by Bill Alive
“Ah, Gwen?” he said easily. “Or Ramiro Romero?”
Somehow he said it like, that guy, and she nodded and laughed a little.
“And they hinted you must have screwed up her dosage?” he said. “There Are No Murders in Brown County, right?”
She laughed again, obviously angry that they’d questioned her competence, but also a little scared.
“That’s why we have private detectives,” Mark said.
“Oh, you’re investigators?” she said. “Wow. Are you licensed?”
Mark’s smile froze, then quickly thawed. “Working on it. So what’d they say to you?”
“What do you think?” she said. “They knew what they wanted before they began. Never mind that Lindsay’s father could get millions—”
“Millions!” Mark and I blurted.
Her eyes narrowed again. There was an awkward silence.
Finally she said, “Mr. Villette, I take it your symptoms have suddenly cleared.”
“I am feeling pretty good, actually.”
“I see. Well, much as I would love to assist you, gentlemen, doctor-patient confidentiality is a serious obligation.”
“But why would her father get millions?” I said. “How did she have millions? What was in her will? Can’t you say that?”
“I’m afraid you’ll have to talk to her family,” she said firmly. “I hope you do. Lindsay was a very sweet woman. It’s very sad.”
Mark rose. “You’ve been wonderful,” he said. “Could I just have your number?” He let a pause hang, then added, “In case we think of any questions you’d feel comfortable answering?”
Her lips crinkled in a repressed smile, but she was quite professional as she said, “Certainly.”
As we walked out, I tried to catch her eye. “Thanks so much, Dr. Kistna! Nice to meet you!”
“You too,” she said, with polite boredom. “But don’t waste my appointment time again. I still need to bill for this.”
“Oh, it’s cool, it’s my parents’ … um, insurance … ”
She closed the door.
I didn’t linger. As we walked down the hospital hallway, Mark said, “That rules out natural death.”
“You think so?” I said, glad to focus on something besides Jivanta’s underwhelm.
“Not absolutely, but she seems legit. And besides … millions of dollars?”
“I know!” I said. “Talk about motive! Booyah!” I raised a hand for a high five, and to my surprise, Mark grinned and totally connected.
The clap echoed down the bare hall.
We froze and looked at each other, suddenly grim.
“That felt dirty,” Mark said.
“Yeah, it’s like, ‘Hooray, a family member killed her for money! Possibly her dad!’”
“Right,” Mark said. “I mean, I’m not happy she was—”
“I know,” I said.
“It’s just that—”
“Totally.”
“Cool,” he said. He sighed, then looked around. “So … where are we?”
“I don’t know, I thought you were leading,” I said.
“Of course I’m leading. That doesn’t mean I know where we’re going.” He hustled to the nearest door and peered through a view pane. “Crap.”
“What?”
“It’s a sick ward!”
“So? We’ll ask directions at the nurse desk.”
“So? Has it not occurred to you that a sick ward might not be a top hangout spot for an empath?”
“Oh,” I said. “Dude, nobody likes sick wards.”
He rubbed his eyebrows.
“Hey!” I said. “This is perfect! You can practice shielding!”
“Oh, rapture.”
“I’ll do it too. Maybe I can make an extra bubble around both of us.”
“I don’t think that’s how it works,” he said.
“I can still try—”
“I can do my own bubble!” he snapped.
I let that one hang. We stood in silence at the door to the sick ward.
“Lately we seem to be having more awkward moments than usual,” I said.
“I have a feeling we’re just getting started,” he said, and he went in.
I hadn’t smelled that hospital smell in years, rubbing alcohol and piss and sick. I think British people use “sick” for “vomit”, but for me, “sick” is really that — sickness — stagnant bodies losing their fight with decay. Plus the smells of coffee in Styrofoam, off-gassing plastic, and pungent flowers for the coming dead.
Mark walked stiffly beside me, his brow furrowed in concentration.
“How is it?” I whispered.
“Taking all my concentration,” he muttered, still squinting ahead. “It’s harder when you also have to walk.”
“But is it working?”
“It was. Sort of.”
“Awesome!” I said. “Oh, crap!”
“What?” he said. “Ow! You broke my … oh, crap!”
Not twenty feet ahead, grilling the nurse at the desk, towered Gwen.
Chapter 14
My first thought was to run. Anywhere. And I still say this would have been the best plan.
But Mark tugged me into the nearest hospital room. Behind the curtain, someone was snoring, presumably not in agony.
“What are you thinking?” I whispered. “If she catches us—”
“Ssh! Listen!” He snuck to the doorway and leaned as close to the opening as he dared.
“I don’t want to ask again, Rita,” Gwen was saying, in her best Drill Sergeant voice, with hints of District Attorney. Gwen is a connoisseur of intimidation. “Which room has Narkis Kalakos?”
“He’s practically in critical condition,” Rita pleaded. She sounded like the kind of nurse who has too many cats. I don’t even know why, she just did. “Mr. Kalakos barely survived a car accident!”
“Then he’ll probably survive this interview.”
Rita heaved a galactic sigh and rose. Mark scuttled back away from the opening, and the two women passed. Mark peeked out after them. When Rita had lumbered back alone, Mark waved me forward.
“Perfect, Gwen’s in a room,” I whispered. “Let’s leave.”
“Leave?” he said. “This is my one chance to try to read Gwen when she doesn’t know I’m there. She’s the only woman I can’t read.”
“What? Are women usually easier than dudes?”
“Give me a break! Night and day. Women are non-stop broadcasts, but men default to shielding. Except, of course, for anger, cruelty, and general assholery.”
“But you’re reading me constantly.”
“Guess you’re a special snowflake. And we’re housemates. Now come on, before we lose her!”
“But why do we have to read Gwen?” I whined.
He was already gone.
I don’t think I can really predict the future, but I knew there was no way this would end well.
Actually, it didn’t start well. When I nipped after him, I found him slumped against the wall beside an open room door, clutching his phone and trying to look casual, but clenching his teeth in agony.
“What … the … hell?” he whispered.
“That bad?” I said. I risked a peek through the door. Through the gauzy room curtain, I saw Gwen, who luckily had her back to me, leaning with folded arms over the patient. When I saw who the patient was, I gasped.
“You’re not going to believe this,” I said.
He groaned. “That damn waiter with the beard.”
A chill twinged my stomach. You never really get used to this. “You did look, right?” I said.
“Didn’t have to. I don’t know what it is about that guy, but man. Talk about connection.”
“So shield!”
“I am shielding.”
“How are you going to read Gwen while you’re shielding?”
“Working on it.”
Inside, the waiter was babbling high and fast. “It wasn’t me, the other guy was drunk. I
was sober, I promise! Stone cold!”
“I know,” Gwen said quietly. “I saw the blood work. But we found quite the stash in your trunk.”
“I didn’t know! I let a friend use my car! I’m clean, you tested my blood.”
Gwen’s voice chilled even colder. “Which friend?”
“I can’t … I swear, I didn’t know …”
“You had enough K-2 in your trunk to put you away for ten years. Easy.” Gwen leaned closer. “I am not going to have that synthetic crap in my town.”
The waiter whimpered.
I was getting freaked myself.
“Shit…” the waiter moaned. “He’s a good guy, it’s not…there’s these other people, I don’t want trouble.”
“Then talk to me. Now.”
The waiter groaned.
In the room’s bathroom, a toilet flushed.
I ducked out of the doorway just as Gwen snapped around to look.
“There’s someone else!” I whispered.
Mark, still hunched, nodded. “A kid.”
I heard the bathroom door open, and footsteps patter out. Gwen demanded, “You’ve got a kid?”
I literally shivered. Mark was on fire today.
“Don’t tell the nurses,” the waiter pleaded. “Her grandma had a surprise double shift, she’s got nowhere else she can be till ten tonight.”
Gwen was silent.
I risked another look. A super cute four-year-old was leaning on the bed, chewing a braid and staring up at Gwen with a shy smile.
Gwen was staring back, her profile a mask. No hint of expression.
But Mark gasped. His mouth twisted in pain, and his eyes went wide. “Oh my God, Gwen,” he whispered. “They shot your father.”
Now I did freak. Was there anything he didn’t know?
Inside, Gwen said, in a strained teacher voice, “Honey, here’s a dollar. Run go get a candy bar while I talk to your Dad.”
The girl skipped out, beaming. She gave us a wave as she passed, and I waved back.
Gwen’s voice went cold. “Listen to me, you stupid bastard. You tell them you’re out, never again, and you get yourself a real job and take care of that kid.”
“Okay, yes, I promise, I promise, thank you—”
“This is your one chance. If you don’t call me in a month with a real job, you are done.”
I was still processing this when I realized with horror she was stomping for the door.
Too late. She burst out, then spun on us with surprise and fury. “What the hell is this?” she demanded.
Mark was still hunched against the wall, but he raised his head. His face was wrought, and his eyes were wet. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “You really loved him.”
Gwen stared. For the first time I’d ever seen in my life, her mask cracked. Her lips parted, and her eyes glimmered with pain.
Then she hardened and blasted me a glare of white-hot rage.
“I didn’t tell him anything!” I cried. “I swear!”
She scrutinized me with a long, searing look. For a moment she looked surprised, and even faintly scared.
Then she snapped, “I don’t have time for this,” and stormed off.
I realized I had been trembling. I exhaled and collapsed against the wall. “That was too close,” I said. “I can’t believe we escaped her unscathed.”
But Mark was watching her go with a look that said he hadn’t.
Chapter 15
By the time we got to Thunder, Mark had recovered and re-entered his shell. He was swiping his phone like nothing had happened.
“Looks like the Linux guys sent us all that info on Lindsay’s family,” he said. “Let’s start with the husband.”
“Right now?” I said. I relaxed into the ratty shotgun seat and put it back. After the ambiguous encounter with Jivanta (though I was now remembering that she had given me a couple smiles) and the near-death experience with Gwen, not to mention almost getting stabbed for a blood sample, I wouldn’t have minded some downtime.
But Mark was already dialing. “No point in waiting. We just reminded Gwen we’re still on her case.”
“Yeah, but—”
“Hello?” Mark said. “Is this Calvin Crowley?”
I groaned and twisted around in the seat to approximate laying down for a catnap.
“Hi, yes, my name is Mark Falcon and I just have a few quick questions about Lindsay Mackenzie. I know you must be … no, I’m a detective. If we could just meet in person … yes, I’m a detective, I’ve been hired to … no, I’m afraid I can’t reveal the client.”
I gave up. I might as well be trying to take a nap inside a giant ashtray. I shoved around the empty cups on the floor and resolved to give Thunder a thorough cleaning.
“No, you’re not required by law to answer any questions,” Mark was saying, “but we do have a relationship with the local police force.”
Heh.
“It’ll really be much simpler if we can do this the easy way … Excellent … two o’clock? Perfect, and that’s at Tyson’s Corner? Yes, I’ll be the bald guy with the mustache. And my colleague is a brown-haired beanpole with too much gel.”
“Hey!” I said.
“Great, see you then. Thanks!” He hung up, fired up Thunder, and screeched out of the parking lot.
“Whoa!” I said, scrambling to belt in. “What’s the rush?”
“Tyson’s Corner by two o’clock?” he said. “There’d better not be any traffic.”
Tyson’s Corner is this huge shopping metropolis deep in the bowels of the Northern Virginia Sprawl around D.C. This meant that, as with going pretty much anywhere that wasn’t Back Mosby, we’d have to get on I-66 and head east for at least forty-five minutes. The first half hour would be classic rural Blue Ridge scenery — rolling mountains, gentle fields, and HAZMAT trucks doing eighty. But once we hit the outskirts of the Sprawl, around Gainesville or Manassas, all bets would be off. We might keep flying and get there early, or we might enter a Black Hole Traffic Vortex that would suck the time-space continuum into a nonstop brake light loop.
Mark sped in silence for the first fifteen minutes, weaving around the trucks. Then, with no warning, he said, “So what happened with Gwen’s father?”
“Oh, man,” I said. “How’d you know about that?”
“I don’t. What happened?”
“He was a cop,” I said. “Got shot on a drug raid when Gwen was like ten.”
“Crap.”
“Yeah. Ceci was only three, she doesn’t really remember him. Their mom remarried, and her stepdad’s awesome. At least, Ceci thinks so. She says Gwen tried to love him, but … you know. She’s Gwen.”
“And now she fights bad guys.”
“Pretty much. I mean, I’m not sure why she got assigned way out here. I think she wanted to tackle the big city criminals, burn them to the ground, but something went wrong at Police Academy. She was dating this cop, Bradley Hirst, who turned out to be a turd. You know, like a Northern Virginia Power Turd, where both parents are corporate defense lawyers and half his aunts and uncles run federal agencies. I’m surprised his family let him be a lowly cop.”
Mark scowled. “Hirst is first,” he muttered, in a singsong taunt. “Hirst is worst.”
“What? You know him?” I said.
“Long story,” he said. “Gwen really dated that guy?”
“They had a bad break-up. He got a top spot as a Police Detective in Alexandria, but Gwen got sent to the sticks.”
“The sticks?” he cried, in mock offense. “And what are you doing in the sticks?”
“Me? I love it out here! I grew up in Manassas, which basically has all the traffic and hassle and gross of the city without any of the museums or operas or flash mobs or whatever that make a city possibly worth it. Actually, that goes for the Sprawl in general.”
“Hey now,” Mark said. “Old Town Alexandria’s pretty cool.”
“Yeah, because they made it in the nineteenth century,” I said. “Any
way, I grew up seeing the Blue Ridge mountains in the distance, like a faraway kingdom where there was more to life than strip malls and traffic lights. I went out to Lord Chesney, made a bunch of local friends, got the job at Valley Visions, and … yeah. The only thing is that people out here don’t seem to do anything besides work and watch TV, but that’s got to be an optical illusion. I’ll figure it out. What about you?”
Mark’s face clouded. “Like I said. Long story.”
“We’ve got time.”
“Not really,” he said. “I hate doing stuff half-ass.”
Really? I thought, flashing images of his rickety home-drilled pine shelves, his barely habitable cabin, his slowly decaying car, his sporadic freelance business…
He growled. “I didn’t say I was perfect.”
“Dude!” I said. “You can’t take it personally unless I actually say it!”
“Oh yeah? You try it.”
We drove the rest of the way in silence. I practiced shielding.
You should give it a go, it’s pretty trippy. For some reason, my bubble kept going purple, like that invisibility girl in Incredibles. And I kept forgetting to imagine it all around to my back. Was I really going to have to train myself to do this whenever I hung out with Mark? Just to maintain a little mental privacy?
The traffic gods had mercy, and we rolled in to the infinite Tyson’s Corner parking lot well before two. As we hunted through the gargantuan mall for the specific ritzy cafe Crowley had picked, Mark deigned to make conversation.
“Crud, I forgot how expensive it us up here,” he grumbled. “They’re going to charge ten bucks for a cup of coffee.”
“Can’t you deduct it as a business expense?” I said.
“Not sure. And I hate tracking all that crap.”
“Really? I love details.”
He started to snark a riposte, but was interrupted by his own wince.
I realized we were walking through a busy mall lobby, surrounded by strangers. Ten feet ahead, an old crone was struggling with a walker.
“Oh, crap!” I said. “We can’t do this interview in public.”
“It’s all good, I’ll be fine,” he said.
“You don’t look particularly fine.”
“Just give me a sec. Not everyone here has arthritis.” He scanned the lobby, then scooted to a bench and sat. He was hauling his laptop backpack (he didn’t seem to leave home without it), and he parked it on the bench beside him.
