Poison Flower

by Thomas Perry

  She was held upright by the seat belt, and she kept her eyes open, scanning the lines of cars in each direction, looking for a police car. That would be all it would take-a police car. She could attract the cop's attention, and this would be over. She watched for what seemed to be twenty minutes, but she knew it couldn't have been that long.

  The police car never seemed to appear, and the pain of the gunshot wound was worse and worse. She felt sweat at her temples, the back of her neck, her sides. She kept fighting waves of dizzy nausea, then faintness. She couldn't lose consciousness now, or she might miss her chance to stop the two men before they got her out of sight somewhere.

  The car slowed a bit, sped up, slowed, and she realized the driver was looking for an address. As he did, other cars began to pass him on the right-a chance. The seat belt, the handcuffs, and the man's hand holding the tourniquet tight would prevent her from moving anything but her head now. She shrieked as loudly as she could, her voice tearing the air, and threw her head against the side window of the car. She shouted, "Help! Call the police!"

  A man driving the car beside her looked shocked. He slowed, then stared at her. Her captor put his arm around her shoulder and pulled her inward. He held up his badge and gave an authoritative wave to tell the gawker to move on. The man pulled over and turned right. She screamed, "No! They're not cops!"

  The man holding the tourniquet tugged on it and the pain shot up her leg. "You really are stupid," he said. "There's no need to kill yourself. Leave something to us, for Christ's sake."

  The driver was staring intently in his mirrors. "That guy's gone, right"

  The other man looked out the rear window. "Yeah. It's safe to go in."

  The car turned left and went between two one-story gray buildings that looked like small factories or warehouses into a parking lot. There were three more low buildings ranged around the lot. The car stopped beside the door of the second one. "Let's get her inside."

  Jane's world was becoming a place with dark patches that would join at the periphery of her vision and then spread like a stain. The man swung open the car door, but she mostly heard it, because almost instantly the pain in her leg was sharp and deep, like a blade thrust into the muscle. She felt as though the knife's serrations were scraping the bone, and then the men had her arms over their shoulders, half carrying, half dragging her to a door, and then inside.

  The inner space was huge, like a small high-tech factory with brushed concrete floors and acoustic tile ceilings. "Let's put her on the couch." The voice had a slight echo as though the place were entirely empty, but it wasn't. There were rooms of some sort built along the side-offices, maybe.

  The two men, now just shadows, dragged her to a couch and then lowered her onto it. The pain always grew, never diminished. Every movement seemed to set off a spasm, bending her body over like a hook. The two shadows stayed there, two blots in the middle of her burning red pain. One of the shadows said, "If you want to scream now, go ahead. That's why we brought you here. But while you're doing it, start thinking about something. You're going to talk. Everybody does."

  2.

  Jane woke up and saw that a new man was beside her, wearing a surgical mask, headgear, and gloves, using a pair of curved bandage scissors to cut along the outer seam of her pants. A doctor. He pulled back the flap of fabric and examined her wound for a few seconds, then began to talk to the man standing above her behind the couch. His mask muffled his voice.

  "You had to shoot her" He was angry. "This is going to make everything harder for you than you can even imagine. She could die." He had a foreign accent, but with the mask she couldn't place it. His skin was light brown, and his eyes were dark.

  "Then make sure she doesn't die."

  "Easy to say after the bullet has been fired."

  "There was no choice."

  "She'll need daily care to control the bleeding, prevent infection, and get the wound to heal properly. She must have antibiotics, painkillers and sedatives, IV feeding."

  "You'll be well paid for everything you do, and for once you won't have to testify in court that your patient got hurt in a car accident."

  "Very funny. I'll need to bring my nurse to assist me."

  "Is she worth all this trouble" The second man was standing somewhere beyond Jane's head, where she couldn't see him.

  "What do you mean"

  "Is she even going to live"

  The doctor's voice became contemptuous. "The bullet passed through her leg and exited the other side, which is why there are two holes. She didn't die of shock, or of blood loss, and the femur wasn't broken, all of which I attribute to luck. The care she gets will determine whether she lives or not. You could take her to a hospital and her chances would be very good."

  "I don't think so. I want to hold on to her."

  "Then we'll have to do our best here. I'll clean and dress the wound now, and then set up the rest tomorrow morning. Let me give her a painkiller so we can move her to the table." He took a very small bottle of clear liquid from his bag, unwrapped a hypodermic needle, filled it, and swabbed Jane's leg with a cotton ball. She smelled the strong, almost nauseating odor of alcohol, and then felt the needle.

  EVERY TIME JANE AWOKE SHE tried to sit up, but there was something tied across her under her arms that prevented her. She was aware, as in a dream, that if she could simply overcome her confusion and gather her thoughts, she would be capable of escaping the restraints. But each time, she exhausted herself and fell back to sleep.

  In her dream it was a winter night somewhere in the north. She could feel the clear, freezing air and see the light dusting of snow on the ground, indented with many footprints. She was in a big enclosure of straight tree trunks with the bark still on them, sharpened at the top, and in the middle there was a single fire that gave no warmth but illuminated the space with a flickering light. There were other people-women and children mostly, with just a few men here and there. She knew they were all captives. They wore dark, dirty, torn clothes she couldn't even tie to one period or style, and they stayed in the shadows. Some of them limped or crouched or tried to bind up their wounds.

  Jane walked, wandering among the people, listening to the things they said to each other. She tried to be unobtrusive, slouching and lowering her eyes to look at the ground as she passed. "Do you think they'll just keep us here until we die" There was no attempt to answer. "Who are they" "Strangers. Enemies."

  She looked up, and she could see his eyes looking at her long before she could make her way through the crowd to reach him. He stood alone, even though there were people on all sides of him. He wore the same gray polyester sport coat with a faint greenish tinge. He had worn it when she had met him, and even though the elbows were faded on that day, probably from countless hours of leaning on poker tables, he wore the coat later when she was taking him into hiding. He must have had it on when he died. As always, he had on brown dress pants that were shiny in the seat and knees, and scuffed shoes.

  Harry Kemple was her only mistake, a gambler who had heard murderers burst into his poker game while he was in the bathroom and kill all of the men at the table. He had opened the door a crack and seen them leaving. They had hunted him, so she had saved his life, taken him away, and given him a new name. Years later she had been fooled into leading one of the hunters to the forger who had made the documents for Harry's new identity, and in two days he was dead. Since then Harry sometimes visited her in dreams.

  "I was coming to find you," he said.

  She came closer. "Where are we"

  "Just one of those places between life and death. It's a convenient place for people from both sides to meet."

  "Sleep"

  "You're not asleep. You're closer to death than sleep."

  She looked down at her wounded leg, and at her feet there was blood in the snow.

  "Your blood is leaking out of you. Those stitches the doctor put in your leg and the bandages are only slowing it down." He lifted his face to look upwa
rd and pointed at his throat, where the medical examiner had put some crude stitches to close the gaping wound where the knife blade had passed. "Nobody knows more about bleeding out than I do."

  "I'm so sorry, Harry," she said. "I thought he was a runner who needed my help. It never occurred to me that he was using me to find his way to you."

  Harry raised an eyebrow and stared at her for a couple of seconds. Then he said, "Every time we meet I have to listen to the same apology. Forget it. If he hadn't collected on the contract on me, there would have been a car crash or a microbe or a blood clot. When you're dead, the way death got you is just one thing that happened among thousands. You don't care more about that day than any of the others, just because it was the last day. You'll see."

  "Are you telling me I'm dying"

  He frowned. "At the moment you are. You're losing blood, and you're in the hands of enemies."

  "Is there any way I can save myself"

  Harry held up his hands and shrugged. "How do I know what you can do or can't do You're the only one who has any way to guess. These things aren't determined ahead of time. The grandsons of Sky Woman fight. That's all we know. The left-handed twin Hanegoategeh raises his arm to strike, but the right-handed twin Hawenneyu reaches up with his right, like the image in a mirror, to block it. Creator and Destroyer, life giver and killer, they struggle, and their constant fighting is what makes the world we pass through into a battlefield. Sooner or later, everyone is a casualty. Every-body sheds his blood, like me. And like you."

  She followed his eyes downward, and looked at her leg. The big white bandage that was wrapped around the wound was bright scarlet, and the blood in the snow was pooling. She raised her eyes again. "I've lost blood before," she said. "I want to do better than to lie on that couch waiting to die so the pain will end. What can I do"

  Harry sighed. "You know I love you, but you made your choice a long time ago-day over night, life over death. You think you're on the side of the good twin, the Creator twin. If he made you, then he must have made you what you are for his own purposes. We can't know the scheme, because he's trying to fool his brother, and the left-handed twin might read our minds."

  "But that doesn't tell me what to do."

  "If you're Hawenneyu's creature, be exactly what he made you, because you have a part to play in the fight. If he made you a fox, he must need a fox, so be the fox he made. Don't think you're smart enough to improve his strategy."

  "And if I die"

  "You will die. You know that."

  "I meant-"

  "I know. Gather your strength now. Your biggest trials are coming soon. Remember the Grandfathers, the ones who chose to stand and fight to block the trail while their friends escaped."

  Jane awoke. She was in the big, dimly lit room on the couch, covered with a sheet. She was sweating, and she was very conscious of the tight bandage wrapped around her leg. Her white blouse and vest had been replaced by a man's shirt. She was terribly hot. She wondered if she had a fever and if it meant that the wound was infected.

  Her eyes moved, following the weak, dim light to the source, a reading lamp on a small desk far off on the other end of the room. It seemed to flicker, and she realized there was also a laptop computer on the desk. A movie was playing on its screen. Jane hoped it was an online version, and not just a DVD playing. In less than a minute she could use a computer to e-mail her husband Carey or the local police. There were a pair of earphones on the desk, but nobody was visible.

  Jane welcomed the extra light because it illuminated her surroundings, and gave her a chance to explore without moving. There were six windows in a row about fifteen feet from the floor, but they looked like immovable glass installed to let daylight into the building but not to open. They had been covered with blackout fabric taped to the glass so no light could pass in or out-had they simply been painted black They had no latches. The right side of the big room had a wall with four doors, but the wall seemed to extend only to the acoustic tile ceiling.

  She heard a door open, and when it did, she heard water, like a toilet tank refilling. The door closed again and a woman in hospital scrubs and a pair of white sneakers walked to the computer. The woman had very dark, curly hair gathered into a bushy ponytail behind her head, and she wore glasses with rectangular lenses and black frames.

  Jane tried to evaluate her features. Did she look cruel or dishonest Jane saw no sign of either. She might be foreign and might not speak English well enough to know that Jane had been kidnapped. But then, what could she imagine had happened If she was a nurse, she knew Jane's wound was from a gunshot, and she certainly knew this industrial space wasn't a hospital.

  Jane decided the woman in scrubs couldn't be much help. Then it occurred to her that the nurse and the doctor might help her unintentionally. At some point, the men who had brought her here were going to try to force her to tell them where Jim Shelby had been heading when he'd left the courthouse. Maybe having the medical people here would restrain them a little.

  And the doctor and nurse had medicines and drugs. The doctor had injected Jane with a couple of things-an antibiotic and a very strong painkiller that had put her to sleep. She wondered if it was the same kind she had stolen from Carey's office and used on the guard in the courthouse. She had filled the syringe she'd gotten from a diabetes kit, then broken the bottle and left the pieces inside the cardboard box, as though it had been dropped in shipping. A mixture of Midazolam and Fentanyl, it was an anesthetic used for minor surgeries, or as a pre-op sedation before a general anesthetic. She had read on the Internet that it was safer than most of the drugs used for that purpose, and a full dose wore off in about two hours.

  Jane kept looking out into the room, taking in the small bits of information that her eyes brought her, and then turning them around in her head to examine them from different perspectives. But she was careful not to move. The sooner the woman she thought of as a nurse knew she was conscious, the sooner she would notify the men who had kidnapped her and the really horrible stuff would begin. Every minute Jane could lie on the couch pretending to be asleep, Jim Shelby got farther from Los Angeles, and farther from the people who were looking for him.

  And perhaps every moment, the police were coming closer to finding her. She had been taken in a busy place. Many of those big public buildings had multiple security cameras going all the time. There were also the subway entrance and the major intersections around the court buildings and government offices. One of these cameras must have caught her fake arrest on tape.

  Jane lay there counting each minute as a point for her side. Whenever she partially opened her eyes, she would see that the woman still had the earphones on and was still staring at the computer screen. After a long time, Jane dozed off again.

  When the doctor came in, he switched on bright overhead lights and talked loudly. "You can assemble the bed over here, in the center of this room."

  As the pieces were brought in from the truck and assembled, the bed took form. It was the size of a twin bed with a steel frame. After less than thirty seconds they were going back out for the mattress. They set it on the steel-mesh spring.

  The nurse took off her earphones and said something to the doctor in a language that didn't sound familiar to Jane, and he answered her in the same language. The nurse went to the truck; came back with a set of sheets, a pillow, and a wool blanket; and made the bed quickly. As soon as she was finished, the doctor said to his employers, "You two are going to have to help us move her onto the bed."

  "How do we-"

  "I'm about to tell you," he snapped. "It's important that you do exactly as I say. We're going to put the blanket under her partway." He and the nurse unfurled the blanket and tucked it under her, then slid her onto it. "Now lift the blanket." Then the four lifted her again onto the new bed, and the nurse arranged her pillows.

  The doctor said to his nurse, "I need to have another look at the wound. Bring the dressing kit."

  The nurse laid out var
ious implements and dressings, and prepared a hypodermic needle. Jane said, "What's in the needle"

  "It's a painkiller."

  "I don't need a painkiller," she said.

  "Yes you do. I haven't begun yet." He injected the painkiller into her arm, and in a short time, she felt limp and sleepy, and then there was darkness.

  When she awoke the doctor was gone, her mouth was dry, and her leg hurt a bit more than she remembered it hurting, as though the doctor had disturbed it somehow.

  "So where is Jimmy Shelby" The voice sounded friendly. It seemed to her the voice was a little bit like the voice of a country singer. She opened her eyes and looked at the man who had spoken. He was ten feet away. He had the reddish skin that some pale-complexioned people had when they'd spent too many years in the sun. The sunburn never seemed to go away. He was tall and lanky, wearing a pair of boots, with the legs of his blue jeans down over them, and a black sport coat. His short blond hair was spiked on top, and it struck Jane as grotesque, because his face looked a generation too old for the style.

  "I don't know," she said.

  He looked at her with an expression of mild surprise, which seemed to blossom into sincere curiosity. "Now why would you say that"

  "Because I don't."

  "You broke him out of the courthouse, left a car for him to drive, and then used delaying tactics to keep anyone from getting to him while there was still time. Are you denying that"

  "No."

  "So you have to be a pro, somebody who has done this kind of thing before, and who knows the way things work. You knew there was a big risk, and you might be caught. You must know where he went."

  "I didn't want to. It wouldn't make either of us any safer. If I don't know, I can't tell."