Joe Kurtz Omnibus

by Dan Simmons

  The hospital room was mostly dark but even the dim light from the bedside table hurt his eyes. Everything had a nimbus around it and when he attempted to focus his eyes, nausea rose up through the pain like a shark fin cutting through oily water. He solved that by closing his eyes. Now there were only the inevitable, ambient hospital sounds from beyond the closed door—intercom announcements, the squeak of rubber soles on tile, inaudible conversations in that muffled tone heard only in hospitals and betting parlors—but each and every one of these sounds, including the rasp of his own breathing, was too loud for Joe Kurtz.

  He started to raise his hand to rub the right side of his head—the epicenter of this universe of pain—but his hand jarred to a halt next to the metal bedrail.

  It took Kurtz two more tries and several groggy seconds of mental effort and the pain of opening his eyes again before he realized why his right arm wouldn’t work; he was handcuffed to the metal frame of the hospital bed.

  It took him another minute or two before he realized that his left hand and arm were free. Slowly, laboriously, Kurtz reached that hand across his face—eyes squinted to keep the nausea at bay—and touched the right side of his head, just above his ear, where the pain was broadcasting like the concentric radio-wave ripples in the beginning of one of those old RKO films.

  He could feel that the right side of his head was a mass of bandages and tape. But when he saw that there were only two IVs visible punched into his body and only one monitoring machine beeping a few feet away, and no doctors or nurses huddled around with their resuscitation crash cart, he figured he wasn’t on the verge of checking out yet. Either that, or they’d already given up on him, issued a Do Not Resuscitate order, and gone off for coffee to leave him to die here in the dark.

  “Fuck it,” said Kurtz and winced as the pain went from 7.8 to 8.6 on his own private Agony Richter Scale. He was used to pain, but this was…silly.

  He dropped his hand on his chest, closed his eyes, and allowed himself to float out of the line of fire.

  Mr. Kurtz? Mr. Kurtz?”

  Kurtz awoke with the same blurred vision, same nausea, but different pain. It was worse. Some fool was pulling his eyelids back and shining a light in his eyes.

  “Mr. Kurtz?” The face making the sound was brown, male, middle-aged and mild-looking behind black-rimmed glasses. He was wearing a white coat. “I’m Dr. Singh, Mr. Kurtz. I dealt with your injuries in the ER and just came from surgery on your friend.”

  Kurtz got the face into focus. He wanted to say “What friend?” but it wasn’t worth trying to speak yet. Not yet.

  “You were struck in the right side of your head by a bullet, Mr. Kurtz, but it did not penetrate your skull,” said Singh in his mild, singsong voice that sounded like three chainsaws roaring to Kurtz.

  Superman, thought Kurtz. Fucking bullets bounce right off.

  “Why?” he said.

  “What, Mr. Kurtz?”

  Kurtz had to close his eyes at the thought of speaking again. Forcing himself to articulate, he said, “Why…didn’t…bullet…penetrate?”

  Singh nodded his understanding. “It was a small caliber bullet, Mr. Kurtz. A twenty-two. Before it struck you, it had passed through the upper arm of…of the person with you…and ricocheted off the concrete pillar behind you. It was considerably flattened and much of its kinetic energy had been expended. Still, if you had been turning your head to the right rather than to the left when it struck you, we would be extracting it from your brain as we speak—probably during an autopsy.”

  All in all, thought Kurtz, more information than he had needed at the moment.

  “As it is,” continued Singh, the soft singsong voice sawing away through Kurtz’s skull, “you have a moderate-to-severe concussion and a subcranial hematoma that does not require trepanning at this time, your left eye will not dilate, blood has drained down beneath your eyes and the whites of your eyes are very bloodshot—but that is not important. We’ll assess motor skills and secondary effects in the morning.”

  “Who…” began Kurtz. He wasn’t even sure what he was going to ask. Who shot me? Who was with me? Who’s going to pay for this?

  “The police are here, Mr. Kurtz,” interrupted Dr. Singh. “It’s the reason we haven’t administered any painkiller since you regained consciousness. They need to talk to you.”

  Kurtz didn’t turn his head to look, but when the doctor moved aside he could see the two detectives, plainclothes, one male, one female, one black, one white. Kurtz didn’t know the black male. He had once been in love with the white female.

  The black detective, dressed nattily in tweed, vest, and school tie, stepped closer. “Joseph Kurtz, I’m Detective Paul Kemper. My partner and I are investigating the shooting of you and Parole Officer Margaret O’Toole…” began the man in an almost avuncular resonant voice.

  On, shit, thought Kurtz. He closed his eyes and remembered O’Toole opening a door for him.

  “…can be used against you in a court of law,” the man was saying. “If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you. Do you understand your rights as I’ve just explained them to you?”

  Kurtz said something through the pain.

  “What?” said Detective Kemper. Kurtz changed his mind. The man’s voice wasn’t nearly as friendly or avuncular-sounding now.

  “Didn’t shoot her,” repeated Kurtz.

  “Did you understand your rights as I explained them to you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And do you wish an attorney at this time?”

  I wish some Darvocet or morphine at this time, thought Kurtz. “Yeah… I mean, no. No attorney.”

  “You’ll talk to us now?”

  How many fucking times are you going to ask me? thought Kurtz. He realized that he’d spoken this aloud only when the male detective got a stern don’t-fuck-with-me cop look on his face and the female detective still standing against the far wall chuckled. Kurtz knew that chuckle.

  “Why were you in the garage with Officer O’Toole?” asked Kemper. The detective’s voice sounded totally un-avuncular this time.

  “Coincidence.” Kurtz had never noticed how many syllables were in that word before today. All four of them hit him like hot spikes behind the eyes. He needed shorter words.

  “Did you fire her weapon?”

  “I don’t remember,” said Kurtz, sounding like every perp he’d ever questioned.

  Kemper sighed and shot a glance at his partner. Kurtz also looked at her and watched her look back at him. She obviously recognized him. She must have recognized his name before they started this interview. Is that why she wasn’t speaking? She was, Kurtz was startled to realize through the pain in his head, as beautiful as ever. More beautiful.

  “Did you see the assailant or assailants?” asked Kemper.

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Did you enter the garage as part of a conspiracy to shoot and kill Officer O’Toole?”

  Kurtz just looked at him. He knew that he was stupid with pain and concussion at the moment, but nobody was that stupid.

  Dr. Singh filled the silence. “Detectives, a concussion of this severity is often accompanied by memory loss of the accident that created it.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Kemper, closing his notebook. “This was no accident. Doctor. And this guy remembers everything he wants to remember.”

  “Paul,” said the female detective, “leave him alone. We have the tapes. Let Kurtz get some painkiller and sleep and we’ll talk to him in the morning.”

  “He’ll be all lawyered up in the morning,” said Kemper.

  The woman shook her head. “No he won’t.”

  It’d been twenty years since Kurtz had last seen Rigby King—what was her married name? Something Arabic, he thought—but she still looked like the Rigby he’d known at Father Baker’s and again in Thailand. Brown eyes, full figure, short dark hair, and a smile as quick and radiant as the gymnast she’d been named for.

  Kemper left t
he room and Rigby came to the side of the bed and raised a hand as if she was going to squeeze Kurtz’s shoulder. Instead she gripped the metal railing of the hospital bed and shook it slightly, making Kurtz’s handcuffed wrist and arm sway.

  “Get some sleep, Joe.”

  “Yeah.”

  When they were both gone, Singh called in a nurse and they injected something into the IV port.

  “Something for the pain and a mild sedative,” said the doctor. “We’ve kept you semi-conscious and under observation long enough to let you sleep now without worrying unduly about the concussion’s effects.”

  “Yeah,” said Kurtz.

  As soon as the two left, Kurtz reached down, ripped away gauze and tape, and pulled the IV out of his left arm.

  Joe Kurtz had seen what could happen to a man doped up and helpless in a hospital bed. Besides, he had a lot of thinking to do through the pain before morning came.

  CHAPTER

  THREE

  The two men came in the night, entering his room sometime after three A.M.

  Kurtz had nothing to defend himself with—he would have stolen a knife and hidden it under his pillows if the hospital had provided him with a dinner, but they hadn’t fed him, so he was still handcuffed and defenseless. He readied himself the only way be could think of—sliding the long intravenous needle on its flexible tube down into his left hand and focusing his energy to swing it into an attacker’s eye if he got close enough. But if one or both of these men pulled a gun, Kurtz’s only hope was to throw himself to his left and try to tip the entire hospital bed onto himself while screaming bloody murder.

  Squinting through his headache pain at the two shadows in the doorway, Kurtz wasn’t sure he’d have the strength to tip the bed over. Besides, mattresses, even hospital mattresses, were notoriously poor armor against bullets.

  There was a nurse-call button clipped to his pillow above Kurtz’s head, but his right hand couldn’t reach it because of the handcuffs and he wasn’t about to release or reveal the IV needle in his left hand.

  Kurtz could see the two men silhouetted in the doorway in the minute before they entered the room, and then the dim glow from medical monitors illuminated them. One man was tall, very thin, and Asian; his black hair was combed straight back and he was wearing an expensive dark suit. His hands were empty. The closer man was in a wheelchair, wheeling himself toward Kurtz’s bed with thrusts of his powerful arms.

  Kurtz didn’t pretend he was asleep. He watched the man in the wheelchair come in. Any hopes that it was an errant hospital patient out of his bed at three A.M. disappeared as Kurtz saw that this man was also wearing a suit and tie. He was old—Kurtz saw the thinning gray hair cut in a buzz cut and the lines and scars on the man’s tanned face, but his eyebrows were jet black, his chin strong, and his expression fierce. The old man’s upper body looked large and powerful, his hands huge, but even in the dim light, Kurtz could see that his trousers were covering wasted sticks.

  The Asian man’s expression was neutral and he stayed two feet behind the big man in the chair.

  The wheels of the chair squeeked on tile until the wasted legs bumped into Kurtz’s bed. Working to focus, Kurtz stared past his own handcuffed wrist and into the old man’s cold, blue eyes. All Kurtz could do now was hope that the visit was a friendly one.

  “You miserable low-life useless scumbag piece of shit,” hissed the old man. “It should’ve been you who got the bullet in the brain.”

  So much for the friendly visit theory.

  The big man in the wheelchair raised his huge hand and slapped Kurtz in the side of the head, right where the bandages and tape were massed above the wound.

  Riding the pain for the next few seconds was probably a lot like riding the old roller coaster at Crystal Beach while standing up. Kurtz wanted to throw up and pass out, in that order, but he forced himself to do neither. He opened his eyes and slipped the long IV needle between the third and fourth fingers of his left hand the way he’d learned how to grip a handleless shank-blade in Attica.

  “You worthless fuck,” said the man in the chair, his voice loud now. “If she dies, I’ll kill you with my bare hands.” He slapped Kurtz again, a powerful, open-handed smash across the mouth, but this wasn’t nearly so painful. Kurtz turned his head back and watched the old man’s eyes and the Asian’s hands.

  “Major,” the Asian said softly. The tall man gently put his hands on the grips of the wheelchair and pulled the old man three feet back. “We have to go.”

  The Major’s mad, blue-eyed stare never left Kurtz’s face. Kurtz didn’t mind this. He’d been hate-stared at by experts. But he had to admit that this old man was a finalist in that contest.

  “Major,” whispered the tall man and the man in the chair finally broke the gaze, but not before lifting his huge, blunt forefinger and shaking it at Kurtz as if to make a promise. Kurtz saw that the finger was bloody a second before he felt the blood flowing down his right temple.

  The Asian wheeled the old man around and pushed him out the door into the dimly lighted hallway. Neither man looked back.

  Kurtz didn’t think he’d go to sleep after that—or, rather, lose consciousness, since real sleep wasn’t an option above this baseline of pain—but he must have, because he woke up with James Bond looking down at him in the early morning light.

  This wasn’t the real James Bond—Sean Connery—but that newest guy: dark hair blowdried and combed back, sardonic smile, impeccable suit from Saville Row or somewhere—Kurtz had no idea what a Saville Row suit looked like—plus a gleaming white shirt with spread collar, tasteful paisley tie sporting a Windsor knot, pocket square ruffled perfectly and not so gauche as to match the tie, tasteful Rolex just visible beneath the perfectly shot starched cuff.

  “Mr. Kurtz?” said James Bond, “My name is Kennedy. Brian Kennedy.”

  Kurtz thought that he did also look a bit like that Kennedy scion who’d flown his plane and passengers upside-down into the sea.

  Brian Kennedy started to offer Kurtz a heavy cream business card, noticed the handcuffs, and without interrupting his motion, set the card on the bedside table.

  “How are you feeling, Mr. Kurtz?” asked Kennedy.

  “Who are you?” managed Kurtz. He thought he must be feeling better. These three syllables had made his vision dance with pain, but hadn’t made him want to puke.

  The handsome man touched his card. “I own and run Empire State Security and Executive Protection. Our Buffalo branch provided security cameras for the parking garage in which yesterday’s shooting took place.”

  Every other light had been knocked out when we came into the garage, thought Kurtz. That tipped me. The memory of the shooting was seeping back into his bruised brain like sludge under a closed door.

  He said nothing to Kennedy-Bond. Was the man here because of some lawsuit potential to his company? Kurtz was having trouble working this out through the pain so he stared and let Kennedy keep talking.

  “We’ve given the police the original surveillance tape from the garage,” continued Kennedy. “The footage doesn’t show the shooters, but it’s obvious that your actions—and Officer O’Toole’s—are visible and clearly above suspicion.”

  Then why am I still cuffed? thought Kurtz. Instead, he managed to say, “How is she? O’Toole?”

  Brian Kennedy’s face was James-Bond cool as he said, “She was hit three times. All twenty-two slugs. One broke a left rib. Another passed through her upper arm, ricocheted, and hit you. But one caught her in the temple and lodged in her brain, left frontal lobe. They got it out after five hours of surgery and had to take some of the damaged brain tissue out as well. She’s in a partially induced coma—whatever that means—but it looks as if she has a chance for survival, none for total recovery.”

  “I want to see the tape,” said Kurtz. “You said you gave the cops the original, which means you made a copy.”

  Kennedy cocked his head. “Why do you…oh, you don’t remember the attack, do yo
u? You were telling the detectives the truth.”

  Kurtz waited.

  “All right,” said Kennedy. “Give me a call at the Buffalo number on the card whenever you’re ready to…”

  “Today,” said Kurtz. “This afternoon.”

  Kennedy paused at the door and smiled that cynical, bemused James Bond smile. “I don’t think you’ll be…” he began and then paused to look at Kurtz. “All right, Mr. Kurtz,” he said, “it certainly won’t please the investigating officers if they ever discover I’ve done this, but we’ll have the tape ready to show you when you stop by our offices this afternoon. I guess you’ve earned the right to see it.”

  Kennedy started through the door but then stopped and turned back again. “Peg and I are engaged,” he said softly. “We’d planned to get married in April.”

  Then he was gone and a nurse was bustling in with a bedpan jug and something that might be breakfast.

  It’s bloody Grand Central Station here, thought Kurtz. Dr. Singh came in—after Kurtz had ignored everything on the breakfast tray except the knife—to shine a penlight in his eyes, check under the bandages, tut-tut at all the bleeding visible—Kurtz didn’t mention the cuff in the head from Mr. Wheelchair—to direct the nurse in replacing the gauze and tape, to tell Kurtz that they’d be keeping him another twenty-four hours for observation, and to order more X rays of his skull. And finally Singh said that the officer who had been guarding this end of the hall was gone.

  “When did he leave?” asked Kurtz. Sitting propped up against the pillows, he found it was easier to focus his eyes this morning. The pain in his head continued like a heavy sleet-storm against a metal roof, but that was better than the steel spikes being driven into his skull the night before. Red and yellow circles of pain from the penlight exercise still danced in his vision.

  “I wasn’t on duty,” said Singh, “but I believe around midnight.”