Читать книгу Flashpoint - Connie Hall - Страница 9

Tijuana, Mexico, Twenty years ago

The icy cold of the operating room soaked through the flimsy sheet, oozed through the hospital gown and bled right down to Jan Strafford’s bones. Her teeth chattered from the cold. Odd thing was, she was sweating all over. Must be a case of nerves.

Muzak played from a speaker in the ceiling. Was it Beethoven? She’d hate “Für Elise” for the rest of her life. She could see windows in the ceiling and an observation gallery beyond the windows. Was it empty—no, wait. A shadow loomed across one window, but she couldn’t see the person. The person must have been sitting in the last row of the gallery, beyond her view. She felt like a specimen being opened for a biology lab, for one special student.

The smell of disinfectant clung to her nostrils like a cloying fog. Why had she agreed to this? Why had she watched that HBO documentary on plastic surgeries gone bad? She could end up maimed, or worse. The doctor had reassured her facial reconstruction was a breeze, an outpatient procedure. But it wasn’t him lying on the table, shivering, sweating every second. The hell with it. She was desperate. She owed several powerful men large sums of money. This was her way out.

A door opened and the nurse anesthetist entered the room carrying a menacing-looking tray. Overhead fluorescent lights gleamed off the glass drug vials and syringes. The end of a rubber tourniquet hung over the tray’s edge. The nurse wore a clinical blank face, a lot like her white coat. Not a hint of compassion in her expression.

Jan felt her palms sweating as she dug her fingers into the sheet covering. The gold charm bracelet she had insisted upon wearing during the operation clanked against the metal gurney, the Victorian ornaments rattling like bones. She’d had the bracelet since her twelfth birthday and never took it off. It was her talisman, her good luck charm. Boy, she needed it now.

“I must see both arms, por favor.” The nurse looked at the veins on the inside of her arms, then the backs of her hands. She grunted under her breath, grabbed Jan’s right arm and tied a tourniquet around her bicep.

“Relax, señorita, just a little stick,” the nurse said.

Jan glanced up at the shadow above her head. It seemed to grow darker and larger, a monstrous thing, many legs spreading all across the observation windows.

Just as the shadow began to emerge in the gallery window, she felt the prick of the needle, the metal forcing its way into a vein. Her last coherent thought was she’d never look the same again. Then searing fire coursed through her mind.