by Tracy Clark
* * *
Two days. Bad vending machine food, the chair from Hell. Whip hadn’t called in yet to report on Bolek. George Cummings hadn’t returned my call regarding his family’s whereabouts. My father hadn’t shown up to produce his train ticket as evidence of his innocence. Ben couldn’t find Dee Dee, and I could no longer stand the suspense. My nerves were fried. But Yancy held the key, so I was here. My phone rang in my pocket, and I lunged for it like a crazy person.
“Are you kidding me?” Ben barked.
“I’m here till I talk to him.”
“You know this is obsessive, even for you.”
“Did you call just to chastise me, or do you have something important to say? Anything on Dee Dee? Bolek? George Cummings?”
“We’ve got cops on it, all right? I called to tell you Yancy’s awake. I just got a call from the floor. I’m on my way over there now to see if I can get a statement. Get a visitor’s pass from the security desk and wait for me at the nurses’ station. The cop on the door knows we’re coming. You can thank me later with expensive booze.” He clicked off, and I popped up from the chair and raced to the security desk. Things were finally looking up.
Yancy was in room 807, and I rode up to the eighth floor pressed into a crowded elevator, anxious for the car to make its way up. When the elevator doors finally whooshed open on eight, I heard a god-awful commotion coming from the far end of the hall and turned to see a small crowd of people standing there.
“Get the wheelchair off her,” a nurse yelled into a small group of onlookers blocking the corridor. Ambulatory patients in hospital gowns were outside their rooms watching, glued to the action as nursing staff and orderlies attended to an old woman dressed in hospital booties and a chenille robe, who appeared to be pinned underneath a collapsible wheelchair, the front wheels pointed upward, spinning.
The old woman wailed. “Somebody shoved me! My back is broken into a million pieces!”
A short, blond nurse reached into the cluster of bodies. “Mrs. Strickley, stop struggling, please. Let us help you.” She scanned the hall frantically. “Did anyone see what happened?” She reached out to the old woman. “Lay quietly so I can see if you’re hurt.”
“Of course, I’m hurt. I’ve been assaulted. Pushed over and out like a sack of spuds!”
A tall male nurse worked to move people back. “Please, everyone, go back to your rooms. Let us work.”
I watched from the nurses’ station as the crowd slowly thinned and I could get a clearer look at poor Mrs. Strickley, blue hair and all. She didn’t look as though she’d been injured too badly, but I was no doctor. She appeared to be about a hundred, but also sturdy enough to last that much longer or more. I smiled, but shouldn’t have.
“Please, everyone, step back.” The harried nurse blew a corkscrew curl out of her flushed face. This obviously was more work than she’d planned on for the day. As everyone moved back to give Mrs. Strickley room, a man in blue stood up, revealing the familiar CPD patch on the sleeve of his uniform sweater. Yancy’s cop? No way. I peered down the other end of the hall toward room 807. There was no one on the door.
I yelled. “Officer!” He reeled, heavy jowls waggling. He looked like a human-bulldog hybrid. “Are you supposed to be on the door to 807?”
He pointed to the old woman at his feet. “Emergency here.”
I turned and ran full speed for Yancy’s room, my back stiff from sitting so long. Maybe the cop had gotten a clue and was right behind me; maybe he hadn’t and wasn’t. Either way, I couldn’t wait for him. Nearly there, the door to 807 eased open, and I watched as a black man with short dreadlocks furtively poked his thin head out. He wasn’t wearing a lab coat or scrubs, but a black fleece jacket and jeans. He was no doctor, orderly, or nurse. He didn’t look like he belonged in the hospital at all, let alone in Yancy’s room. When he turned and saw me, he jolted back, then tore off down the hall toward the stairwell.
“Stop!” I screamed. He kept going. I pushed open Yancy’s door and stepped into a cacophony of deafening bells and beeps. Every machine Yancy had been hooked up to was either beeping, flashing, blaring, or hissing. His still body lay on a mass of rumpled sheets, as though he’d been involved in a horrible struggle. There was a pillow over his face, IV tubes pulled free, blood on the sheets. I knocked the pillow away and hurriedly felt for a pulse, but couldn’t find one. I pulled the emergency alarm, setting off another loud alert. I felt again for a pulse, but got nothing back. He was gone. The jowly cop ran up behind me, frantic nurses running in behind him, pushing their way to the bed. I turned to the cop, screeching. “You left the door! He’s dead because you left the door!”
He swallowed hard, and his face lost all its color as the reality of his situation hit him. He was no rookie, but he’d just made the mother of all rookie mistakes. And he was going to get dinged for it.
“No one passed me,” he argued, grasping for anything, hoping authoritative bluster would mitigate the damage done. “I had the door in my sights the entire time. The old lady . . . Who the hell are you, anyway? Let me see your pass.”
The special visitor’s pass had my name on it. I yanked it off my jacket and flung it at him, then ran for the stairwell. A code blue blared over the PA system, but it’d be too late. Yancy was dead. I gritted my teeth, kept moving. I reached the end of the hall and skidded around the corner, but the corridor was deserted. He couldn’t have gotten that far ahead of me. The hall went on forever, and there were at least twenty rooms on each side of it. I slowly crept along, peeking into rooms at patients sleeping in their beds, listening for anything that didn’t sound right. Two rooms up, a woman screamed.
“Get out. Nurse! Police! Get out!” That’s what I’d been waiting for; I ran toward the wails. Fleece Jacket dashed from his hiding place and took off again. He was a good thirty yards ahead of me, barreling through nurses who appeared out of nowhere, knocking over meal trolleys and medicine carts. An oblivious woman walking an IV pole toward the restroom waddled out in front of me, and I nearly knocked her over. She screamed bloody murder, but I couldn’t stop. Fleece Jacket hit the stairwell door, pushed it open, and disappeared, but seconds later the door wouldn’t budge for me. I rammed it with my shoulder, but felt no give in it at all. I tried again, and the door gave just a fraction of an inch before slamming shut again. I peeked through the small square of glass just above eye level and saw the man hunched down behind the door, leaning all of his weight against it.
I rammed again, harder. The door gave again, but again fell back. Peering up through the glass a second time, I could see him mocking me with a cocky smile. I checked the hall for something, anything to break the glass; my eyes landed on a fire extinguisher in a narrow glass box. I ran over, pulled it out and threw it through the glass without a moment’s hesitation, sending jagged shards raining down on the guy’s back. He pushed away from the door and took off down the stairs. I chased him, taking two stairs at a time, gaining some ground. I could hear him gasping for air. He was tiring; I was, too, but I wasn’t going to stop. He killed Yancy. Maybe he killed Pop and Cesar. Hell would freeze over before I gave in and let him go.
Down the stairs, seventh floor, sixth. When we rounded the landing on six and hit the next flight of stairs, the guy turned back to see if I was still there, hope in his eyes. I was. I wanted him bad and not in a good way. I hoped he could tell. “Stop!” I yelled, though I knew he wouldn’t. If he were going to stop, he’d have done it two flights up.
“Fuck off!” he yelled back, his voice echoing off the walls.
I picked up the pace, though I had little left in the tank. I wanted to kill him. I wanted to plunge my fists into his chest and yank out his beating heart with my bare hands.
“I hear you breathing hard,” he taunted.
I ignored him and dug in again, pushing myself well past empty, my legs buckling. If he got to the first floor he’d be long gone, lost in a crowd of visitors and staff. Fleece practically flew off the fifth-flo
or landing. I was a half flight up, but gaining. Just then the heavy door on the fourth floor opened, and a pair of chattering doctors in gray lab coats stepped into the stairwell, oblivious to the runaway train headed their way.
“Move!” I screeched, half-crazed and nearly despondent at the possibility of defeat. Startled, the pair did the exact opposite and planted themselves like oak trees, over-educated deer caught in the glare of oncoming headlights. I didn’t have all day to think about what to do next. I had just enough time to clench my teeth, brace, and throw my body down the last few steps onto Fleece Jacket’s back. The impact sent the both of us tumbling down the last few steps, slamming hard into the wall. We ended up on the floor in a tangle, each of us trying to get a hold on the other. One doctor flew past us headed up, leaving his stunned companion high and dry. The doctor left behind to fend for herself, flattened out and glued herself to the opposite wall like a panel of wallpaper. Her eyes wide, her mouth agape, she stood there, knees shaking, suspended like a dinosaur jawbone in a slab of amber.
“Get out of here!” I screamed, hoping to unstick her. “Go!”
She bolted back through the door. It was now just me and Fleece amid the wailing drone of security alarms. It sounded as though the entire hospital had been put on notice. Surely someone—the police or hospital security—would show up soon.
We rolled around on the landing, grappling like a pair of howler monkeys, knees ramming into vulnerable places, elbows slamming into bone. There was no way I could outfight him. He had me by at least fifty pounds, and his hands were as big as baseball mitts. The best I could do was slow him down and protect myself. I managed to land a strong kick to his groin on my way out of the scrum. The sound of the air whooshing out of his lungs as he folded in on himself gave me a great deal of satisfaction. The kick was for Yancy. I scrambled to my feet to loom over Fleece, gulping for air, my legs as useful as overcooked noodles. I watched as he whimpered like a child. If I’d had my gun I might have conked him with it. Lucky for him I had to turn it into hospital security before being allowed on the floor.
“Damn you.” He managed to squeeze the words out, his sharklike eyes tearing, wide lips contorted into an agonizing grimace. He writhed around on the landing, all the air drained out of him, glaring at me. I glared back. He wanted to kill me, I could tell.
“You . . . got . . . nothing.” He wheezed. “Less . . . than . . . nothing.”
I sneered at him, breathing hard, sweating, my legs shaking, spent. “Shut . . . up.”
He’d get his day in court, though at the moment it felt like more than he deserved. I kicked his foot away, then plucked his wallet out of his back pocket. “I have you coming out of a room you had no business in, a room where a man was killed.... Now I have you.”
He squeezed his eyes shut. “Dammit.”
“Which one are you, Boss or Buddy?”
He shook his head and clenched his lips shut like a child playing a defiant game of tick-a-lock. It only angered me more.
“Why’d you kill him? What’d he do to you?” I meant Pop, but the question also applied to Yancy and Cesar. They were linked; this man knew how.
“Go to hell,” he managed to spit out.
“Maybe later, but since I’m here now . . .” I opened the battered billfold to reveal a few scraps of folded paper, money. My heart leapt at the sight of the driver’s license sticking out of the narrow slot reserved for such things. “ID in your pocket. Real sure of yourself, weren’t you?”
He made a play for snatching the billfold from me, but didn’t come close. “Don’t mean nothing.”
“Not to you, maybe, but to me.”
He smiled, despite his discomfort, like he knew a secret and found pleasure in keeping it to himself. It was a little freaky. I slid the license free to get a better look, but before I could, the stairwell door burst open, whacked me hard in the spine and slammed me into the wall again. I tried inhaling, but couldn’t. The slam had knocked the wind out of me. Fleece’s wallet flew out of my hands and landed at my feet. I turned to see two security guards tumble into the stairwell, wide-eyed, scared shitless, and braced for confrontation, each brandishing pepper spray and walkie-talkies.
“Nobody move,” the flabby male guard barked, his tan uniform straining across his bulbous middle. “Faces in the dirt!”
His female partner was all of five feet and couldn’t have weighed more than ninety-five pounds soaking wet. She was Cathy Rigby in regulation shoes. “You heard him. Hands against the wall.” Her voice, almost as thin as she was, wobbled some when she spoke. She looked petrified. “I mean, behind your backs.”
I stood there for a moment, stunned, my back burning, waiting for my breath to come back. “I’m an investigator,” I said when I’d recovered enough to speak. “He killed the man in room 807. That’s what the alarms are for.”
“Hell no,” Fleece bellowed. “She jumped me. Tried to steal my wallet!”
The guards looked at me, then back at Fleece, then me again. This was way too real for either of them to get their heads around. Checking visitors’ passes and giving directions to radiology was one thing, two people fighting in a stairwell was something else entirely.
The flabby guard’s eyes held mine. “I said down. Now!”
Fleece—recovered now from the kick—clambered to his knees, pawing for his wallet, which had landed just beyond his reach. I peeled myself away from the wall and lunged for him, and it, both of us desperate, both of us ignoring the guards’ orders. Knotted up together again, we skidded down the stairs together, crashing painfully one level below. Fleece got his big hands on the billfold first, but fumbled with it, unable to get a firm grasp. I batted it away.
“Bitch!” he howled.
The wallet was all I could think about. I needed it. I could hear the guards rumbling down the stairs after us. I skidded over to where the wallet ended up and got my hands on it, clutching it as though it were life itself, but Fleece soon barreled in, working to pry it loose from my grip. I elbowed him in the ribs, and he briefly let go, but he was quickly back. I lobbed the wallet behind his head and pushed him off me. The wallet hit the wall, sending its contents scattering. Fleece now had a choice to make, take time to grab it all up and risk not getting away, or leave everything and run. Which would he go for? I didn’t wait to see. I clawed for the ID. Fleece did, too.
“Stay where you are,” Flabby Guard yelled, his gruff voice echoing off the metal railings.
“Both of you,” Tiny Guard added.
I kept reaching, my fingertips just touching it. Fleece was right there fighting me for it. I almost had it. Suddenly, I felt a strong pull at the back of my jacket. I turned to look. It was Flabby Guard pulling me back. I roared out in frustration. “Let go of me, you idiot!” I lost my grip on the ID and watched horrified as my fingers got farther and farther away from it. I struggled to wriggle out of my jacket and free myself. “Stop him!”
Fleece snatched up his license, scrambled to his feet and ran down the stairs. I reached out to grab him, straining against the hold, getting nowhere. “He’s getting away. Get him!”
Flabby Guard flung me onto my back and pressed his fat foot into my stomach to pin me there. I grabbed his foot and cranked it, which knocked him off balance. I watched as he struggled to right himself, his massive weight working against him. For a moment he teetered on the edge of the stair, his arms paddling, about to fall. I quickly swept my legs behind him and pushed him back toward the landing where he regained his footing. It was likely more than he’d ever do for me. I got to my feet.
“I’m a PI working a case. You’re chasing the wrong person. Stop that man.”
“Down on your knees,” Flabby Guard barked. So much for my saving him from a fall.
“I don’t have time for this.” I barreled past him, took the stairs two at a time, heading for the third floor. The guards could stand there all day and bark orders at the wall. Fleece was on the move.
“Got a monkey on you
r tail, Raines,” Fleece called from below me. “Why’d you kill that crazy man? What’d he ever do to you?” His booming laugh echoed in the narrow stairwell. His taunting was wearing thin. He’d get no response from me. I wasn’t interested in goading him, just catching him.
“Stop,” Tiny Guard yelled. She was close behind me, surprisingly fleet of foot for a jittery munchkin. Her lumbering partner was behind her. I could tell by the closeness of his wheezing.
“You want to help?” I yelled back to her. “Radio ahead. Tell them to lock the doors.”
I peered over the inner railing and could see Fleece taking the stairs two at a time. He was almost home free.
“I said stop,” Tiny Guard said. She was gaining fast. What’d she do? Run track in high school?
I tried stepping up my pace, but I didn’t have much left. “Cass Raines. I’m a PI. Check with the cop on the eighth floor, or Detective Ben Mickerson. Now either help me catch this guy, or back the hell off me!”
“Almost there,” Fleece said. “Sorry I got to bounce.”
I wanted to take off my shoe and torpedo it down at him, but it would only slow me down. I hit the landing, turned for the last flight. Just then, something crashed into me from behind and knocked me to the floor. It was Tiny Guard. She landed hard, pressing her full weight down on me, a pointy knee gouging into my sore spine.
“Are you freaking kidding me right now?” I yelled.
“I said stop. I meant stop.”
I could feel her fumbling for her zip ties. “Get off of me. I’m losing him!” I bucked and squirmed trying to flick her off, but she held on tight, as though I were a mechanical bull at Gilley’s. I twisted around violently, a dangerous scream gurgling up out of my throat. I shoved her back full force, sending her sliding backward into the wall by the seat of her polyester pants. I came up off the floor nearly homicidal. She did, too. I didn’t want to fight her. I turned for the stairs.