Damnable

by Hank Schwaeble

  CHAPTER 6

  MANHATTAN EASTSIDE MEMORIAL MEDICAL CENTER stuck out among the green awnings and brick storefronts of First Avenue like some cylindrical 1960s apartment complex, its name in block lettering curving atop a rounded tower almost twenty stories high. Odd pairs of hopper light windows and soft-edged panels of glossy black composite siding adorned a semicircular façade that faced the street. The architecture looked like an aging glimpse into the future, one that was discovered years ago to have been just a wrong guess.

  The lobby was considerably cooler than the outside. Despite the vaguely medicinal smell, it reminded Hatcher of a bank, with hard, waxed floors and security guards near the door. He wondered what he was supposed to be feeling as he lingered, pacing in slow circles. Tried to decide what mix of emotions would be normal, thinking that whatever it was, it didn’t seem to be there. He scratched the crown of his head and drew an extended breath. Perhaps the feelings not being there meant he shouldn’t be, either.

  The last time he’d seen his father, he was eleven years old. He’d showed up for Hatcher’s birthday, bearing a football. A Wilson “Duke” model, displayed in a box with a top, bottom, and back but no front or sides, allowing him to grip the ball as it was handed to him. It was an awkward encounter. He hadn’t known how to respond, wondered whether his father’s presence was good or bad and remembered quickly having his doubts validated. Moments later, Hatcher’s mother threw a fit when she saw his father at the door, started screaming about child support. His father laughed, told her to take him to court, that he already had a lawyer and snorted something about her having some nerve even bringing that up. Then he told her with all the guys she was sleeping with, he assumed she was making good money, so he wasn’t sure what the big deal was. She called him a bastard, threw an object at him—Hatcher had always thought of it as a tumbler containing a sip of Coke and some melted ice, but it really could have been any number of things—and he left. He gave a tousle to Hatcher’s hair as he turned to go and told him not to use the ball in the street. It would wear out the laces.

  Hatcher’s final memory of him was his father stopping briefly, turning to look back after taking a few steps, and saying, “I don’t blame you, kiddo. I’m sorry I stopped being your father. I tried, but it’s just not who I am, and I can’t change that.”

  Then he was gone.

  More than twenty years had passed, and that same ambivalence he felt then, or something close to it, was giving him pause now. He hadn’t planned on ever seeing the man again and wasn’t sure he wanted to, seriously ill or not. His reasoning was simple. He didn’t hold anything against his father and wouldn’t mind keeping it that way.

  “Excuse me!”

  Hatcher turned around when he realized the words were directed at him. A big-bellied security guard with pinkish skin and a vascular nose was approaching.

  “Sir, can I help you?”

  Hatcher looked the man over. The I’m-in-charge-here tone sounded anything but helpful. “What do you mean?”

  “You’re just standing in the middle of the floor,” the guard said. He was built like a cannonball, round and solid, with bushy eyebrows. “Do you have business here?”

  “I haven’t decided yet.”

  “Sir, you can’t just loiter in the lobby.”

  Hatcher noted his tendency to emphasize the word sir. In the military, guys had a way of using it like an epithet, a bulletproof euphemism for asshole. Hatcher knew the connotation, since he’d used it that way plenty of times himself.

  “I’m here to visit someone.”

  The guard’s cherubic face was slack with contempt, his voice dripping with it. Hatcher told himself it wasn’t anything personal. The guy was just doing his job, probably a thankless one at that. A security guard at fifty, he was a good candidate for hating everything.

  “In that case,” the guard pointed and gave a nod. “The woman at the information desk can help you.”

  The woman eyed Hatcher as he approached. She was older, extremely overweight, and had orange hair stacked up in a nest on the top of her head. Orange hair, orange rouge, and what looked like dark orange crayon on her lips. She was wedged behind a crescent-shaped counter in the rear of the lobby. Hatcher asked her for directions to Phillip Hatcher’s room. She tapped on a keyboard, then peered over the flat rims of cat’s-eye reading glasses and told him he would need to check in with the unit nurse at the diabetes treatment center. The woman gave him a floor and dismissed him by pointing to a corridor containing a bank of elevators

  Hatcher managed only a few steps before his eyes suddenly fixed on Lucas Sherman. The big man was near the elevators, waiting for one of the doors to open, wearing different clothes than he had been earlier. He was carrying a bouquet of wildflowers, pressing the call button multiple times with his other hand. Hatcher veered to his left and kept walking, angling himself away from Sherman’s field of vision. Using the corner of a wall for concealment, Hatcher put a foot on a padded bench and bent as if to tie his shoelace. He watched as Sherman entered one of the elevators and disappeared.

  “Hey, sir, please keep your shoes off the furniture.”

  It was the security guard again, hands hooked in his thick belt.

  The guard watched him put his foot back on the floor, holding Hatcher’s eyes an extra beat before returning slowly to his position against the wall near the front of a small gift shop. Hatcher turned and started back toward the front desk. Halfway there he noticed Detective Wright and Lieutenant Maloney entering the lobby through one of the large glass doors facing the street. He pivoted and pretended to read a floor directory on the wall, shooting discreet glances over his shoulder. A few seconds later he saw the detectives enter the corridor toward the elevators. He flashed an innocent smile in the direction of the guard, who had been watching him the whole time, and curled back to the information desk.

  “Did you just see a man and a woman who came through here?” Hatcher asked. “Dressed in suits?”

  The woman pulled down her reading glasses, letting them hang by the chain around her neck and settle on her bosom. “Lots of people come through here, sir.”

  “I mean just now. The woman in the gray jacket and skirt, hair up in a ponytail?”

  “You’re talking about the two that just walked by,” she said, eyes narrowing in advance disapproval of whatever he was going to ask next. “Yes, I saw them.”

  Hatcher realized they likely didn’t need to request information, probably knew their way around the place. Besides, they didn’t seem to have stopped on the way to the elevators. He glanced back toward the corridor. There had to be a way to figure out where they were headed.

  “Is there something I can help you with?” she asked, glancing past him at an angle. Hatcher turned his head and followed her gaze. The security guard was at the end of it, his stare still fixed like a bird dog’s.

  “No. I mean, yes. There was a woman admitted here a few days ago. I was told no one’s been able to identify her yet.”

  “And?”

  “Can you tell me what room she’s in?”

  “I’m sorry, sir, I can’t give out that kind of information, I can only direct you to the appropriate nurse’s station.” She seemed to consider his question further, and let out a short phhhpf. “And without a name, I can’t even do that.”

  “Do you have any Jane Does listed?”

  “That’s not a patient designation we use. If you’d like, I can direct you to admitting. Perhaps they can help you.” She pulled her lips into an orange Crayola smile. “Or I can call for security and you can discuss the matter with them.”

  Hatcher locked his jaws, forcing a return smile, then lowered his head. He let himself think for several seconds. “How about this. Where would seriously injured trauma patients be treated? People who’d been hit by a car, for example?”

  She looked at him like he was an idiot. “The ER.”

  “After that.”

  “It depends on whether they neede
d surgery. ICU probably, over in Critical Care.”

  “How about after ICU? Where would they go then?”

  “That would depend on their injuries. We have almost seven hundred beds in this building alone.”

  Hatcher took in a breath, blew it out through his nose. This was going nowhere. “Did you see a big guy, bald, with a wraparound mustache come by right before I did? Maybe heard him mention who he was here to see?”

  “No. And I’m really not comfortable answering these questions.”

  Her eyes jumped over to the security guard again. Hatcher closed his and thought for a moment.

  “Which way to ICU?”

  She huffed out a sigh and told him. Hatcher listened to the directions and headed back to the elevators, picking up his pace for the last few yards as he saw one open and eject a pair of doctors. A woman entered the same cab just as the doors started to close, pressing one floor above his. She was a redhead, very attractive. Almost too attractive. Lips like strawberries, eyes the blue of a robin’s egg. In the tiny confines of the elevator, her scent was intoxicating. He caught himself staring at her breasts, mentally undressing her, imagining what her skin tasted like.

  The doors opened and he exited, partly wishing he could have stayed on. He’d been missing women even more than he realized. What do you expect? You just got out of prison.

  The nurse at the ICU station was much friendlier than the woman at the information desk, but not much more forthcoming. Yes, the woman from the auto accident had been there. Yes, she was transferred earlier out of ICU. No, she couldn’t tell him where the woman was now.

  “Why not?” Hatcher asked.

  “Because her record’s been flagged. They usually do that when they don’t want the press sneaking into the patient’s room.”

  “Why would the press want to talk to her?”

  The nurse shrugged. “You’d have to ask them.”

  “Look,” Hatcher said, resting his forearms on the counter. “I’m not a reporter.”

  The woman lifted her hands, then let them drop. “Sorry, I’m just not allowed. I can give you the number for patient information, if you like.”

  “All I want to know is where to send flowers.”

  He watched her eyes search his. She was a black woman, probably in her forties, and wore an expression that said she had seen and heard pretty much everything, but would play along anyway. “Just send them to General Recovery.”

  “But I don’t know her name.”

  Pursing her lips, she glanced down at some papers next to a keyboard and ran a finger down one of them. “You can mark them for Patient 097457.”

  Hatcher thanked her and left. It wasn’t much of a plan, he realized, but it was better than nothing. He took an elevator back to the lobby. He smiled at the security guard as he headed into the gift shop.

  The cheapest arrangement of flowers they had was twenty-five dollars. He had forty-two in his wallet. He bought them anyway.

  Bouquet in hand, he decided to start with the third floor. After a bit of wandering, he learned from an orderly that General Recovery comprised floors seven through nine. He took another elevator to the eighth floor and roamed until he found the nurse’s station.

  One woman was seated behind a computer in flower-print scrubs that looked like pajamas, another was clad in white, including hose and shoes, leaning over a counter at the other side of the station. Hatcher decided the nurse at the computer would be the one guarding the info. He bypassed her and approached the one in white. She was writing something on a clipboard. Her name tag read Lori Sanford, RN.

  “Hi. I’ve got some flowers for a patient, but I’m not sure if I have the right floor.”

  The woman gestured absently toward the other nurse. “Give her the name and she can tell you.”

  “All I have is the patient number: 097457.”

  She looked at him quizzically. “You don’t have a name?”

  “She was in an accident.” He held up the bouquet. “The guy who hit her wanted me to bring her some flowers.”

  She glanced over to the woman in scrubs. “Denise, could you look up 097457?”

  The woman at the keyboard punched in the number, hit a few more keys. “The records are flagged. Can’t give out the room number.”

  Hatcher nodded, saying nothing. He let the silence hang and expand, a void demanding to be filled. Questions weren’t the only way to get people to talk.

  The nurse in white eventually stepped over behind Denise and looked at the screen. “You can leave them with me,” she said a moment later. “I’ll be heading down on my break in about forty minutes and I can drop them off on the way.”

  Down, Hatcher thought. Thank you very much.

  “Thanks, Lori,” he said. He weighed his options. Leaving the flowers would mean walking around empty-handed. He decided that wouldn’t work. “I’m surprised she’s not on this floor. This is seven, right?”

  “No, you’re on eight.”

  “No wonder. How stupid of me. I’ll just bring them down there myself.”

  He thanked them both and took the elevator to seven.

  The nurse’s station on seven was almost identical to the one on eight, situated in the same place on the floor. It had the same design to it, a countered space cut out of the interior of the middle of the floor, accessible from parallel halls on each side, and what looked like the same notices on the walls. The main difference he noticed was this one had four nurses behind the counter, huddled together, discussing some matter of importance that seemed to be of too much interest to them to be anything but gossip. Hatcher walked past, eyes ahead. The plan was to act lost if challenged. Nobody challenged him, and he found himself strolling the corridor, glancing into rooms.

  He slowed as he saw the woman from the elevator, the stunning redhead. She was wearing a white lab coat, heading his way. She offered a tight-lipped smile before she passed, and he caught her scent again. He closed his eyes, savoring it, then stopped, looking back over his shoulder.

  She was wearing high heels and back-seamed hose. Hatcher watched her click away, something about her making him uneasy. Uneasy and aroused, simultaneously. She cut to her right and pushed the door open to a bathroom. He continued walking.

  At the far end, an exit stairwell with an emergency push bar loomed, and the hall took a sharp turn. Detective Wright was in the first room after he rounded the corner. She was standing next to a bed, visible through a framework of metal traction railing, nodding. A man in a white coat with a stethoscope around his neck was next to her, gesturing toward the bed as he spoke. The patient was obscured by the narrow angle of his shifting line of sight. Hatcher’s view panned as he passed, allowing him to see Lieutenant Maloney at the foot of the bed, staring contemplatively at its occupant.

  Hatcher kept walking. The door to the next room was closed, but the room after that seemed empty. The next corner was only a dozen or so yards away, and he stopped after he rounded it and leaned against the wall on the other side. His plan suddenly seemed pointless. What was he trying to accomplish? To see the woman? Talk to her? Find out what Wright was lying about? See if that Sherman lowlife had some connection to all this? All of the above? He wasn’t exactly sure. There was something about the woman that Wright didn’t want him to know, of that much he was certain. But whatever it was, skulking around the halls of the hospital wasn’t going to help him find out.

  A bit further up the hall, halfway between him and the nurse’s station that bisected the floor, a woman in a white coat wheeled a hospital gurney to a stop. She parked it next to the wall and engaged a wheel brake. Hatcher was worried she was going to call him out, ask him what he was doing just standing there, but she didn’t say anything, barely glancing his way. His gaze fastened onto her as she turned and headed in the opposite direction, a brunette with straight, shoulder-length hair and long legs. She was like the redhead, a centerfold-quality bombshell. He watched her do the runway walk up the hall in a pair of bright red heels an
d no hose, feeling both stirred and wary. Either the medical profession had taken to hiring swimsuit models, or things in the civilian world were a heck of a lot different than he remembered.

  Voices echoed down the hall from behind him. Hatcher stuck his head back and peeked. Wright, Maloney, and the doctor were outside the room now, acting like they were about to part company. They milled around near the doorway for several seconds, Wright handing the doctor her card, mumbling something about vital information. The doctor promised to call as soon as the patient was up to speaking. Hatcher heard him say something about the effects of trauma and shock.

  “Excuse me.”

  Hatcher spun at the sound of a voice close by. A nurse in scrubs was standing near the gurney, a clipboard tucked under her arm, pinching the patient’s wrist. She was Asian, rather short and a bit plump in the hips. Hatcher realized she couldn’t have walked from the station that quickly, so she must have come from one of the closer patient rooms. She was looking directly at him, wearing the same expression he’d been worried about getting from the brunette.

  “Have you checked in?” she asked. “Are you visiting someone?”

  “More like waiting for someone,” Hatcher said, holding up the flowers. “The visit’s supposed to be a surprise.”

  “Well, I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to—” She stopped and looked down at the man on the gurney, moving her hand to his throat. “Oh my God. Did you see how this patient got here?”

  “A woman wheeled him up a couple of minute ago.”

  There was a jumpiness in her eyes, a glint of urgency. “A doctor? A nurse?”

  “I have no idea. She was wearing a hospital coat. Dark hair, on the tall side.”

  The woman studied the man on the gurney for another moment before double-timing it back up the hall.

  Hatcher glanced around the corner again. Wright, Maloney, and the doctor were gone. The nurse would be coming back, so this might be his only chance. He was about to step toward the room when the door next to it opened and Lucas Sherman emerged, leering cautiously in the direction where Wright and the others had been standing. Hatcher pulled his head back behind the edge of the wall as Lucas shot a glance in his direction. He waited for a count of five, then eased his eyes around again. A glimpse of Lucas’s back, then the man disappeared into the room where Detective Wright and the others had been. The door shut slowly behind him.