by G. M. Ford
The scrape of a shoe provided the answer. I got halfway turned around when the back of my head exploded, sending me staggering forward, my vision nothing more than a flickering collection of silver spheres. I reached for the back of my head and fought for balance in the flicker before the second blow dropped me to my knees. Last thing I remember seeing was Blondie running up the alley in my direction, right before another blow from behind put my lights out altogether, and I found myself French-kissing the concrete.
I’d like to tell you about my dreams—you know, falling forever into the obsidian abyss, huge gothic houses with no doors, Dracula eating my liver for lunch with some nice fava beans, that sort of thing—but truth is, I didn’t have any dreams. Next thing I remember was something cold trickling down my throat. I remember gagging on it. And then becoming aware that I was sucking cold water through a straw, and how I could barely work up enough suction to pull it down my throat. The top of my head nearly blew off when I dropped my eyes toward my chest to see what was wrong. Somebody moaned out loud. Me, I think. I forced my eyes to focus. Took three tries. A hand holding the cup up by my mouth. Straw. Red-and-white stripes. Little wrinkles. One of those bendable straws that either meant I’d been demoted back to grammar school or I was in the hospital. My body was leaving no doubt the answer was door number two. Felt as if I were lying on a bed of nails. As if every square inch of me had a separate pain. Worst part was my chest. Felt like you could char a steak on it. Another moan. And then it was back to the bottom of the ocean.
Little face. Big glasses. Saying my name. Over and over. Holding a blue plastic cup up by my lips. “Mr. Waterman. Mr. Waterman.” I tried to lift my arm, guide the straw into my mouth. No go. Couldn’t get my hand up off the sheet.
Tried to move my legs. The pain tore a howl from my throat. Also, no go. My legs felt as if they were encased in concrete. For about ten seconds, I was sure I was a paraplegic. The thought of being paralyzed flooded me with a level of grief I’d never experienced before. When I began to sob, the unknown hand pulled the cup away from my face. As I moved my eyes toward the side of the bed, it felt like somebody was pounding nails into my skull.
My hand was tied to the bed rail with a thick piece of surgical gauze. A jungle of tubes and wires sprouted from the back of my hand like plastic swamp grass. I wiggled my index finger. I nearly smiled but thought better of it. Very slowly, I shifted my eyes in the opposite direction. Same thing over there. Except there was a silver tree. Took me a while to figure out that the low-hanging fruit were IV bags. I watched the mystery hand take a syringe and inject something into a valve in one of the bags. My vision began shrinking to a pinpoint, like the end of an old black-and-white movie. Roll the credits. Goodnight, Irene.
“Leo. Leo.” I knew the voice.
I tried to bench-press my eyelids open. Hurt like holy hell, so I backed off and went for the incremental approach to lid lifting. A couple of minutes and I managed to get my left eye open far enough make out Rebecca standing at the foot of the bed.
I tried to force a greeting but couldn’t push the razor blades out of my throat.
“No . . . no . . . don’t,” she whispered, putting her hand on my forearm.
A nod in her direction nearly knocked me unconscious. I waited for my vision to stop doing that strobe-light thing and tried to say something again, with the same blindingly painful result.
When I opened my eyes again, Rebecca had moved up to my side, and tears were running down her face. I tried to reach out to her, but my medical manacles wouldn’t let me. “Stay still, Leo,” she sniffled. “Please stay still.”
I groaned in frustration. She put her hand on my forehead. I asked her with my eyes if I was going to die. She shook her head.
“It’s bad this time, Leo. You’ve got two semicompressed skull fractures. Six broken ribs. A lacerated kidney. A substantial chunk of your fifth lumbar vertebra is broken off completely. You’re having spine surgery tomorrow to fix that . . .” She shrugged. “As best as they’re able. They’re not promising anything.” She paused as if gathering herself and took a couple of breaths. I didn’t like that at all. When somebody who looks at dead bodies every day pauses before she gets to the bad part, you know it’s pretty much guaranteed to be the shits.
She looked over at the window. I followed her gaze and waited for her to spit it out. It was dark. I was in Swedish Hospital, looking out over the First Hill. I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen her this upset before. I must have made some sort of sound. She looked over at me. Her lower lip was quivering. She looked away again. “They ran over your legs,” she blurted.
I heard her suck in some air. “And, Leo . . . those sons of bitches . . . they carved something into your chest.” She sounded as if she were welded inside a fifty-five-gallon drum somewhere in central Illinois, all tinny and far away. My pulse pounded my skull like artillery fire as I looked down the length of myself. I was a friggin’ pup tent. I looked up at her. She read the question in my eyes.
“I haven’t seen it, but I’m told it looks like arrows.”
That was the last thing I recall before I started pushing the blue button.
Turned out, that wasn’t the worst news either. That came a few days later in the form of a middle-aged ER surgeon named Dr. Hyman Morse, who stopped by my room right after the day nurses had finished getting me spiffed up, a routine that consisted of cleaning up any unauthorized leaks I may have sprung since their last visit and making sure my IV bags were working. The little blue button they’d hooked me up with to push whenever my pain got too intense didn’t do a heck of a lot for my IQ. I kept thinking of things I wanted to ask, but before I could put a sentence together, whoever I wanted to ask had left the room. But it kept the fire at bay, so I was good with it.
Dr. Morse gave me a quick wave as he slipped into the room and introduced himself. He was a medium-size guy with a fluorescent-light pallor, wearing a fresh pair of the green scrubs, hat and all. If his wooly caterpillar eyebrows and forearms were any indication, Dr. Hyman Morse was, quite possibly, completely haired over in the manner of a gibbon. He walked to my side.
“I hear you’re making noises,” he said.
“A few,” I croaked.
“Consider yourself lucky.”
I took his word for it.
“How long?” I asked.
He seemed astonished by the question. “How long what?”
“Here,” I coughed up.
“How long are you going to be here? In the hospital?”
“Yeah.”
He thought about it. “Six . . . seven weeks, I’d guess.”
“Noooooo.”
He grabbed my chart from the foot of the bed. Put on a pair of half glasses and gave it a full AMA gander.
“Looks like you’ve got three more surgeries scheduled.” He offered a palm to the ceiling. “Just the pre- and post-op will keep you here that long,” he said. “Presuming there’s no complications of course.” Neither his tone nor his facial expression suggested he held out much hope for perfection.
“My legs,” I rasped.
He whistled and made a face. “Whoever did this to you was trying to cripple you, Mr. Waterman. Permanently. No doubt about it,” he added. “If you weren’t such a big galoot, with bones the size of a triceratops, they’d have managed it too.”
“But?”
“But . . . miraculously, they didn’t break anything when they ran over your legs. Partly because of your unusual bone mass and partly because I think they were going fairly fast when they ran you over.”
I swallowed a couple of times. Got my throat loosened up. I managed to dredge up enough spit to say, “On my feet again?”
Okay . . . it wasn’t really a question, but he got the idea. I could tell from his frown that, like most doctors, he wasn’t anxious to speculate.
“How long?” I asked again.
He decided to humor me. “Six months maybe. Something like that. Maybe a little longer. Assuming everyth
ing conforms to protocol and the creeks don’t rise.”
He rubbed his hands together. “So . . . I’m glad to see how you’re coming along,” he segued. “I had my doubts there for a while.”
“Me too.”
“There’s a cast of thousands waiting to see you,” he said. “Dr. Duvall. A guy I’ve seen a bunch of times before, so he’s probably a cop. Another fellow in a wheelchair . . . and a”—he made a motion with his hand—“you know, the dreadlocks.”
I couldn’t work up sufficient moisture to spit out Rastafarian, so I settled for, “Charity . . . wheelchair’s caregiver.”
He gave me a two-fingered salute and a wink. “I was you . . . I’d stay out of alleys for a while.”
He pulled open the door and disappeared into the hall.
Turned out Dr. Hyman Morse was an optimist. Ten weeks after they’d brought me in, I was still on the premises. And the bottom half of me was still totally immobile. My legs looked like giant purple eggplants, but the swelling had abated considerably. My torso was Velcroed into some sort of plastic body cast, so I still hadn’t seen what my chest looked like, and where they’d fixed my back felt as if somebody’d driven a railroad spike into my spine. But I could sit up as long as somebody put me there, and I could use my arms and hands—which, all things considered, was progress, or so everybody told me anyway. As for me, I’ll admit I had my doubts about coming all the way back from this one. Two and a half months of being manhandled by nurses and orderlies had made a serious dent in my rugged Northwest individualism.
Hospitals thrive on routine. Mostly, the same things happen at the same times every day, so when three nurses showed up an hour and a half early and changed my dressings, unhooked me from all the electronic monitors, and then got two orderlies to help strap me to a gurney, I knew for sure something was up.
Five minutes later, Rebecca came into my room, trailed by Joey Ortega and a pair of his urban gorillas. They had scrubs on, but I knew the smaller one from when I occasionally went to Joey’s place. He was always holding down the elevator that went directly up to Joey’s office. His name was Marty something. The other guy needed a bigger pair of scrubs. He looked like a sausage packed into a giant blue casing.
Joey and I were childhood friends. His father, Frankie, had been my father’s chief leg breaker and bagman for twenty years. Joey and I had spent endless hours playing together in the backyard while Frankie and my old man were inside working out new ways to feather their nests at the taxpayers’ expense. We’d double-dated as teenagers. Played on the same Legion baseball team. All that kind of stuff. Unlike me, however, Joey had followed his father into the business. Chip off the ol’ block and all of that rot.
In the years since his father had passed away, Joey had parlayed three strip joints and a couple of sleazy massage parlors into a quasi-legal entertainment empire stretching from Tacoma in the south to Bellingham in the north. You wanted a rub and a tug, some of the forty bucks ended up in Joey’s pocket. Feeling frisky, lookin’ for a little poke in the whiskers . . . more money in Joey’s pocket. Wanna gamble? He was a silent partner in a dozen card rooms. Yeah . . . if you were lookin’ for a little something you couldn’t get at home, Joey was your man. All of it under the banner of Entertainment Associates. Truth in advertising at its finest.
Rebecca gave me a quick kiss on the forehead and then used her toe to unlock the wheels of my IV tree. Joey had always made Rebecca nervous. Whenever he was around, she generally made it a point not to be, which I could understand. She was a county employee and an officer of the court, and Joey wasn’t exactly somebody you’d want found on your speed dial in the event of your demise. Seeing them together was a bit like seeing Nancy Reagan and Charles Manson having tea together in the Rose Garden. I wondered why the sudden spate of détente.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“Takin’ a little trip,” Joey said from behind me.
“Where to?” I tried.
“You ready?” Rebecca asked.
Marty and his buddy each took one end of the gurney. Joey took charge of the IV stand. Rebecca got the door. They wheeled me down the hall to the elevators, all the way down to the parking garage, where an unmarked ambulance was waiting. The Bruise Brothers opened the back of the van, hoisted me up, rolled me inside feetfirst, and tied me down. The minute I saw the back of the driver’s head, I was sure of two things: First, I knew who it was. Second, it meant, somehow or other, things had gotten serious. I opened my mouth right as Joey climbed into the ambulance with me. He folded one of the jump seats down and took a load off.
He’d gained a little weight since the last time I’d seen him but still had a full head of slicked-back hair so thick you couldn’t have pulled a hay rake through it.
“How ya doin’, big fella?” he asked.
“Middlin’,” I said.
“So I hear.” He leaned in close. “You got any idea who the assholes were?”
“Never seen either of them before.”
“You musta really got under somebody’s skin . . . which as we both know—”
“Yeah . . . I do have a knack for it,” I interrupted. “But I’m telling you, not this time . . . Okay, I’m following somebody, and they make me. So what? That’s grounds for beating the shit out of me and leaving me for dead in an alley?”
“Not unless they got something else entirely goin’ on.”
He made a face that looked like I’d run a turd under his nose. “I broke all precedent and had a word with your cop friend Eagen,” he said. “The plates from the Rover came off a half-ton pickup from Yakima. A car that according to DMV records was scrapped late last year.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I figured if Eagen had come up with anything useful, he’d have let me know by now.”
“Cops found the Range Rover. Up by Paine Field someplace. Stolen from down in Burien. Wiped clean.”
“I got sloppy,” I said. “Early onset arrogance,” I joked.
“Happens. But that don’t give anybody call to be running over a guy’s legs.”
I told him everything I knew, about Matthew and Art and Martha, and her telling me that people were following her, and how I’d assumed it was the antigun crowd and nothing to worry about. About the funeral. About all of it.
Joey frowned. “You talkin’ about the kid who aced that commie city councilman up north?”
“That’s the one,” I said.
Behind him, the ambulance rocked. A second later Gabe Funicello walked around the back bumper. I craned my neck.
“Can’t leave your big ass alone for a minute, can I?” Gabe said with a grin.
Gabe and I had managed to keep one another from being killed back when Rebecca got suspended from her job. In the process, we’d formed a bond I’m not sure I have the words to describe. Gabe was what the medical community calls genetically ambiguous, meaning that no matter how one parsed the X and Y chromosomes, there was no definitive answer as to Gabe’s gender. But, you know, when somebody saves your ass a couple of times, exactly what they’ve got for plumbing parts ceases to matter much. What I was sure of was that if I had to face the hordes from hell, there’s nobody I’d rather have at my back than Gabriella Funicello. Nobody.
Joey patted my arm and climbed out of the ambulance. Gabe climbed back in the driver’s seat.
I twisted Joey’s way. “So what’s all the cloak-and-dagger stuff?” I asked.
Joey shrugged. “Your house,” he said. “People came over the wall. Couple of days after they found you. Set off the security system both times.”
“Slow learners,” Gabe said from the front seat.
Joey leaned toward me. “Your girlfriend was the security company’s emergency number. They couldn’t get hold of you, so they called her. She called Gabe.” Joey made his dubious face. “You climb over an eight-foot stone wall, with all those signs and the gate and lights and the fucking motion sensors, you either got a real good reason, or you ain’t the brightest bulb in the box.”
“Burglars?” I tried.
Joey shook his head and made his don’t be stupid face. “Girlie’s got the pictures on her computer. See what you think. Second-story men don’t generally show up with assault rifles.”
“No shit.”
“Only thing I can figure is they were looking for you and got scared off when the security lights lit the place up.” He shook his mane in disbelief. “Fucking twice,” he said. “Don’t make no sense.”
Gabe piped up again. “And the second time it don’t look like the same two bozos neither. Only thing the same are the heaters. Full autos.”
“You know . . . if you was up and around,” Joey began, “I’d figure you could take care of yourself, but what with you being down for a bit, and since we’re more or less running blind here . . . might be best if you got back on your feet someplace else.”
I was still pushing that one around my circuits when Rebecca climbed up and strapped herself into the jump seat on my right. Her face was tight. The muscles along her jawline rippled like snakes.
“You’re officially signed out,” she announced.
“You’re my doctor now?”
“One of the perks of a medical degree,” she said with a thin smile.
“Does that mean I’m dead?”
“Probably soon,” she answered, without a hint of levity.
“And nobody’s gonna tell me where we’re going?”
“You know what the Hells Angels say?” Joey said from behind me.
I didn’t figure he needed a prompt, so I kept my mouth shut.
“Three people can keep a secret, as long as two of ’em are dead,” he finished.
We were on the freeway heading south. Rebecca had rolled the top half of the gurney up and stuffed a couple of pillows behind me so I could see between the two front seats, and was sitting next to me monkeying around with her laptop. I had my hand resting on her knee. She was pretending it wasn’t there.