Again, her box-spring raft tossed in the flamboyant sea of bad motel decor. A second attack of vertigo, worse than the first, spun a whirlpool of nausea through her, and instead of executing the butt-booting assault that she’d envisioned, she groaned. ‘I’m gonna puke.’
Retrieving his Coke and peanuts, picking up his medical bag, the stranger said, ‘You’d better resist the urge. The effects of the anesthesia linger. You could lose consciousness again, and if you pass out while regurgitating, you’ll wind up like Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, choking to death on your own vomit.’
Oh, lovely. She’d simply gone out to buy some root beer. Such an innocent undertaking. Not ordinarily a high-risk task. She had fully understood the need to compensate for the root-beer indulgence with a dry-toast breakfast, but she hadn’t gone to the vending machines with any expectation whatsoever that by doing so she would put herself at risk of choking to death on her own upchuck. Had she known, she would have stayed in her room and drunk tap water; after all, what was good enough for Fred was good enough for her.
‘Lie still,’ the crackpot urged, not with any element of command in his voice but with what sounded like concern for her. ‘Lie still, and the nausea and the vertigo will fade in two or three minutes. I don’t want you to choke to death, that would be stupid, but I can’t risk hanging around here, playing nursemaid. And remember, if they get their hands on me and discover what I’ve done, they’ll come looking for anyone I’ve injected, and they’ll kill you.’
Remember? Kill? They?
She had no memory whatsoever of any such previous warning, so she assumed that it must have been part of what he’d been talking about when her brain haze, now gradually clearing, had been as thick as London fog.
From the door, he looked back at her. ‘The police won’t be able to keep you safe from these people who’re coming. There’s no one to turn to.’
On the rolling bed, in this tilting room, she could not help but think about the chicken sandwich, slathered with chipotle mayonnaise, and the greasy French fries she’d eaten. She tried to concentrate on her assailant, desperate to devastate him with words in place of the boot that she hadn’t been able to bury in his bottom, but her gorge kept trying to rise.
‘Your only hope,’ he said, ‘is to get out of the search area before you’re detained and forced to have a blood test.’
The chicken sandwich struggled within her as though it retained some of its chicken consciousness, as though the fowl were attempting to take a first messy step toward reconstitution.
Nevertheless, Jilly managed to speak, and she was at once embarrassed by the insult that escaped her, which would have been lame even if she had pronounced it without confusion: ‘Siss my kass.’
In comedy clubs, she frequently dealt with hecklers, cracked their thick skulls, wrung their geek necks, stomped their malicious hearts till they cried for mama – metaphorically speaking, of course – using a dazzle of words as effective as the fists of Muhammad Ali in his prime. In postanesthesia disorientation, however, she was about as witheringly funny as chipotle mayonnaise, which right now was the least amusing substance in the known universe.
‘As attractive as you are,’ he said, ‘I’m sure someone’ll look after you.’
‘Pupid srick,’ she said, further mortified by the utter collapse of her once formidable verbal war machine.
‘In the days ahead, you’d be best advised to keep your mouth shut about what happened here—’
‘Cupid strick,’ she corrected herself, only to realize that she had found a new way to mangle the same insult.
‘—keep your head down—’
‘Stupid prick,’ she said with clarity this time, although the epithet had actually sounded more withering when mispronounced.
‘—and never speak to anyone about what’s happened to you, because as soon as it’s known, you’ll be a target.’
She almost spat the word at him, ‘Hickdead,’ though such crude language, whether or not properly pronounced and clearly enunciated, was not her usual style.
‘Good luck,’ he said, and then he left with his Coke and his peanuts and his evil dreamy smile.