from her belt and examined the digital readout. “Where’s your phone,
Alex?”
I walked her into the kitchen and hung around as she punched numbers.
“This is Dr. Eves. I just got. . . What?. . . When?. . All right,
give me the resident on call. . . Jim? This is Stephanie. What’s up? . . . Yes, yes, there’s a history of that. It’s all in
the chart. . . . Absolutely, keep that drip going. Sounds like you’re
doing everything right, but get me a full tox panel, stat. Make sure
to check for hypoglycemic metabolites. Check all over for puncture
wounds, too, but don’t let on, okay? It’s important, Jim. Please………. Thanks. And keep her totally isolated. No one goes in. . . . Especially not them. . . What?. . . Out in the hall. Leave the
drapes open so they can see her, but no one goes inside. . . . I don’t
care. . . . I know.
let it be on my head, Jim. . . . What?. . . No. Keep her in ICU. Even if things lighten up. . . I don’t care, Jim. Find a bed
somewhere. This one’s crucial. . . . What?. . . Soon. Soon as I
can, maybe an hour. Just- What?. . . Yes, I will. . . . Okay.
Thanks.
I owe you.” She hung up. Her face was white and her chest heaved.
Again,” I said.
She looked past me. Held her head.
Again,” she said. “This time she’s unconscious.”
Quiet night on Chappy Ward. No shortage of empty rooms.
This one was two doors down from 5o5W Cassie’s room.
That cold, clean hospital smell.
The images on the TV I was watching were black-and-white and fuzzy and
small, a miniaturized, capsulated reality.
Cold and clean and a medicinal staleness-though no one had been in this
room for a long TIME
I’d been in it most of the day and all of the evening.
Into the night.
The door was bolted shut. The room was dark, except for a focused
yellow parabola from a corner floor lamp. Double drapes blotted out
Hollywood. I sat on an orange chair, as confined as a patient. The
piped music barely leaked through from the hallway.
The man who called himself Huenengarth sat across the room, near the
lamp, cradled by a chair identical to mine that he’d pushed up to the
empty bed. A small black hand radio rested in his lap.
The bed was stripped down to the mattress. Resting on the ticking was
a sloping paper ramp. Government documents.
The one he was reading had kept his interest for more than an hour.
Down at the bottom was a line of numbers and asterisks and a word that
I thought was UPDATE. But I couldn’t be sure because I was too far
away and neither of us wanted to change that.
I had things to read, too: the latest lab reports on Cassie and a
brand-new article Huenengarth had shoved at me. Five typed pages on
the subject of pension fraud by Professor W W Zimberg, written in
starchy legalese with lots of words blacked out by a broad-tipped
marker.
My eyes went back to the TV No movement on the screen other than the
slow drip of sugar-water through plastic tubing. I inspected the
small, colorless world from edge to edge. For the thousandth TIME
Bedclothes and railings, a blur of dark hair and puffy cheek. The I.V
gauge, with its inlets and outlets and locks.
I sensed movement across the room without seeing it.
Huenengarth took out a pen and crossed something out.
According to documents he showed Milo in the deputy chief’s office,
he’d been in Washington, D.C the night Dawn Herbert was butchered in
her little car. Milo told me he’d corroborated it, as the two of us
drove to the hospital just before sunrIse.
“Who exactly is he working for?” I said.
“Don’t know the details but it’s some sort of covert task force,
probably in cahoots with the Treasury Department.”
“Secret agent man? Think he knows our friend the colonel?”
“Wondered about that myself He found out pretty damn fast that I was