Second Honeymoon

Chapter 10

“MAY I PLEASE have my pills?” Ned asked calmly.

Ace’s puffed-out chest deflated like a bounce house after a church carnival. After all his goading, his baiting, his outright cruelty, he couldn’t believe this was the best Ned could do. Nothing. The supposed hotshot professor had no fight in him.

“Do you know what? I think you’re a pussy,” scoffed Ace, reaching for the pill cup on his drug cart.

The night before, though, Ace wasn’t thinking at all. He’d been asked to cover for Eduardo, who usually delivered the dinner meals to all the patients. Eduardo had called in sick. Ironically, the reason was food poisoning, perhaps caused by sampling one of the hospital’s entrées.

So Ace made the rounds the previous evening, mindlessly dropping off trays to every room on each floor. Including the seventh floor. That’s when he forgot that the PAINs were supposed to get a different dessert from the rest of the patients. It was a simple mistake.

Then again, sometimes the difference between life and death is as simple as the difference between an ice cream sandwich and a cherry Bomb Pop…

On a stick.

“Here you go, take it,” Ace said, pill cup in his hand.

Ned reached out, but it wasn’t the cup he grabbed. With a viselike grip, he latched on to Ace’s wrist.

He yanked him toward the bed as if he were starting a lawn mower. In a way he was. Let the cutting begin.

Ned raised his other hand, viciously stabbing away with the popsicle stick, which he’d honed to razor sharpness against his cinder-block wall. He stabbed Ace’s chest, his shoulder, his cheek, and his ear, then went back to his chest, stabbing over and over and over again, the blood spraying high in the air like fireworks.

Then, for the finale, Ned plunged the stick deep into the incompetent aide’s bloated neck—bull’s-eye!—slicing his carotid artery as if it were a piece of red licorice.

How’re you holding up there, Ace?

He wasn’t. Falling to the floor, Ace tried to scream for help, but all that came out was more blood. The guy who couldn’t shut up suddenly couldn’t say a word.

Ned stood up from the bed and watched Ace bleed out on the floor, counting how long it took for the aide to die. It was just like counting ceiling tiles, he thought. Almost soothing.

Now it was time to go.

Ned gathered his personal items, the few things the hospital allowed him to have in his possession. He was checking out. He would slip past the skeleton crew as quietly as a mouse.

Or a little boy with his daddy’s gun.

But before leaving, Ned took one last look back at Ace, lying dead on the floor. The guy would never know the real reason why Ned had killed him—he would have no clue whatsoever. It didn’t matter that he was a mean son of a bitch. Ned couldn’t have cared less.

Instead, it was something Ace did his very first day on the job that set in motion something terrible deep inside Ned’s brain.

Just awful, hideous…

Ace had told Ned his real name.