by John Lutz
Carver opened the car door. “Okay, I’m on my way.”
“Anybody sees you on the lower floors,” Val said, “try and look like you belong there.”
“I’m good at that,” Carver assured him.
“They see you on the fourth floor, get the hell away fast as you can.” Val glanced at Carver’s cane.
“It won’t come to that,” Carver said, trying to convince himself as well as Val.
He set the cane’s tip outside the car and scooted out to stand up. After shutting the door as quietly as possible, he limped toward the service entrance Val had indicated. It was a small gray door that was barely noticeable in the shadows. His stomach felt hollow. His mouth was dry. He understood habitual, professional burglars; always had. When he reached for the doorknob the real apprehension set in and he began to enjoy himself.
He was inside quickly, standing at the base of a dim stairway that led to a small concrete landing and another door. He picked up the small block of Styrofoam that had been used to prop open the outside door half an inch and stuck it in his pocket. It had a jagged end and seemed to have been broken off a solid form used to pack electronics or some other delicate product. Probably some sensitive medical paraphernalia. Hoping Jane had thought to deal with the door on the landing, he limped up the concrete steps.
That door was propped slightly open with a similar block of foam. Carver eased through and was on a small, square concrete landing. He craned his neck and could see up the zigzag, brightly lighted stairwell all the way to the fourth floor. Since he’d entered the building he’d seen no one, and presumably no one had seen him. His heart was pounding like a mad carpenter’s hammer. Sweating coldly, he smiled and began to climb the stairs.
The fourth-floor fire door was also propped open just wide enough to prevent the latch from catching. Carver edged it open wider and peered into darkness. From his hip pocket he drew the penlight he’d brought and switched it on. The narrow yellow beam jumped out at eye level, and he quickly brought it down to focus on the hall carpet. He wasn’t sure if light could be seen through a window from down in the parking lot or street, but it was wise to minimize risk.
It was quiet in the dark hall. The antiseptic hospital smell from below had permeated the third floor. It was a scent Carver hated; it reminded him of pain and the death of people who’d been integral parts of his life. Some of them were people he’d despised; still, their passing more clearly defined his mortality and in his way he mourned them.
Holding the narrow yellow beam low, he limped along the hall. All the doors were closed. Most of them were lettered with doctors’ names, or words like ADMINISTRATION or FINANCE. Carver recognized the door he’d passed through a few days ago to talk to the redheaded receptionist and Dr. Wynn. And Nurse Gorham, the beautiful Marquise de Sade, R.N.
As Val’s friend Jane had said, the door at the end of the hall was unlettered. Carver turned its knob and pushed.
No give.
The door was locked.
He quickly made his way to the door that said ADMINISTRATION and tried it.
Ah! Unlocked.
He went inside and limped around behind the receptionist’s desk, then began searching through the drawers.
He found everything but keys.
As he straightened up with a soft groan, something gleamed in the flitting penlight beam. He focused the light and saw a thick ring of keys dangling from the lock of a gray metal file cabinet. It looked like a complicated insect that had been surprised and frozen by the light on its climb up the steep wall of steel.
He smiled and wiped the damp back of his hand across his lips. The odds were good, with that many keys.
He went to them and pulled the file cabinet’s key from the lock. Carrying the key ring, he limped back into the hall and down to the file room’s locked door.
He counted carefully. The ninth key he tried opened the file room door. He played the penlight beam over the floor to make sure there were no obstacles, then entered.
There were no windows in the room, so he located the wall switch and flicked it upward.
Fluorescent tubes buzzed and flickered to life, then light flooded the room and Carver felt a rush of disappointment.
There were no file cabinets.
The room was only about ten feet square. There was a small gray metal table in its center, with an IBM computer on it, a box of disks, and some pens, pencils, and erasers. A gray folding chair was at one end of the table. There was some sort of cabinet that took up most of one wall and had louvered metal doors.
Carver opened one of the doors and saw a bank of small, square filing drawers. He slid one of the narrow drawers out on its casters.
It was lined with 31/2-inch computer disks.
He cursed anew the age of the microchip. If anywhere in the medical center there were printouts of whatever was on the disks, he didn’t have time to search for them.
He saw that the drawers were labeled alphabetically. When he pulled out the K drawer, he saw more disks. All of them were labeled in blue ink. Under K he found “Keller” and started to remove the file.
Then he decided someone might notice it was missing.
He limped over to the computer on the table, and the open box of disks. He got the Keller Pharmaceutical file from its drawer and laid it on the table next to a disk he drew from the box. Carefully he peeled the adhesive label from the Keller disk, then pressed it onto the other disk. Placed the substitute under K in the file drawer.
He remembered a “Deceased” heading in the file cabinet. Quickly he found Jerome Evans’s file disk and substituted for it as he had the Keller disk.
He took the genuine disks with him as he made his way out of the building the same way he’d entered.
Still on an adrenaline high, he felt good when the night air hit him.
In fact, great.
“Get what you wanted?” Val asked eagerly, when Carver was standing outside the Dodge.
“I think so. It’s on disks.”
“Computer disks, I guess you mean.”
“Yeah. So it’ll take a little time before I find out whatever there is to know.”
“With the world all complicated the way it’s gotten, you’re gonna need a computer.”
“I know somebody who’s got one,” Carver said. He looked at his car parked out on the street. “Right now, I need to get back to the Warm Sands and get some sleep.”
“Was tonight worthwhile?” Val asked, as he hunched forward in his seat and started the Dodge’s engine.
Carver said, “I’ll let you know.”
He watched as Val cranked up the window to hold in the air-conditioning, then drove slowly from the lot.
Carver limped toward the Olds, feeling the thickness of the humid night as if he were plodding underwater, the stolen disks heavy in his pocket.
Val was right. The world got more complicated every day. Somehow, while Carver wasn’t paying attention, it had been turned into an electronic jungle.
Making it an ever more dangerous place for hunted and hunter.
28
Carver stood leaning on his cane behind Beth, looking over her shoulder. They were in her room at the Warm Sands, breakfasting on stale doughnuts and coffee he’d brought from a quick-stop market down the highway, seeing what was on the Keller Pharmaceutical disk Carver had stolen last night. He was fully dressed, Beth was in panties and bra, seated like a supplicant at the room’s tiny desk with her portable computer open and glowing like a god before her.
It had taken her only a few minutes to key up the information on the disk, which consisted mainly of Latin medical descriptions and columns of figures.
“Not much here but what looks like a record of orders, delivery dates, and payment amounts and dates,” Beth said. The radio was on in the room, not very loud, rap music. The human voice was never meant to be a drum. He wished she’d turn that crap off.
He leaned closer and studied the orange-tinted screen. It would tak
e someone more knowledgeable than either of them to know what the listed drugs were for, what the prices and delivery dates meant. Maybe a CPA with a medical degree.
While he was leaning so near her, Carver decided to kiss Beth on the ear. He was bending farther forward to do that when he noticed one of the abbreviations on the computer screen: MCL.
Beth shivered as he spoke less than an inch from her ear. “What do you make of that?” he asked. He pointed to the half-dozen identical abbreviations.
She rubbed her knuckle in her ear. “That your mind’s not entirely on the job.”
“I mean those sets of letters. They might stand for Mercury Laboratories.”
“If they do,” Beth said, “it appears some of the medical supplies were drop-shipped. Ordered and paid for through Keller Pharmaceutical but delivered direct from Mercury.”
“Nothing necessarily unusual there,” Carver said, “but it does isolate the Keller drugs that were developed by Mercury.”
“Some of them, anyway,” Beth said. “Other Mercury shipments might have reached the medical center by way of Keller.”
Carver straightened up, leaning on his cane and still gazing at the computer screen. The names of the drugs, be they generic or commercial, meant nothing to him. But then he didn’t read Latin. He took a bite of chocolate-iced cake doughnut, licked his fingers, and reached for his foam cup of coffee where it sat on the desk. He chewed, swallowed, sipped. Said, “Let’s see what’s on the Jerome Evans disk.”
Beth changed disks and went through her ritual with the computer, mumbling under her breath about EXE commands and paths. It was a lingo Carver regarded as intelligible as Latin. A fly droned close to the computer. Without bothering to look directly at it, she managed to knock it across the room with a casual backhand flick, a blur of dark flesh and red fingernails. Maybe EXE stood for “exterminator.”
She punched several keys in quick succession. The disk drive whirred and clunked softly, the screen flickered, and there was the information they sought.
The Jerome Evans file contained a plethora of information, from the date and time of his checkin at Emergency, to the date and time of his expiration written on what Beth called a scanner copy of the death certificate. From what Carver could make out, the autopsy revealed fatal damage to the heart. Jerome also had prostate cancer, but it was in the beginning stages and was in no way a factor in his death. As Hattie had told Carver, the official cause of her husband’s death was listed as cardiac arrest. The trauma to the heart was effected by a massive blood clot that had moved into the aorta. There was Dr. Wynn’s signature attesting to all of this.
“Know anything about heart attacks?” Carver asked.
Beth said, “I know enough to see what happened here. The heart had no way to pump blood out while it was still pulling blood in. It exploded.”
He tried to imagine how that might have felt, acutely aware of the thumping of his own heart. What he felt was a pang of pity for Jerome Evans. Then a tickle of fear. It could happen to him. He decided he’d better pay more attention to his diet, cut down on fats and cholesterol. Definitely.
“Ready to move on?” Beth asked. She was watching his reflection in the mirror over the dresser but near the desk. He nodded and she scrolled the information on the screen.
The brief history of Jerome Evans’s treatment at the medical center was there, from when he’d come in for his routine checkup, to when he’d been brought in two months later by ambulance on the day of his death. Readings from his blood sample workups (Carver noticed Jerome’s cholesterol level had been only slightly higher than his own), a record of body temperature, reflex responses, and blood pressure readings.
Beth reached the end of the file. “Notice,” she said, “there’s no record of an electrocardiogram?”
“He was almost dead when they brought him in,” Carver said.
“I meant from before then, from his physical examination. Heart’s something they always check, ’specially in a man that age.”
She was right, but that wasn’t what interested Carver. “Something else is conspicuous by its absence,” he said. “There’s no record of medication.”
“Digitalis,” Beth said, scrolling up and pointing at the screen. “Day of his heart attack. Looks like massive, desperation doses.”
“But that’s it,” Carver said. “Nothing else. Nothing earlier in relation to his routine physical. Wouldn’t you say that was odd for a seventy-year-old patient? I mean, he wasn’t given blood pressure pills or anything.”
“This says he didn’t have high blood pressure.”
“Maybe not that, but you’d think he’d have some ailment. According to his file, the old guy was healthier than I am.”
Beth smiled at him in the mirror. “Maybe you better enjoy life while you can.”
“Will that thing print?” he asked, pointing to the computer with his cane.
“I don’t have a printer with me, but there are places that rent them or charge to use them. I can probably scare one up.”
“All I need,” he said, “is a list of the drugs supplied directly from Mercury Labs.”
“We can do that with paper and pencil,” she said. She scrolled back to the beginning of the file, got some Warm Sands stationery and a ballpoint pen from the desk drawer, and jotted down the information Carver had requested. Her left hand worked the computer, her right hand worked the pen, while she glanced back and forth between screen and paper. Very dexterous, physically and mentally. He thought she was beautiful in her intensity.
When she was finished she handed him the product of low and high tech, and he folded it and slipped it in his shirt pocket.
“Gonna cross-check with Hattie?” she asked.
“That’s the plan,” Carver said. “I want to know if Jerome was on any medication.” He thought again of his own cholesterol count; the doctor had cautioned him to cut down on fatty foods, mentioned something about too much bad cholesterol, not enough good, as if health were a question of ethics. “And if so, was it part of a drop shipment from Mercury? Hattie should be able to remember what he might have been taking. Could be she even still has the container, if he died before he’d emptied it. Trouble is, empty prescription bottles aren’t the sort of keepsakes grieving widows tend to save.”
Beth leaned back from the desk and looked up at him. “No, Fred, you’re wrong about that.”
He hoped so. He’d try to find out as soon as he finished his doughnut.
29
Nine o’clock. Carver figured Hattie would be up and about by now. Probably she’d been awake for hours, watering plants, dusting, waxing, organizing her world so it had purpose, so she could continue to cope. Carver understood. Didn’t he do the same sort of thing? Wasn’t that his work, keeping the world orderly via something called justice?
When he phoned Hattie she told him she’d been awake since seven. “I’ve been up since six,” he lied, not wanting to be topped, then told her why he’d called. She invited him to come right over to the house, if he had something he wanted to discuss in person. No sense burning up the phone line, she said, and she had things to do. And she hoped he’d be able to make sense, having been awake since six o’clock.
Carver smiled and hung up. He told Beth where he was going and asked what she had planned for the rest of the morning.
“Gonna modem those files to Jeff Mehling,” she said, “and let him come up with an analysis that might tell us something more. Then I’m gonna crawl back in that bed and doze awhile. Recover from last night.”
Six A.M. Carver couldn’t argue with that one. “Will Mehling keep all this secret?”
“You can count on it. We’ve worked together before and he’s been tight as a clam. I tell him, he’ll delete everything from his system after we exchange information and he’s had time to study it, maybe run some software on it.”
“Tell him, then,” Carver said. “And point out he’s involved in the theft of confidential medical records.”
“Thieves have been known to fall out.”
“Not thieves like us, lover.” She ran a finger along the inside of one of her bra straps, causing the cup to strain away and reveal a swell of breast highlighted with perspiration in the lamplight and glow from the computer screen. “Wanna come back to bed with me for a while?”
“Wanting and doing are two different things.”
“Never noticed that about you, Fred, when you didn’t have some kinda substitution in mind.”
There was no point in trying to deal with this woman when she was in the mood to dogfight.
Carver walked to the window and parted the drapes a few inches, peered outside. Up near the other end of the parking lot a blond man and a blond woman were loading suitcases into the trunk of a car with one of those phony convertible tops that made no sense to Carver. It had a green license plate. He didn’t know which state the plate represented, but it wasn’t Florida.
He waited until the man and woman had gotten into their ersatz convertible and departed. It was wise not to let anyone see him leave Beth’s room, even an apparently vacationing couple from out of state.
The lot was deserted now in the thick morning sunlight. He nodded good-bye to Beth and slipped out the door. Heard her say, “Later, lover,” as the latch clicked solidly behind him.
He twisted the knob both directions to make sure the door was locked.
The Olds was parked on the edge of the lot, in partial shade from a grouping of date palms. The hazed plastic rear window of the canvas top, the overlaying jagged shadows of the palm fronds, kept Carver from noticing until he was almost to the car that there was a figure on the passenger side of the front seat.
He stopped and planted his cane in loose gravel, feeling his adrenaline kick in as if he’d just downed a jolt of hundred-proof liquor. The Colt was in its belt holster beneath his untucked, baggy tropical shirt, multicolored flowers and birds of paradise on a black background. He touched its comforting bulk, keeping his thumb beneath the hem of the wild shirt so he could get the gun out in a hurry if necessary.