THE JACK REACHER FILES: VELOCITY (with bonus thriller CROSSCUT)

by Jude Hardin

  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 mess 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 blue 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.”

  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 1998 Camry was in the visitor’s lot where he’d parked it yesterday. Having signed 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 from a paper cut, he thought.

  He climbed the stairs and walked to Anna’s door and rang the bell. No answer. He knocked, and then knocked louder, finally deciding that she must either be out of the apartment or a very sound sleeper.

  Or intentionally avoiding him.

  That was another possibility.

  Maybe, after their date, she had run some sort of background check on Kei and had decided to bail before things went any further. Understandable, in a way, but Kei hoped that she would at least allow him explain the circumstances behind all of that before giving up on him forever. All he wanted was a chance.

  He turned to walk away, and then he noticed that the front window of Anna’s apartment didn’t have any curtains. It wasn’t that they were open, or partially open. They just weren’t there. He cupped his hands against the window to block the reflection from the light over the stairwell, saw right away that the floors and walls were bare.

  Miscellaneous bits of trash on the carpet, wires sticking out of the cable TV outlet.

  Kei had stepped in for a couple of minutes when he picked Anna up for their date, and the apartment had been fully furnished at that time. In fact, Kei had made some sort of comment about it, complimenting Anna on her taste in décor.

  Now the place was totally empty.

  Kei stood there for a few seconds, trying to imagine how this could have happened. Anna hadn’t mentioned anything about moving. Seemed like she would have, but maybe not. Maybe she wanted to see how things went before revealing any details about an upcoming relocation. Then maybe she’d gotten scared off by the background check. If she’d done one. Which she probably had, Kei decided, the more he thought about it.

  So that was that. Anna had changed residences and she wasn’t returning Kei’s calls and there was nothing he could do about it except move on.

  And he would have. He would have given up right then if it hadn’t been for the old man at the hospital.

  IT’S ME! ANNA!

  TOMORROW LIKE YESTERDAY.

  Kei had decided that the old man’s verbal and written attempts to reach out were nothing more than a series of strange coincidences from a fearful and confused mind. Kei the former physician had decided that. Kei the scientist. It was the only rational explanation.

  But the fact that Anna had suddenly cleared out of her apartment made him start thinking about everything again. Was it possible that Anna had somehow communicated with the old man? Was she the one who needed help?

  Not likely. In fact, it was so unlikely that Kei started wondering about his own thought processes over the past few days. It was quite possible that his infatuation with Anna had affected his ability to think strait. As a former medical professional, he knew that such issues were fairly common. But even as this realization sunk in—knowing that pursuing the matter any further would probably qualify as obsessive behavior on his part—he stepped over to the unit next door and rang the bell.

  The peephole darkened, and a few seconds later a man wearing gym shorts and a sleeveless white T-shirt opened the door. Thirty-something, overweight, heavy black stubble on his face and neck, tan lines on his arms just below the deltoid muscles. He was holding a beer in one hand and a disposable butane lighter in the other. The last half inch of a filter-tipped cigarette dangled from a dry and crusty pair of lips, severely chapped, probably from overexposure to the sun.

  “Can I help you?” he said.

  “I’m looking for the woman who lived next door, and I was wondering—”

  “Ms. Parks. Yeah. Some guys came and got all her stuff yesterday. Woke me up with all the bumping and banging. There was a truck out in the parking lot for about two hours. At least.”

  “Have you seen Ms. Parks around here lately?” Kei said.

  “It’s been a few days, I guess.”

  “Did she mention anything about moving?”

  “Not to me. But it’s not like we hung out or anything. I didn’t even know her, to tell you the truth.”

  The man finished the rest of his beer in a single gulp, dropped the smoldering butt into the can. The hot ash sizzled when it hit the wet aluminum. He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a fresh cigarette, held it and looked at it but didn’t light it.

  “Did you happen to notice the name of the moving company?” Kei said.

  “No. It was just a plain white truck. The guys wore jeans and T-shirts. So what’s going on? She in some kind of trouble?”

&nbs
p; “I don’t know,” Kei said. “Does the landlord live here somewhere?”

  “Yeah. Down in one-sixteen. You a cop or something?”

  “Just a friend. Thanks.”

  The man thumbed the flint wheel on his cigarette lighter as Kei turned and headed back toward the stairs.

  The middle-aged couple living in 116 didn’t actually own the apartment complex, just managed it. Mr. and Mrs. McFadden. They answered the door together, stepped out onto the stoop together, but Mrs. McFadden ended up doing most of the talking.

  “We found this in our mailbox this morning,” she said.

  She handed Kei a standard sheet of copy paper, creased where it had been folded in thirds. It was a note from Anna, apologizing for vacating the apartment on such short notice and acknowledging the consequential loss of her security deposit. No explanation for the seemingly abrupt decision to move, no forwarding address. The note had been printed out from a computer and signed at the bottom in black ink.

  “Are you sure this is her signature?” Kei said.

  “Why wouldn’t it be?”

  “I don’t know. I’m just trying to understand why she would—”

  “I’ll be right back,” Mr. McFadden said, snatching the note from Kei’s hand.

  Kei and Mrs. McFadden shared an awkward moment of silence under the yellow porch light while they waited for Mr. McFadden to return.

  He came back out with a copy of the lease.

  “Looks the same to me,” he said, comparing the signature on the rental agreement with the signature on the note.

  He handed the papers to Kei.

  “Yeah,” Kei said. “So I guess that’s it.”

  “Better that it happened now instead of later,” Mrs. McFadden said.

  Kei had told the McFaddens that he and Anna were engaged to be married. Otherwise they probably wouldn’t have shared any information. It was a wonder they had anyway.