‘Certainly.’
‘Have someone wake me up in three hours,’ Rosen said on the way to his office, where a nice comfortable couch awaited.
‘Nice tan,’ Billy observed with a smirk. ‘I wonder where she got it.’ There was general amusement. ‘What do we do with her?’
He thought about that. He’d just discovered a fine way to deal with bodies, much cleaner, in its way, and far safer than what they’d been doing. But it also involved a lengthy boat trip, and he just didn’t have the time to be bothered. He also didn’t want to have anyone else use that particular method. It was too good to share with anyone. He knew that one of them would talk. That was one of his problems.
‘Find a spot,’ he said after a moment’s consideration. ‘If she’s found, it doesn’t matter much.’ Then he looked around the room, cataloging the expressions he saw. The lesson had been learned. Nobody else would try this again, not anytime soon. He didn’t even have to say anything.
‘Tonight? Better at night.’
‘That’s fine. No hurry.’ Everyone else could learn even more from looking at her for the rest of the day, lying there in the middle of the floor. He took only a little pleasure from it, and people had to learn their lessons, and even when it was too late for one of them, others could learn from that one’s mistakes. Especially when the lessons were clear and hard. Even the drugs wouldn’t block this one out.
‘What about the guy?’ he asked Billy.
Billy smirked again. It was his favorite expression. ‘Blew him away. Both barrels, ten feet. We won’t be seeing him no more.’
‘Okay.’ He left. There was work to be done and money to collect. This little problem was behind him. It was a pity, he thought on the way to his car, that they couldn’t all be solved this easily.
The body remained in place. Doris and the others sat in the same room, unable to look away from what had once been a friend, learning their lesson as Henry wished.
Kelly vaguely noted that he was being moved. The floor moved under him. He watched the lines between the floor tiles travel like movie credits until they backed him into another room, a small one. This time he tried to raise his head, and indeed it moved a few inches, enough to see the legs of a woman. The green surgical slacks ended above her ankles, and they were definitely a woman’s. There was a whirring sound, and his horizon moved downwards. After a moment he realized that he was on a powered bed, hanging between two hoops of stainless steel. His body was attached to the bed somehow, and as the platform rotated he could feel the pressure of the restraints that held him in place, not uncomfortable, but there. Presently he saw a woman. His age, perhaps a year or two younger, with brown hair stuffed under a green cap and light eyes that sparkled in a friendly way.
‘Hello,’ she said from behind her mask. ‘I’m your nurse.’
‘Where am I?’ Kelly asked in a raspy voice.
‘Johns Hopkins Hospital.’
‘What – ‘
‘Somebody shot you.’ She reached out to touch his hand.
The softness of her hand ignited something in his drug-suppressed consciousness. For a minute or so, Kelly couldn’t figure out what it was. Like a cloud of smoke, it shifted and revolved, forming a picture before his eyes. The missing pieces began to come together, and even though he understood it was horror that awaited him, his mind struggled to hurry them along. In the end it was the nurse who did it for him.
Sandy O’Toole had left her mask on for a reason. An attractive woman, like many nurses she felt that male patients responded well to the idea of someone like her taking a personal interest in them. Now that Patient Kelly, John, was more or less alert, she reached up and untied the mask to give him her beaming feminine smile, the first good thing of the day for him. Men liked Sandra O’Toole, from her tall, athletic frame to the gap between her front teeth. She had no idea why they considered the gap sexy – food got caught there, after all – but as long as it worked, it was one more tool for her business of helping to make sick people well. And so she smiled at him, just for business. The result was like no other she had encountered.
Her patient went ghostly pale, not the white of snow or fresh linen, but the mottled, sickly look and texture of Styrofoam. Her first thought was that something had gone gravely wrong, a massive internal bleed, perhaps, or even a clot-driven thrombosis. He might have screamed, but couldn’t catch his breath, and his hands fell limp. His eyes never left her, and after a moment O’Toole realized that she had somehow caused whatever it was. O’Toole’s first instinct was to take his hand and say that everything was all right, but she knew instantly that it wasn’t true.
‘Oh, God… oh, God… Pam.’ The look on what ought to have been a ruggedly handsome face was one of black despair.
‘She was with me,’ Kelly told Rosen a few minutes later. ‘Do you know anything, doc?’
‘The police will be here in a few minutes, John, but, no, I don’t know anything. Maybe they took her to another hospital.’ He tried to hope. But Sam knew that it was a lie, and he hated himself for lying. He made a show of taking Kelly’s vital signs, something Sandy could have done just as well, before examining his patient’s back. ‘You’re going to be okay. How’s the shoulder?’
‘Not real great, Sam,’ Kelly replied, still groggy. ‘How bad?’
‘Shotgun – you took quite a bit, but – was the window on the car rolled up?’
‘Yeah,’ Kelly said, remembering the rain.
‘That’s one of the things that saved you. The shoulder muscles are pretty beaten up, and you damned near bled to death, but there won’t be any permanent damage except for some scarring. I did the job myself.’
Kelly looked up. ‘Thanks, Sam. Pain isn’t so bad … worse the last time I -‘
‘Quiet down, John,’ Rosen ordered gently, giving the neck a close look. He made a mental note to order a complete new set of X rays just to make sure there wasn’t something he had missed, maybe close to the spine. ‘The pain medication will kick in pretty fast. Save the heroics. We don’t award points for that here. ‘Kay?’
‘Aye aye. Please – check the other hospitals for Pam, okay?’ Kelly asked, hope yet in his voice though he knew better, too.
Two uniformed officers had been waiting the whole time for Kelly to come out from under. Rosen brought in the older of the two a few minutes later. The questioning was brief, on doctor’s orders. After confirming his identity, they asked about Pam; they already had a physical description from Rosen, but not a surname, which Kelly had to provide. The officers made note of his appointment with Lieutenant Allen and left after a few minutes as the victim started to fade out. The shock of the shooting and surgery, added to the pain medications, would diminish the value of what he said anyway, Rosen pointed out.
‘So who’s the girl?’ the senior officer asked.
‘I didn’t even know her last name until a couple minutes ago,’ Rosen said, seated in his office. He was dopey from lack of sleep, and his commentary suffered as well. ‘She was addicted to barbiturates when we met them – she and Kelly were living together, I suppose. We helped her clean up.’
‘Who’s “we”?’
‘My wife, Sarah. She’s a pharmacologist here. You can talk to her if you want.’
‘We will,’ the officer assured him. ‘What about Mr Kelly?’
‘Ex-Navy, Vietnam vet.’
‘Do you have any reason to believe that he’s a drug user, sir?’
‘Not a chance,’ Rosen answered, a slight edge on his voice. ‘His physical condition is too good for that, and I saw his reaction when we found out that Pam was using pills. I had to calm him down. Definitely not an addict. I’m a physician, I would have noticed.’
The policeman was not overly impressed, but accepted it at face value. The detectives would have a lot of fun with this one, he thought. What had appeared to be a simple robbery was now at least a kidnapping as well. Wonderful news. ‘So what was he doing in that part of town?’
‘I don’t know,’ Sam admitted. ‘Who’s this Lieutenant Allen?’
‘Homicide, Western District,’ the cop explained.
‘I wonder why they had an appointment.’
‘That’s something we’ll get from the Lieutenant, sir.’
‘Was this a robbery?’
‘Probably. It sure looks that way. We found his wallet a block away, no cash, no credit cards, just his driver’s license. He also had a handgun in his car. Whoever robbed him must have missed that. That’s against the law, by the way,’ the cop noted. Another officer came in.