Chapter 3 - THE CHILD’S CRAYON
Adrian stared at Dr. Evans.
The chief medical officer of the Moretti organization was a tall, silver-haired man with the comforting bedside manner of a small-town physician. He had been the one to deliver Sophie. He had been the one to look Adrian in the eye in the hospital and tell him he would never walk again.
Now, looking at the black medical bag in Evans’s hand, Adrian saw nothing but an executioner’s kit.
“I’m not feeling up to the injection today, Arthur,” Adrian said. His voice was perfectly level. It was the voice that had negotiated multi-million dollar harbor deals. Not a trace of the panic or rage boiling inside his chest leaked out.
Dr. Evans offered a sympathetic, practiced smile. “I know the phantom pain is difficult, Adrian. But if we skip a week, the nerve inflammation could spread. We don’t want to compromise your upper body mobility.”
It was a threat. Beautifully disguised as medical advice.
Adrian’s hands gripped the armrests of his wheelchair. He could draw the hidden pistol mounted beneath his seat and shoot Evans between the eyes. It would take less than two seconds.
But Marcus was right outside the door. If a gunshot went off, Marcus’s men would flood the room. Adrian couldn’t walk. He couldn’t run. And he had a three-year-old girl standing next to his wheel.
“You’re right, Arthur,” Adrian said smoothly, wheeling himself backward to the center of the room. “We shouldn’t skip it.”
Lily stood nearby, watching the doctor with wide, unblinking eyes. She clutched her ragged rabbit so tightly her knuckles were white.
Evans opened his bag. He drew a long, thick needle, filled with a viscous, milky fluid.
Adrian recognized it. It was the same fluid Evans injected into his lower lumbar every Friday. The fluid that left his legs numb and dead for another seven days.
“If you’ll just lean forward,” Evans said, stepping behind the wheelchair.
Adrian braced himself. He needed to think of a way out. He needed a distraction.
Suddenly, Lily walked right up to Dr. Evans.
She reached into the pocket of her oversized denim jumper and pulled out a crumpled, folded piece of construction paper.
“I made a picture,” Lily said, her voice piercing the tense silence.
Evans paused, the syringe hovering inches from Adrian’s spine. He looked down at the child with mild annoyance. “That’s very nice, little girl. Why don’t you go sit on the sofa?”
“You have to look at it,” Lily insisted, pushing the paper against the doctor’s pristine white coat.
Adrian turned his head, his heart pounding. “Lily, go sit down.”
“No,” Lily said stubbornly. She unfolded the paper.
It was a crayon drawing. The figures were crude, drawn in sharp, heavy lines of black and red wax.
It showed a tall man in a white coat handing a thick green square to another man in a dark suit. Above them, a clock was drawn with no numbers.
“I saw you,” Lily said, looking up at Dr. Evans. “At my bad house. Before the fire man came. You were in the hallway. You gave the fire man a big stack of green paper. And you told him to make sure the lady didn’t wake up.”
The blood drained from Dr. Evans’s face.
The syringe in his hand wavered. His professional mask slipped, revealing a flash of absolute, panicked malice.
Adrian didn’t wait.
He didn’t have the use of his legs, but three years in a wheelchair had turned his upper body into coiled steel.
Adrian grabbed the doctor’s wrist with his left hand, twisting it violently outward. The syringe snapped out of Evans’s fingers, clattering onto the Persian rug. With his right hand, Adrian grabbed the lapels of Evans’s coat and yanked the man forward, slamming the doctor’s face directly into the heavy titanium armrest of the wheelchair.
Bone crunched.
Evans let out a muffled shriek, stumbling backward, clutching his broken nose as blood spilled through his fingers.
Adrian drew the suppressed 9mm pistol from beneath his seat in a blur of motion and leveled it directly at the doctor’s chest.
“Not a sound, Arthur,” Adrian whispered, his eyes entirely black. “Or I put the next one through your lung.”
Evans fell to his knees, gagging on his own blood, his eyes wide with terror.
Lily didn’t scream. She just stepped back, watching quietly, as if violence was a language she already understood too well.
“Who paid you?” Adrian demanded, keeping the gun steady. “Marcus gave you the poison, but Marcus doesn’t have the money to buy a chief medical officer. Who financed this?”
“You don’t understand,” Evans choked out, spitting blood onto the rug. “I had to. They would have killed my family.”
“Who?” Adrian pulled the hammer back. The click was loud in the quiet room.
“It wasn’t a rival family!” Evans gasped, holding his hands up. “It wasn’t the Rossi syndicate! The money came from inside, Adrian! It came from a blind trust!”
“Whose trust?”
Evans looked up, his eyes filled with a horrific mixture of fear and pity.
“It came from Claire’s trust, Adrian. Your wife.”
The world stopped spinning.
Adrian lowered the gun by a fraction of an inch. “You’re lying. My wife is dead.”
“She set it up before she died!” Evans wept. “Two months before the car bomb! She created a blind trust with five million dollars, instructed to pay me ten thousand a week to keep you paralyzed if you ever survived a hit!”
“Why would my wife do that?” Adrian roared, the gun shaking in his grip.
“Because she knew about the girl!” Evans cried out, pointing a bloody finger at Lily.
Adrian looked at the three-year-old orphan standing by his desk.
May you like
Lily reached up and unzipped the back of her ragged stuffed rabbit. From deep inside the stuffing, she pulled out a heavy, brass safety deposit box key.
“The pretty lady with the sad eyes gave this to me,” Lily whispered, holding the key out to Adrian. “She said if I ever found the man in the chair, I had to give it to him. Because he was my daddy.”
