Mort Weatherby, St. Luke’s Community Hospital, trauma center, south building, fourth floor, room 406.
Warden entered the man’s room wearing a white coat and a laminated photo of himself clipped to his pocket. Even with all the hullabaloo about increased security, he found that walking into a hospital room was one of the easiest things to do, so long as there wasn’t a dinosaur nurse at the front desk who knew the name of every doctor and patient she’d ever met in the last fifty years. But he’d been doing this kind of thing awhile.
He had the vial; he had the syringe; he had the sleeping body.
This would only take a minute.
Mort. What an appropriate name.
“What are you doing?” Craven was already in the room. His eyes widened and he came off the wall where he had been slouching.
“Accepting your invitation to join the party.”
“What?”
Warden filled the syringe and tossed the empty vial into the trashcan on the other side of the room. This was his preferred method: hide the evidence in plain sight and almost no one ever sees it.
“You’re not going to kill him?”
Craven, a foot taller than Warden but half his weight, stood beside him, avoiding his eyes like some poor noodle of a high school boy who couldn’t hold the gaze of the star quarterback. His cheeks were flushed and his nose was running. He wiped it on the heel of his hand.
Warden lowered the needle to the crook of Mort’s elbow.
“I’ll file a complaint!” Craven protested.
Warden lifted the needle off the skin and cast an unconcerned glance at Craven. “Don’t whine. You should have anticipated this when you involved my girl in your little escapade last night.”
Craven’s bloodshot eyes are glassy. “What are you talking about?”
“That little girl you almost killed.”
“You said the Grüggen woman was yours.”
“That’s her mother, imbecile.”
The cackle that rose out of Craven’s throat at this news was most grating. It started low like an angry cat and crescendoed into a full chicken cluck. Warden had met hyenas with less agonizing expressions of pleasure. He restrained his annoyance. There was no point in wasting it on a worm like Craven.
“I would have liked that very much,” Craven said. “If the little one had died.”
Warden returned the needle to the vein pulsing weakly beneath Mort’s skin, silencing Craven.
“You can’t kill him. It’s against the rules.”
“Not even you play by the rules.”
Craven was a weightless thing, but fast. His arm lashed out and his knuckles struck the inside of Warden’s wrist, knocking the syringe out of his hand. It slid across the floor, spinning as it went, right under the vacant bed next to Mort’s. Craven dived for it.
Warden pulled the bed on wheels away from the wall. It rolled over Craven’s outstretched hand. Warden sat upon the bed, pinning his opponent’s palm to the floor. Craven snarled. The situation couldn’t possibly hurt, but Warden was sure he found it inconvenient.
The needle rested in a cloud of fuzz, having stabbed a dust bunny clean through the heart. “Someone should tell Mort that this place isn’t sanitary,” Warden said.
With his outstretched foot, he kicked it out of Craven’s reach while the man tried to extricate his hand from under the wheels, cursing as if Warden weren’t already cursed.
“Relax,” Warden said. “I’m not going to kill him.”
Craven still wriggled, but less vigorously. He spat on Warden’s shoe. “I don’t believe you.”
“Fortunately, belief doesn’t change facts. Of course I won’t kill him. I need something to keep you occupied and out of my way. If Mort dies, I have a hunch you’d become an even bigger pest than you presently are.”
“Then why come here at all?”
“To remind you of your place.”
Warden jumped off the bed, landing on Craven’s forearm. A bone cracked, and Craven cried out, spitting and writhing more. Taking two steps, Warden bent over to pick up the syringe, gingerly, without spilling his little bacteria sample everywhere.
Craven descended onto his back, all arms and legs and teeth. He flailed and bit and, in spite of Warden’s conscientious effort, managed to knock the piston out. It rattled to the floor and rolled under Warden’s heel as he tried to pry the octopus off his body while keeping the syringe upright. He heard the plastic snap as his weight ground down on it.
Warden imagined what this scuffle looked like to dear Mort, lying there, thinking he was dreaming. He couldn’t prevent a chuckle from escaping him. Craven swung at his head with renewed gusto.
Still holding the syringe, Warden kept the needle pointed at the floor in order to preserve the contents of the tube. Craven’s bobbing head connected with the precious cargo, driving the needle like a nail into Warden’s opposite hand. This made him laugh harder. The sensation of pain, such as it is, was invigorating. And he had a firm grip on the bacteria now.
Staggering only slightly under his furious burden, Warden returned to Mort. At the edge of the hospital bed, he raised his arm over Mort’s peaceful face and upended the separated syringe. The germ-ridden fluid splattered, hitting the patient right between the eyes. It pooled in the corners and ran into his ears and baptized his nose and mouth with an unholy sprinkle.
“That’ll do,” Warden announced.
He shook Craven off. The greasy figure slid off his back like water off the proverbial duck, landing on his feet, staring at Mort.
“What is it?” he asked.
Warden gripped the hollow plastic tube and yanked the needle from his hand. It was a fine needle, slender but strong, and still intact after the scuffle. He waved it in front of Craven’s eyes, breaking his concentration.
Then he brought his arm down hard and shoved it into Craven’s back, into the soft tissue between his shoulder blade and his spine. Though if he had to guess, he would say Craven had no spine at all.
Craven winced and grabbed at it, but the thing was out of his reach.
Warden made to leave the room.
“If you’re lucky,” Ward said, “he’ll live.”
Lexi and Angelo arrived at St. Luke’s within ten minutes. Gina was still in intensive care, though her condition had been upgraded from critical to serious. Her room, which was third from the left on the bleach-white U-shaped ward of St. Luke’s, was partitioned off by a sliding glass door so that she, like every other bed on the floor, could be continuously within sight of the staff. Lexi wouldn’t be allowed to see her, a nurse on duty said, but when Gina’s mother saw her through the glass, she came out and grabbed Lexi in a bear hug. Angelo hung back, a gesture Lexi perceived as kindness.
“You give that little girl of yours this hug from me,” Mrs. Harper said into Lexi’s hair. “I’m making Molly my honorary grandbaby.” She leaned back to look at Lexi. “They told me what happened. How’s Molly holding up?”
“She’s good. I don’t think she knows how bad it could have been.”
“And you?”
“I’m okay.”
“I asked after Mort this morning. Gina has a thing for him, you know.” Lexi smiled. Mrs. Harper shook her head. “They say he’s taken a turn for the worse.”
Distress for the man who’d only tried to help her family filled Lexi’s stomach.
“Oh no. I’ll check in on him. How’s Gina?”
Mrs. Harper let her go at the shoulders but grasped Lexi’s hands. She shook her head. “A virus of some kind maybe. One wicked germ. There’s so many tests to do. Far as I can tell they’ve only just started.”
“Not food poisoning or something basic like that, huh?”
“Oh no. They ruled all that out pretty quickly, not that I know how.” She faced Lexi.
“Has she woken?”
“In and out,” Mrs. Harper said. The women walked arm in arm to Gina’s room without going in. She lay in bed on the other side of the window-wall, looking unearthly pale but at rest. An IV was hooked up to her hand. “Her oxygen’s not what it should be, you know. And her blood pressure is low. But they’re good people here. They’re looking after her alright.”
“Can I get you anything?”
“Oh no. Gina’s dad is on his way down and he’s bringing my things. The two of us’ll do fine.”
“What about Gina? Maybe I could bring her pajamas or something.”
“That’d be nice. I’m sure she’d like that.”
“Next time I come then. In the meantime, you’ll let me know how I can help?”
“You pray, dear, and we’ll do the same.” Mrs. Harper smiled at Angelo, who lingered by the nurse’s station, and patted the back of Lexi’s hand.
“I’ll do that. Molly will too. Iassume you’ve got our number at home?” When she nodded, Lexi said, “Please tell Gina not to stay down too long. Molly wants to learn some more blonde jokes.”
“We’ll kick her into gear as soon as she’s sitting up.”
“Okay then.” Lexi kissed Mrs. Harper’s cheek and waited until she was beside Gina again before turning to go.
Without taking in any details, her eyes scanned the other rooms on the ward. She probably wouldn’t have noticed anything had an orderly in green scrubs not pulled back a privacy curtain in one of the rooms on the opposite side of the unit.
Through the sliding glass door, she saw a uniformed police officer standing in the corner of the room and a patient with a bruised face lying in the bed. His left arm was in a cast and his head was wrapped in gauze over his right eye.
A slim doctor about Lexi’s age, perhaps Pakistani or Indian, was walking into the room while engrossed in a chart. The officer walked out and took up post by the door.
The man in bed turned his head to the doctor and in so doing caught sight of Lexi.
Norm.
He smiled. A light, casual, corner-of-the-mouth, isn’t-it-a-crazy-day kind of smile.
That scythe of a smile cut Lexi’s heart. That smile, which had once knocked her senseless, aroused in her every fiery arrow of flaming emotion she had ever felt over the death of her sister. News of his pending parole had made her angry, but this unexpected encounter transported her to the day she had learned Tara was murdered and Norman charged with the crime.
The blackest day of her blackest year.
Tara had visited Lexi the day before she died. She arrived while Molly napped, bearing hot cinnamon rolls and a thermos of fresh coffee because she knew both were Lexi’s weakness. They sat and ate and laughed and licked their sticky fingers, and she waited until Lexi bit into her second roll before ruining the mood.
You need to end this thing with Norman, she said. You need to cut him off because he has a wife and they want a child and he needs them the way you need Grant. Norm won’t make you whole.
You’ll shatter his family into a million pieces, Tara said. And yours. If you and Grant can’t hold it together, you’ll kill Molly.
Lexi found that last bit to be over the top. Grant is the one who’ll kill Molly, she shot back. He’ll kill her by ignoring her or by hooking her on his drugs—if he doesn’t kill himself first. Tara didn’t have any idea what she was talking about, Lexi announced. She couldn’t possibly. She wasn’t married. She wasn’t even dating.
Neither Tara nor Lexi budged in their positions, Lexi because she was stubborn and Tara because she was right. Lexi sent her away with her thermos but kept the leftover rolls and devoured them all within the hour.
They turned to a rock in Lexi’s stomach and sat there for weeks, months even, after she understood she would never see Tara again.
Barrett was the one who called with the news. He was in the morgue and couldn’t speak for a whole minute after Lexi realized it was him on the other end. He sobbed and she imagined him with his free hand tilting his forehead so that his face turned up toward God, groaning the questions that had no answer.
“Your sister’s dead, Lexi. A random, freak accident. They’ve arrested someone.”
Lexi was at home, tethered to the kitchen phone by a cord too short to reach a chair, and by the time he finished she was on her knees on the cold, sticky floor, pressing her brow into a cupboard door and gripping the overhanging counter above her head.
Grant came home in a drugged-up stupor. He found Lexi on the floor, still holding the phone receiver, which by that time was droning on with a recorded message about what to do if she’d like to place a call. Molly was crying, but Lexi only noticed because Grant demanded she hang up the phone and do something about it.
Now, there he was, Norman Von Ruden, getting the same professional medical care that her best friend was receiving. What he deserved was a third-world, flea-infested armpit of a disreputable clinic.
No, he didn’t deserve even that.
There he was, getting patched up to be released a mere seven years after he killed Tara in a haze of what experts believed was undiagnosed bipolar disorder.
There he was, smiling at her, after he huffed and puffed and blew down her family and left her standing in the rubble.
You should have died last night! Lexi’s screams bounced around inside her brain. You don’t deserve to lie in that bed! They should dump you out on the street!
She was aware of a presence by her right arm, touching her at the elbow.
Even in prison you can’t leave my family alone! Molly almost died! It’s your fault! You don’t deserve to live!
The hand on her elbow took hold of her, squeezing hard. The brownskinned doctor in Norm’s room turned to look at her. A nurse at the station was staring. The sheriff posted at Norm’s door was headed in Lexi’s direction.
Her body quavered. Norm’s smile faltered. She heard the sound of her own voice and realized she was shouting.
I’ll kill you myself! I should do it right now!
The physician took two steps and yanked the privacy curtain closed.
Angelo gently pulled Lexi from the ICU before the officer reached them.