THE SURGICAL NURSE, JENNA SPINELLI, HAD BEEN one year ahead of me in high school. Her calm gray eyes were flecked with blue, and her hands were made to play piano concertos.
The news that she brought was not as grim as I feared, not as good as I would have liked. The chief’s vital signs were stable but not robust. He’d lost his spleen, but he could live without that. One lung had been punctured, but not beyond repair, and none of his vital organs had been irreparably damaged.
Complex vascular repairs were required, and the physician in charge of the surgical team estimated that the chief would be in the OR another hour and a half to two hours.
“We’re pretty sure he’ll come through surgery good enough,” Jenna said. “Then the challenge will be to prevent postoperative complications.”
Karla went into the ICU waiting room to share this report with the chief’s sister and Jake Hulquist.
Alone in the hallway with Jenna, I said, “Have you swung both hammers, or are you holding one back?”
“It’s just the way I said, Oddie. We don’t soften bad news for the spouse. We tell it straight and all at once.”
“This blows.”
“Like a hurricane,” she agreed. “You’re close to him, I know.”
“Yeah.”
“I think he’s eventually going to make it,” Jenna said. “Not just out of surgery but all the way home on his own two feet.”
“But no guarantees.”
“When is there ever? He’s a mess inside. But he’s not half as bad as we thought he’d be when we first put him on the table, before we opened him up. It’s a thousand to one odds that anyone can survive three chest wounds. He’s incredibly lucky.”
“If that’s luck, he better never go to Vegas.”
With a fingertip, she pulled down one of my lower eyelids and examined the bloodshot scenery: “You look wrecked, Oddie.”
“It’s been a long day. You know—breakfast starts early at the Grille.”
“I was in with two friends the other day. You cooked our lunch.”
“Really? Sometimes things are so frantic at the griddle, I don’t get a chance to look around, see who’s there.”
“You’ve got a talent.”
“Thanks,” I said. “That’s sweet.”
“I hear your dad’s selling the moon.”
“Yeah, but it’s not a great place for a vacation home. No air.”
“You’re nothing at all like your dad.”
“Who would want to be?”
“Most guys.”
“I think you’re wrong about that.”
“You know what? You ought to give cooking classes.”
“Mostly what I do is fry.”
“I’d still sign up.”
“It’s not exactly healthy cuisine,” I said.
“We’ve all got to die of something. You still with Bronwen?”
“Stormy. Yeah. It’s like destiny.”
“How do you know?”
“We have matching birthmarks.”
“You mean the one she got tattooed to match yours?”
“Tattooed? No. It’s real enough. We’re getting married.”
“Oh. I didn’t hear about that.”
“It’s breaking news.”
“Wait’ll the girls find out,” Jenna said.
“What girls?”
“All of them.”
This conversation wasn’t always making perfect sense to me, so I said, “Listen, I’m walking grime, I need a bath, but I don’t want to leave the hospital till Chief Porter comes out of surgery safe like you say. Is there anywhere here I can get a shower?”
“Let me talk to the head nurse on this floor. We should be able to find you a place.”
“I’ve got a change of clothes in the car,” I said.
“Go get them. Then ask at the nurses’ station. I’ll have arranged everything.”
As she started to turn away, I said, “Jenna, did you take piano lessons?”
“Did I ever. Years of them. But why would you ask?”
“Your hands are so beautiful. I bet you play like a dream.”
She gave me a long look that I couldn’t interpret: mysteries in those blue-flecked gray eyes.
Then she said, “This wedding thing is true?”
“Saturday,” I assured her, full of pride that Stormy would have me. “If I could leave town, we’d have gone to Vegas and been married by dawn.”
“Some people are way lucky,” Jenna Spinelli said. “Even luckier than Chief Porter still sucking wind after three chest wounds.”
Assuming that she meant I was fortunate to have won Stormy, I said, “After the mother-father mess I was handed, fate owed me big.”
Jenna had that inscrutable look down perfect. “Call me if you decide to give cooking lessons, after all. I’ll bet you really know how to whisk.”
Puzzled, I said, “Whisk? Well, sure, but that’s mainly just for scrambled eggs. With pancakes and waffles, you’ve got to fold the batter, and otherwise almost everything is fry, fry, fry.”
She smiled, shook her head, and walked away, leaving me with that perplexity I’d sometimes felt when, as the player with the best stats on our high-school baseball team, I had been served up what appeared to be a perfect strike-zone slow pitch and yet had swung above it, not even kissing the ball.
I hurried out to Rosalia’s car in the parking lot. I took the gun from the shopping bag and tucked it under the driver’s seat.
When I returned to the fourth-floor nurses’ station with my bag, they were expecting me. Although tending to the sick and dying would seem to be grim work, all four nurses on the graveyard shift were smiling and clearly amused about something.
In addition to the usual range of private and semiprivate rooms, the fourth floor offered a few fancier co-payment accommodations that could pass for hotel rooms. Carpeted and decorated in warm colors, they featured comfortable furniture, nicely framed bad art, and full bathrooms with under-the-counter refrigerators.
Ambulatory patients able to afford to augment their insurance benefits can book such swank, escaping the dreary hospital ambience. This is said to speed
recuperation, which I’m sure that it does, in spite of the paint-by-the-number sailing ships and the kittens in fields of daisies.
Provided with a set of towels, I was given the use of a bathroom in an unoccupied luxury unit. The paintings followed a circus theme: clowns with balloons, sad-eyed lions, a pretty high-wire walker with a pink parasol. I chewed two tablets of antacid.
After shaving, showering, shampooing, and changing into fresh clothes, I still felt as if I’d crawled out from under a steamroller, fully flattened.
I sat in an armchair and went through the contents of the wallet that I’d taken off Robertson’s body. Credit cards, driver’s license, a library card…
The only unusual item was a plain black plastic card featuring nothing but a line of blind-embossed dots that I could feel with my fingertips and see clearly in angled light. They looked like this:
The dots were raised on one side of the card, depressed on the other. Although it might have been coded data that could be read by some kind of machine, I assumed that it was a line of tangible type, otherwise known as Braille.
Considering that he had not been blind, I couldn’t imagine why Robertson would have carried a card bearing a statement in Braille.
Neither could I imagine why any blind person would have kept such an item in his wallet.
I sat in the armchair, slowly sliding a thumb across the dots, then the tip of a forefinger. They were only bumps in the plastic, unreadable to me, but the more that I traced their patterns, the more disquieted I became.
Tracing, tracing, I closed my eyes, playing at being blind and hoping that my sixth sense might suggest the purpose of the card if not the meaning of the words spelled by the dots.
The hour was late, the moon sinking beyond the windows, the darkness intensifying and marshaling itself for a futile resistance against the bloody dawn.
I must not sleep. I dared not sleep. I slept.
In my dreams, guns cracked, slow-motion bullets bored visible tunnels in the air, coyotes bared fierce black plastic teeth marked by cryptic patterns of dots that I could almost read with my nervous fingers. In Robertson’s livid chest, the oozing wound opened before me as if it were a black hole and I were an astronaut in deep space, drawing me with irresistible gravity into its depths, to oblivion.