By Paths Coincident

Chapter 7

11 Years Ago

Villa El Otro Lado, Portabelo, Panama

Eliot Spencer barely made it down the steps from Damien's plane at the very private airstrip in Colombia. His knee was swollen and excruciatingly painful. He suspected a torn ACL which was going to need surgery. But he couldn't go near a doctor until he was clear of any connection to the job that had gone down in Spain.

To make matters worse, his jaw was equally swollen and immobilized. He had been unable to take oral pain medication because the damned first-aid kit in the plane hadn't contained anything liquid or injectable. Eliot swore he was never going to take on a job again without a stock of IV pain meds instantly available. He'd finally crushed some extra strength Tylenol with the hilt of his knife, tried to dissolved it in water, and managed to use a straw to get it down. It had all of the effectiveness of trying to put out a volcanic eruption with an eyedropper.

Not to mention he was starving. It had been nearly 48 hours since he'd last eaten.

He forced himself to hobble to the Jeep he'd left concealed by the airstrip. Managing the brake, the gas, and the clutch with his bad leg left him sweating and nauseated. The crappy roads between the airstrip and the coast jarred his knee, his ribs, and his jaw unmercifully. And thanks to the fact that he couldn't open his mouth, he couldn't even alleviate his misery with profanity.

The boat ride, in the dark, navigating by GPS alone, was a hellish blur. By the time he reached Damien's private dock in the mouth of the river, out of sight of the tourist launches, he was ready to collapse, but he still had to commandeer one of the launches to make it to El Otro Lado.

He had reached the point where every step he had to take added a zero to the total amount he was going to charge Damien for this job.

When Siobhan met him just before dawn, as he slipped surreptitiously in through the tall window that opened onto the private patio of his villa, she gave a little cry of shock. He really must look terrible, Eliot thought before his bad leg gave out, pitching him headlong into her arms.

Siobhan Byrne was made of pure grit all the way through and didn't flinch as his dead weight and bloodied filth landed on the turquoise wisp of a negligee she was wearing. Instead, she supported his sorry ass to the chaise lounge where he finished his collapse.

Eliot mentally added another zero to how much Damien was going to be paying her.

Forty minutes later, Eliot found himself with his blood-encrusted clothing cut away, his leg elevated and packed in ice, his ribs also wrapped and iced, another ice pack pressed to his jaw, and most important, enough painkillers to drop a horse coursing through his veins.

The lovely and blurred Siobhan had apparently an eclectic education in field medicine. He wondered drowsily where she had got it.

He might have proposed marriage to her if he could have talked when she brought in a basin of warm water and began washing the blood and sweat off his face. It was probably a good thing he couldn't talk.

It had been 72 hours since he'd had more than a catnap. Eliot thought he felt Siobhan's lips on his swollen mouth briefly before sleep ambushed him and dragged him under.

He would have avoided the sleep altogether if he could have.

They lay in wait for him behind the curtains of his eyelids, as they always did, pale stains of past atrocities, new and bloody spectres fresh from the kill. Their eyes met his in that moment before they ceased to see, frozen in fear or rage or astonishment or pain or grief. Their voices, crying and screaming and pleading and cursing and choking, echoed in his ears. Their bodies twitched, writhed, crumpled, contorted, broke and bled out, re-enacting over and over the agonies of their deaths.