Vitamin Sea

by Maia Ross

  The machines wailed. Irma and I stood at the door. I was so horrified I couldn’t move. I couldn’t feel my feet.

  Julian fiddled with the IV stand before starting compressions on Scooter, whose right arm was hanging over the side of the bed, his fingers slightly curled, but still reaching for something. I kept watching that hand while they injected meds into Scooter’s IV line and took measurements and barked out orders.

  “I’ve got breath sounds,” Julian said. His voice was hoarse.

  One of the EMTs slung a stethoscope around his neck as Julian uncoiled the IV and moved the motionless body to the gurney, that hand still limp and lifeless. And it occurred to me, the skin on the back of my neck rippling with gooseflesh, that maybe this wasn’t a pretty place where people came to get better after all.

  One of the EMTs started to roll the gurney. And Scooter beeped all the way out the door.

  Five—Irma

  I had two neighbours in my cul-de-sac: a lovely neighbour who owned a beautiful fawn pug named Mr. Pugglesworth. And the other one, who thought I didn’t know she stole my lawn furniture every Saturday morning for her weekly book club meeting. I mean, really, I once spent ninety-seven days on a surveillance op in the desert during the heatwave of ’86.

  My lovely neighbour, Mrs. Sepp, also had six cats, who, it had to be said, sometimes ganged up on Mr. P. They were a highly organized bunch. Which was why he was staying with me tonight.

  Normally he was an excellent houseguest, but right now he was sitting on my chest, his tongue slurping up the left side of my face. At 4:07 in the morning, which was not my best time of the day.

  He whined as he came in for an eyeball-lick that I blocked.

  “Bad Mr. P!” I said, but my heart wasn’t in it after he gave me one of his googly-eyed pouts. “I’m sorry, my little sausage.”

  He perked up a little but jumped off me and onto the floor. Since he was as sedentary as Violet, it was most surprising. But he kept going and waddled toward the door. I tried to take him with me on my morning runs to imbue him with some fitness sessions, but I was pretty sure Mrs. Sepp was foiling my plans with some liberally distributed doggie treats. Maybe I should just infiltrate her residence while she slept and hide the bloody things.

  At the door, Mr. P whined again.

  “All right, all right.” I pushed the bedcovers back and sat up in bed. I was a little cranky; after Scooter had been whisked away, I’d gone to sit with Charlotte at her place so we could wait for news together. She’d still had no update as of ten p.m. when another island doctor had come and given her a sedative so she could sleep, the poor thing. Distraught wasn’t a strong enough word to describe her. She and her late husband—a lovely man—had never had children of their own, and they doted on Scooter.

  A little piece of my heart had shattered when she’d asked me to find the man who’d abducted and shot Scooter. I wanted to help, but I was a civilian now, just like her. And if I’d wanted to keep on trying to save the world, I would have stayed in the business. Better guns. Shorter passport lines. Interesting teas.

  But that wasn’t all. Intelligence work was civilized. There were rules and etiquette. And you knew who the enemy was. I had no experience with civilian crime-solving. And no resources whatsoever these days, a detail Charlotte was refusing to acknowledge.

  I got out of bed. I’d never shed the habit of wearing street-ready clothes, which is why I was wearing a t-shirt and trousers from one of my tracksuits as pyjamas.

  After I flicked on a light, I pulled on a pair of tennis shoes, assuming Mr. P wanted to take care of business. But instead of trotting to the back of the house like he usually did, he was pawing at the front door.

  Like there was something or someone out there.

  Suddenly I was awake. The front door—and all the windows—were bulletproof, which was comforting, but it was never smart to be smug at this time of the morning. What if Mr. P’s canine senses had actually…sensed something?

  That’s enough. The good Irma seemed to be wide awake, so I yielded the floor. You’re a civilian now. You have to start acting like it.

  The bad Irma grumbled about operational security and risk analysis but was otherwise silent.

  “Come on, Mr. P,” I said, making my way to the back door.

  He jumped—jumped!—at the doorknob on the front door, his nails clicking against the hardwood. My head went on a tilt, and I walked slowly toward the vestibule, which was framed on each side by two windows. Also bulletproof.

  And through that bulletproof window I could see a strange white van parked in front of my driveway, the front wheels partly in my laneway, partly squashing my pansies, the driver’s seat yawning open.

  Then I moved. I scooped up Mr. P and brought him back to the bedroom. I plopped him on my bed before the little thing could pass gas. I was at my gun safe three seconds later. It had two separate compartments, one for weapons, one for ammunition. It had been developed for me by an old colleague and required an eye scan, two combinations and a key I kept in a place I’d never revealed to anyone. The whole process took less than thirty seconds, although the safe’s unlocking protocol would have probably asked for my firstborn if I’d ever had one.

  “You stay here, Mr. P,” I said, racking the slide on my favourite .32. “That’s a good boy.”

  I shut the gun safe and the bedroom door behind me, locking both even though I had no intention of letting anyone get past me, and snatched up a camera and a pair of night vision goggles I’d picked up in Reykjavik years ago, stuffing them into a knapsack, my heart pounding in my ears.

  I surveilled the scene, then made my way out the back door and around the side of my house. I ducked into a little alcove beside my bay window, the night vision glasses showing me a closeup of the driver’s side of the van, a figure slumped forward in the seat. I had to remind myself to breathe. Holding my breath in challenging situations was a bad habit I’d never really been able to shake.

  Scooter had said he might have shot the robber, so that was probably him. But was I sure the thief had acted alone? And why was he here, of all places?

  It was not a good moment. My desire to be someone who planted gerberas and sailed and ran marathons and watched the sun set from my dock warred with my comprehension of the obvious: the robber had brought his problems to my doorstep. And if he wasn’t just a robber, if he was something more, someone after me, the police weren’t going to be able to handle it. I’d known most of them for decades, and I didn’t want anything bad to happen to them.

  I had to do something.

  Crouching, I ran for cover behind my boxwood hedge. No movement up and down the street. No movement in the van. I surveilled the vehicle while I tried to regulate my breathing. It bothered me he was here. I had some field training in medicine, although he’d have no way of knowing that. So what was he up to? After three deep breaths, I scooted over to the back of the van. I crept around the side, my gun in my right hand.

  Three more feet. Two. One. My heartbeat roared in my ears.

  I reached the driver’s side.

  A man sat in the driver’s seat, and blood was pooled on the seat and the floor of the van. I took his pulse: nothing. And he wasn’t breathing. He was still warm, though, and I took a quick look into and under the van to make sure no one else was lurking. I once had a one-eyed jockey fling herself at me from under a Hummer parked near Piccadilly Circus. Bad day all around, that one.

  I was back in my house before I’d even really made a plan, running toward the landline in my kitchen. In my former line of work, police were the very last people you called when you were in a bind. They didn’t appreciate organizations—or the people who worked for them—that coloured outside the lines. And they were so very focused on paperwork and jurisdiction. But I called 911 anyway. The boy might still have a chance.

  Back outside, I took his pulse again. Was that a faint throb, or my fingers beating out a rhythm? No matter. The ambulance would be here soon. The driver ha
d pale blond hair and a nondescript face that was ageless—maybe twenty-five, maybe thirty-five. He’d pulled off the black shirt he’d been wearing during the robbery and wrapped it around his left thigh, but his leg was still wet. I wondered if Scooter had nicked the femoral artery.

  I took the strap off my camera and made a tourniquet above the wound on his leg. His jeans were dark and I couldn’t see exactly where the blood was, so I had to feel for it. He was too big for me to move if I didn’t want to damage him, so I left him where he was and started CPR. I didn’t have a great angle, but it was workable.

  In the distance, sirens.

  I breathed in and out, trying to calm my heartbeat.

  The ambulance screamed around the corner and skidded to a stop beside me.

  “What’s the situation, Irma?” Frederick White, a county EMT, had two medical bags in his hands. “I’ll take over.”

  “I have no idea. I woke up and found him here.”

  Frederick stepped in and started to work, and I made my way around to the passenger side of the van and eased the door open. On the floor was a .22 and a satchel full of Renée’s jewellery. I couldn’t tell if all of the loot was there, and I didn’t want to touch anything, but it looked like it. And tucked into the passenger’s side door was a license plate. Briefly, I considered lifting it, then rejected the thought. I certainly did not want to interfere with police business only sixty-eight days into my retirement.

  Instead, I snapped a picture of it as well as a few of the young man and the plates that were attached to the back of the van. I searched for my throwing star at the same time; the little gash it had opened above the bumper was visible, but the star itself was gone. It had probably fallen off during the young man’s escape, which was a bother. It was a matching set.

  Then I stepped back, stowing my camera and night vision gear in my knapsack.

  The police were here. And there was blood on my hands.

  “Another?”

  Julian and I were settled in two of the wide-backed Muskoka chairs I kept on the dock in my back yard. I’d taken a good long nap this morning after being up half the night with the police, giving my statement, insisting I knew nothing about the strange gentleman in the van, which was, regrettably, actually the truth. But Julian looked worse than I did, and I wondered if he’d been at the hospital all night.

  He’d walked all the way from town to my front door, his hair looking like he’d been wearing a hat for the last five years and circles under his eyes that didn’t belong on a thirty-six-year-old. He hadn’t been on duty when the John Doe from my driveway had been wheeled into the clinic—dead as a doornail, apparently—so something else was on his mind.

  Julian nodded for a refill, and I poured him more tea.

  We sat in a tense silence until he said, his voice full of anguish, “I missed something.”

  “What did you miss?”

  “Scooter overdosed,” Julian said simply.

  My chest tightened. “How on earth?”

  “I can’t figure it out. He’d only been on the propanifen drip for a little over an hour.”

  “Did he have a button he could press to get more medication? Was it one of those setups?”

  “Yes. But it’s all managed by computer. Maybe the injury to his lung weakened him enough that even a small dose suppressed his breathing too much… Or maybe he took another painkiller before coming to the clinic. I mean, he wasn’t in great shape to begin with. His diabetes is poorly controlled, and he won’t stop drinking.” He ran his hand through his hair. “Anyway, we administered Narcan en route to the mainland hospital, and his vitals are stable, but he still hasn’t regained consciousness. It’s just a wait-and-see game now.”

  I put my hand on his arm and gave him a squeeze. I wasn’t surprised he’d made his way over here. Even though I was many years his senior, we’d always been close. His grandfather and I had been good friends, and he’d asked me to look out for Julian once he realized he was dying of liver cancer when Julian was only a little one. Like many of the families who made their summer home here, Julian’s parents were often off globetrotting and running multi-national corporations. Of course, I’d circled the globe myself. A little more heavily armed than most people, but still. So every summer for years I’d been taking Julian sailing, to brunch, to whatever entertaining summer festival the town put on. My favourite was the potato sack incident of 1991. He once told me that the carnage from that particular event was what made him want to be a doctor.

  Julian made a strangled noise in his throat, and I suddenly felt like I’d run a million miles, like I’d been doing recon at the top of Everest. And there was a sadness caught in my throat I couldn’t shrug off. I wanted Scooter to be all right. I wanted him to be home for his dinner with Charlotte.

  “Maybe his kidnapper dosed him with something, and he didn’t realize it?” He looked out over the water. From the way his shoulders were slumped, I could tell my pep talk wasn’t getting through to him. I wished his mother was home instead of summering on the bloody French Riviera. “Did he say anything strange? Was he complaining of pain or shortness of breath?”

  I shook my head. “He used the oxygen mask a few times, that was it. He didn’t say much.”

  “Huh.”

  “Where are they doing the blood tests? That’ll give you more information,” I said.

  “Mainland,” he said, a bite in his words. “They’re expediting it.”

  I didn’t bother to remind him that both law enforcement and medicine could be long, slow bureaucracies and that “expediting” lab results could still take weeks. Months, even. “Good,” I said instead.

  “I guess.” He sighed, raking his hand through his hair. “Do you have any idea why the robber ended up at your place?”

  Funny, the police had asked me the exact same question. I’d been trained in how to use subterfuge when being questioned by police, but there had been no reason to use it—because I had no bloody clue. Plus, even I had to admit it did not look good. The old chief and I had been friends, and he’d known about my past, but the new chief was not thrilled to be on my blood-spattered driveway at five in the morning, no matter how much I tried to convince her that the robber must have gotten lost on his way out of town.

  Charlotte’s request for me to look into all this sat heavily on my shoulders. I was retired. Out of the game. But it bothered me, the robber taking Scooter when he hadn’t needed to. Who did things like that? Scooter had said that the robber didn’t know the town—but didn’t they have that MapQuest these days? Could it be that the young man was as technology averse as I was? It was impossible to know. But what if someone else came here and started snatching islanders up willy nilly whenever they bloody well felt like it? I wanted to protect the civilians on the island just like I’d done for people all over the world, for all those years. It was hard to turn them off, all my meddlesome meddling feelings. I was used to good Irma and bad Irma, sitting on my shoulders, pushing me to do things.

  And I wasn’t quite sure if bad Irma knew all three of us had retired.

  So I’d decided to ask a few questions. That couldn’t hurt, could it? Not that I was getting involved. I wasn’t. I had plans to sail today, and that was what I was going to do. In the meantime, I’d asked an industry friend to run a comparison between the robbery on the island and other crimes in North America, but that was off the books and would take a while. Then I’d asked her if she could ID John Doe Driveway from the pictures I’d taken of him. Getting them off the digital camera Violet had gotten me as a “hostess present” and onto a throwaway email account I sometimes used had been a painful experience, seeing as how I had a touch of the Luddite about me, but I’d figured it out in the end. Violet had been awoken by all the noise, and even though she seemed to have taken the whole thing in stride, I didn’t feel like pushing my luck and asking her to do it.

  “Do I know why a dead man ended up in my driveway?” I said. “No.” And it was the truth, even.
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br />   He raised an eyebrow at that but said nothing. His grandfather, the little bugger, had told him I was a spy like James Bond when he was only six. He must have also told him never to ask me about it because he never had. But Julian was aware I’d had an interesting past.

  Julian’s pocket rang.

  “Don’t answer it, dear,” I said. “You’re exhausted.”

  “I have to,” he groaned.

  “Are you on call?”

  “Nope. But—”

  I put my hand over his, the phone clenched in his fingers. I truly despised the evolution of the cellular telephone. On one hand, they were helpful if you were pinned down by eleven shooters and needed backup. On the other, they were a blight on modern civilization.

  “Hello?”

  I stifled a sigh. Young people could be so energetic at times.

  “What?” Julian was on his feet now.

  My stomach tightened.

  “That’s impossible,” Julian said, suddenly an alarming shade of red.

  “What’s wrong?” I mouthed. He stared at me like I held the answer. In his ear, a voice buzzed on.

  “No, I checked it. The nurse on duty checked it. We—no, but the room would have been cleaned after the code. What you’re saying is impossible.” More silence. “Of course I deny it, what are you talking about?”

  I took a deep breath to settle my nerves. People always wanted to blame someone when things went awry. It was human nature. I was once blamed for the untimely demise of a walrus at the Bronx Zoo, if you can believe it.

  Abruptly, Julian clicked off the call and jammed his cellular telephone in his pocket.

  “What’s wrong?” I tried to keep my voice calm. No reason to let him pick up on my distress.

  “The police want to talk to me about Scooter. They think he might have been overdosed on purpose.”

  Six—Irma

  Julian was one of those people for which a police station inspired a lot of chattiness, which was not an excellent state of affairs, I must say, since we were currently seated in a conference room at the local precinct.