The beeping woke me up. It was a steady drone, pounding out beat after beat. It was my heart I heard being digitally reproduced for an audience. The machine beside the bed was monitoring its uniform spasms. I lay with my eyes closed, ignoring the beeps, focusing on the other sound that erupted intermittently. I waited for what felt like ten minutes until the eruption happened again. A wet phlegmy cough started low in someone's gut and fought gravity all the way up. In the midst of the coughing fit, I opened my eyes and looked around the room. A second later, I closed them and tried to re-create the scene in my mind while the coughing subsided. The room was white, as were the machine and the bed rails. Handcuffs joined my wrist to the bed. The chair by the door was overflowing with a lot of bad suit. The fabric was worn and out of style. Every pocket on the jacket brimmed with papers and the tops of pens. There was also an angular bulge on the right side of the coat, visible under the thinning material. The suit and the gun bulge had cop written all over it.

Almost 4,000 beeps later, the cop got up from the chair. He had to take a few seconds to get his wind back from the exercise.

"Don't go anywhere," he chuckled.

The door creaked twice, open then closed, and my eyes opened. I was in a windowless box of a room. Fluorescent lighting showed every imperfection on the walls and the floor. Every scuff and scratch stood out and showed the age of the hospital room. I breathed deep and felt the air rush into my nostrils. The antiseptic scent made me nauseous. The sudden pang of discomfort tuned me in to every other pain I was feeling. A wash of anguish rolled over me. My head ached and my ribs hurt. I tried to reach up to my face, but the shackles held me solid. The chains slammed against the bed frame with a loud metal-on-plastic crack. The sound was an explosion in the small white room. I lay back and closed my eyes — expecting company, but no one came in.

I opened my eyes again and stared at the ceiling thinking back to the last thing I could remember. I had been forced to work a job for a mob boss. I had told Paolo Donati that I was done being his problem solver, but no one quit on Paolo. He used my friends to force me into finding who had kidnapped his nephews. I became a fixer again and found out that Paolo's nephews were kidnapped as part of a coup. His former right hand, Julian, wanted the brass ring and thought going after the boss's nephews would unhinge Paolo enough to knock him off his throne. The two mob heavies were on a collision course with me in the middle. I did the only thing that would keep me above ground. I led Paolo into his enemies' web and let nature take its course — after I got Julian admitting on tape that he killed the two kids. The info was enough to keep Julian away from me forever: the kids had powerful relatives in the States who would be honour bound to settle up with Julian if they found out what he did. I remembered walking away from Domenica's, Julian's restaurant, a free man. Then I remembered leaving the pavement. Everything after that was blank.

I took the alone time in the hospital room to research. There was nothing nearby that I could get my hands on, nothing to use against the cuffs holding me down. Everything I could touch was flimsy and soft. I kept looking for an option until I heard the doorknob twist. The door swung in, and the wheezing cop wedged himself back into his chair. I fake slept to the tune of beeping and coughing with crinkling plastic on drums. The cop ate at a rapid pace, pausing only to unwrap the snack on deck. It was as though he thought someone might burst through the door and take the food right out of his mouth. After about a minute, my nose picked up the scent of stale cigarettes. The cop was a smoker and enough of an addict to leave his post to sneak a smoke break. I tried to run through scenarios in which I could get my hands on the cop and out of the cuffs, but my arms had barely enough slack to reach the thin mattress. My lack of options took my hands out of my equations. My feet were free, but there was no guarantee that I could kick the cop in a way that would still leave me access to his keys or his gun. I couldn't lift his piece or pick his pockets with my toes anyway, so I let the idea drift out of my mind. I had to play the waiting game until a new opportunity presented itself.

I lay chained to the bed for two days feigning unconsciousness. Every time the fat cop took off to sneak a cigarette, I stretched out as best I could and looked for anything I overlooked before that would help me escape. I was always disappointed.

On the third day, I was counting the perforations in the ceiling tiles with my eyes when the door opened earlier than I expected it to. I usually had a few minutes and a few hundred beeps before I had to begin faking sleep again. I quickly adapted to the schedule change and resumed my conscious coma, listening for the cop's breathing. What I got was something entirely different. Rubber-soled shoes squeaked as someone approached the bed. It wasn't the doctors or nurses — their footwear didn't make a sound. The fat cop had worn-in dress shoes that slipped on the glossy floor. I had heard him stumble and break his fall on expensive medical equipment several times. This was someone new.

The fluorescent light dimmed outside my eyelids as the person who was now standing over me took a huge deep breath and slowly let it out. This was not like the fat cop's breathing — this person was in shape. The breath lasted over thirty seconds. I took a slow breath of my own to slow my own heart. I didn't want the monitor giving anything away. Just as I finished exhaling, a heavy hand closed over my nose and mouth. The hand pressed down and the bed groaned in response. The machine beside the bed monitoring my heart picked up speed, but my body stayed slack. The beeping quickened its pace, becoming more and more of a solid sound as another hand tore the monitor pad from my chest. The machine registered a flatline. It was going on too long. I could no longer afford to play dead. My mouth opened and found part of the hand over my lips. I bit down hard and tasted blood.

"Shit!"

The hand moved away as the door flung open. The fat cop rushed in, at his snail's pace, ahead of a nurse and a doctor.

"Morrison!" the fat cop said.

"Don't worry, Miller. Our patient woke up. It's a miracle." The man who had been suffocating me was pressing his thumb over where I had bit. His face was to the door, giving me only a look at his suit; it was tight, but not like the fat cop's. The material was taut across muscular shoulders and arms.

"But the nurse's station got an alert that his heart stopped. Whatever was monitoring his vitals said he was dying."

"When you left for your little break, our patient must have removed the sensor. The alert wouldn't have happened if you managed to stay at your post."

"Sir, I ..."

"Shut the fuck up, Miller. Get everyone out of here. I'll deal with you later."

"Now hold on a minute, I have to check on my patient."

"Later, Doc, later. Right now he has to check in with me. When I got what I want from him, you can have him."

"I am his physician, and while he is in this hospital he is under my care. Hospital protocol demands I check on him after an alert," the doctor protested. He had a hard time realizing that he was outranked on his own turf.

"Miller, get them out of here now!"

The...