he could not. She had enough experience from her time spent working in the Montréal General Hospital that she could tell what had made the marks and how much pressure had been applied. If she had to guess, she would say that he took several punches to the face, chest and abdomen, kicks to all of his limbs, probably when he’d fallen to the ground. His hands and fingers had been stomped on, as were his feet. The intent had been to cause extreme pain without doing life threatening damage.
Shaun had no way of dealing with a cardiac arrest beyond thinning his blood with aspirin, and without a hospital, it would ultimately be what killed him. After she finished cleaning and dressing the injuries that she could actually treat, she sat back on her heels and surveyed the man. It was no use ‒ he was going to die, and he was going to do it soon. His breathing was shallow and his skin was grey and clammy.
“That’s all I can do,” she said, feeling helpless and afraid.
She lifted her eyes to meet the unsympathetic ones of the man across the room. He hadn’t moved while she worked, just watched. He now shifted his eyes down to her patient, his victim. He took a long look, then signed to her, wake him up.
She didn’t know how to make him understand that she couldn’t just wake the patient. She sighed and rubbed at the headache hovering over her left eyebrow. A stress headache that came along once in a while when she found herself in an impossible situation.
“What’s your name?” She decided on a new tactic; try to form some kind of bond with her captor so he might trust her.
He pushed away from the wall, straightened and rolled his shoulders back as though releasing tension. Finally, he signed the letters - J - O - Z - E - F.
She nodded, and said softly, “Jozef.”
He looked at her, his eyes dropping down to her mouth, a strange expression flitting across his hawk-like features.
“Jozef.” She deliberately repeated his name. “You have to understand, this isn’t a matter of just ‘wake him up’ or ‘don’t wake him up’. You, or whoever did this to him, beat him until his heart gave out. On top of his other injuries, he probably has a concussion at best and a skull fracture at worst. He may never wake up.”
Jozef growled and began pacing the basement, his big booted feet kicking up dust from the floor. He was such a terrifying and imposing figure. If she had to guess, she would put him in his mid-thirties, same as her. He was probably a professional criminal with a good dose of street thug. He was the type of person that mamas and small children would cross the street to avoid.
Throughout her career, Shaun refused to avoid anyone, to be intimidated by people like Jozef. In her profession, she’d learned that anyone was capable of anything. Sweet little old ladies could be serial killers and the biggest, noisiest, scariest looking men could be teddy bears who cried over a few stitches. She’d seen it all and knew better than to judge. Unfortunately, Jozef was proving himself to be the former, rather than the latter. He’d already killed one person and she was terribly afraid there were two more on his list.
After another minute of pacing, he turned on his heel and strode out of the basement. The moment he was gone, Shaun hovered over top of her patient and shook his shoulder.
“Hey, wake up. Can you hear me?”
There was no response, so she tried harder, tried to wake him up without jarring his injuries too much. She checked his breathing and his pulse again and realized it was a lost cause. This man was going to die very soon, and he was going to do it without helping her escape.
Before she could come up with something else, she heard the clatter of feet on the rickety wooden steps. She glanced up in fear as Jozef returned with another person, one of the men from the van. Jozef walked toward her, his steps so rapid, she lurched back. He didn’t reach for her though, instead picking up the bucket of now dirty water and throwing it in the face of the man on the ground.
Shaun gasped and grabbed hold of his wrist, trying to pull him back. As soon as her fingers touched Jozef’s arm, he gave her a