THE HOSPITAL WAS alternately cold, warm, then cold again, incomprehensible, visionary. A place of blurred fluorescent lighting, unintelligible urgent voices, scurrying people, hallucinatory half-remembered images and smells. Then they put me under. I remember that—being terrified that Winter would find me and kill me if I lost consciousness.
I awoke sometime during the night, either hours later or days, I had no way of knowing. I didn’t say anything, though I tried. My mouth wouldn’t work. My body felt unresponsive, a breathing, inanimate thing that was me, but not me, something I lay inside. It was a cocoon of me, not hot or cold, a numbed wrapping out of which I saw Kayla in a chair, staring at nothing. A moment before I drifted off again, I caught a glimpse of Dallas, or thought I did.
* * *
In time, the dreamworld came to an end. As I’d feared, Mortimer Angel, gumshoe extraordinaire, was once again a household name—and Dallas, Kayla, Jeri, Victoria, Winter, the whole damn circus—but I’ll get to that in a while.
Sometime before midnight, Winter died. I heard about it the following day, or maybe the day after. She’d been bitten twenty-three times by black widow spiders, possibly a North American record. It was determined that she had rolled and thrashed along that lattice, gathering some, crushing others, pissing them off thoroughly, which is never a good idea. When she arrived at the hospital she had a few smashed and dead in her hair and one missing legs but still gnawing. Black widow envenomation. Technically, it’s called latrodectism—the kind of word I’m inclined to forget within minutes, but I would remember this one, and fondly, because it had rid the world of a monster. They gave her calcium gluconate and antivenin among other things, but she didn’t make it. Maybe she’d been brought in too late, but I’m inclined to think that at barely a hundred pounds she wouldn’t have stood much of a chance if she’d been brought in sooner. She had one bite for every four-and-a-half pounds of girl. It’s hard to bounce back from something like that.
She was under the house for over an hour before the paramedics found her and pulled her out—unconscious, breathing with difficulty, cramped, covered in oily sweat. Kayla and Jeri hadn’t known what had happened to her, and I couldn’t tell anyone. Winter had a broken arm and numerous contusions, all of them self-inflicted except for an enormous bruise where I’d kicked her belly, managing to break two ribs. I was happy about that. May she rest in pieces.
Victoria was found in the basement with a broken neck, broken jaw, ruptured windpipe, teeth shattered. Russell Fairchild told me she was dead before she hit the floor. As far as I was concerned, Jeri had the best damn kick in all of North America, bar none.
Mine were the first fencing wounds anyone at the hospital had ever seen. They’d pretty much gone out of style in the 1700s. Chalk up another one for me. The doctors treated them like .22 caliber gunshot wounds. I was in surgery for five hours, mostly because of that damn punctured lung. The steel had gone in between my second and third ribs, missing the left subclavian artery by a quarter of an inch. By millimeters, I was still alive.
Jeri wandered into intensive care wearing a hospital gown at ten o’clock the morning after—about the time I was starting to come out of it, though I was high as a kite on a very nice morphine derivative. She’d spent the night up on a different floor, under observation. She had a slight concussion after landing on her back on the floor, hitting her head on that door. My concussion was worse. We traded concussion stories like old combat Marines, and she held my hand for ten minutes with Dallas smiling at us—then a gang of nurses chased them both away in order to do terrible things to me, one of which was unmentionable and involved a catheter.
All of this was fine fodder for the media. A news van had pulled up at Sjorgen House before any police or ambulance crews got there, and, later the following day, I saw myself on television—again. It had taken considerable effort on the part of blackout artists to render Jeri, Kayla, and me acceptable for consumption by an alert, eager, news-hungry nation.
I missed Greg’s funeral. Catheters, I didn’t have to be told, make for awkward, unsightly travel. But my sister, Ellen, came by and we had a good long visit until I lapsed into morphine-derivative unconsciousness right in the middle of a sentence I don’t remember starting.
Awake the next day, I decided it would be a good long while before I showed up at the Golden Goose and heard what that sonofabitch O’Roarke had to say about all this. As it turned out, I didn’t have to. Five days into my recovery, when I was hours out of intensive care, he wandered into my room with a shit-eating grin on his Irish mug, a bunch of dumb-ass pink-and-white carnations he’d probably swiped from the room next door, and sixty free-drink coupons that wouldn’t expire until the end of the year.
In time, of course, the police trooped in, meaning Fairchild. He wasn’t happy that we’d solved his case for him, made him and the department look bad on national TV. Before the Sjorgen House Battle, his men had tracked down the bare-bones, sanitized agreement that had given Sjorgen House to Edna Woolley, but not the reason behind it. They’d never heard of Jacoba, Victoria, or Winter. They’d been spinning their wheels while the country’s finest gumshoe—okay, gumshoes—had busted the case wide open. Forty years had buried the relevant history too deep, even if it was the police department that had helped to bury it. I tried to cheer Russ up by pointing out that he had been about two years out of diapers at the time Edna took over occupational possession of Sjorgen House, probably tearing around his backyard on a bright yellow Big Wheels and watching Sesame Street or Mr. Ed reruns on television. That was the first and only time I’d been given the finger in a hospital.
* * *
I went home after eleven interminable days, six days after they removed the drains from my chest, four days after I decided hospital food might be more lethal than being run through with a sword. Dallas was with me when a nurse pushed me out the front door in a wheelchair, through half a dozen video cameras and a flurry of inane questions. She drove me back to my house in a brand-new Mercedes, one in which neither Jonnie nor his head had ever taken a ride. By then, Jeri was away on a case, somewhere in Las Vegas. It had been five days since I’d last seen Kayla.
Ever the note-leaver, she’d left one on a nightstand in the bedroom. It read:
Dear Mort,
She would have died for you.
I’ve gone back to Ithaca.
Please forgive me.
K.
What was to forgive? Things had gotten pretty hairy down there in that dungeon-basement. I could understand her not wanting to remember any part of it. I set the note down, feeling rotten even though I’d known she was gone, known back at Sjorgen House that terrible afternoon that she and I would never make it even if we survived the ordeal. Not after what had gone down.
“That from Kayla?” Dallas asked, looking at the expression on my face.
“Yeah. She’s gone.”
“I’m so sorry, Mort.”
“Uh-huh.”
I was still tired. Dallas hung around a while longer, made me eat a little soup, then she left.
* * *
In time, however, and it didn’t take all that long, considering, the entire business took on something of a dreamlike quality. I think that was because it was so weird, the whole thing. The horror of it softened to something resembling a well-remembered nightmare—frightening as hell, but unreal. I could deal with it. At times I could even shut it off, forget it for full minutes at a time. I could even watch Leno and laugh. Jonnie had died very badly, maybe worse than he’d deserved, Milliken too, but people die badly every day and too many of them are innocent children, so I didn’t shed a tear for Jonnie, per se, just for the sick horror of it all. Mostly, I tried to forget.
A week went by. I was in the shower and fairly well recovered from my wounds when the doorbell rang. Perfect timing. God must arrange these things to see what’ll happen. So, not wanting to disappoint, I got out—dripping—thinking now was my big chance to run some hotshot media buzzard from my doorstep all the way to the sidewalk by the seat of his chinos. The sutures had been removed. It would be a good test of my shoulder and basic arm strength. I wrapped a towel around my waist. One glance at a clock told me it was seven o’clock in the evening.
Rachel was at the door. Rachel. Wow. I had a flashback, a sudden smell of meat and cheese, a vision of Skulstad’s bean counters hunched over their desks. She had a paper sack in one hand. She looked good, very statuesque, wearing a clingy sleeveless dress that came to eight inches above her knees, neckline so low it took all I had to keep my eyes from drifting.
At my attire, and the puddle forming at my feet, she gave me an apologetic smile, then took a single step into the house so I could close the door. I caught a whiff of perfume. “It was Iris,” she said.
“Huh?”
“Iris Kacsmaryk? She left one day after you gave that menacing little speech of yours, which Betty repeated for me. Betty Pope, if you remember. Lady with the big hair. Since then, things have been fine. We hired a new girl yesterday.”
“Oh. That’s good.”
“I just thought you’d like to know.”
I’d solved bigger cases since then, so her news amounted to small potatoes, but I didn’t tell her that. “Thanks,” I said.
She smiled awkwardly. “I, uh, brought over some food. It’s from Sardina’s, over on Mira Loma. Rigatoni and lasagna, garlic bread. It’s still hot.”
Smelled good, too.
Behind me, Jeri said, “Hi, I’m Jeri.” She was wearing a towel that matched mine. And, like me, she was dripping all over the floor. I’d told her to stay put, I would handle it, whatever it was, but…hell, she never listens.
Rachel said, “Oops, uh, I’m Rachel. A friend.”
I said, “Jeri, Rachel. Rachel, Jeri.”
“Guess I’ll be on my way,” Rachel said. She put the bag in my arms, backed out the door, and said, “Enjoy, Mortimer, Jeri.”
“Mort,” I said.
Rachel left. I shut the door, then turned and looked at Jeri. She smiled, water dripping into her face from sopping hair full of those wonderful deep-red highlights.
“Hey, look,” I said. “Food.” I held up the bag.
“Delivery girls are getting prettier all the time.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Uniforms are cut kinda lower, too.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You never mentioned that one before.”
“Uh-huh. It’s not my fault that girls flock to me like pigeons to a statue.”
Jeri unwound the towel and let it hang from one hand. She stood hipshot and looked me in the eye. “How about you put that stuff in the kitchen. We were interrupted. You’re needed in the shower.”