Four
Matt leaned against the wall of the doctors’ lounge in the Ben Taub Hospital emergency room and rubbed his eyes. He was dog tired. He’d just finished a twelve-hour shift, from seven in the morning to seven in the evening, supervising the ER’s house staff; it was all part of his duties as an associate professor of emergency medicine.
He stifled a yawn and looked at the blackened, stained coffee urn in the corner, wondering if his stomach lining could survive another cup of the potent brew. He was trying to decide two possible outcomes—getting an ulcer or falling asleep at the wheel driving home—when the door opened and Jeff Strickland, the chief surgery resident on duty, stuck his head in.
“Hey, Matt, they’re paging you,” Strickland said.
Matt glanced at his watch. “Damn, five more minutes and I’d be out the door.”
Strickland grinned and shrugged. “Such is life as a professor, Matt. That’s why they pay you the big bucks.”
Matt grimaced at the humor. Everyone knew professors were paid far less than they could make in private practice. “Yeah, right,” Matt groused, wondering if he should just ignore the page and pretend he’d already left for the day.
But, as usual, his conscience and almost compulsive dedication to his duty prevailed.
He stepped to the corner and picked up the phone, dialing the operator as he yawned again.
“Dr. Carter,” he said when the hospital operator answered.
“You have a call from a patient up on surgery, Dr. Carter,” the feminine voice said. “Would you like me to put him through?”
Matt frowned. He never received calls from patients after they were admitted to the hospital, even ones he’d treated in the ER. “Uh, sure,” he said, wondering just what this was all about and who might be calling him.
After a couple of clicks, the operator said, “Go ahead, sir. Dr. Carter is on the line.”
A male voice said, “Matt?”
Matt recognized the voice immediately as belonging to Damon Clark. “Damon?” he asked. “What are you doing back in the hospital?”
“Why don’t you come up to my room when you get a chance and I’ll tell you. Room three twenty-two.”
“I’ll be there in ten minutes,” Matt said.
“Oh, Matt,” Damon said.
“Yeah?”
“See if you can bum a couple of smokes. The bastards took mine when they admitted me.”
Matt grinned, shaking his head. Damon, chief of detectives of the Houston Police Department, was an inveterate smoker. About the only thing he did that was politically incorrect.
“You know the Taub is a nonsmoking facility, Damon,” Matt said.
“What are they gonna do, arrest me for smoking?” Damon said with a chuckle, quoting a line from a movie.
“I’ll see what I can do,” Matt said, and hung up.
A few minutes later, while riding up to the third floor in the elevator, Matt reviewed what he knew of Damon Clark. The first black man to be made chief of detectives on the Houston Police Department, Damon was independently wealthy and was a fixture in Houston society. Handsome, articulate, and extremely politically astute, he’d been the first to recognize the presence of a serial killer working the Houston streets the previous year. The killer’s trademark of slashing throats and draining his victims of their blood had caused him to ask for help from the medical community. Matt and Sam and Shooter had gotten involved, eventually determining the killer was a vampire.
After a long investigation, in which the creature had killed one of Damon’s female officers, Damon had finally led the assault on the killer’s ship, which resulted in the death of the vampire. During the assault, the vampire had managed to skewer Damon through the abdomen with a sword, resulting in his losing almost half his small bowel and a portion of his colon. Matt hadn’t heard from Damon since his release from the hospital after a series of difficult operations a few weeks back.
Matt knocked on the door to room 322 and entered. He tried to keep the look of shock off his face at Damon’s appearance. The man seemed to have lost twenty pounds and his eyes were sunken in his face. He still wore his trademark gold-rimmed designer glasses, but his once-lean frame now looked gaunt and his eyes had a yellowish tint to them.
“Hey, Damon,” Matt said.
Damon looked up from his hospital bed and grinned. The smile reminded Matt again that this was one of the most charismatic men he’d ever known.
“Howdy, Matt,” Damon said. “Close the door and come on in.”
Matt shut the door and took a seat next to the bed.
“Were you able to get what I asked for?” Damon asked, glancing at the door to make sure it was closed.
Matt pulled a wrinkled cigarette from his shirt pocket, along with a kitchen match. “Yeah. We had a homeless man in the ER needing some stitches in his head. He made me give him a dollar for the cigarette and match.”
Damon reached out and took them from Matt’s hand. “Worth any amount when you really need one,” Damon said. He got out of the bed, opened the window a crack, and sat on the window ledge as he struck the match and took a deep puff.
“Those things’ll kill you,” Matt said.
Damon gave him a look, smoke trailing from his nostrils and an expression of sublime satisfaction. “Sure they will, but only if your doctor friends don’t do the job first.”
“Speaking of that, just why are you in here?” Matt asked.
“Adhesions,” Damon said shortly. “Seems there’s some scar tissue building up around where they took my guts out and they want to go back in and get rid of it before it causes an obstruction.”
Matt nodded. Scar tissue as a result of massive bowel injuries was fairly common. “Well, at least it’s nothing serious.”
“Serious is in the eye of the beholder, Matt, my boy,” Damon said sarcastically. “Anytime they cut me open and poke around in my insides, I consider it serious business.”
“When are you scheduled?”
“Tomorrow morning, first thing. That’s why I wanted to talk to you.”
“Anything I can do, Damon. You know that.”
Damon took a final drag off the cigarette and threw the butt out the window. He grinned. “Got to get rid of the evidence or that Nazi nurse will have my hide.”
Matt looked at the tray across Damon’s bed. “Yeah,” he said, “she might take away your bouillon as punishment.”
“That wouldn’t be punishment; that’d be a blessing,” Damon said. He walked over to the closet and took out a leather-bound book. “This is the real reason I wanted you to come,” he said, handing the book to Matt.
The book appeared to be very old, with a leather cover that was cracked and wrinkled with age and pages that appeared to be made of parchment rather than paper. The writing inside was done with India ink and was in long hand in a style that seemed . . . ancient.
Matt looked up at Damon over the book, with a questioning expression.
Damon sat on the edge of the bed. “Shooter tells me you all have been having some trouble with TJ,” he said.
Matt nodded slowly, wondering what that had to do with the book. As he considered Damon’s statement, he was unsure of how much he could tell Damon without breaking patient confidentiality.
Damon held up his hand. “I know. You can’t talk about a patient without her consent, but I think there are some things in that journal that may be of help to you and the doctors who are treating TJ.”
Damon hesitated and his eyes got a faraway look in them. “It’s a hell of a read.”
“Just what is this book?” Matt asked, glancing again at the old-style writing on the pages.
Damon’s eyes came back into focus. “It’s the journal of Roger Niemann. The man . . . or thing we killed on that ship.”
“The vampire?” Matt asked, unable to keep the incredulity out of his voice.
Damon held up his hand, a half smile curling his lips. “You know the department never admitted he was anything other than a serial killer, Matt.”
“But we know different, don’t we, Chief?”
Damon frowned. “I don’t know what to think, Matt. One of my men found that book in the ship and gave it to me after he looked through it. He didn’t think it should go into the evidence room at the station. He was right. That thing is political dynamite.”
“What do you want me to do with it?” Matt asked, unconsciously running his hands over the supple leather.
Damon shrugged. “Read it. Study it. There may be some things in there that will do TJ some good. I owe my life to Shooter for what he did to protect me on that ship, so this is the least I can do.”
Matt got to his feet. “Thanks, Chief. I’ll go through it tomorrow after I’ve had some sleep.” He stuck out his hand. “Good luck tomorrow, Damon.”
Damon shook his hand. “The doctors tell me luck has nothing to do with it.”
Matt nodded, but he was thinking luck is always a part of surgery, no matter how skilled the surgeon. Most surgeons admitted to each other they’d rather be lucky than good any day.
He told Damon he’d check in on him after his surgery the next day and left the room, cradling the ancient journal under his arm as he walked tiredly down the hall.
When Matt got to the parking garage, he tossed the journal into the passenger seat of his new Mazda Miata convertible and got behind the wheel. He’d bought the Miata with the insurance money he’d received when his ’65 Vette convertible was wrecked while chasing the vampire Niemann a few months back. While not as throaty sounding as the muscle car from the sixties, the Miata at least had reliable air-conditioning, a must in Houston’s ninety-plus summer heat—and it was a fun ride.
Since it was only a little past eight in the evening and the temperature was manageable, Matt put the top down and cruised home to his town house in University Place near Rice University.
Since he was heading away from the medical center, the Sunday-evening traffic was against him and he made good time, arriving home twenty minutes after he left the parking garage.
He parked in his space, took the journal, and trudged slowly up the walk to his door.
Once inside, he kicked his shoes off, headed to the bedroom, dropped the journal on his bedside table, then flopped facedown on the bed without bothering to undress. He was deep asleep within minutes.