Dansk leaned forward against the steering-wheel. You tell a lie or two and they bring a little happiness. Where’s the harm?
Amanda. It was the first name that had sprung to mind. He wondered about that, then decided it was on account of how much she occupied his thoughts, the way she eclipsed all other business. In one bizarre sense, he was more intimate with her than he’d ever been with any other woman in his entire life. He looked at the back of his hand, seeing the red mark left by the knife she’d used against him. Pathetic.
So somebody’s got it in for you personally. Dansk, say.
Until a few days ago I didn’t even know he existed, Willie. I’d be inclined to dismiss anything personal.
Personal, yeah. It hadn’t started out that way, but somewhere along the line it had changed.
Dansk opened the paper sack, dipped a hand inside and gripped the Ruger. It had a lovely gravity. It seemed to emit a low humming sound, like a machine plugged into a power source. He took the gun out, passed it from one hand to the other, over and over. This killing device. This snuffer of human candles. He imagined saying, Open your mouth a little, part your lips just enough for me to slide the gun inside your mouth, Amanda. Let me bring an end to your troubles. The gun is foreplay. The rest is darkness.
He shut the sack. She was nearby and he knew it, he could sense it. He was tuned into her frequency. She was a clear image on his radar screen.
The wedge of pain had shifted to the front of his brain, and when he looked at the hospital it seemed to him that the edifice was disintegrating, like an ice-cream concoction melting in the heat.
A pigeon flew from the roof, flapping into the sun. Dansk watched it climb. He tightened his hold on the Ruger and imagined shooting the bird out of the sky. This was an unsettling junction where past and present intersected, and for a moment he seemed to hover outside himself, looking down and seeing a red-haired man sitting in a car with a gun in his lap and a freckled kid in the back seat clutching an air rifle. Both had murderous expressions.
52
She parked at the back of the hospital in one of the slots reserved for physicians and, wearing her cracked sunglasses, walked quickly between a fleet of ambulances. She went inside the building through double doors marked DELIVERIES, expecting to be challenged by hospital security guards. Nobody appeared.
She found herself in a wide corridor leading to the laundry. She passed a glass-panelled door, behind which she saw industrial washing-machines, enormous dryers rumbling, people in white smocks ironing and folding bed sheets. She took off the glasses when she reached the service elevator and punched the button for the third floor, where she emerged into a warren of corridors stretching into great pastel infinities. She took a left turn. Two security officers in chocolate-brown uniforms were talking together. They gazed at her, a moment of professional assessment, then turned away. She’d passed their scrutiny. A woman in a dark business suit, not worth challenging.
The door of room 360 was open.
He was propped up against pillows. His face was pale and swollen, his plastered arm in a white sling. His eyes were lacklustre. She drew up a chair to the side of the bed and Rhees managed a smile.
‘How are we?’ she asked.
‘Prodigious amounts of Percodan in my bloodstream,’ he said. ‘I feel like a passenger on a slow-moving train crossing Kansas.’
She held his good hand between her own. Her and Rhees and nothing else. If only that small world could be restored. She watched him tilt his head back against the pillows. She wanted to protect him, make him safe. She wished she had the magic to turn back clocks.
He cleared his throat and said, ‘Coughing’s the real killer.’
The real killer, she thought. She looked at the window, seeing the frazzled morning gathering the kind of momentum that would lead to 100 degrees and change, mercury exploding in glass tubes.
She said, ‘I don’t think they were burglars who came to the house, John. Dansk sent them.’
He looked at her for a time. ‘He gets to you through me. Is that the idea?’
She looked round the room, the walls the colour of mango flesh, the wheelchair in the corner. ‘I’m sorry for this, all this.’
‘What’s the point? I don’t think you can help yourself. You’re programmed to run in a certain direction, Amanda. It just happened that this time you ran into a bad place.’
‘I might have disconnected the program,’ she said. ‘Ripped out the logic board. Anything.’
‘You might have, but you didn’t, and I didn’t do enough to stop you.’
‘I look at you and I feel like shit,’ she said.
He closed his eyes and turned his face slightly away from her.
She said, ‘Dansk got Isabel’s letter from me.’
‘How?’
‘I was distracted. The point is he got it, he read it, and I think he knows you read it too. I don’t know what conclusion he imagines I’ve reached.’
‘Have you reached one?’
‘I wish I could say yes. Willie’s helping now.’
‘You finally enlisted him? That’s a step forward.’
‘One I might have taken sooner,’ she said.
Rhees flexed the fingers of his undamaged hand. ‘How safe are we in this place?’
She looked through the door towards the corridor. People passed carrying flowers, bags of fruit, paperback books, magazines. People visiting the sick. She wondered about them and their credentials, whether at least one of them had a hidden purpose. She walked to the window and gazed down at the parking-lot. The roofs of cars were like tinted mirrors. Tension was rising inside her.
She was aware of Rhees watching her. ‘Well?’
‘I don’t think we’re safe, John.’
‘Where is Drumm right now?’
‘He said he’d call me here.’ She looked at her watch. Ten-thirty. She had no idea when Willie would contact her. He’d talked about going to see Dansk, an idea that seemed to her suddenly loaded with menace.
Rhees said, ‘You know what would be nice? A little protection. A cop posted outside the room. Somebody handy with a gun.’
A man appeared in the doorway. He was dressed in an open-neck shirt and held a plastic-wrapped bouquet of mixed flowers to his chest. He wore tinted glasses and his beard was neatly trimmed.
Jangled, Amanda rose immediately from her chair.
‘This three zero six?’ the man asked.
Amanda stared at the bouquet. Bright petals, green stems slick with water. They seemed fake, pressed out of synthetic materials. Anything could be hidden in those flowers. Plastic crackled against the guy’s shirt and Amanda thought of explosives detonating miles away, like something you’d hear in the background of a TV broadcast from Bosnia or Sarajevo or wherever the world was at war.
‘Three six zero,’ Amanda said. This is what your condition comes right down to: a place where guns might be hidden in flowers and you hear bombs in the crackle of plastic.
‘I guess I got the wrong room,’ the guy said, and drifted back into the corridor.
Rhees was staring at the empty doorway. ‘Last time I saw that guy he was selling magazine subscriptions on our doorstep. I signed up for Sports Illustrated.’
‘That’s the same guy? You’re sure?’
‘No question. We chatted a few minutes. It was raining and I felt sorry for him. It’s no coincidence he’s here, is it?’
‘Dansk wants us to know how exposed we are,’ she said.
‘I guess that answers my question about safety. Call Drumm, Amanda. Do it now. Get him to come here.’
She lifted the handset from the bedside table. She punched Drumm’s number. A woman answered and introduced herself as Sergeant Betty Friedman.
Amanda asked, ‘Is Willie available?’
‘He’s out of the office,’ the sergeant said.
‘If he calls in, get him to phone me at the Valley of the Sun Memorial Hospital immediately. My name’s Amanda Scholes.’
>
‘Amanda Scholes?’
‘Scholes. You want me to spell it?’
Betty Friedman said, ‘No, I’m pretty familiar with your name. It’s funny though, because I saw Willie about twenty minutes ago and he was rushing out, and when I asked him where he was buzzing in such a heart-attack hurry, he said he’d received a message to meet you.’
‘A message to meet me?’
‘What he said.’
‘I don’t know anything about any meeting. Did he say where it’s supposed to be?’ Something caught and fluttered in her throat.
‘He just boogied out the door. I guess maybe some wires got crossed along the way if he isn’t with you.’
‘Do you know where the message came from?’
‘He never said. I’ll see if I can find out. You want to hold?’
Amanda said, ‘Sure.’ A message, she thought. A message she’d never sent. She stared at the open door. People still passed back and forth along the corridor, a shuffling procession, funereal in its lack of energy.
Sergeant Friedman came back on the line. ‘Nobody seems to know who received the message, Miss Scholes. Could be the officer has gone off-duty.’
‘Can you contact Willie?’
‘If he’s not in his car, it’s a problem. He carries a cellular, but he keeps it switched off when he feels like it. He says a man needs some private space, time to think.’
‘The number here is nine four nine seventy seventy, extension three eight nine eight,’ Amanda said. ‘I need to talk with him – badly.’
‘I’ll get back to you.’
Amanda put down the receiver.
Rhees said, ‘Problem?’
‘Somebody left a message for Drumm to meet me.’
‘We don’t need three guesses, do we?’ Rhees said. ‘Dansk can predict your future. He knows you’ll call on Drumm for help, so he lures Willie away with a story.’
She thought of Dansk trespassing in her head, forecasting her moves. He’d sent a message luring Willie away. Something about this bothered her. Luring Willie away. Before she could think it through any further, the telephone rang. She picked it up and heard Betty Friedman’s voice.
‘Sorry, I can’t raise Willie,’ she said.
‘Please keep trying, it’s important.’
Amanda hung up. This wasn’t going to do it. Waiting here balanced on a piano-wire, waiting for Drumm. She couldn’t just linger until some totalitarian head nurse told her visiting hours were over and ejected her, and she couldn’t go, leaving John on his own. She’d left him once before and she wasn’t abandoning him again. Ever.
‘Who else can you call?’ he asked. ‘What about Drumm’s boss. What’s his name?’
‘Kelloway’s a hard-ass who doesn’t like me.’
‘The Irishman then. Maybe he could help in some way.’
‘I don’t see Concannon walking into a situation without knowing how the odds are stacked. What am I supposed to tell him? We need your help but it might be dangerous?’
‘So we’re in a box and it’s just you and me,’ Rhees said, ‘and either we stay inside it or we try to get out.’
Amanda thought, This is no longer a hospital, but another kind of institution altogether, one of danger and high risk where a surgical mask might conceal a killer’s face, a rubber glove a murderer’s hand. She searched her mind for a small pocket of clarity. She thought of the parking-lot at the back, getting John to the car, getting him away without being seen. She thought of waiting here in the hospital for Drumm to call. Inside outside, a bind.
‘I’ll get you out of here safely, John. I swear.’
‘Then what? The house is out of the question. The drive to the cabin in my present state would be gruelling, and we can’t go to your father’s, because I don’t see any reason to drag him into all this.’
Her father. She hadn’t had time to think of him. She owed him a phone call, but this wasn’t the moment. ‘Then we drive downtown. The mountain goes to Muhammad.’
Rhees said, ‘I hear the click of the little steel ball in the roulette wheel.’
‘What you’re really hearing is my heartbeat,’ she answered.
53
She pushed the wheelchair close to the bed. ‘We’ll do this as quickly as we can. First the shirt.’
She slipped the hospital gown from Rhees’s upper body and looked at his strapped ribcage. She draped the clean shirt she’d brought loosely around his shoulders. ‘I need your legs next.’
Rhees groaned when he swung his legs in stilted fashion towards the edge of the bed. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he said.
She bent, drew the jeans over his bare feet and rolled them halfway up his legs. His bloated knee looked raw and awful. ‘I’ve got to get you into the wheelchair, so I need you to stand up. I know it hurts. Grab my shoulder with your right hand.’
He reached out and moaned. His fingernails dug into the flesh around her shoulder. He was halfway up, his body bent forward awkwardly.
‘I’m tottering, Amanda. The knee’s fucked.’
‘You can’t afford to totter. Come on.’
He was upright now, all his weight on his good leg. She eased him into the wheelchair. She drew his jeans to his waist and buttoned them quickly and slipped his bare feet inside his canvas espadrilles.
She wheeled him to the door where she looked for the guy with the flowers, but didn’t see him, which didn’t mean he wasn’t around somewhere, lingering, watching, waiting. Her whole life was a book lying open and somebody with the power of life and death was reading the pages.
Rhees had his upper body angled forward. His breathing was shallow. She tried to remember the way back to the service elevator. Her memory skipped a beat. Blank. She took a chance, turned right, then glanced back the way she’d come. An overweight woman in a baggy hospital gown stood propped up by a walking-stick, a kid with a bandaged head bounced a rubber ball on the floor, an old guy in a walker was being helped along by an elderly woman who had one leg in a metal brace. It was like the Lourdes Express had just disgorged its passengers.
She rolled Rhees through a door and faced another corridor. She recognized the colour scheme ahead: sky-blue and lemon. Quick, quick as you can. The service elevator was about 20 yards away. An orderly was waiting outside the door. The elevator arrived, the orderly held the door open for them and Amanda pushed the wheelchair inside.
The orderly looked at Rhees and said, ‘He OK?’
‘He’s fine,’ Amanda said.
The elevator started to descend with a cranking sound and a shudder. Rhees had his eyes shut. ‘Looks like he needs rest,’ the orderly said.
‘I want to get him out of here.’
‘Yeah, this hospital experience can really be a major bummer.’ He was skinny and whitefaced and had the look of a guy who spent all his leisure time travelling the deepest arteries of the Internet until his eyes popped.
‘Say, you taking this guy out without authority? This some kind of escape from the Gulag?’
‘In a sense,’ Amanda said.
‘Cool. Anarchy.’
Amanda had the slight suspicion that this orderly had been dabbling inside the pharmacy, maybe a little speed to propel him through the day.
‘I wonder if you’d do me a favour,’ she said. ‘My car’s parked out back. Would you get it for me? Reverse it right up to the back doors, so I don’t have to push this wheelchair all the way across the lot?’
‘You’re asking me to assist you in an unauthorized escape?’
‘I guess I am.’
The orderly said, ‘Sometimes I kinda imagine this whole place is a penal colony floating in outer space, you know? Like the patients are really prisoners of some oppressive regime that injects them with experimental drugs? And I’m on this secret mission to scope out the truth.’
‘Outer space, huh,’ Amanda said. Boy, you really know how to pick them. ‘Maybe you can pretend my car’s some kind of mini space shuttle.’
‘Yeah, I could get i
nto that.’ The elevator stopped, the door opened. ‘Just gimme the keys and point the way.’
‘It’s a yellow Ford parked near the ambulances.’
She pushed Rhees in the direction of the sign marked LAUNDRY. The laundry door was open and steam floated out and fogged the air. The exit was just ahead.
‘Back the car as close as you can possibly get,’ she said.
‘Gotcha.’
She looked in the direction of the Ford, 30 yards away. She scanned the parking-lot and saw a crew of guys washing ambulances. Pressurized water whizzed from black hoses, smacked against the panels and gathered in glittering oily puddles. BMWs and Jags were parked in the physicians’ slots. No sign of the bearded guy with the flowers, and yet everything was charged and tense, as if somewhere nearby, perhaps inside a trash can, perhaps stashed under the chassis of an ambulance, there was Semtex attached to a ticking clock muffled in old newspapers, or someone hidden in the shadows with a gun.
The orderly walked to the Ford, got in and backed up at speed, docking the shuttle.
He squeezed the car all the way inside between the open doors, a narrow margin. He got out and surveyed the distance separating car and door-frame, a matter of maybe a foot on either side.
‘That close enough for you?’ he asked.
‘Terrific,’ she said.
‘Lemme help you get your friend in.’ He opened the passenger door. There was just enough room for Rhees to slide in, but it was a difficult manoeuvre, even with the orderly’s assistance. They raised Rhees out of the wheelchair, but when he had to bend to get into the passenger seat, he gasped.
Silencer Page 22