He looks weary when I eventually pull his line. I press a cotton ball to his vein, and he takes a huge, shuddering breath and closes his eyes.
“Weird to think of that stuff inside me.”
“It’s going to work,” I say.
“I don’t feel all that bad,” he says. “Just tired.”
“Give it a few hours.”
“I thought you were supposed to make me feel better,” he says, smiling up at me.
“I’m here to help you, not pat your head.” But I pat his head anyway. Then the doorbell rings.
His color muddies. His smoke had been strengthening despite the chemo, moving to a stronger red, but it yellows with the knocking. His eyes snap to the door, then he looks at me. His eyes tell me all I need to know. Nobody was supposed to bother us. We’re both silent, thinking the same thing: maybe they’ll just go away.
The doorbell rings again, then someone pounds on the door. I wince at the sound.
“Want me to get it?” I whisper.
He shakes his head. “Help me up.”
I take his outstretched hand with both of mine and pull him to his feet. He steadies himself and eyes the door with narrow lids. He sets his shoulders and moves over to the door. There’s no window in the door—it’s just a slab of wood—but there’s a chain catch, and he slides it to before opening the door a crack. I hear a man’s voice outside.
“Mr. Dejooli?”
“Yes,” Ben says.
“It’s Agent Parsons, with the FBI. I’m here with Agent Douglas as well. May we speak with you?”
“It’s not a good time,” Ben says.
“I’m afraid we must insist,” the other, Douglas, says from behind the door. His voice is lower, just above a growl.
“Insist all you want,” Ben says. “I can’t talk to you today. If it’s about the report, it can wait until tomorrow.” Ben moves to close the door, but it thuds against a shoe.
“We found Joseph Flatwood,” says Parsons.
Ben freezes.
“We need to talk with you,” says Douglas, more forcefully this time.
Ben rests his head against the back of the door for a moment, then slides the catch free. He swings open the door and two men in drab suits and bad ties step inside. They have the instantly forgettable faces of government lackeys. They eye me with a clinical unease. They take in the rig and the bag without comment. There can be no mistaking what’s going on here, though. I’m still dressed like a chicken, after all.
“All right,” Ben says. “What is it?”
The agents look at me, and then something unsaid passes between them.
“She’s with me,” Ben says. “Now out with it.”
I flush. I staunch a smile. Agent Parsons gives me a pitying look before turning to Ben. “Flatwood hit another hospital. In Flagstaff.”
“And you got him?”
“No. He got away. Again.”
I try to see Ben’s color. It’s hard. He’s hiding it well, something I suspect he is doing without thinking. The Navajo are very good at affecting a passive face when they want to.
“How?” he asks.
“We don’t know. From the looks of it, he just…disappears.”
“What?”
“He shoots up now, right on site. Right where he steals the drugs. He should be in a coma, but instead, he gets away.”
“But you said you know where he is?”
“He drives an old motorcycle. We’ve had our eye out for it ever since a traffic camera picked him up in Portland. We found it outside of the hospital in Flagstaff, and we bugged it in case he eluded us again.”
“Good thing,” Ben says. Neither of the agents moves a muscle. “So where’s he going?”
“East. Fast. His movements are erratic. He would be hard to catch, even if we wanted to.”
“But you don’t.”
“No. We don’t want to tip him off.”
Ben puts his hands on his hips, and I can see that he wants to scratch at his stomach. His nausea would be knocking at the door right about now.
“I don’t understand. What do you want from me?” Ben asks, and it breaks my heart to hear the hint of desperation in his voice.
“We know where he’s going, Ben. There’s only one major hospital on his route that’s big enough for him to slip in and out unnoticed.”
I go cold. “ABQ General,” I say, before I can stop myself.
The agents turn to me briefly, then nod as if they were approving of the pictures on the mantel. “And he’s almost there. We’re just ahead of him.”
“Well, catch him then. What are you standing here for?” Ben says.
Parsons smooths at his tie. Douglas scratches at his neck. Their coloring is hard to describe. It’s flat brown. Almost dead. There’s been very little movement until now, but at Ben’s insistence a muted flash of mottled black speckles around both men. They’re embarrassed. And angry about it.
“We have tried. Twice our people had him dead to rights. Twice he got away.”
“You don’t think you can catch him,” Ben says, and I hear a hint of a smile in his voice.
“We think you might have a better shot,” Parsons says.
“Me? You’re kidding. What makes you think I could do anything?” He sounds incredulous, but I know otherwise. I can see it in how he sharpens, like a camera snapping to focus. He wants to see this Joey character. This friend I thought was dead. He wants it badly.
I jump in, before anyone can say anything. “Ben, you’re going to be very sick soon. We don’t know how you’re going to react, but odds are it’s not going to be good. You shouldn’t leave this house.”
The agents seem totally disinterested in me. Disinterested in everything but getting Ben to go with them. They’re so flat. Like they’re cutouts of men.
“I don’t like them,” I say. I cover my mouth for a second, then drop my hand before I look too much like a little girl. “I mean…what I mean is that if they have a tracker on him, you can get him tomorrow. Or the next day.”
Or never, and you can just stay with me. And I’ll talk to you. And hold your hand.
“He’s getting violent,” Parsons says evenly. “He assaulted two orderlies at Flagstaff Presbyterian Hospital. Hurt one of them fairly badly. He is extremely hard to take down. His strength is…outsized. We read your report. You can get in his head. Talk to him. Slow him down or distract him enough for our guys to take him down.”
“Ben—” I begin, pleading.
“We don’t have a lot of time, Mr. Dejooli. A matter of hours. And it’s a little over an hour to get there.”
I drop my hands to my sides, and my gown crinkles loudly. I already know I’ve lost.
“Okay,” Ben says. “I’ll go. Just give me five minutes.”
The agents nod, then turn to leave. One of them, Douglas, turns to me and stares at me with the blank malice of a guard dog. Then he follows Parsons out. Ben and I are alone again.
“I have to go. You don’t know about things between Joey and me. I… just have to go, that’s all.”
“You’re gonna get sick.”
“I’ll bring a bag.”
“Dammit, Ben,” I say, quietly.
“I’m sorry. I wouldn’t go if it was anything else. You gotta believe me.”
I rummage around roughly in my tote until I find the anti-nausea medication I brought along with me.
“Here,” I say, throwing it a little harder than I had intended. He catches it out of midair, and it rattles. “Take two. Then take two more in two hours. So on and so forth. It’ll help, but it won’t take care of everything. You’re gonna feel like garbage.”
He looks so grateful and relieved that I can’t stay mad at him. I’m not sure it’s my place to keep him anywhere if he wants to go. I can only say what I can say. I take off my gown and start packing things away while he dashes to the back. I hear him pour a glass of water and gulp the pills down, then I hear him cut left to his room. When he comes back out,
he’s in uniform. Hat and all. He pauses in the kitchen and looks back at the side room where I saw the crow at the window. He takes a tentative step forward and seems to be thinking. I try to fade into the wall while still watching him. He takes a few slow steps and reaches up where the bag is with the sticks. He sets them aside and slowly reaches in the bag. His back is to me so I can’t see what he’s doing, but he stays like this for several moments, long enough to where I’m afraid the agents might ring the doorbell again.
When he turns around from the bag, he looks spooked. He tucks his shirt in and pats at his belt, but his mind is elsewhere. He takes his hat off and scratches at his head, then plunks it back on and walks back to the front room. By then I’m all packed up.
“Thank you, Caroline,” he says, but he’s dazed. His color is flashing faintly, like lights underwater. He wants to tell me something, but he can’t. “I’ll see you…when?”
“Next week. But call me if you feel weird. Or if anything. For anything, I mean.”
He nods and holds the door open for me. He follows me out, and I watch as he gets into a big black Suburban. It turns around and takes off like a rocket, and I’m left outside alone, holding the rig and the cooler.
I almost drop everything on the street when a flock of crows that had stood silent watch in the tree nearby suddenly explodes into flight in a firework of black. They take off after the Suburban, and I can still hear their keening and squawking even when they look like a floating black ribbon in the distance against the sky.
Chapter 12
Owen Bennet
We’ve had our fair share of bad apples visit the oncology floor. Cancer doesn’t go away just because the person who has it is in prison. Cancer doesn’t make a distinction between the girl next door and a violent offender. Cancer is cancer. You can debate the ethics of it from a taxpayer’s perspective all you want, but the law, my oath, and my beliefs tell me that if a person needs treatment, they should get it. No matter what.
Usually you can tell a dangerous patient is on their way because the hospital beefs up security at the entrances and exits to the floor, and two guards are assigned to prep a room, do sweeps, and remove anything that could be used as a weapon. In other words, it’s pretty obvious, and it sets the staff abuzz and generally creates a heightened tension that everyone could do without. It’s tense enough on the onc floor as it is.
This time is different. Very different. But different because everything looks exactly the same. When I get to the hospital, it looks like business as usual. I’m the attending. I relieve the night attending. I get report. I review any material changes from the cases I prepped overnight. I get my schedule, I drink my coffee, and I start making rounds. Then I’m charting in the on-call room when the CEO, Dick Schwartz, walks in flanked by what looks like two accountants. Schwartz seems like he’s about to keel over. In fact, he looks so peaked that I think he’s come to check himself in.
“Hello, Doctor Bennet,” Schwartz says. “Can I speak with you?”
Outside of the one day around Thanksgiving when he and the other C-level administrators hand out turkeys to everyone and shake their hands, I have never spoken with Dick Schwartz in my life. He has no reason to know my name. There are hundreds and hundreds of doctors in his employ. Now all of a sudden I’m the one feeling peaked.
“Mr. Schwartz,” I say, watching as the other two check the hallway outside and close the door to the on-call room. I see a black shoulder holster under the arm of one of them. Not accountants after all. Schwartz pulls out a chair and positions himself so that his jacket doesn’t rumple under him.
“We have a situation here,” he says, and he clasps his hands together on the table. “Things are moving rather fast. I’ve only just been appraised of the situation myself by the agents here, but the gist of it is that we have a violent criminal on his way to ABQ General.”
“All right. You want me to handle the transfer personally?”
Schwartz swallows.
“He’s not being transferred. In fact, he’s not in custody at all. Yet.”
I furrow my brow. “I’m not sure I follow.”
“This man, he targets hospitals for their drugs. He prefers oncology floors, for whatever reason.” Schwartz looks at one of the agents, who nods. “Maybe because onc floors stock high levels of pain killers, but either way, we think he’s going to end up here.”
“And what do you want me to do?”
“That’s just it. Nothing.”
“What?”
The agent by the door steps in. “We need things to appear completely normal here. The suspect must not be tipped off in any way.”
I clear my throat. “So…what, just let him roam the halls? I have a responsibility for the safety of my nurses and staff as well as the patients.”
“If his other hits are any indication, you won’t even see him. He’s…very good. And to date he hasn’t harmed anyone unless approached first, although we believe he may start to attack indiscriminately if he isn’t stopped. He does occasionally go into patient rooms.”
“My God.”
“The sickest patients, it would seem,” says the other agent, with chagrin. “He likes the ones who are dying.”
“What’s he do to them?” I ask.
A nurse tries to come into the break room, but is blocked by the agent, who waves her off like a fly before turning back to me. “To date he’s just stared at them,” he says.
“He is a severe addict, doctor,” says the first agent. “If what he steals is any indication, he will not be in his right mind.”
“So are we supposed to keep him here for you?”
“No,” he says, and he pulls a security camera still from the breast pocket of his jacket and hands it to me. It’s of a young Navajo man, squat, with that peculiar, faded look of an addict. He looks like a man who was once strong and is now retreating from that strength, as if his skin doesn’t quite fit right. He wears a black leather jacket and has wild black hair down to his lower back. His eyes flash vacantly in the camera exposure.
“This is him. If you see him, stay away. If you see any of your staff approaching him, intervene. But like I said, I don’t think you’ll see him. That is why we won’t be notifying the rest of the floor. We think it would do more harm than good.”
“How are you going to catch him? You are catching him, right? Not just escorting him from hospital to hospital?”
Neither agent bats an eye.
“Let us take care of that. All you need to do is stay alert and act normal. And if either Agent Douglas or I tells you to do something, do it.”
I look at Dick Schwartz for help. I don’t like the tone or the demeanor of either of these agents, but I get no help from Schwartz, who looks as harrowed as I feel. Something tells me this isn’t the time to get into a discussion of liability. Something tells me nothing I can say will change a damn thing. This guy is coming no matter what. But I make a mental note to step into Schwartz’s office with a vengeance if we all survive this thing.
“How long do I have?”
“About fifteen minutes,” Parsons says, as he reaches over and plucks the photograph from my hands.
“Thank you, Doctor Bennet,” Schwartz says, but his eyes are saying I’m sorry. These men will not be put off.
Then all three of them sweep out of the room, and I’m left alone with the approaching storm.
I can only thank God that Caroline isn’t working today.
Chapter 13
Ben Dejooli
The agents point out the motorcycle as it approaches. We’re parked in the general lot, right next to a whole host of trucks and SUVs. We look just like everyone else, and there’s no way that Joey could notice us or hear us in the car, but still we talk in whispers.
It’s a beautiful vintage Honda 650. Round body. Black and gold coloring. It’s the bike we’d dreamed of buying and restoring as kids, even down to the offset striping on the gas tank.
“That son of a bitch,”
I say. The agents nod, unaware.
First thing: that Honda doesn’t look like the kind of thing a drug addict would be zipping around on. Drug addicts don’t restore classic motorcycles. They scrap ‘em and hock ‘em.
As he pops over the hill and comes to a stop at the light before the turn off, I get my first good look at him. Sort of. He’s in riding leathers and boots, and he wears a red kerchief over his face. It’s pinned to him above the nose by a big pair of reflective aviator goggles. It’s him though. He doesn’t wear a helmet, and it looks like he hasn’t cut his hair in the six years since I last saw him. It nearly settles down to his seat and is as black as night.
That’s the second thing. He doesn’t exactly look inconspicuous.
I have to take my eyes from him because I’m going to vomit again, but otherwise I’d be mesmerized.
I’ve nearly filled a second grocery bag with vomit. We tossed the first one out of the window on the highway. I think next time I’ll tell Caroline I need to take the anti-nausea stuff before she pricks me. I’m pretty sure the two capsules I took with water before I left are intact in that bag on the side of the highway. Still, it’s not all bad. I kind of like how disgusted the agents are. These guys grate on me. They have less than zero concern about any of the human aspects of this sting, or whatever you’d call what’s going on here. It’s like they’re getting orders beamed to their heads at the same time. Like rats on a mission through a maze, they’re that focused. I feel like they’d eat through the walls if that’s what it took.
Joey pulls into the general lot and coasts right up to the motorcycle parking at the front, maybe twenty feet from the double door entrance. He throws the kickstand out and steps off. He pulls down his bandana, and I get a good look at the face of a man I made sure was kicked out of Chaco forever. The man I threw from the Navajo Way. He looks terrible. He always had a squat body, but he doesn’t fill it out anymore. His eyes are wide and bulging. His mouth is set, clenched, and his face is gaunt and angled to the bone. He doesn’t look thin, not exactly. He looks worse than thin. He looks diminished. He looks like he’s fading.
Follow the Crow Page 14