THE JACK REACHER FILES: THE GIRL FROM THE WRONG SIDE OF CORDIAL (with Bonus Thriller THE BLOOD NOTEBOOKS)

by Jude Hardin

  “How’s the old man doing?” Kei said.

  “I’m really not allowed to talk about that. It’s a confidentiality issue.”

  “Is he still next door to me? Or did you move him closer to the nurses’ station where you can keep a better eye on him?”

  “He was never next door to you.”

  Brent administered the morphine. Kei experienced a wave of nausea this time, but it passed quickly. The pain in his finger clicked off like a switch.

  “He kept saying the name Anna,” Kei said. “I thought he must have overheard me when I gave you her phone number.”

  “I don’t see how he could have,” Brent said. “Anyway, it’s a common name. Maybe it was his wife’s name. Or his mother’s.”

  Kei nodded. That made sense. The poor old guy was probably thinking about someone from long ago.

  Brent spiked the new bag of saline, tossed the old one in the trashcan on his way out of the room.

  Kei fell asleep right away.

  Anna was sitting across from him at the seafood place. Table for two, view of the Gulf, guy on a stool playing an acoustic guitar next to a small dance floor in the corner.

  “What kind of name is Kei?” Anna said.

  “It’s Japanese. Apparently my mother spent some time over there while she was pregnant with me. I have a picture somewhere of her standing in front of the Tokyo National Museum. She looks like she stuffed a watermelon under her shirt.”

  “So your parents traveled a lot?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “I like long stories.”

  The waiter came with their drinks. Kei didn’t feel like sharing the details of his childhood with Anna right then. The abandonment. The foster homes. Too boring and too embarrassing for a first date. So he changed the subject.

  “There’s a concert at the amphitheater next weekend,” he said. “Want to go?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. What night is it?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  Who’s playing?”

  “I don’t remember that either.”

  Anna laughed. “You’re crazy,” she said.

  Kei wanted to lean across the table and kiss her. He didn’t, of course. Not then. But he wanted to.

  “I’ll be right back,” he said.

  He got up and walked over to the guy playing guitar in the corner, whispered a request in his ear. A few minutes later he and Anna were up on the floor, slow dancing to “A Tomorrow Like Yesterday,” the classic ballad from the fifties.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever heard this song before,” Anna said. “But I like it.”

  “One of my favorites,” Kei said.

  Her body felt perfect next to his, like it belonged there. When the song ended, they walked back to their table, sat down to the two steaming plates of food that had been brought while they were gone.

  “Here’s your breakfast, Mr. Thrasher.”

  Kei woke up, blinked a few times, looked around the room. It took him a few seconds to remember where he was.

  Television, IV pump, side rails.

  The hospital.

  The blinds covering the window were closed, but he could see light around the edges so he knew it was daytime.

  “Where’s Brent?” he said.

  “He went home about an hour ago. It’s a brand new shift now, and I’m going to be your nurse for the day. My name’s Ashley.”

  White scrubs, tall and slender, long blond hair tied back in a ponytail. Squeaky white nursing shoes. Some kind of perfume or scented lotion that Kei didn’t really care for. She adjusted the height on the bedside table and positioned it across the bed. There was a tray on it with a glass of orange juice and a cup of coffee and a plate covered with a blue plastic dome.

  Ashley checked the IV bag, which was still over half full.

  “When are they going to let me out of here?” Kei said.

  “You’re scheduled for a PICC later this afternoon. That’s the IV line you’ll be going home with. So you’ll be NPO after breakfast. That means—”

  “I know what it means. Nothing by mouth.”

  “Right. So eat up while you can. If all goes well, the doctor will probably discharge you tonight.”

  “Who’s my doctor?”

  “You were assigned to the hospitalist service. They work shifts, just like the nurses, so it changes every twelve hours. I think Dr. Garcia is on today. She should be making rounds in just a little while.”

  “Thanks.”

  “How’s the finger?”

  Kei showed it to her.

  “It’s not as red as it was,” he said. “And I think the swelling has gone down some. No pain right now.”

  “Good. I’ll be back in just a little while to check on you.”

  Ashley left the room. Kei lifted the dome from the plate and set it aside. Scrambled eggs, two strips of bacon, two slices of toasted white bread cut diagonally into triangles. Everything looked okay, not bad for hospital food, but Kei really wasn’t very hungry.

  Anna still hadn’t messaged him back. He didn’t know whether to feel sad or concerned at this point. She was probably all right. She probably just didn’t feel like talking. Maybe she was busy at work. Or maybe she just didn’t like Kei as much as he liked her. Maybe there was someone else in her life. Kei felt as though he’d known her forever, but he hadn’t. They’d only been out the one time. He drank the coffee, watched a few minutes of a morning news show on television, decided to get out of bed and take a little walk.

  He got up and put on the robe and slippers he’d packed in his gym bag, and then he unplugged the IV pump, which immediately switched over to battery power. He rolled the pole out into the hallway, looked left and right, decided to walk toward the nurses’ station. Not that he needed anything. He just thought they should know that he was out and about. He passed the room next door to his, and the next room, and the next, the first two with contact isolation signs on the doors and the third wide open with a white-haired woman sitting on the side of the bed eating breakfast.

  The fourth door down was open as well, but the room was vacant. The mattress had been stripped and there was a mop and bucket in the corner. The patient must have been discharged, Kei thought. The housekeeping staff members who’d had been in the process of cleaning the room must have taken a break. Or maybe they had been called elsewhere. A stat clean on another unit, maybe. It appeared as though they had left in a hurry.

  The room was a mess. A pair of soft wrist restraints dangled from the bed frame, and a length of oxygen tubing—still connected to the regulator on the wall—hissed on the floor next to the bedside table. There was a bloated plastic trash bag about a foot inside the threshold, its contents spilling out onto the grungy tiles. Kei saw some wadded-up surgical tape and some empty packages that had once contained gauze for dressings, along with a plastic wash basin and two disposable drinking cups.

  And an insulin syringe.

  Kei didn’t know if the syringe had been used, but it definitely didn’t belong in the regular trash. As he bent down to pick it up, intending to drop it into the nearest sharps container, he noticed the word HELP scratched out in pencil on a torn and crumpled menu from the dietary department. He turned the tattered piece of card stock over, and on the other side, written in the same shaky scrawl, were the words TOMORROW LIKE YESTERDAY.

  3

  Kei figured the note had been written by the same confused old man who’d been shouting for help last night. The only thing that didn’t make sense was that the old man had written down part of the title of the song Kei had been thinking about, the song he’d requested at the seafood restaurant, the song he and Anna had danced to. Odd to say the least. Shocking, really. TOMORROW LIKE YESTERDAY. The words sent a chill up Kei’s spine as he read them again.

  Squeaky footsteps.

  “What are you doing?”

  Kei stood up and turned around. It was Ashley.

  “I was just going for a walk, and I noticed the me
ss here on the floor,” Kei said.

  “You need to get back to your room. Dr. Garcia is making rounds now, and I wouldn’t want you to miss her. Anyway, you shouldn’t be digging around in the trash.”

  “What happened to the patient in this room?” Kei said. “Was he discharged?”

  “I’m not allowed to discuss—”

  “You can’t tell me if he was discharged or not?”

  “You need to get back to your room, Mr. Thrasher.”

  Kei didn’t like being told what to do, and he didn’t like Ashley’s condescending attitude.

  “You see that?” he said, raising his voice, nearly shouting now as he pointed down at the insulin syringe. “Think you might want to take care of it?”

  Ashley’s face turned red. Kei figured the response was partly because she was annoyed with him and partly because she was embarrassed that one of the nurses had been so careless.

  “I’ll take care of it,” she said.

  Kei turned around and started pushing the IV pole back toward his room. As he made his way down the hall, he noticed the paperwork caddies mounted outside each doorway. Brushed stainless steel with a plastic binder slid into each one. Notes on the patients, Kei supposed, hard copies waiting to be transcribed into the computer. He stopped outside his own room, pulled the binder out of the caddy and opened it to the first page. It was his medication record.

  “I’ll take that.”

  A petite middle-aged woman with short black hair and a metal clipboard stood half a meter to Kei’s right with her hand held out. The ID badge clipped to her lab coat pocket said S. Garcia, MD.

  Kei handed her the binder.

  “I was just looking to see if it was time for my pain medicine yet,” he said.

  “Let’s go in here and talk about it.”

  “Okay.”

  Kei walked into the room, plugged the IV pump back into the wall socket, sat on the edge of the mattress and guided the bedside table out of the way. Dr. Garcia walked in and closed the door behind her.

  “I see you didn’t eat your breakfast,” she said.

  “I wasn’t very hungry.”

  Dr. Garcia listened to Kei’s chest with her stethoscope, and then she looked at his finger.

  “It’s still hurting?” she said.

  “A little. Not as bad as last night.”

  “Scale of zero to ten?”

  “About a four, I guess.”

  “I’m going to discontinue the morphine. You can call your nurse as soon as I leave, and she’ll bring you a dose of ibuprofen. Has anyone talked to you about the home healthcare service yet?”

  “Not really. But I was wondering if it was going to be a problem.”

  “Why would it be a problem?”

  Kei paused, hesitant to tell the doctor about his current living situation, feeling like a total failure as the words spilled from his lips.

  “I’ve been staying in a storage unit,” he said. “There’s a twenty-four-hour gym nearby. That’s where I shave and take a shower and everything.”

  D. Garcia laced her hands together, nodded contemplatively.

  “I think we can work around that,” she said. “It’s no problem, really, as long as you have a physical address. A nurse will come and administer your antibiotics once a day for one week. It only takes a few minutes to hook everything up, and then you can disconnect the IV tubing and flush the line yourself. The nurse will teach you how. Oh, and you’ll need to keep your hospital ID bracelet on until your treatments at home are complete.”

  Kei fought the urge to tell Dr. Garcia about his past. There had been a time when he could guide an endotracheal tube down a patient’s throat with one hand and insert a central femoral line with the other. That was an exaggeration, but he’d been a first-rate emergency room physician before everything went sour. He’d been one of the best in the country. Other doctors took notes when they observed his techniques. He didn’t need a nurse to show him how to disconnect the tubing from an IV drip and flush the line.

  But once again he decided not to talk about it.

  “I’ve been trying to save enough money to get a real apartment,” he said.

  “What kind of job do you have?”

  “I work in a restaurant.”

  “And do you like that?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “Have you thought about going to school? The local colleges have some excellent programs, and you could check to see what kind of financial aid is available.”

  “Thanks,” Kei said. “Maybe I’ll look into it.”

  “Good. You should be able to go home tonight, so let me just say that it was a pleasure to make your acquaintance, and I hope everything works out well for you. Any questions before I leave?”

  “Were you taking care of the elderly gentleman in four-twelve?”

  She glanced down at her clipboard. “Oh, yes. I discharged him to a long term care facility earlier this morning. Why do you ask?”

  “Just wondering,” Kei said.

  He knew she wasn’t going to tell him the old guy’s name, or which nursing home he’d been sent to.

  “Well, have a good day,” Dr. Garcia said.

  She exited the room.

  Kei reached over and picked up a piece of toast from his breakfast tray, nibbled on it as he thought about the note he’d found on the old man’s floor.

  HELP on one side and TOMORROW LIKE YESTERDAY on the other.

  The old man was confused, no doubt about it, and it seemed that he might have been experiencing paranoid delusions. Which wasn’t terribly uncommon among geriatric patients in the hospital. Strange surroundings, people in strange clothes walking around doing strange things. It could be very unsettling sometimes. Kei understood that quite well. He’d been in the middle of it for years. What baffled him, though, was that the old man had kept shouting the name Anna, and then he’d written down the title of the song Kei and Anna Parks had danced to—the melodic ballad that Kei had already started thinking of as their song. Mentioning one or the other might have been a wild coincidence. But both? It was nothing short of bizarre.

  And Anna still hadn’t returned any of Kei’s calls or texts.

  Not that Kei thought one thing had anything to do with the other. It was highly unlikely that the old man’s rants and scribbles had anything to do with what was going on in Kei’s life. Such a correlation didn’t even make sense.

  But still.

  Kei couldn’t stop thinking about it. He wanted to talk to the old man, ask him about the name he’d shouted out and the song title he’d written down. He wanted to talk to the old man, and the only way to do that was to find out which nursing home he’d been sent to.

  He needed to know the guy’s name.

  He unplugged again and walked out into the hallway again. As he made his way back toward the nursing station, traveling as fast as he could with the cumbersome IV pole, he could see that the blue plastic binder was still in the stainless steel caddy outside room 412. Maybe the old man’s records were still in the binder. All Kei needed was a quick peek.

  He slowed his pace and glanced into the room. The trash bag was gone, and a man in a gray uniform was mopping the floor. Kei lifted the binder out of the caddy and was about to flip it open when someone snatched it out of his hands.

  It wasn’t Ashley this time. It was the young lady who’d taken Kei’s blood pressure earlier, the patient care associate working this end of the hall. Kei couldn’t remember her name, and she was standing at an angle where he couldn’t see her ID badge.

  “Still need to write down his last set of vitals,” she said, nodding toward the binder. “You okay?”

  “Yes. I was just—”

  “You were just being nosy, huh? Seems to be going around these days.”

  She smiled and walked away.

  4

  Kei’s fifteen-year-old Toyota Camry was in the visitor’s lot where he’d parked it yesterday. After signing the waiver that allowed him to walk
out of the hospital unassisted, he made his way toward the car, the ports from his brand new PICC line dangling annoyingly against his right bicep.

  He’d decided to forget about the business with the confused old man. Just a bizarre coincidence. Had to be. Anyway, the words TOMORROW LIKE YESTERDAY didn’t necessarily refer to the title of the song Kei had been thinking about. Maybe the old man was simply trying to tell the dietary staff, or the nursing staff, or whoever he was trying to get help from, that tomorrow he wanted the same menu as yesterday. Whatever the case, Kei didn’t have time to dwell on it. He had some errands to run, and he needed to talk to Anna and find out why she hadn’t returned his calls. If she didn’t want to see him again, he would have to accept that and move on.

  But he hoped that she wanted to see him again.

  And again.

  And again.

  He hoped it with all his heart.

  He unlocked the Camry, slid into the driver’s seat and started the engine, noticing right away that one of his headlights was out. Another expense, he thought. It was always something. He exited the hospital lot and headed toward the steel and concrete structure he slept in at night. He refused to call the place home, even on a temporary basis. It was a hollow cube that sheltered him from the elements while he struggled to reassemble his broken life. It was a stark reminder of the mistakes he’d made, and he couldn’t wait to move out of it.

  He decided to stop at Anna’s first. Her apartment complex was a couple of miles past the storage facility, but it was already after 9:00 p.m. and Kei was afraid she might be in bed asleep if he showed up much later. Some mornings she had to be at work by six, which meant she probably got up at four-thirty or five. Maybe it was already too late to be stopping by, Kei thought. But he didn’t turn around. His stomach had been in knots all day. He needed to see her, even if it turned out to be the last time.

  He steered into the parking lot, found a place close to her building, killed the engine and eased out of the car. His finger throbbed and the new IV line caught on his shirtsleeve every time he moved a certain way. All this from a paper cut, he thought.