“I’ve been digging into the doctor. He jumped around in specialties before eventually settling on plastic surgery, where he made a big name for himself. He moved around a lot, and I’m not just talking from hospital to hospital. I’m talking country to country. He even did out-of-pocket work in placeslike Sudan and Syria, earning himself quite the reputation as a philanthropist.”
“I can picture this guy working on aging rock stars not ready to admit defeat, but not kids maimed and disfigured,” Havoc admits.
“Always two sides to a coin. If he only had bad qualities, he would have nothing about him to draw Lil in,” G tells him. I have to admit, it makes sense.
“That doesn’t mean there haven’t been rumors, little whispers made by people too afraid to speak up.”
“What kind of rumors?”
“Controlling and coercive behavior, I found in one report that was dismissed. Sexual misconduct by another, but the person withdrew their complaint. I dug a bit more and found at least a dozen in the various places he worked, and those were just the ones reported. The people he messed with were lower in status than him—cleaning crew, admin, etc.”
“He was a classic predator, and he picked victims that he knew others would view as disposable while making sure he wasn’t. So even if they reported him, they either wouldn’t be believed or their complaints would be brushed under the rug.” Havoc gets up and leans over the railing, looking out across the yard.
“So this guy has been a walking time bomb all along?”
“And his missing wife is the trigger. I just don’t get why now. She’s been missing for a decade.”
G looks up sharply. “Unless they crossed paths here at the hospital. She was training to be a nurse, remember? And all of a sudden, she quit right before she took her exams.”
“That was just before shit went down with Bear, right?
“Yeah. There wasn’t much in it, though. It’s gonna sound like shit, but the attempted coup stole the focus off everything. A lot of things slipped through the cracks, Lil included. I hadn’t evenknown about her sleeping in her car or shelters because she was too afraid to sleep in the clubhouse overnight.”
“Okay, but if that was the case, that was six years ago. If he knew Lil was here, he’d have made his move before then, surely.”
“Lil has proven to be smart, far smarter than we ever gave her credit for. My guess is she led him on a merry goose chase. Hell, she probably had it all set up just in case he did find her. No, I think he left to keep looking for her. Something brought him back, though. Maybe she let something slip that he’d just pieced together or…” G drifts off with a frown, pulling out his phone and scrolling before he curses.
He turns the phone around and shows a photo from a local newspaper, which was also posted across social media. It’s the shelter Lil helped set up. And lo and behold, there in the background, talking to a man in a wheelchair, is Lil, a big smile on her face as she listens to him talk, both of them completely oblivious to the camera.
“Fuck. Well, at least we know how, and we know why. But in this day and age, even with him being who he is, he can’t force her to stay with him.”
I look at Havoc and shake my head.
G sighs. “My dad wailed on my mom for years, and the police did shit. It didn’t matter if she wanted to press charges or not. It didn’t matter that there were kids in the house. Cops might drag him into the drunk tank for a few hours, but they always sent him home afterward. Eventually, we got a piece of paper signed by a judge and everything, saying he had to stay away. Know what that did? Fuck-all. I used it to mop up the blood from my mom’s busted nose. The cop even turned around and told me the paper was a waste of time and that I should just get my mom to leave and hide if she couldn’t handle it. Like it was so easy to pick up three kids and run when you had nothing.”
“A lot of the time, people don’t realize that domestic abuse and financial abuse go hand in hand,” Havoc agrees.
“Exactly. He earned the money, and my mom was a stay-at-home mom with very traditional values. Though the sanctity of marriage was nothing but a trap to hold my mom in a cage. Me and my siblings were just extra locks on it.”
“She ever get out?” I ask.
“I was a scrawny runt, but I worked to change that. The first time I knocked him out was the last time he laid a hand on my mother. He was a coward, but then aren’t they all? By this point, the cult-like community we lived in had turned into a bunch of devoted zealots. They couldn’t control me, so they kicked me out. I went off on my own, made a life for myself, and hoped that one day my mom would join me.
“I offered to buy her a place of her own and help her start divorce proceedings, but my father had an unexpected heart attack before I could convince her to leave. After that, she wouldn’t leave my siblings, who all believed in the same values as my father had. Deep down, I think it was more about staying for the grandkids. I won’t pretend it didn’t gut me. And then a year later, she was dead too. Complications from routine knee surgery, they said. It was a cruel twist of fate that by the time her cage was left open, she was too scared to fly away.”
Neither of us says anything about that. What is there to say? The world is a fucked-up place, and we just all have to find a way to survive in it.
“So what you’re saying is we should find this doctor guy, and scare him enough to give him a heart attack?” Havoc deadpans.
It’s quiet for a beat before me and G start laughing. If only shit were that simple.
“Fuck that. This guy seems more like an annoying STD. You can treat it, but it’s never really going away.”
“I say cut off his hands. That’s gotta mess with a surgeon as much as cutting off his dick would.”
“No more dissected dicks, thank you very much.” Havoc grimaces.
I throw a questioning look at G, but he just grins at me.
