Hostage Zero

Jonathan stopped him with a raised hand. “Save it. I don’t care. Not now, anyway. Keep on keeping your mouth shut, and everything will be fine.” He pounded on the door for Battles.

CHAPTER THREE

The body was a little boy wearing torn pajamas, and Harvey hadn’t been prepared for that. The kid lay on his back with his eyes closed, a loop of duct tape around his mouth. His legs lay slightly askew, but his hands lay on his stomach, as if placed there by a mortician. Harvey was no expert in these things, but he placed the age at somewhere around thirteen or fourteen years old. Maybe a little younger. It was always hard to tell with kids this age.

The sudden rush of emotion had come from nowhere. Harvey found it embarrassing at first, and then he found it just human. He’d seen his share of death over the years, and after a while you sort of get used to it. But not with kids. If you can get used to that, then there’s no point living anymore. Slip to that level, and society has no use for you.

Harvey just stood there for a long time-probably three, four, five minutes-figuring out what he was supposed to do. It was one thing to leave some bum like himself out in the weeds to get eaten by buzzards and carried off a piece at a time by foxes and dogs, but you couldn’t-

The boy’s chest moved. It wasn’t anything dramatic, but there definitely was movement.

As Harvey leaned closer, he saw that he’d been wrong. The kid wasn’t dead. His face had too much color. Stooping to his haunches, he grasped one of the boy’s hands. It was warm. With his own heart racing, Harvey dropped to his hands and knees at the level of the boy’s shoulders and felt his neck. With the tips of two fingers, he located the larynx, and then slipped his fingertips into the groove between the cricoid cartilage and the anterior border of the sternocleido-mastoid muscle. He expected to find a weak thready pulse, but found a strong one, instead.

This wasn’t right at all. He lifted one of the boy’s hands from his belly and let it drop. It fell like a rock. The kid was out cold. A peek under his eyelids reveal pinpoint pupils. That meant drugs.

Harvey raised up straight, still on his knees. He again craned his neck, looking to see if help might have wandered by. Seeing none actually brought relief. This next step had to be done, but it would be a bitch to explain if anyone wandered by.

He had to make the kid naked.

There’d been a gunshot, for God’s sake. He didn’t see any holes or any blood on the pajamas, but that didn’t mean there weren’t any on the boy. Harvey’s hands trembled as he undid the four buttons of the pajama top and peeled it away. The chest and belly looked normal, though he noted light bruising high on his chest, inferior to the clavicles. The kid looked on the thin side, but there appeared to be no nutritional issues.

The speed with which Harvey’s skills returned amazed him. He used his fingers, left hand under the right as if making a forward dive into a swimming pool, to palpate the boy’s belly. It felt loose and malleable, so there was no significant internal bleeding. Liver and spleen were both normal size.

There comes a point where a lack of a diagnosis is as concerning as a troubling one, and Harvey found himself rapidly approaching that line.

Scooting to the child’s hips, Harvey slipped his fingers into the pajamas’ elastic waistband and slid the fabric down to his shins. Again, no sign of trauma, but he’d definitely entered puberty, and he definitely was not a practicing Jew. Feeling progressively more optimistic that he’d find no bullet wound, Harvey leveraged the kid’s thigh and ribs to roll him to his side, till he rested against Harvey’s kneeling thighs. He shoved the pajama top up to his shoulders to expose the entire posterior surface and issued a sigh when he saw that there were no signs of penetrating trauma. He returned the boy to a supine position and pulled his clothing back into place.

What else was there? Harvey wondered. He fought to recall his Marine Corps training.

Of course! His arms. With bullet trauma off the table, the arms made the most sense. Sure enough, as soon as he wrestled the boy’s left arm free from the sleeve of his pajamas, he saw an antecubital bruise. The injection point for whatever had knocked this kid out appeared as a bull’s-eye in the middle of a purple halo at the crease of his elbow joint.

Sixteen hours later, the boy still had not awakened. He’d stirred a few times, and in the last couple of hours he’d made some mumbling sounds-all good signs-but he remained unconscious.

Harvey recalled the list of drugs that could have such lasting effect and realized how lucky the kid was to still be alive. Risks remained for liver damage or renal failure, but with each additional sign of recovery, the risks diminished.