When I did, the edge of my glove caught on one of the buttons on the sleeve of his jacket, pulling it up and revealing one grungy cuff of an equally grimy flannel shirt.
It was just enough to spark a memory of the day I’d first encountered him outside the restaurant. The scene played itself in my head—and in slow motion, to boot. I watched myself hand the man a dollar. I saw him stick out his hand to accept it. When he did, the sleeve of his jacket slid up, just like it did now.
And I realized what it was that had spooked him that night and made him hurry away.
“You weren’t wearing a flannel shirt that first night I saw you outside Piece.”
Big points for Mr. Homeless, he didn’t contradict me. He did look surprised, though—plenty surprised—and while he was still processing what I said, I closed in (figuratively speaking, of course, since he wasn’t all that clean looking and I wasn’t all that eager to make new friends).
“You were wearing a dress shirt that night. A dress shirt with French cuffs. And you forgot you had it on until your jacket sleeve sneaked up. You didn’t want me to see it. That’s why you grabbed my money and hurried away. What, you thought taking off your cuff links would make you look more homeless?”
“You’ve got a good eye.”
That went without saying, but it wasn’t going to distract me. “You’re a cop.”
“You think?”
“I think homeless people don’t wear business shirts, heavy on the starch.”
“How do you know it was heavy on the starch?”
“Give me some credit,” I said, the better to let him know that I wasn’t just some moron with no fashion sense who, number one, hadn’t been engaged to a guy who was just as fashion conscious as I was and number two, didn’t date (if what Quinn and I did could be called dating) a guy who knew what was what when it came to the right way to dress. (And to undress, for that matter, but that wasn’t something I wanted to consider at the moment.) “Why are you following me?”
“Why are you so interested in the Gerard Clinic?”
“Why are you?” Even as I asked the question, I knew the answer. “You’ve got your eye on Doctor Gerard. And Dan. You weren’t just hanging around outside the restaurant that night, you were waiting for them. You were following them. That’s why I’ve seen you outside the clinic, too. You’re doing surveillance, though I’ve got to tell you, I don’t think it qualifies as undercover. Not if you’re careless enough to forget to change your office shirt to one that’s a little more in keeping with the whole I’m-a-poor-homeless-person thing. And since you’re not—homeless, that is . . . how about giving me back that buck I gave you?”
“You referred to Mr. Callahan by his first name. You must be friends.”
“And you must be delusional if you think I’m going to give him up to some cop playing dress-up.” This was one of those classic comebacks that was too good to waste. For emphasis and to show him I meant business, I quickened my pace.
He was apparently not as into great scene-ending lines. He hurried to catch up. “Do you know something you could give him up for?”
“Do you think if I did, I’d spill my guts to some guy I don’t know?”
“What if I told you you’d be better off if you did?”
“Is that a threat?”
I hadn’t realized I’d stopped and turned to him, my chin raised, until I already had. He was only a hair taller than me, and my guess was that he wasn’t used to people confronting him so openly. His chin came up, too.
“I don’t need to threaten,” he said. “But if you’re smart, you’ll listen to a warning.”
“Oh no!” Whether he knew it or not, he had spoken the magic word. Warnings were something I was sick to death of getting from Dan. I wasn’t going to fall into that trap again. “Don’t even start. No talk of things that go bump in the night, OK? Not unless the thing that’s bumping is that creepy shadow that’s been following me around, and you can explain what it is and what it wants and—” Since we were standing so close, I knew exactly when I spooked him. That would have been when what I was saying sank in and he backstepped away. And his expression went from stony, to curious, to just a little apprehensive.
I regrouped. “OK, so you’re not going to warn me about ghosts and such. Good. That’s not something I want to talk about. But that means you were going to warn me about real things, right? Things like—”
“How about things like breaking the law?” He regrouped, too, and now that I’d stopped talking crazy, he went back to stony in an instant.
“I wouldn’t dream of breaking the law.”
“Then how about what you know about your friend Mr. Callahan breaking the law?”
I threw my hands in the air. As far as I was concerned, there was no better way to demonstrate my feelings and distance myself from the half-truth I was about to fling as casually as if it was the bouquet I never got to throw at the wedding that never happened. “Can’t say he has,” I pointed out, because, let’s face it, to date, I hadn’t found a thing to prove or disprove Madeline’s theory, either about Doctor Gerard or Dan. “And just for the record, I can’t believe he ever would. Dan Callahan is a nice, regular, ethical guy, and even if I thought he was doing something wrong, I wouldn’t tell you. Because you know what? Even if you’re one of the good guys, I don’t trust you. There’s the whole scamming-a-buck-from-me thing, to begin with. And the fact that anybody who would try to get away with a disguise as hokey as yours can’t be very good at what he does. So unless you’ve got an actual reason to talk to me—which you don’t—and unless you’ve got some legitimate reason to follow me—which you don’t—and unless you show up with a subpoena or a writ or whatever the hell you police types call it when you force people to talk even when they don’t want to talk and they don’t have anything to say anyway—which you never will since you don’t have any of those other things to begin with and that means you could never get a subpoena or a writ or a whatever—”
“Are you done?”
I was, but only because I’d run out of air.
He didn’t bother to say good-bye.
Something told me it didn’t matter, since it wasn’t the last I was going to see of him.
I watched him walk away, and before he was out of sight, I followed. He was headed for the front gate, and I was anxious to get out of the place.
“Told you I was right.”
I didn’t jump and squeal when Madeline popped up beside me.
Not too much, anyway.
My sneer told her what I thought of her tactics. “You mean, I was right. He’s following Doctor Gerard. And Dan. He thinks I can tell him something about what they’re up to. He’s a cop.”
“He’s an FBI agent. And I was right.” Madeline didn’t have to worry about the slick patch of ice in the middle of the road. I walked around it. She floated right above. “You see what this means, don’t you?”
“It means—”
“It means the net is closing on Danny.”
“That’s what I was going to say.”
“Sure you were.” I’d never heard anybody agree about anything in a more condescending way. “It’s time to stop messing around, Pepper, and do something. Fast. You have to help Danny, or something really, really bad is going to happen to him.”
I could have said I didn’t care. I could have mentioned that whatever Dan had gotten himself into, he could get himself out of.
I could have brought up the not-so-small point that I still wasn’t convinced I wasn’t on a wild goose chase.
Except for the fact that the feds were onto Dan, and something told me they didn’t like to waste their time.
And then, of course, there was that little voice inside of me. The one that told me that if my appearance at the clinic had anything to do with Stella going under that train . . .
Well, if it did, that meant I owed her.
That’s why just an hour or so later—after I found a cab and headed to the other s
ide of town—I found myself at the Gerard Clinic again. This time, I wasn’t going to mess around. I was going to march in, demand to talk to Dan about each and every one of the people on that list Sister Maggie had given me, and get to the bottom of things once and for all.
And I would have done it, too, if I didn’t see something odd just inside the alley that Ernie called home sweet home.
Something square and flat caught the light of a nearby streetlamp and sparkled at me from the murky shadows. Something that looked like it was covered with glass.
I took the chance, stepped into the alley, and bent for a closer look.
“Alberta?” I picked up the framed photo of Ernie’s wife and automatically glanced around. Every other time I’d seen the picture, Ernie had been hanging on to it for dear life. I knew that once he realized the photo was missing, he’d panic, so I carefully picked my way through the garbage in the alley and headed for his box.
I knocked on the lid. “Ernie!”
“He ain’t there.”
The answer came from a doorway along with a man in a tattered jacket who was in the process of zipping his pants. “Ernie’s gone.”
“Gone? Where?”
“Lucky bastard. I hear he got himself accepted into that special study of Doctor Gerard’s.”
My heart thudded. “Are you . . .” I swallowed hard. Not easy considering that my mouth suddenly felt as dry as a sun-parched desert. “Are you sure?”
The man was pencil thin and hardly taller than the Dumpster he opened and began picking through. “Not sure, no,” he said. When he fished out all that was left of a brown and battered apple and took a bite, I turned away. “But he said he had an appointment. Last night. He said he was going to talk to Doctor Gerard because he finally knew how to get into the study for sure. And since then, well, nobody’s seen him. Hey!” When the man plucked at my sleeve, I turned back to him. “Since he ain’t using it, think I can move into Ernie’s box?”
“No.” I shook him off, tucked the photo of Alberta into Ernie’s box, and started for the clinic, my mind made up once and for all. “Ernie will be back,” I told the man, and myself. “No matter what it takes, Ernie will be back. Because I’m going to go in there right now and find out what the hell is really going on.”
I did, too. I went into the clinic, demanded an appointment, filled out the appropriate forms, and waited with the great unwashed.
And when the gray-haired receptionist finally called my name and told me Doctor Gerard would see me? Well, I have to admit, I was actually jazzed.
But then, I had no idea what I was getting myself into.
12
I dreamed about a ghost with bad taste in clothes, a box that was a house, and Dan in an orange jumpsuit. I think he was an FBI agent.
Oh yeah, and while it was on a roll, my drug-muddled subconscious tossed in a bit about a syringe as big as a banana. No surprise there.
The image was burned into my brain. So was the memory of Doctor Gerard leaning over me, grinning, as the needle pierced my skin. My head told me none of it was real, that it was all something I’d experienced hours (or was it days?) before. That didn’t keep the rest of me from reliving every terrifying moment. Or from feeling exactly like I had back there in Doctor Gerard’s office when that syringe penetrated my skin and the nasty, mind-numbing drug inside it coursed through my veins.
First, fire spread up and down my arm. Then it rushed into my chest and made my heart feel as if it were pumping lava. Every muscle in my body contracted. My head felt as if it was going to explode. My tongue swelled. My eyes flew open.
I’m pretty sure that was the point where I sat up and screamed.
It was also when I realized there was no one around to hear me.
I was alone in a nearly pitch-dark place, and with nothing else to go on, I relied on instinct and instinct alone. My instincts told me I wasn’t in my hotel room. It wasn’t my apartment, either, or any part of the Gerard Clinic I’d ever seen. For one confused minute, as I fought to make sense of my surroundings and couldn’t, panic washed over me. I hate to admit it, but for that one minute, I let it. Too tired to fight, too frightened to care, I gave in to the out-of-control sensations. My heartbeat raced and my breaths came in gasps and I curled up into a tight little ball on the mushy mattress where I found myself. I knew giving up and giving in like that was a sign of weakness, but honestly, I didn’t give a damn. I only knew that I felt like hell, I didn’t know where I was, and I was really, really scared.
Maybe I fell asleep. I can’t say. I only know that by the time I stopped crying and opened my eyes again, my head wasn’t pounding nearly as hard, and there were thin slices of gray morning sneaking in through the mini-blinds. In the anemic light, I saw that I was in a hospital room. There was a white, standard-issue dresser across from the bed where I lay in a snarl of sweat-clammy sheets. There was a metal chair to the left of the dresser. On the other side of it was a bigger, darker rectangle that I knew must be a doorway. The door was closed. Another door on the wall to my right was open, and from where I lay, I could see into a tiny bathroom.
None of it looked the least bit familiar.
“Not to worry.” The comforting words that scraped their way out of my parched throat didn’t do their job. When I untangled myself from the blankets, my hands shook, and when I swung my legs over the side of the bed, I knew I had to take my time. My knees were weak, my legs were shaking, but that didn’t stop me from standing. Or from collapsing right back on the bed.
“Not to worry,” I said again, because at that point, lying to myself sure beat facing the truth. “Snap out of it, Pepper. There’s nothing weird going on. There’s a logical explanation for all of this. Something went wrong when Doctor Gerard gave you that shot. Yeah, yeah, that’s what happened. Doctor Gerard called the paramedics. The way a nice, responsible, professional doctor would. They took you to a hospital. A nice, responsible, professional Chicago hospital. Like the one on ER.”
That made me feel better, and feeling better, I figured I’d ring for the nurse, find out what was going on, and hightail it out of there as fast as I could. I wasn’t made of money, and the health care benefits at Garden View left a lot to be desired. The sooner someone called a cab for me and I got back to my hotel, the happier I’d be.
Too bad I couldn’t find one of those nurse call buttons.
Or a phone, for that matter.
And though my purse was on the chair across from the bed, my cell phone wasn’t in it.
I grumbled my displeasure and decided on a more direct approach. I went to the door and turned the knob.
The door was locked.
This was not something I’d ever seen the nice, responsible, professional folks on ER do, but was I worried? Well, not too much. Just like there had to be a logical reason for me being in the hospital, there had to be a just-as-logical one for my door being locked. Maybe those nice paramedics who brought me there realized Doctor Gerard was acting weird. Maybe they locked the door to keep him away from me. Or maybe I had something contagious. I pushed up the sleeve of my peachy sweater and scratched my arm even though it didn’t itch. Determined to make sense of the whole thing, I found a light switch and flicked it on.
Light on, light off, it didn’t make a whole bunch of difference. The door was still locked, there still wasn’t a phone in sight, and damn, I still didn’t know where I was.
I grumbled my displeasure, considered my options, and chose the first one that came to mind. I cranked open the blinds.
I found myself looking over a sloping roofline and gingerbread woodwork where snow swirled and icicles hung from the gutters like dragon’s teeth. A couple stories down was a wide expanse of windswept land. The grass was frosty and the landscape was dotted with trees, their branches bare at this time of year and their limbs waving madly in the wind. Beyond that, the waters of what must have been Lake Michigan churned into white-caps and sent sprays of ice crystals into the air. There wasn’t another b
uilding in sight. Or another person, for that matter.
If this was Chicago, it was a rustic, desolate part of town that wasn’t on any tourist map.
“Yeah, a part of Chicago that doesn’t exist.”
My words were no more enthusiastic than my mood, and my mood went from merely terrible to truly awful, because the second I looked out the window I realized something else. I mean, something other than the fact that I wasn’t in Chicago anymore.
There were bars on the windows.
This, I told myself, could not be a good thing.
Night of the Loving Dead Page 15