by Nancy Smith
Tears spilled out his eyes. He choked and gasped. It became harder and harder for him to breathe. His throat and lungs were swelling. He would die if he didn’t get medical help, so he stumbled to front of the bus.
“I need medical attention,” he intended to say, but it came out as strangled gasps. He pulled the cord for a stop.
“No more unscheduled stops,” said the driver.
That was the last he remembered.
10
Isa forced herself to wait a couple of hours until she was alone to make the call to her father. Rory had gone to the station to deliver the insipid evening news and she was at home. Her hands shook as she picked up the phone and punched the buttons.
“Hello. May I help you?”
It was a woman’s voice. Isa didn’t know what to make of that.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m looking for an older man. He’s fifty-eight years old and six feet tall.” Isa didn’t know what her father weighed or what he might be wearing. She wouldn’t make a good witness in a trial. “He has thick light-brown hair. This is his phone.”
“I know who you mean. I’m sorry to say that he’s in our emergency medical clinic. May I ask your relationship to him?”
“I’m his daughter. What happened?”
“We’re not sure. Maybe some kind of fire. He’s not yet awake to tell us for certain.”
“He’s burned?” Isa couldn’t keep the alarm from her voice. “How bad is it?”
“He’s recovering.”
“Where are you?”
“San Marcos. Apparently he was on a bus when he passed out.”
“But he’ll be okay?”
The nurse didn’t respond directly to her question. “He didn’t have identification on him or his insurance card. We think maybe his wallet was stolen.”
Isa got the details she needed from the nurse. “I’m on my way.” Isa hung up the phone. “I’ll be there as soon as I can,” she contradicted herself.
Isa watched Rory on the late repeat of the evening news. She paced in front of the TV set, but she couldn’t take her eyes off Rory. Did she trust him? Hadn’t he proven that she could trust him?
Wilder had been beautiful and he’d used his looks and charm to get what he wanted. When she’d been with him it was like he had mesmerized her. She hadn’t been able to reason like an adult. It was like she was a teenybopper he was her idol.
Mom had warned her, but Isa hadn’t paid attention. She’d yelled at her mom to the point of injuring their relationship. But it turned out that Mom was right. Wilder couldn’t be trusted. He’d charged her credit card to the max and taken out two more in her name. That’s why Isa was living at home. She was paying off Wilder’s debt. Isa had vowed to never trust a pretty boy again. But Rory was different, wasn’t he?
Rory came in the door as he was signing off on the television.
“Hey,” he said. “I thought that report went pretty well. You watch?”
“Yeah. Yes,” she said.
“What’s wrong?”
If she’d promised to never trust a pretty boy again, why was she jumping right in? She had no other choice.
“I’ve got something to tell you—off the record. And I need your help.” She went on before she lost her nerve. “My father is alive. He didn’t die in that explosion.”
“What!”
“I got a call from a hospital. They have him. He’s hurt, maybe badly.”
Rory’s face turned red as he went through a series of emotions, ending with angry.
“You knew all along,” he said.
“I suspected. It’s not the same thing.”
“Off the record,” he repeated what she had said. “You don’t trust me.”
“More now. I don’t know you.” Isa felt guilty because she didn’t fully trust him and she had purposefully not said what clinic had her father or where.
“I told you that Kolli was my friend. You don’t think I might have liked to know that he might be alive.”
“You told me you met him once,” she replied, the volume of her voice going up. “That’s what you said.”
Rory stormed outside.
She paced the living room wondering how to get the papers she needed.
He was back in twenty minutes with an unopened soda and bag of chips. “They’re still watching the house,” he said as he nodded to the items he’d bought at the little neighborhood store. “I didn’t want to draw their attention.” He sat on the sofa and took a few deep breaths. He opened the chips.
Stress-eater, Isa thought.
“What kind of help?”
“What?”
“You said you needed my help? What do you need?”
“At the hospital, my father is listed as a John Doe. He needs to stay that way, but the hospital insists on insurance. I can’t go see him until I can provide insurance information.”
“You need a fake ID and an insurance card using a fake name.”
“Yes.”
“And why do you think I can get those things for you?”
“I don’t know that you can. I’m hoping you can. You said you have contacts.”
Rory glared at her for a bit longer. He was likely wrestling with trusting her too. Ironic, she thought.
“Can you help?” Isa asked.
“Maybe. I’ll see. It will take a few days if I can.”
“I was thinking about that. The hospital thinks his wallet was stolen. If we can get the insurance card, no picture, that may give us time to get the rest.”
“Fast. That’ll cost.”
“How much?”
“I’ll let you know.”
Isa left quietly by the back door. She sneaked through the neighbors yard and met Rory on a corner of the block behind hers. He was in his alternative car, the old one.
Rory and Isa met with a middle-aged woman who would not give her name. She dressed like a librarian: brown pencil skirt and dusty pink cardigan, except for a colorful headscarf that covered her head like a bandana. The long tails of the scarf blew in a gentle wind as the three of them sat at a picnic table in a small park. Isa wanted to treat her with care in case the headpiece meant she had cancer.
On the far side of a chain-link fence, children were having their last swim in a neighborhood pool before it closed and they had to go back to school. Isa watched them playing in the water, teasing each other whenever the lifeguard looked the other way. It was as if this was any other normal day.
Scarf Woman had wanted $10,000 for a card with a valid insurance number and a birth certificate to go with it. Isa didn’t have the money. She had about one thousand in cash in her go-bag, so Rory came up with the remainder. Isa knew that her dad could repay Rory once they found him. Scarf Woman had also wanted an egg salad sandwich for her lunch as a bonus for her quick work. Isa handed her an old plastic grocery-store bag that contained both the cash and the sandwich.
“These plastic bags aren’t good for the environment,” she said as she pulled out the sandwich and began to voraciously eat it.”
“I didn’t have a paper bag.”
Scarf Woman handed Isa an envelope. “They don’t even give out plastic in the stores anymore.”
“We had some in a cabinet.”
Isa opened the envelope and looked at the two documents. “You named my father after the head of the Russian federation?”
“It was the only Russian name I could spell, yeah? That or Stalin. I’m sure plenty of other people have the name Poutin too.”
“Why a Russian name?”
“Rory said your da was Russian, yeah?”
Isa looked askance at Rory. Her look said “really?” but she didn’t say it out loud.
“My ancestors are primarily from Finland, not Russia.”
“Stuck with it now, aren’t you?”
Isa noticed that Poutin was spelled differently from Vladimir Putin. Scarf Woman was not a librarian.
Kolli dreamed of trucks. Big rig trucks that were continuously bac
king up. Beep. Beep. Beep.
As he moved more into consciousness, he noticed the smell of antiseptic. He was in the lab. He had fallen asleep at his desk again. He’d done that more than a few times.
The clinic upstairs was unloading something in the alley. Beep. Beep. Beep.
He had something over his face. Was he in the clean room? Did he fall asleep in the clean room? That wasn’t safe.
Someone gently touched his arm. Maria? In a minute the beeping stopped.
Kolli opened his eyes. Not Maria. He was in a hospital room. A young woman in flowered scrubs changed his IV bag. She adjusted the mask over his face.
Kolli reached up to remove the facemask.
“No,” she said. “Leave it there. You need the oxygen.”
“Where?” Kolli managed to get out of his irritated throat.
The nurse smiled, patient and reassuring, as she was taught to do. “You’re in an emergency clinic in San Marcos. You were on a bus and lost consciousness, but you’re going to be okay now.”
Kolli nodded.
“You didn’t have any ID on you. Maybe somebody stole it I’m sorry to say, but we found your phone and called your daughter.
Kolli heard the nurse say, “She’s on her way” as he nodded back out.
Isa and Rory arrived at the medical center. It was one of those facilities that they have in many small towns that are for 24/7 emergency services. Located right on the highway, it was likely the only place to which they could take her father when he passed out on the Greyhound Bus. To Isa, it looked like a shop in a strip mall, but it had emergency doctors and emergency equipment and they had kept him alive. That was all that mattered.
Isa flew out of the car as soon as Rory pulled into a parking space. The doublewide, glass doors automatically slid open as she approached them. She looked. A few patients sat on plastic chairs in front of a reception counter. A child of eight or nine held his arm at an awkward angle. It was probably broken. This was likely the kind of patient this center usually got, in and out—in a couple of hours.
A receptionist in purple scrubs with yellow daisies approached the desk from one side as Isa approached from the other.
“Hi,” Isa said. “I’m looking for my father. Someone called. He was burned in a fire, she said.”
“Yes. I’m so glad you could get here. He’ll be so happy to see you. Did you bring his insurance information?”
“Is he okay?” Isa asked as she shoved the envelope with the fake documents across the desk.
Daisies glanced at the forms and smiled in a way that felt warm and insincere at the same time. “My name is Daisy. I’m your father’s day nurse. How about I take you back to see him and I’ll deal with this paperwork while you visit.”
Daisy opened a gate on the reception desk for Isa to pass through.
“My, ah, boyfriend is right behind.”
“I’ll send him along. No worries.”
Isa and Daisy passed a lab, a records room, x-ray facilities, and a number of small exam rooms. They turned a corner and walked down a hall with patient rooms. Isa counted five in all. Five rooms for patients.
Daisy opened the door to a room. “You’re in luck. The doctor is here,” she said.
The doctor stepped out into the hall with his hand extended. “Miss, ah?” he asked.
“Just call me Lisa.” Isa didn’t want to give her real name. Just adding an L would make her harder to find, especially since her proper name was Isabel.
“Nice to meet you, Lisa.”
“How is he?”
“Do you know what happened?”
Isa hesitated for a moment. She’d done pretty well so far at not giving identifying information, but she felt that she had to explain so that her dad could get the best medical care. She knew she would tell this doctor anything he asked.
“I wasn’t there, but I heard that there was a chemical fire at his work.”
The doctor nodded and looked sage. “Yes. That explains it.”
Isa waited for him to go on. She worried that he had already put it together: a chemical fire just forty miles north in Austin—the seventy-five. Most likely, the doctor would think that her dad was a person who worked in the upstairs clinic. Everyone knew none of the seventy-five had survived. She wondered, not for the first time, how he had.
“He has the symptoms of smoke inhalation, however there was a complicating factor that has made his condition more difficult to treat. Chemicals would do that.”
Isa looked alarmed.
“Don’t fret. It was touch and go for the first forty-eight hours. There was some permanent lung injury and we discussed removing a piece of one lob of his lung.”
“Can he live without a lob of his lungs?”
“He’s improving steadily now, so we didn’t have to do surgery. His red blood cell count is up and we did a bronchoscopy that indicates only a limited degree of damage to his airways. We hope the lung damage will repair itself over time.”
“But?” Isa could see the look on his face.
The doctor placed his hand on Isa’s arm to calm her. “Yes. In fact, I put in a chest tube after surgery, but I’ve just taken that out. Another couple days of rest and he can go home. He shouldn’t do anything too strenuous, but it will actually be good for him to walk around a bit.”
Isa pushed into the room and looked at her dad. He looked small and pale on the bed, not at all her robust, healthy father. He had on a facemask that she assumed was pumping oxygen into his lungs.
“He’s been awake,” the doctor said, “but we have him sedated so he can rest. He’ll sleep for a few more hours.”
Isa pulled a chair to his bedside and sat.
Rory walked into the room. “Oh God,” he said.
11
It was National Puzzle Day and Peabody sat at his desk thinking over the first of the ten brainteasers that had been posted online to celebrate. The first puzzle was a Sudoku with many more spaces than numbers.
Peabody was curious. He liked to explore and understand every puzzle he came across. That is how he got his nickname. He’d been called Peabody since childhood after the Mr. Peabody and Sherman cartoon.
These kinds of puzzles relaxed him so that he could concentrate on the bigger mysteries in his life— like where was Nick?
Nick Calhone was a nice guy. He had never developed a taste for the wet work like some of the other men had. Peabody should have never sent Nick to that lab. It was most likely that Nick had just taken off. What was he going to do about it? There was no retirement from this job. If he couldn’t find Nick soon and talk him off the ledge, Peabody would have to text Darwin.
Peabody got his instructions from Darwin—always by text. They had never spoken in person or over the telephone. Peabody’s crew had done a lot of jobs for Darwin—jobs all over the globe, but mostly in the United States. The jobs were usually innocuous. They’d watch somebody in Florida or special deliver a box to somebody in New Jersey.
Peabody suspected that Darwin wasn’t one person. He’d studied the texts and noticed that the word choice, use of shortcuts, and abbreviations varied from place to place. He thought Darwin was a group and he believed that they had offices in Austin, Shreveport, Atlantic City and West Palm Beach. Not the biggest cities. Not the hubs. He thought that was interesting too.
“Hey, where’s Peabody?” he heard one of his men call.
Peabody looked up from his computer, adjusted his tie and waited for the man to enter is office. In a moment, he wasn’t disappointed.
“Yes?” Peabody said.
“The girl and the nosy reporter have gone missing.”
“Gone missing?” he used the quiet, calm tone of voice he knew disconcerted his men. They would much rather he yell at them. “How long have they been gone?”
“Four hours.”
“Well. You better find them then.”
“Yes, sir.”
Another man appeared behind him. “I’ve been checking area hospitals for Nick
. I found a John Doe in a 24/7 emergency room in San Marcos.”
“Description?”
“Male, but older, maybe late fifties.”
“Injuries?”
“They won’t say. HIPPA.”
The two soldiers stared at Peabody. Peabody looked back and forth between the two men, his forehead crinkled in concentration.
“I want the identity of every one of the seventy-five verified. Now. Right now. You got that?” They had kept fingerprints where the skin wasn’t too burned, blood and hair samples of every person from the lab before they released the remains. “Start with the father of Isa Vedkka,” he said.
“Yes, sir.”
12
They raided the bandits’ supply of stolen camping equipment. They set up two ten-by-ten camping shelters and lined cots underneath. Each cot had a sleeping bag, most of which shuttered under the jerking and shivers of its owner. Jesus used twine to hang a saline bag from one of the roof poles and stuck the needle into his latest patient.
“We’re going to need lanterns soon and mosquito netting.”
Main Guy was still on his feet, but didn’t look like he would be for long. He went himself to get the lanterns and netting.
Jesus felt fine except for the exhaustion, beatings and stress. His vaccine had worked. Why hadn’t Amanda’s?
He laid his hand on Amanda’s forehead. Hot to the touch. He stroked her hair.
“You’re going to be fine, honey. I’m going to take care of you,” he whispered into her ear.
She was oblivious to him.
Jesus had received the formula for the original vaccine at a hotel and casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey. He had met an older man who wore the most expensive suit Jesus had ever seen close up. As he arrived, the man was playing one thousand dollar chips at the Roulette Wheel like they were pennies. Weird situation, but not too surprising. Jesus knew that the original vaccine hadn’t come from any place official.