Tower of Babel

by Michael Sears

  -63-

  “Hey!” Ted yelled, instantly regretting it. The man had not known Ted was there, and he whirled around and went into a fighter’s crouch. Whatever benefit of surprise Ted might have had was gone. “What are you doing?” Ted demanded, putting as much authority into his voice as he could summon at that late hour.

  It was the Russian. The man with the nose of a boxer. He rushed forward, stopping suddenly and swinging his leg in a roundhouse kick aimed at Ted’s thigh, a blow that could have ended the altercation immediately.

  But Ted reacted. He fell backward, landing on his hands bent kneed. The kick passed over him, and Ted pushed up onto his feet. In the split second that the Russian needed to rebalance from the kick, Ted closed on him, coming in low.

  The guy recovered quickly and landed two left-handed jabs on Ted’s head before Ted connected. Ted grabbed the man around his thighs and pushed forward with his shoulder. They crashed into the cleaning cart before both tumbled to the ground.

  Having lost his fleeting advantage, Ted rolled away and up onto his feet. The Russian also came up quickly. In the moment before the next attack, Ted saw why the man seemed to be fighting one-handed. In his right hand, he held a large syringe with a needle that looked as big as a pencil.

  He had been about to inject something into Kenzie’s saline bag—into her IV. The realization distracted Ted. The Russian saw this and moved in. He threw three quick jabs, which Ted easily deflected, but they left him off-balance. He had too much weight on his back foot, and when the next kick came up, he couldn’t move fast enough to avoid it. It caught him in the side, just above his waist. Ted felt himself falling and grabbed the man’s leg as he went down. It was a sloppy defense. Never close with an opponent unless you control the action. They hit the floor together. The Russian was on top.

  People had noticed. A nurse screamed. A deep-voiced man was yelling orders, but Ted ignored him. A flashing red light spun on the hallway ceiling, sending shafts of blood-colored shadows across the Russian’s straining face. He may have been on top, but he did not control the action either. He was protecting the syringe while attempting to choke Ted with his free hand.

  Ted bucked hard and then brought his legs up into the air. When the Russian reared to regain his balance, Ted locked his calves around the man’s head and rolled to the side. They slammed into the cart again, sending it sliding out into the hallway, where it crashed and fell over. More screams.

  The fight had none of the grace and elegance Ted had brought to the sport of wrestling seventeen years earlier. He was out of shape, out of practice, and outmatched. And the stakes were deadly serious. Already he could feel his energy flagging, his muscles complaining and straining, his side aching where the kick had landed.

  They were flailing at each other, their punches without weight or leverage. Neither was willing to break away and risk having the other take advantage of his retreat, and so they scrambled, pushed, deflected, and hit wildly and with no effect.

  Then Ted felt a searing blow land on his shoulder, both a thump and a sting. He gasped in pain and terror—what in hell was in that syringe?—but for the briefest moment, his adversary’s neck was open, unguarded. Ted grabbed the Russian around the throat and squeezed. The man thrashed, for the first time showing fear, and swung his right arm in a wide arc, smacking Ted in the temple. Without the encumbrance of the syringe, he was able to inflict real pain even at those close quarters.

  Ted felt another blow land and another, the last directly on his ear. He lost his grip on the man’s neck and felt himself sliding away. The fight was all but over. He was losing. He drew back his hand, formed a fist, and drove it down with all of his remaining strength into the man’s Adam’s apple. Something broke.

  Hands gripped him from behind and pulled him away. He looked over his shoulder. Uniformed security guards were filling the room, subduing both men with weight and numbers.

  -64-

  Ted tried to pull free of the guards holding him, but his muscles failed to respond.

  “The thing!” he yelled, various body signals announcing he was beginning to panic. The word for the medical device used for injecting liquids through a needle had been wiped from his mind.

  The thug was making noise—cursing in a strangled chicken squawk and demanding to be allowed to leave, though he repeatedly hawked up globs of thick blood. The tall male nurse ventured closer in an attempt to examine the Russian’s neck and earned a glancing kick to the side of his head for his trouble. The Russian croaked sounds that could not have been words and threw flailing punches. His eyes were dazed and unfocused, but he was still dangerous. The security detail backed off and let the police take over. In seconds he was facedown on the floor, his hands cuffed behind him. He kept on screaming in that hideous animal cry.

  “He’s Russian,” Ted tried to explain to the police, believing that this simple fact would explain so much of what had happened.

  “Syringe!” Ted yelled the second the word came to him.

  A nurse found it tossed into a corner and held it up. It was broken. Ted gasped and tried to remember why this was important.

  Two blue uniformed men took over from the security guards. They sat him in a chair. Nurses, both male and female, were shouting at one another. Ted tried to focus on relaying facts to the cops. Facts had become slippery, sliding through his fingers as he grasped at them.

  The police listened to Ted’s story. The broken syringe and the puffy injection mark in his shoulder lent some credence to an otherwise unlikely story.

  “I don’t feel well,” he said. “I need a doctor.” He was enormously proud of himself for getting those thoughts out. Forming sentences was a chore. He was tired. Exhausted. And at the same time, he felt on the verge of a panic attack, starting at sudden sounds and riding a whiplash of emotions. As he listened to himself explaining why he had attacked the man in Kenzie’s room, he heard only the gaps and leaps in logic. And he couldn’t seem to care. His voice tapered off and he went silent.

  The head nurse and the police finally negotiated a settlement whereby the Russian, under guard, was delivered downstairs to the ER. The cops abandoned Ted in the ICU while the staff worked to determine what unknown substance had been injected into him.

  Ted found their discussion increasingly difficult to follow, a fact that should have bothered him a lot more than it did. His world was inundated with gauzy cotton balls that blurred his vision, blocked his hearing, and sapped his energy. Minutes before, he had been wide awake. Now he wanted only to lie down.

  “Can you tell us how you’re feeling, Mr. Molloy?” The male nurse’s eyes were filled with anxiety. Ted’s anxiety spiked again.

  “Is she okay?” Ted asked. He had some trouble putting the question into words.

  “What did he say?” A woman’s voice.

  “I didn’t get it. What’s his heart rate now?”

  “Soaring.” Another nurse’s voice.

  “Jesus, he’s sweating buckets. Where’s Dr. Cox?”

  “On her way.”

  Ted couldn’t keep the voices straight. He felt as if he had dropped off to sleep for a moment and couldn’t remember or understand anything that was being said—only it kept happening, over and over. Each second was a newly erased blackboard, and the squiggles and lines that appeared made no sense.

  “Whoa. Hold him. What is he doing?”

  Ted realized he was lying down. Had he just been standing? Why were they all yelling? Faces swirled above him, blurred and indistinct, then suddenly hyperfocused and enlarged as though seen through a glass bubble.

  “He’s going into shock. Hey! Mr. Molloy! Stay with me!” It was the male nurse speaking. Yelling, actually.

  “It’s a stroke,” another voice said, the speaker quite sure of her instant diagnosis.

  One more voice chimed in. “Hypoglycemic shock. Is he diabetic? He needs sugar. Anyt
hing sweet.”

  Ted’s field of vision was shrinking—or the kindly face of the male nurse was expanding dramatically.

  “Drink this. Come on.”

  The man gently lifted Ted’s head and forced a plastic cup to his mouth. Warm, watery apple juice. Ted spat it out in an explosive spray of pale gold liquid.

  “Goddammit.” The kind-faced man had been replaced by a stern woman. “What’s that?” She tore the Mountain Dew out of his pocket and twisted the cap. Another spray—florescent green this time. Ted wasn’t sure he wanted any right then, but the nurse had become very insistent. It was easier to go along than to fight her off.

  And he was surprised at how thirsty he had become. He gulped down the cupful of soda. Someone poured him another. He didn’t really like Mountain Dew. Did they have a . . . ? What was it called? The brown one.

  “Root beer,” he said.

  “What’d he say?”

  “God knows. ‘Super,’ maybe?”

  “Good. Keep feeding him the soda. Somebody get another.”

  “Where the hell is the doctor?” a particularly upset voice screeched.

  “On her way,” a new voice replied from very far away.

  Other people arrived and crowded around. Ted heard snatches of the conversation. Two women may have been arguing. The word “insulin” was repeated more than a few times. He was beginning to feel a touch more alert, better able to connect with the world, so he explained that the man he had fought with had punched him outside the elevator at the courthouse. He wasn’t sure why it was important to impart this information at that moment, but he wanted to help. But the words didn’t flow as easily as he imagined them coming out. His tongue seemed to have quadrupled in size and developed a primitive yet independent mind of its own.

  “I’m Dr. Cox. You’re going to be okay, Mr. Molloy.” The speaker was a glossy-skinned woman with long thick hair the color of ebony. She was very young.

  “I got shot,” he said. No, not shot. Something else. Another word. It didn’t matter. Did it?

  “We think you were injected with insulin, but we don’t know how much. The effects may last some time as it works through your system, but the needle did not pierce any major blood vessels. A subcutaneous dose is rarely fatal.”

  Rarely. He would have been alarmed, but he was finding that he didn’t care. Everything seemed pointless.

  The head nurse pushed her way to his side. “Here. Hard candy. Jolly Ranchers. Keep it in your mouth. Don’t swallow it.”

  “He won’t like it,” said a woman’s priggish voice from the back of the crowd.

  “Fig Newton,” he said. He hadn’t eaten one in decades, but right then it was the most important thing in the universe.

  “What did he say?”

  “Here. Here.” The nurse forced a candy through his lips.

  Grape. He hated grape. He opened his mouth and let the candy fall out. He needed to get that awful taste out of his mouth. He asked for more soda.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t understand what you’re saying.” It was the woman with the nice hair. She sounded nice. But she was too young to be a doctor. “Drink this and you’ll feel better soon.” The cup came up to his mouth, and he gulped down another eight ounces of Mountain Dew. “Can you eat?”

  “No. Please. No.” Ted did not want any more grape disasters forced into his mouth.

  “So? Was it a stroke?” Another new voice. Male. Older. The man’s breath smelled of cigarettes and coffee.

  “No. Insulin shock. Can I ask you to stand back, please?”

  The nice male nurse spoke again. “A lollipop would be perfect.”

  The sugar in the soda was kicking in. Ted was beginning to make sense of the voices and what they were saying. He decided that he was going to live. Now was the time to convince the crowd hovering over him. “No more fucking candy!” he yelled. The words were crystal clear and met with two beats of silence.

  “I told you not to give him candy,” the hidden woman’s voice chimed in.

  The male nurse helped Ted to his feet and guided him to a bed. Ted sat on the edge and stared at the doctor, who seemed to be waiting for him to do something interesting. The world was moving much too fast—then too slow. His bodily chemistry was all askew. As clarity returned, it came with a frenetic rush of desperate energy. Changes came in waves less than seconds apart. As the adrenaline wore off, the caffeine from the soda began to give him a headache and caused an annoying buzz that left him cranky and ready to argue—about anything. And he was hungry. Monstrously hungry. He craved water and lusted for a Gallagher’s cheeseburger. Or that stew Mohammed had been eating.

  “Can I get any real food?” he asked.

  Shortly, a prepackaged sandwich appeared in front of him. Tuna salad—that tasted mostly of chopped raw onion—on a soggy white roll. It was heavenly. He devoured it in four bites and promptly fell asleep.

  -65-

  He woke much later, temporarily confounded to find himself in a private room in the ICU. His bladder felt as if it were the size of a basketball. He pulled himself out of bed and rushed to the bathroom, where he pissed a jet-propelled stream for the next few minutes. Catching sight of himself in the mirror as he washed his hands, he almost didn’t recognize the much older man staring back at him. He splashed cold water on the original until the reflection appeared awake. It was time to reengage with the world.

  He drifted out to the nurses’ station. “Is she awake yet?” he asked the nurse closest to him.

  “Who?” She looked up, obviously surprised to find Ted on his feet and leaning over the counter. “You should be lying down.”

  “My fiancée. McKenzie Zielinski.” Maintaining the persona seemed more important than ever.

  “She’s fine. Asleep. Now get yourself into that bed.”

  “Sleeping? Or . . .” His voice trailed off.

  That earned him a sad smile and a touch of empathy. “She hasn’t awakened yet, but we’re all confident that it’s just a matter of time. You saved her life, you know?”

  He hadn’t known. She explained. If he’d shown up a couple of minutes later, the Russian would have been done and out the door. A hefty shot of insulin into the IV, and Kenzie would have slid into a diabetic coma. The machines wouldn’t have recognized the difference. She’d just never have woken up.

  “And insulin wouldn’t show up on a tox screen,” she added.

  A perfect murder, Ted thought. “Can I see her?”

  “She’s not leaving. Get your butt in bed. And by the way, there are two policemen waiting to talk to you.”

  “Are they here?”

  “I’ll tell them you’re awake.” She stood and took two steps toward the door.

  “Wait,” he almost yelled. “The guy who attacked me. How is he?”

  “Sorry. I have no idea.”

  He turned back and was, for a moment, disoriented. Which room was his? He shuffled along, peeking in doors until he found an empty rumpled bed that had a familiar look. A clear plastic bag was hanging from the bed frame. He was wearing a hospital gown with his suit pants and socks, but there were the rest of his things. His shirt had been bloodied, but his wrinkled jacket looked salvageable, despite the small tear in the upper arm. He located his cell phone and wallet. He could communicate and provide evidence of his existence. Things were looking up.

  He turned on the phone and found four missed calls. Three from Lester. One from Jill. He hit the call-back button as two uniformed policemen entered the room. He disconnected and shoved the phone in his pants pocket.

  “How are you feeling, sir?” the older of the two asked.

  “Good.” Ted was surprised to find that this was the truth. He had not slept enough, and he ached in certain areas that had taken the brunt of the abuse the night before, but overall he felt ready to tackle another murderous Eastern European if n
eed be.

  “We have orders to keep you here until you’ve been interviewed by the detectives on this case,” the officer said.

  “Am I under arrest?”

  “Not at this time. Make yourself comfortable and I will give them a call.”

  Ted wasn’t surprised. He would need to make a statement. He imagined that the nurses and other staff would back up his story. Waiting was an annoyance but nothing more.

  The phone buzzed as he was about to dial. Lester.

  “I thought I might have heard from you by now.” Lester’s voice had lost the slushy quality.

  “Kenzie is asleep, but they keep telling me she’s going to be okay.”

  “Do you believe them?”

  “Yes and no. Mostly yes. I couldn’t call, because there was some excitement here last night. One of the Corona Partners showed up.”

  Lester made appropriate sounds as Ted spun the story of the night’s events. “The nurse told me I saved her life,” Ted said. “I haven’t really grasped that as yet. The whole night was like a bad dream, and I’m not fully awake.”

  “But you’re all right?”

  “Yeah. I didn’t get much of a dose.”

  “Are you going to stay and keep watch over her?”

  “I don’t know. The police want to talk to me.”

  The two suited cops who entered the room were all too familiar to him. Duran and the pit bull partner. Ted was immediately on guard.

  “I wasn’t expecting to see you,” he said. Nassau County had jurisdiction there. The NYPD hadn’t sent two detectives to investigate a scuffle in the hospital.

  “Who else?” Kasabian said. “The Lone Ranger and Tonto?”

  “No, but not Fred and Barney either,” Ted said.