WIN by Coben, Harlan (best book reader txt) 📕

It does. But not enough.

The bullet hits me in the upper back below the shoulder.

I don’t stop my spin. My momentum carries me through. I keep a thin razor blade in the cuff of my right sleeve. Bobby didn’t notice it as he searched me. Almost no one does. It shoots out now at the wrist and into my palm. I have the razor blade in my right hand, and while the driver is going at seventy-one miles per hour—yes, I see the numbers lit up large on the dashboard—I slice his throat to the point of near decapitation.

The van lurches hard to the side. Blood sprays from his artery, coating the inside of the windshield. I feel the warm contents of his neck—tissue, cartilage, more blood—empty out onto my hand. My left arm snakes through his seat belt harness so I can be somewhat braced for the upcoming collision.

I hear the gun go off again.

This bullet only grazes my shoulder before shattering the windshield. I grab the steering wheel and spin it. The van jerks off the road and teeters onto two wheels.

I close my eyes and hold on as the van flips, then flips again, then crashes hard into a pole.

And then, for me, there is only darkness.

CHAPTER 20

All superheroes have an origin story. All people do, when you think about it. So here is the abridged version of mine.

I grew up in privilege. You know that already. What you may consider relevant is that every human being is snap-judged by their looks. That’s not exactly an earth-shattering observation and no, I’m not comparing or saying I had it worse than others. That would be what we call a “false equivalency.” But the fact is, many people detest me on sight. They see the towheaded blond locks, the ruddy complexion, the porcelain features, my haughty resting face—they smell the inescapable stink of old money that comes off me in relentless waves—and they think smug, snob, elitist, lazy, judgmental, undeservedly wealthy ne’er-do-good who was born not only with a silver spoon in his mouth but with a forty-eight-piece silver place setting with a side of titanium steak knives.

I understand this. I, too, sometimes feel that way about those who inhabit my socioeconomic sphere.

You see me, and you think I look down on you. You feel resentment and envy toward me. All your own failures, both real and perceived, rise up and want to target me.

Even worse, I appear to be a soft, easy, pampered target.

Today’s teenagers might dub my face “punch-worthy.”

Inevitably, all of the above led to ugly incidents in my childhood. For the sake of brevity, I will talk about one. During a visit to the Philadelphia Zoo when I was ten years old, decked out in a blue blazer with my school crest sewn onto the chest pocket, I wandered away from my well-heeled pack. A group of inner-city students—yes, you can read into that as you might—surrounded me, mocked me, and then beat me. I ended up hospitalized, in a coma for a short time, and in a suddenly interesting life cycle, I nearly lost the same kidney Bobby Lyons had so recently pummeled.

The physical pain of that beating was bad. The shame that ten-year-old boy felt from cowering, from feeling helpless and terrified, was far worse.

In short, I never wanted to experience that again.

I had a choice then. I could, as my father urged, “stay amongst my own”—hide behind those wrought-iron gates and well-manicured hedges—or I could do something about it.

You know the rest. Or at least you think you do. Human beings, as Sadie noted, are complex. I had the financial means, the motivation, the past trauma, the innate skills, the disposition, and perhaps, when I am most honest with myself, some sort of loose screw (or primitive survival mechanism?) that allows me to not only thrive but take some pleasure from acts of violence.

Take all those components, puree them in a blender, and voilà. Here I am.

In a hospital bed. Unconscious.

I don’t know how long I’ve been here. I don’t know whether I dreamed this or not, but I may have opened my eyes and seen Myron sitting bedside. I did that for him when we scraped him off the pavement after our own government tortured him. Other times I hear voices—my father’s, my biological daughter’s, my deceased mother’s—but since I know for certain that at least one of those voices cannot be real, perhaps I am imagining the rest.

I am, however, alive.

Per my “plan”—I use that word in the loosest sense possible—I’d managed to fold enough of my body across the driver’s seat belt harness before the crash. It kept me strapped in during impact. I don’t know the fate of Teddy’s two brothers. I don’t know what the authorities believed happened. I don’t know how many hours or days it has been since the crash.

As I begin to swim up to the surface of awareness, I let my mind wander. I have begun piecing some of this case together, or at least it feels that way. Hard to know for certain. I am still mostly unconscious, if that’s what you call this cusp, and thus many of my purported solutions—about the LLC, about the bank robbery, about the murder of Ry Strauss—seem plausible now but may, like many a dream, turn into utter nonsense when I awake.

I reach a stage where I can sense consciousness, yet I hesitate. I’m not sure why. Part is exhaustion, a weariness so heavy that even the act of opening my eyes would seem a task far too rigorous in my current condition. I feel as though I’m strapped down in one of the dreams where you’re running through deep snow and thus moving too slowly. I’m also trying to listen and gather intel, but the voices are unintelligible, muffled, like Charlie Brown’s parents or the audial equivalent of a shower curtain.

When I finally do blink my eyes open, it is not a family