Lifeline

Three dazzling shafts of first daylight streamed in through a trio of clerestory windows and met the darkened barroom floor with a warming kiss just where Freddy Hightower lay collapsed, bellydown, head turned sideways so the face received the full illuminating effect. The brilliant white beams teased him up from a near-coma state, through multiple levels of narcotic visions, to the rude awakening of his very real and very dismal circumstances. He deduced that he’d been poisoned. He recalled thinking that he would surely die when he’d slumped on the floor in that very spot a couple of hours before. The way he felt as he regained consciousness, he almost wished he had.

His eyelids fluttered briefly, then closed again, tightly, in a futile effort to keep out the stabbing glare. His entire head throbbed as if an internal trip-hammer had invaded his skull. The excruciating cranial pulses precisely matched the rise and fall of an intense ringing in his ears.

It was only when that infernal ringing suddenly and miraculously ceased that Freddy was able to bring some semblance of order to his thoughts and take stock of his situation.

Poisoned! That wily old bastard Ezra had somehow slipped some sort of deadly potion into the bourbon bottle they’d shared. Never had Jim Beam’s good name been desecrated in such a vile manner! How Ezra managed to taint the whiskey that Freddy drank without poisoning himself was beyond the victim’s reckoning. Perhaps it was some sleight-of-hand maneuver—something that would certainly fall within a shaman’s repertoire. A more likely scenario would have had the old brujo drinking the poison as well. A toxic concoction proving fatal to a mortal might well be a mere liqueur to a demon—an aperitif, in fact, to a feast of blood.

Then, as suddenly as it had ceased, the ringing in Freddy’s head resumed, reprising the same painful pulses as before. He instinctively raised his hands to his ears as if he could shut off the wicked blasts from the outside. To his amazement, it worked. With hands cupped over the ears, he actually muted the ringing effect. The pulses were reduced to a mild intermittent buzzing. It wasn’t inside his head after all; it came from some external source. Absent the amplified attack on his brain, he was able to get a fix on the origin of the horrible noise: it was the telephone. Someone was calling the bar phone, and quite persistently so.

Steeling himself for another salvo of auditory assaults, Freddy removed his hands from his ears. With an immense effort, he pushed down on the floor and raised his torso, but several attempts to get to his feet failed. Again, the ringing ceased, and the only remaining sound was that of his own pathetic whimpering.

It was probably Manny, his faithful servant, calling so frequently. He’d be concerned that Freddy had stayed at the restaurant digs without calling to let him know, as was his habit in such cases. Good old Manny’s loyal concern just might be Freddy’s saving grace. If he could make it to the bar and grasp the receiver on his faithful attendant’s next call, he would get the old man to roust Dr. J. P. Morton, Freddy’s close friend and physician. He’d survived the initial onslaught of symptoms; there was good reason to believe that, given some medical care, he might win yet another reprieve from death.

Believing the phone to be a lifeline, Freddy somehow mustered the energy to raise himself up on hands and knees. At a turtle’s pace, and stopping to rest three times, he closed the distance between the site his of collapse and the bar inside of five minutes. It was a ponderous journey, albeit short in terms of distance, and it sapped what little strength he’d regained with his awakening. Nevertheless, he grasped the frame of a barstool and pulled his chin level with the bar. The telephone sat inches from his face when it began to ring again.

The roaring blasts from the phone at that close range proved overwhelming to Freddy’s raw senses. He stifled an urge to scream from the cranial pain that the ringing invoked. A new wave of nausea swept over the diminutive restaurateur, and the inches of distance to the phone suddenly became miles. He reached out with a swiping paw as his knees buckled, and he managed to bat the receiver off the hook in a valiant but failed attempt to grasp it.

An eternity and several hundred feet of dizzying descent seemed to pass before him until his limp body finally met the floor again. The retching began anew. The flow of blood streaming from his parted lips was alarming. The floor began to rock like a pendulum, and Freddy fought to retain his consciousness. Opening his eyes, his blurred vision landed on a strange black object, about the size and shape of a small shoe, seeming to dangle before him, suspended from some unseen tether.

“Hello, Freddy—are you there?”

Despite the exaggerated tinny quality of the sound, Freddy recognized the voice emitting from the object to be Isabel’s—a tiny Tinker Bell version of Isabel, calling from the depths of a coffee-can prison—but Isabel’s distinctive voice nevertheless. Miraculously, it was the telephone receiver that danced before his face, strung up by its own cord. He mustered all of his waning vitality to utter a response.

“Isabel!” he croaked, but could only manage that much.

“Alfredo, are you okay? I have some wonderful news…are you okay? I can’t hear you. Are you okay?”

With an enormous effort, he drew in a deep breath and ejaculated the single word that summed it all up: “No!” Freddy cried out loudly, and then passed immediately into oblivion.