Read Online Killer Focus by Fiona Brand - Free Book Online

more than twenty years.
    She forced eyelids that felt like they’d been glued shut wider, so she could continue to study her dead father. The fact that he was standing just feet away, staring out of a window, convinced Taylor that the bullet that had punched through her back and sliced and diced at least one lung had, most likely, been fatal. If she was in Jack’s company, she definitely hadn’t gone to Heaven.
    The only alternative to death was that she was alive and having a drug-induced vision, because to the best of her knowledge, Taylor didn’t have a psychic bone in her body.
    She turned her head and, like a switch flicking on, pain flared, burning in her chest and all down the back of her throat. She swallowed, trying to ease the dryness in her mouth, and the pain went ballistic.
    A sharp click registered. Someone dressed in white bent over her. “She’s awake and she’s not supposed to be.”
    There was a second metallic clink, a cool sensation running up her right arm.
    The next time she surfaced it was dark. A light glowed beside the bed, illuminating the fact that she was in a private room and her mother, Dana, was sitting beside the bed. Her chest still felt painful and tight; her throat was even sorer. A tube ran across her face: oxygen.
    Dana’s hand gripped hers. “Thank God. I thought I was going to lose you.”
    Taylor tried for a smile. Dana looked fragile, dark smudges under her eyes, the skin across her cheekbones finely drawn. “I’m hard to kill.”
    Although, if the way she felt now was any indication, she must have come close to dying. She was having trouble breathing. Speaking was even more difficult.
    With an effort of will, she tried to remember what had happened, but her mind was a blank from the time she had consciously registered that she had been shot until she’d woken up and hallucinated that Jack Jones had been standing beside her bed. “Which hospital am I in?” There were wires and tubes everywhere. A shunt ran into her bandaged right wrist, and to her left she could hear the beep of a heart monitor.
    â€œGeorge Washington. They moved you out of ICU yesterday.”
    Yesterday. That meant at least a day had passed since she had last woken up. “How long since I was admitted?” She cleared her throat, suddenly ferociously thirsty.
    â€œTwo days.” Dana leaned forward with a plastic cup and a straw. “You can have a few sips, but not too much. They don’t want you throwing up in case you rupture your stitches. And don’t worry about the back of your throat. The reason it’s sore is because they’ve had a tube down there.”
    Ice-cold water filled her mouth then flowed down her throat. She winced at the rawness, took another sip and watched as Dana replaced the drink on her bedside table.
    Two days. The amount of time that had passed explained why Dana looked so tired and rumpled; she would have caught a flight out yesterday. Dana had a key to Taylor’s apartment but, knowing her mother, she would have bypassed the apartment and come straight to the hospital. She had probably slept here last night.
    Dana’s hand tightened around hers. “The bullet broke a rib and punctured the bottom lobe of your left lung. They’ve got you strapped up so the rib doesn’t move. Luckily the bullet went all the way through so they didn’t have to dig it out. They did keyhole surgery to repair the lung, but unfortunately, you had a reaction to one of the drugs they used, which is why you’ve been out for so long.”
    The sound of footsteps in the hall was followed by the glimpse of a woman carrying a brightly colored plastic bag. Taylor had a flashback of a woman with two children and other shoppers huddled against the cold. “Was anyone else hurt?”
    â€œThe guy who owns the take-out stand got grazed, but that was all.”
    Despite the fact that Chen had gotten hurt,