Page 37 of Deathtoll

“A rough day.” No sense in overwhelming him with what was nothing more than an educated guess at this stage.

Her easy response calmed him a little. He nodded. “I can’t go on like this. You people have no idea what it’s like.”

“I really don’t. You’re one-hundred-percent right about that. But you could tell me. Let’s give ourselves a much-needed caffeine hit and figure out how you could be best helped.”

She slowly, carefully, reached for the full mug of steaming coffee behind her and sat down with it. His was still waiting, untouched, on the edge of her desk.

“You don’t have to sit down if you don’t want to,” she told him.

And probably because she’d put it that way, he finally dropped into the nearest chair.

“Did you bring clothes for the stay?” she asked. “Shaving kit? Stuff you’ll need for a couple of weeks?”

“In the car.”

“Good.” He really did plan on staying, making it work, instead of just grabbing some drugs and taking off. That gave her hope.

“So, you just give massages?” he asked.

“That’s what I do.”Easygoing. Relaxed.Maybe he’d follow her example. Patients often mirrored their therapist. “Some people come here with mental issues, some with physical, some with both. We do our best to help everyone.”

He rolled his neck. “I have some shrapnel damage.”

“Murph Dolan, my colleague who’ll be registering you, has had a piece of shrapnel in his shoulder for over five years now. His doctor said digging it out might cause more damage than leaving it in. The injury only bothers him when the weather is bad.”

“Mine are all out,” Ian said.

“That’s good.”

He nodded.Finally, they were in agreement about something. Now she’d just have to take it from there.

“My head hurts more than my leg. The pain is blinding sometimes. I need something for that. And this fucking anxiety. I can’t sleep.”

“Once we finish the coffee, we’ll walk over to Maria. If you talk to her, she can probably start you on a prescription right away.”

“Not right away.” Resentment and impatience flashed. “I’ll have to find a pharmacy first. Then they need to get VA approval.”

Kate smiled. “She can get you started on her pharmaceutical samples. We have pharma reps here almost every day.”

Ian swallowed a gulp of coffee, hope sparking in his bleak eyes for the first time, dots of light in a bottomless well of darkness. “She would do that?”

“For every single person who works here, Ian, our number one goal, every single day, is to help.”

He put his phone on her desk so he could hold the mug with both hands. His shoulders relaxed. The tension in the room eased.

And that was when Murph burst from the treatment room, weapon in hand, a one-person commando attack.

Chapter Thirteen

Murph

“Hands in the air!” Murph threw himself on the guy, knocking him away from Kate.

Kate shouted, “Stop! Murph!”

Like hell he would.

Murph held Ian down, putting his full body weight on the man. Where the hell was Bing? They had no handcuffs at the center, an oversight Murph was going to remedy at the earliest opportunity.