A Reason to Kill Read Online Free PDF Page B

appeared at the bedside with what looked to be a kiddies’ plastic beaker, complete with lid and spout. “Just take a couple of sips,” he said, slipping one hand gently beneath Matt’s head to elevate it slightly, as he placed the spout to his lips.
    “Donny? The others?” Matt whispered, after the cool water had moistened his mouth and throat.
    Linda could not summon the words, but her expression answered for her.
    Matt closed his eyes again, but was unable to hold back the tears that forced their way out onto his cheeks.
    “I’m so sorry,” Linda said, her fingers smoothing his hair back from where it lay damp on his brow.
    Matt’s teeth were clenched, his cheek muscles bunched. He let the horror sink in. The facts were simple. Professionals had walked in like some bloody terrorist group on a mission, and coldly blown away everyone in the house, bar him. More by luck than good judgement, he had survived. Going for a piss had saved his life. Had he gone before Donny, then it would have been him that ended up wasted with the others. He pushed all the pointless ifs to the back of his mind. One thing was not an if, it was a definite. He would get past what had happened to his team by nurturing the anger and finding those responsible. Nothing could put things right. Dead was dead. But retribution would go a long way to even things up and bring about some measure of closure.
    First things first. “How am I doing?” he asked Linda.
    “It was touch and go for a while,” she answered. “They had you in surgery for hours. You’d lost a lot of blood.”
    “And?”
    “You...you lost a kidney.”
    “You make it sound as if I misplaced it. What else have I lost?”
    “That’s it. You get to joust at windmills again another day, when you’ve healed up,” she said with a sharper edge to her voice than intended.
    There was something distant about her. He sensed a farrago of emotions, and one approximated that of a woman sickened by her partner’s constant philandering. She was acting the way a wife might, having found lipstick on one collar too many. He had the premonition that, not at this time while he was in an intensive care unit, but soon, when he was fitter, she would deliver an ultimatum. Her eyes and body language said that he was in the last chance saloon.
    “Are we in trouble?” he asked.
    “Yes, Matt. Think of this as time out. You need to know that I couldn’t go through it again. I love you too much to spend my life waiting for another knock at the door. Maybe I just haven’t got the strength of character to sit on the sidelines of a copper’s life.”
    “You’re asking me to quit the force?”
    “No, I didn’t say that. I’m suggesting that you look at your priorities. If playing cops and robbers is something that you can’t walk away from, then I don’t think we have what it takes to be a couple.”
    As if on cue, to leave the subject hanging like the sword of Damocles over them, the Badger, Dr. Lawson, swept into the unit with the air of James Robertson Justice in the old ‘Doctor’ movies.
    Linda bobbed her head and kissed Matt on the forehead, not his lips. “I’ll be out in the waiting room,” she said. “My mother came, and Tom Bartlett is back. He stayed with me for hours. They’ll both want to know that you’re back in the land of the living.”
    “How’re you doing, Inspector? I’m Dr. Lawson. I patched up your bullet-ridden body.”
    “You tell me how I’m doing, Doc. I’m a cop, not a medical student. And call me Matt.”
    “You got away with it, Matt. One bullet nicked your femoral artery and fractured your femur. The other pulverised your left kidney. The resulting shock and blood loss nearly killed you. And there was a chance you might have suffered brain damage, due to oxygen loss to the brain. We still need to do a few tests, but I think you beat the odds this time. The belt around your thigh was a lifesaver”
    “What about the kidney?”
    Sam Lawson