Chapter 5 - The Anatomy of a Phantom
By three o'clock in the morning, the rest of the Moretti estate had fallen into a heavy, artificial sleep.
Ground-floor security guards rotated shifts in silence. Augustus Moretti slept in his library chair downstairs with a loaded revolver resting on the side table beside his Bible.
On the third floor, Sloan sat on a low wooden stool beside the hearth, feeding small, dry sticks of pine into the embers one by one to keep the air from growing cold.
Rafe was asleep.
It was not a peaceful sleep—his brow remained furrowed, his jaw tight, and his remaining left foot twitched periodically beneath the light cotton sheet—but it was sleep. It was the first continuous three hours of rest he had experienced in eleven days.
Sloan stood up softly, her gray soft-soled shoes making no sound against the Persian rug.
She walked over to the nightstand and examined the six prescription bottles scattered across the wood.
She picked up the bottle of Gabapentin—a nerve-pain medication—and looked at the label.
Prescribed by Dr. Arthur Vance, Boston Neurological Institute. Dosage: 800mg, three times daily.
Sloan’s brow furrowed. 800mg three times a day was an extraordinarily high dose—near the maximum therapeutic limit—yet looking at the pill count inside the clear amber bottle, less than a dozen capsules had been taken over the last three weeks.
She picked up the OxyContin bottle. It was completely full.
She picked up the Valium. Full.
Sloan turned her head and looked at the sleeping man on the bed.
He hadn't been taking the medication.
The expensive Boston specialists hadn't failed because their prescriptions were ineffective; they had failed because Raphael Moretti was throwing the pills into the fire the moment Daniel left the room.
"They make my brain slow," a quiet, rough voice said from the bed.
Sloan turned around.
Rafe was awake. He hadn't moved his body, but his dark eyes were open, watching her through the dim shadows of the room.
"Opioids depress central nervous function," Sloan said casually, setting the amber bottle back on the mahogany table. "They don't fix nerve damage anyway. They just make you care less that it hurts."
"Is that what they taught you in nursing school?" Rafe asked.
The room went dead silent.
Sloan didn't move. Her right hand remained hovering an inch above the glass nightstand.
"Daniel checked your name," Rafe said softly, his voice devoid of anger, carrying only a flat, clinical certainty. "Sloan Merrick. Former Senior Trauma Nurse, Rhode Island Hospital. License suspended fourteen months ago following a fatal accident involving a family member and allegations of medical negligence."
Sloan pulled her hand back, folding her arms across her chest.
"Your grandfather told me my job title was housekeeper," she said flatly.
"My grandfather is an old man who believes money can buy quiet servants," Rafe replied, pushing himself up onto his elbows. "I don't care about quiet servants. I care about why a woman with six years of trauma unit experience is scrubbing my floors for twenty-five hundred dollars a week."
Sloan looked directly into his eyes.
"My sister Junie is eighteen," Sloan said, her voice dropping all pretense of domestic humility. "She has a spinal cord injury. She needs four thousand two hundred dollars by Friday at five o'clock to stay in her physical therapy program at Harbor Ridge. If she doesn't get it, she stops walking."
Rafe stared at her. His gray-bearded jaw tightened slightly.
"So you came to steal from a cripple?" he asked, a cold, dangerous edge entering his tone.
"I came to earn a wage from a man who throws glass at women," Sloan shot back instantly.
Rafe let out a short, sharp snort through his nose. He leaned back against his pillows, reaching down to pull the cotton sheet over his stump.
"Why didn't I take the pills?" he asked suddenly.
"Because you're a mobster," Sloan said, walking toward the hearth to throw another stick onto the fire. "Your entire existence depends on being three seconds faster than the men who want to kill you. If you take sixteen hundred milligrams of synthetic narcotics a day, you can't think, you can't react, and you can't run your empire."
"I can't run an empire with one leg either," he muttered, looking toward the dark wool drapes nailed over the arched window.
"The leg isn't your problem, Mr. Moretti," Sloan said, turning to face him.
"Really?" Rafe scoffed, pointing a thick finger at his right thigh. "Because from where I'm sitting, six inches of missing bone and muscle feels like a fairly significant problem."
Sloan walked over to the bed, stopping two feet from his mattress.
"The leg is gone," she said, her voice clear, cold, and absolute. "The nerve endings at the bottom of your stump are healed. The pain you feel isn't in your foot. It's in your parietal cortex. Your brain still holds a three-dimensional map of your body that was drawn when you were born. That map says you have a right foot. Your severed nerves are sending static signals, and your brain is filling in the blanks with terror."
Rafe stared at her, his dark eyes wide in the gloom.
"How do you fix a map?" he asked softly.
"You don't fix it with pills," Sloan said. "And you don't fix it by sitting in an eighty-degree room with black curtains nailed over the windows."
May you like
She turned toward the door.
"Get some sleep, Mr. Moretti," she said. "Tomorrow at sunrise, I'm pulling those nails out."
