused
of anything. I think you did whatever they’ve got you in here for, it’s just why you did it that’s getting to me.”

She grabbed a bottle of something from an unlocked
cabinet on the desk and rummaged through a drawer beneath it.

“I know they’ve got one in here,” she said, shuffling things around in the drawer. “Ah. There you are.” She pulled
out a small blue plastic box. Inside it was a suturing kit.

I chuckled and shook my head. “You know how to stitch things up, too? Jesus, what can’t you do?”

“When I was a teenager, I used to hike a lot. Slid down the side of a steep cliff once, bashed into a protruding rock, and split my forearm open. You learn things fast when you have to. And that was just a regular sewing kit, too.”

“Sorry you had to go through that,” I said, looking her in the eye.

She had kind eyes. Weathered, but kind. Like she had good intentions but life had thrown her a share of curveballs along the way.

“We learn from our experiences, right?” She laughed it off and then pressed her lips thin. “Anyway, where was I?” She threaded the short, curved needle. “That’s, uh, an interesting tattoo you’ve got. Any particular meaning?”

“
I’m half Samoan. It reflects who I am and who I’m trying to become. Too much to explain but, yes, it means a lot to me.”

“I see. Well, it’s better than most of the crappy ball-point pen, self-inflicted trash I see coming out of here.” She
patted the skin around the wound with a gauze pad and some liquid that stung like hell. “I know this isn’t your first battle scar, but hopefully it will heal better than the rest of these,” she said, gesturing to a line of scar tissue near the center of my chest.

“I’m used to it.”

“Bleeding?” she asked.

“Fighting.”

“You really shouldn’t be proud of that.” The needle pierced my flesh and I flinched. “Do… you want me to use an anesthetic?”

“No. And who said I was proud of that?”

“Well, I just assumed by the way you brushed it off.”

“These scars are the reason I am who I am today. Every single one of them shaped me.”

“Even the bullet wound?” She stopped abruptly and lifted
her face up.

“Even the bullet wound.”

She shrugged and went back to work, gently tugging the thread before sticking it back through and tugging it down again several more times.

“Look, David, I’m not supposed to be getting involved
with your case, but I did some asking around and it seems like they have some fairly hard evidence pinning you to a handful of crimes. The ballistic report hasn’t even come back yet.”

“Then why are you telling me this? I thought you just wanted another sample.”

She pulled the thread through and tied it around itself somehow before snipping off the end with
a tiny pair of scissors. She tossed the remnants in the trash and peeled off her gloves.

“I’ve been at this game long enough to know that there are normal samples and there are abnormal samples,” she said, typing a code into the keypad on one of the cupboard doors. She pressed her thumb into it and it beeped, clicking open. “Yours were neither. They were messed up. I’m going to need another sample of your blood to run them again.” She removed a syringe and rubber tourniquet, along with a new pair of gloves.

“What makes you think the abnormalities you found weren’t real?” I shrugged my shirt back up over my shoulders and buttoned it.