Free The Last Deep Breath by Tom Piccirilli Page B

life leaking out.  When he was a kid his old man drilled holes in bowling balls.  Looked like Jericho was going to wax lanes his entire life, but raised himself from some one stoplight town and managed to swing a serious scholarship to a prestigious school.  Not Ivy League but close.  Started off selling weed but quickly moved up to the harder stuff, had a whole network in place by the time he was nineteen.  Had the charm to pimp a few of the cheerleaders at school, made money with Internet amateur porn.  Made a bundle and moved to the city, put the girls up in a nice place and gave it a five-star name.  Premium Friends.  Didn’t really need to get his hands dirty except on a few occasions.  At least one girl probably thought she was getting cheated and threatened to go to the cops.  Jericho cuffed her to the bed and tortured her with pressure points, raped her, and promised to kill her parents if she ever said anything.  She fell back in line and was probably one of the happiest whores in the place.  The heroin came in from the Asian woman’s family somewhere in Thailand.  If anything ever went wrong he was at least four connections away from customs.  Nothing ever stuck to him.  He thought of himself as a gentleman bandit, an entrepreneur of pleasure and desire.
     Grey kept the gun pointed directly at Jericho’s belly.
    “You don’t need that,” Jericho said.  “Give it to me.”
    “Eva Rains.  Ellie.  Where is my sister?”
    “I’ve been waiting for you,” Jericho said.  “I’ll take you to her.”

23
     
    Maybe one of the bouncers doubled as a chauffeur because Jericho drove his own Mercedes over to a hospital on the Upper West Side.  Grey had given him the gun and followed without another word and they’d both kept silent the entire ride uptown.  As they pulled in to the medical center Grey swallowed down a groan.
    Pax had been right.  Grey had gone about this entire thing backward. He should’ve checked the morgue and the hospitals the day that Ellie sneaked from his bed.  But he’d been so blinded with his need to find her that he’d gone out of his way not to discover the truth.
    “Are you Pax or Grey?” Jericho asked.
    “Grey.”
    “She talked a lot about both of you.  You’re the one she ran to.”
    Grey said nothing.  He thought, What could she have said?  She hadn’t seen either of us in more than ten years.  Would she just tell the same old stories of the abuse they’d suffered at the hands of the Wagners?  He had questions to ask but couldn’t seem to quite form them.
    They parked and walked into the building and Jericho nodded and said hello to a nurse working the front desk.  He’d been here plenty of times before.  They knew him on sight and gave him sweet smiles.
    Grey followed, the lights of the corridor burning as brightly as the desert sun.  He had to shade his eyes.
    When they got to ICU, the antiseptic stink of the place made him gag.  He had to stop for a moment.
    “Are you all right?” Jericho asked.
    “Yeah.”
    “You don’t have to go on.”
    “Of course I do.”
    “You look sick.  What do you use?”
    “I don’t use, you prick.”
    Jericho tilted his head.  “This way.”
    They proceeded up another hall, had to punch in a number on a keypad to get through.  Jericho was a trusted visitor.  They turned one corner and then another.  They passed open rooms where head trauma cases lay in bed with their shattered skulls held in place by enormous iron braces.  Grey huffed.
    Finally they arrived at Ellie’s room.
    It reminded Grey of Monty’s office.  Glass walls and a huge sliding glass door.  Another fish bowl where every passing stranger could look in on the dying.
    Ellie was hooked up to fifty-thousand watts of machinery.  A ventilator had been attached to a tube in her throat and every few seconds it would force air into her lungs and make her body jerk and sway.  As if she were lying at the edge of a lake and wind-blown