I'd always considered myself something of an athlete. I played sports through high school, and went out for track in college, and kept right on running even after the academy. I stayed active, watched my cholesterol, took the department physical every year. My goal was to be one of those people Thomas Perry wrote about, who exercise and diet all their lives, and then get a big surprise when they turn eighty and die of nothing.
I didn't even make it halfway.
My wake-up call came at 12:53 P.M. on an overcast Wednesday that bore the rare promise of a late summer rain. The desert breeze still blew hot and dry, but it no longer had that brick-oven edge to it, and you could tell it wouldn't even reach a hundred that day. I was riding shotgun in an unmarked unit with Felix Segovia, my partner on Homicide, heading out to the Red Rock Casino to talk to a cocktail waitress about her felony-prone boyfriend. We'd just crossed Rainbow when I started feeling punky and figured I got a bad piece of grilled chicken for lunch. Felix pulled into a gas station where I bought a bottle of water and started feeling better. When I threw up behind the No. 2 pump I felt even better, and figured I'd be okay. We were back in the car when I felt sick again. Felix told me to man up and quit whining because the cocktail waitresses at the Red Rock pool were renowned for the brevity of their bikinis. Felix had used up all his bedside manner back at the gas station.
My face felt greasy with sweat. I was scared, like worse was coming—the first steep drop on life's big roller coaster. Felix told me to make a fist, and I tried but couldn't; my arms belonged to somebody else. Anyone who knows Felix won't believe this but he looked scared too. Then the roller coaster hurled off the tracks and I was careening out into space thinking this ain't right. I'm not supposed to die out here on Charleston Avenue with the taste of puke in my mouth.
"Hospital," I told Felix, but instead of running code he pulled over and called in a 444 Officer Needs Medical Assistance and three minutes later the paramedics showed up to start working on me. I don't remember much after that, but later I found out they'd taken me to Valley Hospital for an emergency angioplasty. Felix told me they broke their old record—twenty-four minutes from call to balloon.
When I woke up Liz was there and I was feeling good. They'd put a stent in my heart, so the next few days were a drug-induced haze, but Liz smiled whenever I came to and I knew things couldn't be all that bad. It seemed like everyone I'd ever met came by. Even the sheriff dropped in, though I don't have any idea what I said to him. Then the drugs wore off and all the fun stopped.
"Bad ticker," the surgeon told us. "Very bad. That stent won't last long. It was like trying to sew Jell-O together."
I met a whole new slew of doctors after that. The whole experience was like a slap across the face. I woke up, looked around, and saw what a fool I'd been.
The first time I ever saw Liz was at the Y in Chicago, where I spent summers lifeguarding—and that last summer, watching the auburn-haired beauty in the white bikini. Believe me when I tell you, it wasn't easy doing both—those Red Rock girls had nothing on Elizabeth Gannon. I didn't get up the nerve to ask her out until Labor Day, and I couldn't believe it when she said yes. I was the luckiest guy in the world. When we got married a year later, I was the luckiest guy in the universe.
But then . . . I don't know. Seems like there was always overtime to work, or a marathon to train for, or something. Something that I thought was important. But when I was sitting on the side of road thinking that I was going to die—when I was watching the fat raindrops spatter on windshield, the traffic whizzing by, the world spinning on without me—it wasn't the ribbon I won in the marathon or the golf clubs I bought with the overtime money that seemed to be floating in front of my face. It was Liz. It was always Liz. She was the single most important thing in my life, and I'd almost lost her forever.
I remembered that when I woke up in the hospital, and realized I'd gotten a second chance. I'd been ignoring Liz for too long, taking her for granted, but now I could devote whatever life I had left to making it up to her.
I waited eight months on the donor list, waiting to make Liz a widow. We put the house and the bank accounts in her name, and sold the plot of land we'd always sort of daydreamed about building a house on someday. I told Liz the preparations were just-in-case worst-case scenario, but I knew—and she did too—that we were putting up the shutters and closing up shop.
Even so, those were good days for us. I'd always thought of us as a happy couple, but now we were happier. Liz blossomed into the girl I remembered from the Y, and I was once again her besotted beau. I took her to the shows we'd always meant to see, and some of the new restaurants we'd heard about but never got around to trying. It was date night every night. We acted like a couple of kids, laughing at our own private jokes, or at nothing. It was great.
Until the day I came home from a doctor's appointment to find two Nevada Highway Patrol cruisers parked in front of our house. I figure they sent two because I was a cop, and not so deep down inside I knew why they were there. I got out of my car and they got out of theirs and met me on the sidewalk in front of the cast-iron mailbox Liz ordered from The Renovation Company. Turns out Liz had been killed on I-15 by a jack-knifed semitrailer full of espresso machines. Joke's on you, says God.
My heart donor was a guy named Sammy Podrazo, a retired blackjack dealer from the Hacienda. I actually met him before the operation. We were both at Summerlin Hospital on the same day—the day I was downgraded from Status Two to Status One Critical, and he was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. A red-letter day all the way around.
Sammy wasn't the kind of person I usually came into contact with—which means he wasn't a cop or a crook—but circumstance and blood type had brought us together. I placed him at about sixty, which was old for a heart donor, but it was sort of a waste-not-want-not situation. Sammy was short and wide and thick, with wisps of gray hair sticking out from his ears, and a glass eye that made him look skeptical of everything—probably not a helpful characteristic in a high-limit blackjack dealer. Sammy didn't look like he'd jogged a mile in his life, though he did once admit to running for a bus. He had a chronic cough that punctuated everything he said, yet did not seem to impede the flow of his stories. He never told me the one about his glass eye, and I never asked—I was afraid the story would be too mundane, like a car accident or retinal cancer.
We spent that day in the sterile waiting room, me waiting for the fax from UNOS while he waited for his biopsy results. We were both widowers, so we had that going for us. Sammy, strenuously coughing throughout his life story, told me about what it was like to work in the big casinos back in the glory days, before they were imploded as New Year's Eve diversions. He told me about his daughter winning a blue ribbon in the seventh-grade science fair, and about Sheldon's Deli in the Gold Dust Casino, where they made the best Reuben sandwich in Vegas.
I don't usually talk shop with civilians, but for whatever reason I told Sammy about an old case of mine—the one with the Pomeranian, the wheelchair, and the Brink's armored truck—and he got it. When the doctor came in with his biopsy results, Sammy asked me to stick around awhile, and then he shook my hand afterward.
"Guess that's it, then," was all he said before he left.
So now, about once a month—usually after my echocardiograms—I stop in at Sheldon's Deli for one of their famous Reuben sandwiches. Sheldon's reminds me of the places my dad used to take me after baseball practice—shiny red booths, chipped blue dishes, bustling waitresses in once-white aprons; golden oldies, muted conversation, the clink of silver playing in the background. The sandwiches aren't bad, but if I gain two pounds in two days my doctor hits the rejection alarm, so I have to count every calorie the week before. I could probably run it off because I'm supposed to run six miles a week, but I never do. My heart's just not in it anymore. But I do what I have to do for the sandwich, and for Sammy. I figure I owe it to him. More often than not, he joins me.
Sammy slides into the booth across from me,
still wearing the same old royal blue sweat suit he wore in the hospital. He looks, not surprisingly, like death.
"How's the ticker?" he always asks.
"Takes a lickin'" is the stock reply.
The pre-transplant Sammy I met in the hospital may have had terminal lung cancer, but he looked more than ready to box a round or buy one. Today's Sammy is only a shade of his former self—thin, pale, dispirited. But at least he lost the cough.
"Still on steroids?" he asks, evidently noticing the lingering puffiness of my face. "Those things used to kill me, so to speak. How's the sandwich?"
"The best." I take an extra big bite and talk around it. "Best I've ever had."
Sammy closes his eye and takes a deep breath, wafting in the aroma of corned beef and sauerkraut. I wonder again why I do this to myself. It's the first really hot day of the year and the deli's air conditioning is cranking like gangbusters, but I still feel damp under my clothes from my walk through the parking garage. Sammy, on the other hand, look's like he's packed in ice.
"Those sandwiches were always the best," Sammy says. "But what I miss most is the cigarette afterward. You know I used to smoke three packs a day?"
"Yeah, how'd that work out for you?"
"You're the one fella who oughta be glad I didn't have no self-control. Lemme see the scar again."
I put my sandwich down and unbutton my shirt, discreetly pulling it aside just enough to expose the ten-inch crease in my sternum. I hardly even notice it anymore.
"Coming along nicely," he says, and I tell him I'm glad that he approves. Then he pulls the zipper of his sweatshirt down to show me his—a ragged Y-shaped incision that runs from his shoulders to the elastic waistband of his royal blue sweatpants. His chest looks like a railroad switching yard, and I'm glad I put my sandwich down.
"I definitely got the worst end of the deal," he says, cheerfully zipping up again. I can't help but look around to see if anyone's noticed.
"I ever tell you I have a daughter?" he asks me.
He has, but I shake my head anyway, because my mouth is full again. I can't wait to choke down the rest of this sandwich and get the heck out of here.
"I got a favor to ask you," he says.
This is something new. Our usual postoperative conversations have been fairly depressing, but I can live with depression. Or not. It hasn't escaped my notice that I now keep my service pistol on the nightstand when I go to bed—something Liz would never have approved of. I also attribute this new and alarming habit to depression. Sometimes I worry myself. I should probably talk to somebody, but I don't have anyone to talk to anymore. So I lie in bed and watch the eerie glow of tritium night sights shining in the long, lonely dark, and think, My new girlfriend has green eyes.
"Sure, anything," I tell Sammy. Maybe he's going to ask me to start smoking. I don't know if I'll do it or not. I already have everything I'm ever going to need from Sammy, but something keeps him coming around. Maybe just knowing that a piece of him is going to live beyond his years.
Sammy digs down into his pants pocket and comes up with a dog-eared photograph.
"My daughter," he says, smiling at it before showing it to me. "This picture is the only thing I took with me when I checked into the hospital, except for the clothes on my back."
The photo is of a twentysomething blonde standing next to Johnny Depp, with one hand on his shoulder and the other on his crotch. She's wearing too much eye shadow and a not-ready-to-have-the-picture-taken expression. Then the photo—not so obviously taken at the Venetian's wax museum—vanishes back into Sammy's pocket.
"What's the problem?" I ask, as noncommittally as possible. "Johnny break up with her?"
"Nah," Sammy says, sadly shaking his head. "She's with a different loser now, and thinks she's in love. Problem is, this one's getting her jammed up in his business, which is selling drugs. His whole family lives off misdemeanors. Him and his brother are a crime wave all by themselves. Anyway, he talked my girl into helping him with a bank robbery, and seeing as how you're a bank robbery detective, I figured the obvious solution was to have you straighten it out."
"Straighten it out how?"
"Get her out of it. And throw her dopey boyfriend in the slammer while you're at it."
"It sounds easy when you say it fast."
"What could be easier?" he says, giving me the google-eye. "I know everything about the bank robbery—the time, the place, the plan. Everything."
"Now how would you know all that, Sammy," I ask, but it's not really a question. Post-op Sammy seems to know a lot of extra special things.
"How do you think I know? I spend most of my time hanging around her apartment, don't I?"
"When you're not here haunting me."
"So where else do I have to go?" he shrugs. "Summerlin Hospital? I hate that place."
"Why don't you just . . . talk to her yourself?"
"I tried that, believe me. But I can't seem to get through to her. It's like I'm not even there. You and me, though," he says, pointedly staring at my shirt pocket. "We have a bond between us."
I almost laugh. There's no way I can eat the rest of this sandwich.
"Listen to me," he says, dead earnest now. He folds his hands on the table like he's praying, and fixes me with an off-kilter stare. "She's my only daughter, and she's in trouble. There's a time I'd a taken a baseball bat to that mope and swung for the fences, but in my present condition there's nothing I can do. I need you to fix it. You owe me."
"Hey, Sammy," I say, tapping my chest. "It's not like you needed it anymore."
But I know I'll do what he asks. He knows it too. After a suitable delay I pull my notebook from my pocket and ask him to tell me about the plan.
"Her boyfriend's name is Cory Fergis. Last week he traded some meth for a crappy old Mustang. It's his getaway car. His brother told him to do the bank on a Friday morning when it's full of payroll money, which means he has to do it tomorrow, cause the car's got paper tags that expire next week. See how I put all the dots together?"
"What color's the Mustang?"
"Primer black, the whole thing."
"Any idea what bank he's going to hit?"
"United Federal, on east Tropicana. You know the one?"
"Yeah," I say, writing it down. "How're they going to do it?"
"He'll go in alone, with a note. He told my daughter that the tellers have to do whatever the note says, so he's writing in stuff about no exploding dye packs or marked money. Is that true? The tellers have to do whatever the note says?"
"What's your daughter's part in this? Getaway driver?"
"Yeah."
"And she's okay with it?" I'm not writing now.
"Yeah," Sammy says, looking at me cockeyed again. "Yeah, she is. You ask a lot of questions, even for a detective."
"One more. Does he have a gun?"
Sammy hesitates, then shakes his head. He isn't looking at me now, but staring at what's left of my sandwich. "I didn't hear nothing about a gun. Just United Federal Bank, note job, nine o'clock tomorrow morning." Then he shrugs, grins, and looks more like his old self than I've seen in a long time. "Like I said, what could be easier?"
I set up on the United Federal Bank at eight o'clock the next morning, parking my unmarked Buick in a shady spot next to the AutoZone, where I can see the front door of the bank. It doesn't look like a real bank—just a storefront sandwiched between two other shops at the edge of a huge parking lot, with yellow UFB logos in the windows so you can tell it's not a nail salon. The car temperature already reads ninety. I unroll my foil sunshield and tuck it in around the windshield, to keep the morning sun out and anyone else from seeing in.
I assume I must be nuts. First, for even listening to Sammy, and then for half believing anything he said. Even if only part of it were true, nine o'clock drug dealer time could mean anywhere from noon to three o'clock next week. Still, I decide to give it a couple of hours, or until my magazines and bottled water gave out.
I watch
through the gap in the sunshield with one eye and browse Living Without with the other—something Sammy could never do. I see the manager arrive a few minutes before nine. She unlocks the door and goes inside, and about a minute later pulls the curtains open, which I assume is the "all clear" for the other employees. They show up over the next few minutes, ambling inside with purses and paper bags. At nine they turn the lights on and unlock the front door, and then a primer black Mustang pulls up out front.
I know my heart's got to be pounding like crazy, but I sure can't feel it. The nerves were cut during the operation and won't be growing back. Denervation, the doctors called it. I could be having a massive coronary right now and not even know it, which accounts for my monthly echocardiograms. I slip my hand under my shirt to feel it in person. Oh yeah, just like old times.
The Mustang sits there idling for a while. It's not the junker I pictured but a vintage '66 that's had some expert bodywork done and is ready for paint. The meth business must be pretty good. After a couple of minutes a skinny, greasy-haired kid jumps out the passenger side and sidles into the bank—the estimable Cory Fergis, I presume. I don't get a good look at his face, as he's wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap—standard bank robbery attire. I memorize his black boots, faded jeans, white T-shirt as he disappears inside. The driver is invisible behind the blinding glare of the windshield. I get out of my car and walk toward the Mustang, subconsciously tapping my badge and handcuffs, flexing my arm against my pistol, making sure everything's where I need it. I walk up on the Mustang from behind. I notice it's got a '65 gas cap.
The driver's window is down and the raccoon-eyed blonde from Sammy's photo is sitting inside. She's alone, with all her attention focused on the bank. She smells like piña colada, or the air freshener does. When I slap my hand on the Mustang's roof she jumps like she's been tasered.
"Take off," I tell her, pulling my jacket aside to show her the badge on my belt.
She stares up at me in shock and fear, then in confusion, then with suspicion. When she closes one eye she looks a lot like Sammy.
Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine 10/01/12 Page 9