I came awake to a feeling like angry hornets crawling around in my face, trapped between the skin and the muscle and not real happy about it. I tried to express my unhappiness at this situation through a properly piercing scream, but my lips were mashed shut and my jaw really didn’t care to cooperate. Hot-lead pain blazed up through my skull every time my heart pounded, so that my head and heart throbbed in a dizzying syncopated rhythm.
“God, Frank, oh my God!”
The voice floated down to me out of the black, senseless sky behind my eyelids, but I didn’t have to see her to know that voice. I struggled a second to open my eyes, but the effort rumbled thunder-like through my brainpan and I gave it up for a while.
Eyes.
I tried to count them, even through the mask of pain somebody had put in place of my face. I thought I got to two, but counted again to be sure. Two. So the goon had only wanted to scare me and work me over a little. I can’t say I was exactly ecstatic with relief right then, but knowing I might still have some depth perception didn’t bother me any.
“Just stay still, Frank, I’ll call an ambulance … oh my God—” Cass stammered from somewhere above me.
“No,” I managed to say, “ambulance.”
“Hush, now, Frank,” Cass whispered sweetly. “Just lie still.”
“No ambulance.”
I amazed myself by putting some force behind the words.
“Frank! Your face is … I mean, God, Frank. I’m calling an ambulance.”
I couldn’t allow it. An ambulance meant a hospital. A hospital meant sooner or later someone would call the cops. Cops meant people asking questions I couldn’t answer, or didn’t intend to. I wasn’t having any of that.
“No damn ambulance,” I muttered. “Call Doc Ambrus.”
I managed to tilt my head, ignoring the avalanche of pain in my skull, and opened one eye—the one not puffed-shut—as far as it would go, which was just about nowhere.
“Frank—”
“Doc … Ambrus.”
“Okay,” Cass relented. “But if he ain’t in, I’m calling Mercy Hospital and have ’em send an ambulance.”
I settled back onto the comforting hardwood floor and let the lead weights in my eyelid drag it closed again. I tried to call a phrase or two of music into my mind—a whisper of Mozart or Strauss to salve the pain some—but my hands didn’t feel up to the task of moving over the ivories, imaginary or otherwise, and I never can make the music come to life without tickling it awake with my fingers. Funny how the notes seem to live in my fingertips and nowhere in my gray matter.
I heard Cass pick up the phone, heard her exchange hurried pleasantries with the Doc … and then for a while I didn’t hear much of anything. And that was fine by me.
Next thing I remember, someone yanked my right eye open and blazed a white light straight into my brain.
“Knock it off, Doc,” I muttered, surprised at how well my mouth worked given how mashed my lips felt. “I already had one fella try ’n blind me.”
Doctor Jayr Ambrus was a retired GP who’d had a family practice sometime back, though there was still some dispute about precisely which Family he’d practiced for. I’d done some work for him a few years ago when he’d suspected his wife—a pretty, empty-headed strawberry blond twenty years his junior—had gotten involved with a fella closer to her own generation. I’d gotten pictures of the wife with the interloper, and the interloper had gotten dead—though not by me, to be sure. Doc promised me he hadn’t asked anyone in his Family to rub the poor slob out, but he’d gotten his wife back, and plenty contrite, and he couldn’t say he felt real sorry for the boy with the great big hole in his skull. For my help, Doc had offered his whenever I needed it. I had to say he was a gracious sort, for someone who didn’t put too much stock in the Hippocratic oath.
“Gotta check for concussion,” Doc said, letting my left eye go and prying the right one open without much regard for the fact that it was blown up like an innertube. “For all I know you could be in a coma right now. Hell, the way you look, you might be dead.”
“You’re a real riot, Doc,” I said through lips that felt like jellyfish, all soft and puffed up and full of poison. Still, thinking of that shadow I thought I’d seen behind my attacker, I had to wonder how badly rattled my brain might be.
“Hush, now,” Cass said, nearby. “Let the man do his work.”
“Smart girl,” Doc said, prodding my face with what felt like red-hot knitting needles but may’ve just been his fingers. “You should listen to her.”
“Like when I said this case felt all wrong,” Cass said. “I told you there’d be trouble, didn’t I tell you?” Her tone didn’t have a hint of gloating in it, only a kind of giddiness I took for nerves and shock. Must’ve been a fun time for her, finding me sprawled out and broken on the floor of my office, my face looking like a tomato someone had peeled, pureed, then stomped on for good measure. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as it felt, but knowing how a shaving cut bleeds I figured it must’ve been hell to look at.
“Yeah, you told me,” I agreed from inside my halo of agony.
“He gonna be okay, Doc?”
“If he were in anyone else’s hands, he’d be coffin stuffing,” Doc said, working my face over with acid-soaked steel wool, or maybe only cotton gauze. “Fortunately I specialize in putting the meat back together after it comes out of the grinder, so I think I should be able to make this lump of hamburger into a face again.”
“Thanks loads,” I said.
“You got much pain?” he asked, prodding, making sure I had plenty.
“Never been better,” I said. The hurt in my flesh tried to shove me back into the dark of unconsciousness, but I fought it. I thought of the revelation that’d brought me down here in the dead middle of the night, and the photograph tatters on the floor, the wreckage of the only tangible evidence I’d gotten so far in this case. A nasty thought occurred to me then.
“Cass … the dark room …Check the negatives.…”
“Huh?” she said, forgetting in all the fun that she still worked for whatever was left of me. “Oh, sure Frank. Right.”
I heard her low-heeled shoes shuffle across the floor.
“Nasty business ya got here, Frank,” Doc Ambrus observed.
“You’re one to talk,” I muttered. The sounds continued to come out enough like words for him to make some sense of them.
“Now, no point dwelling on the ugly past. We’ve both got skeletons in our closets, huh?”
I didn’t think he had anything specific on me, but the general principle was sound enough. I offered agreement by way of silence.
“There ain’t no negatives in the dark room, Frank,” Cass reported. “Sorry.”
That figured. I doubted the goon who’d broken my face had much by way of brains, but even dumb hired muscle like him would have strict instructions to make sure the negatives got destroyed. Thinking that, I finally placed that odor in the air.
“Look in the trashcan,” I told Cass.
A half-second’s quiet.
“Hm,” she said. “Buncha ashes and, uh … melted lookin’ stuff.”
The remains of the pictures and the negatives, I guessed. Torched in the trashcan and left here to make sure I understood what my guest had dropped in to take care of. Pounding me to within an inch of my life had been the added bonus, his good luck.
“How …” I managed, slipping, trying to yank my senses back into place by force of will. “How did he … get in?”
That queer thought I’d had when I imagined my attacker had brought a friend echoed in my mind right then—So that’s how he got in … But it made even less sense now than it had then.
“I,” Cass started, then stopped. I could just about hear her looking around the room, inspecting windows, doors. “I can’t figure. Wasn’t through the front door?”
“Locked when I got here,” I said, while Doc went on about whatever he was doing. “Not jimmied.”
“Coulda been picked,” Doc ventured. He’d started prodding at other parts of my battered body, but that didn’t matter so much. The pain wrapped around my skull washed out any other aches and bruises.
I thought about Doc’s comment, but lock-picking didn’t seem like my midnight visitor’s style. He struck me—so to speak—more as the type who took the “breaking” part of “breaking and entering” pretty literally.
And yet there didn’t seem to be any sign of that, not from what Cass said and not in what I remembered from my interrupted inspection of the place last night. If I could have managed it, I would’ve frowned at the apparent contradictions in all this.
Doc said, “You’re gonna need to be sewn up. I’ll give you something for the pain—or would ya rather just bite on a bullet?”
“Just hold your horses, Doc,” I said, fending him off with a hand that shook badly. “Cass, call the Chandler and have them ring Miss Gray’s room. If she doesn’t answer, have the day manager go pound on her door. Tell him to use his passkey if he has to. I wanna know if our client slipped away again.”
She went into the outer office to make the call. I waited while Doc went about pulling various instruments of medical torture out of his little black bag. The call lasted a long time, and much of it was silence. That couldn’t mean anything good.
When Cass came back, I knew what she was going to say. Not that I liked it any better for that.
“She’s gone, Frank,” Cass said. “The fella said her bed didn’t even look slept in.”
I sighed. More legwork ahead, and no knowing if it would lead to a paycheck.
I tried not to think about how much it bothered me to imagine the erstwhile Miss Gray out there lost, alone, hurting, or maybe just hurt.
“Okay, Doc, your magic potions all ready to go?”
He tapped the syringe and smiled entirely too broadly. “Always,” he said.
“Great,” I said. “Fix me up, and fix me up.”
I hardly even felt the needle as it pushed a dose of morphine into my blood. And then for a while I didn’t feel anything at all.