Lula and I left the lounge and followed the corridor to the dining room. The dining room doors were closed, and the sign on the door stated that lunch would be served at noon. Noon was a little over an hour away but people were already lining up.
“Your granny is right,” Lula said. “It’s good living here. You get to watch television, and someone makes your food, and it’s real pretty. And everyone looks happy unless they’re talking about Cubbin. I bet they give out good pharmaceuticals.”
“What about the pigeons?”
“That would be a problem.”
There were four men sitting on a couch by the dining room door.
“Would one of you be Bill Smoot?” I asked.
“Yep, that’s me,” one of them said.
He was about 5'7" with white hair and thick glasses. I put him at late seventies, possibly early eighties. He was wearing tan slacks and a three-button white knit shirt.
“I’d like to talk to you about Geoffrey Cubbin.”
All four men leaned forward, eyes narrowed.
“Asshole,” one of them said.
“I understand you went to see him?”
They exchanged glances, and I knew I’d found the hospital contingent.
“What’s this about?” Smoot asked.
“I’m looking for Cubbin and I thought you might be helpful.”
“Why are you looking for him? Are you a cop?”
“Fugitive apprehension agent.”
“Hah!” one of them said. “Bounty hunter.”
There were smiles all around. “All right then,” Smoot said. “What do you want to know?”
“Did you go to the hospital to see him?”
“Yeah,” Smoot said. “We were gonna beat the snot out of him until he told us where he had the money stashed.”
“You’d beat up a guy who’d just had his appendix removed?”
Everyone sort of shifted in his seat.
“We didn’t have a clear-cut plan,” Smoot said. “We might have just slapped him around a little.”
“So what happened?”
“Ernie over there spent some time on that floor a couple months ago so he knew the drill,” Smoot said.
Ernie shrugged. “Gallbladder. Easy come, easy go.”
“The night nurses come on at eleven. They punch in, skim over the charts, and then they watch movies on their iPads. Central isn’t exactly an award-winning hospital,” Smoot said. “So we figured we could sneak in after visiting hours when the nurses were snarfing down vodka-laced chocolate candies and tuning in to Twilight episodes. We took the stairs and everything was going to plan except when we got to Cubbin’s room it was empty. No Cubbin.”
“So what did you do?”
“We left. We got stopped by the night guard on the way out. I guess he caught us on one of the monitors. We acted all dumb and demented and confused and he helped us get to our car. And then we went to the diner on Livingston and then we went home.”