The road to recovery is paved with a lot of ups and downs.
Well, perhaps more downs than ups. Convulsions aside, caused by a certain type of medication Harry didn’t know he was allergic to, it was going to take time.
Time that he didn’t have because the Jones’ cases were still on the books.
Yes, the quirky details of the case he’d been working on came back to him, but without any answers as to what happened to the brothers or why.
And, now, he had another case, his own. Who had kidnapped, tortured, and then tried to kill him? If it was not for the incompetence of the shooter, whose marksmanship was appalling, and thankfully so, he would be dead.
Patchy memories of those missing days, though he was still not sure how many, had returned, and it seemed his mind was blocking out the really bad events, mostly the torture and what happened afterward.
All he really knew about it was that he had overheard a conversation, a random one of hundreds within earshot, but unfortunately had the curiosity to go and visit the meeting site. If he had not...
Sykes had put a press embargo on his hospitalization, the single request Harry made, and Sykes put into effect, to give the perpetrators no inkling he was still alive, and therefore give both himself and the police an opportunity to find who did it.
They would be expecting, as the doctor had said, that his body would never be found. It was a rare opportunity and one he, personally, was going to find hard to capitalize on.
The doctor’s prognosis was not good.
Nothing strenuous beyond lying in a bed for at least a month, time for the broken bones in his legs to heal, a result of being thrown into the dump from a cliff top, and a ‘wait and see’ on the effects to his head after sustaining a cracked skull.
Lucky to be alive: yes.
Even luckier still he had his brain functions, memory, and no lasting paralysis: double yes.
But there were details that bothered him.
The first: he’d been in an induced coma for two weeks, give or take. It didn’t seem like it, because he could remember voices talking about him.
The second, until he told them, they were referring to him as John Doe, not Harry Walthenson, which meant he had no ID, and they had only Sykes word he was who he said he was.
The third, he had a mysterious visitor who gave her name as Gwen, no last name, and by the description, he’d been given it was no one he recognized. His first thought, until the nurse described his visitor, it might be Jennifer or Angela Morrison.
It was unlikely it was a representative from the kidnappers interested in what he might say, because they had no reason the think he was not still lying at the bottom of the dump, so that theory holds no water, and, so far, the mysterious female visitor had not returned.
The fourth, how did Sykes know he was in the hospital? Especially if he was registered as John Doe and not by his real name. Harry suspected Sykes kept an eye out for John Doe types, another mystery for him to solve.
These and other thoughts were swirling around in his head when he heard the door to his room creak, and then slowly open.
© Charles Heath 2016-2019
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