As soon as he looked that direction, I slipped the gun into the middle of the clothes, and then I tied the shirt sleeves over top to make sure it wouldn't fall out.
"She'll be okay," he said. "I think we will have to call the police on this one. It seems odd."
He took the bundle from me, and then started wheeling me out of the room. The other nurses made way for us, and I was pushed to the elevator. The bed was on wheels.
"How are you going to treat me," I asked.
The nurse pushed an elevator button. "We're going to run a blood test to see how much you actually have in your system. Since it's already in your bloodstream there is nothing we can do to get it out. So, we'll hook you up to the machines to keep your vitals pulsing. We'll hook you up to a fresh IV and flush your system as much as possible. Once the drug has passed through your system, you'll be fine."
"So, the ICU machines will keep me alive while the drug tries to stop everything in my body?"
We got on the elevator. "Something like that," he said.
I was feeling very relaxed. Too relaxed. The sedative was working. Mickey had tried to have me snuffed out again. I don't remember much more after that.
I woke up and had no idea where I was. For a moment, I couldn't even think of who I was.
"You're awake?"
A female voice. I tried to think of who it was but couldn't. Was it safe to talk? I didn't know.
"How do you feel?" she asked again. Now I saw her face. She was a nurse.
I was in the hospital.
"What happened?" I asked.
"You were drugged," she said. "We took you up to ICU. Do you remember?"
I did now. "Am I okay now?"
"You're fine," she said.
I waited for her to explain more, but she didn't. "What happened?"
"You were drugged," she said repeating herself.
"Was the guy caught?"
"Excuse me?"
"The guy who drugged me. Was he caught?"
"I'll have to call a doctor." She left.
I tried moving a little. There was pain, but it wasn't much. The only surgery I'd had was removing the bullet from my skin. The pain should be minimal, I thought. I could handle it.
Staying here would be deadly. Mickey would know I was alive, and he'd send someone else.
Screw that. I was going to go and teach Mickey a lesson he wouldn't forget.
An older man stepped into the room. "Mr. Crusafi?"
"Yes," I said. "Let's just cut to the chase. I need to leave."
"You'd like to be discharged?"
"I need to leave."
"It would be my advice that you stay," he said. "Your wounds need to heal."
"I can handle it," I said. "I need to leave."
"Does this have something to do with the mistaken dosage?" he asked.
I frowned. "Mistaken dosage?"
"My understanding is that you came from ICU. You had an accidental dosage," he said. "The attendant was prepping you for surgery, but he was in the wrong room."
I couldn't believe what I was hearing.
"We are very sorry. I've been told by management that the employee who made the mistake no longer works for us, and we're crediting your entire stay. There will be no expense for you, as long as you agree to the confidentiality agreement."
"You're a doctor?" I asked.
"I am," he said. "And I'm a counselor for the hospital too."
"You're a nut," I said. "Give me the agreement to sign." This was unreal. They were offering me free treatment in exchange for keeping my mouth shut. At the same time they were feeding me this bull story. Whatever. I didn't care what bull they wanted to shove. Getting this all free, however, I was okay with that.
Why not? I was not sure how I was going to pay the bills, but this made it easy.
He laid a tray, several papers, and a pen in front of me. The type was tiny and covered page after page. It bound me to lots of things and told me in short that I had to keep my mouth shut about the hospital error.
"Come here," I said to the doctor. He bent down. "So we're on the level. I'm not stupid. The guy that came into my room didn't work here. I know that, and I know it wasn't a mistake."
He cocked his head to one side. "Mr. Coker did work here. I can assure you of that."
"Mr. Coker?"
"Did you see his face, Mr. Crusafi?"
"I did," I said.
"One moment," he said and he left.
I went back to studying the paperwork in front of me. Several minutes later he came back in. He was holding two things.
One was an ID badge. The other was a sheet of paper. Both the paper and the ID badge had the picture of the man on them. The man who'd drugged me and then ran.
Unreal.
He really was hospital staff. Mickey had bribed hospital staff, and that was the scariest thing yet. If he'd bribed one of them, who else had he bribed?
What would be coming next?
"I have to get out of here," I said. I signed the papers saying that my hospital care was free if I was quiet.
"I will discharge you," the doctor said. "But it's against my medical advice. You'd be better off healing in here."
"No," I said. "I really don't think so." I sat up and tried my hardest not to visibly show the pain I felt.
"Well, let's see if you can dress yourself. If you're able to do that, then you will be released," he said. "If you are unable, there is a pull cord in the restroom. Pull that to call a nurse to help you. In that case, you will need to stay a bit longer."
They, the doctor and nurse, excused themselves from the room.
Using the railing on the left side of the bed, I pulled myself out. My bundle of clothes was still there, and I took them into the restroom.
I tried to bend down, and that hurt too much. I decided to walk around the room for a minute. Leaving the bathroom, I walked around the small room for a moment.
Little by little, it started to feel a little more normal to walk. That was it. I needed to move around.
Next, I tried making the bed. That I couldn't do. I left it looking lumpy with the sheet bunched up. As I stepped away from it, looking at it, it kind of looked like someone was still in it. That made me smile a bit, and I went back to the bathroom to tackle getting dressed by myself.
I had managed to get my pants on when I heard the door to the room open and then close outside. Silently I opened the door to my bathroom and looked out.
Someone was standing over the bed with his or her back to me. I turned around and gripped the gun, but I held it out of view.
I saw the person move the sheets backward. The person seemed startled to find no one in the bed.
"Excuse me?" I said.
The person started and turned around quickly. It was a guy, someone I'd never seen before. He held some kind of sharp surgical instrument, and he held it like a dagger. As if he was going to stab someone.
He saw me and started to move at me. I brought the gun into view. He stopped.
"Get out," I said.
He looked undecided.
"I'll shoot you," I said. "Now get out."
Backing up, to keep his eyes on me, he backed up to the door. There he let himself out and disappeared.
Mickey was such a dead man when I get out of here. I left the bathroom door open, and I finished getting dressed. It took longer than normal as I didn't want to rip any of my small sutures open.
After getting fully dressed, I shoved the gun into my waistband and let my shirt hang out to cover it.
I made my way outside to the nurse station and eventually I was discharged from the hospital. In a sealed box, they returned my belongings, including my weapons.
My car was still at the office, and there I walked. I wasn't practicing clear thinking. I was barely thinking at all.
All I could think of was how I was going to kill Mickey. At the office, there was a construction crew. They must have been repairing what had been my office.
I
got into my car and I started driving to the east side of town and the industrial park. I figured I'd do him right in his office.
No gun. I'd use my hands. It would feel better that way. Not to mention it would be less messy.
Something caught my eye as I sped along the main highway that went through town. One of the stores that had prime space on the main drag was a statue place. They did things in concrete and sometimes stone.
Outside the store and in the front of the parking lot was a full-sized statue of Mary the mother of Jesus.
My foot came off the gas, and my car started to lose speed. It made me think of what I had told the priest about working to give up violence. Not only that, but murder was wrong.
But this was self-defense, I told myself.
That wasn't true, and I knew it. Self-defense would be protecting myself from the actual attacks. This guy, this worm Mickey, wasn't actually trying to kill me himself.
In short, it would be wrong to kill him. I felt disappointed in myself. I felt weak, but I knew I couldn't do the wrong thing.
Instead I changed direction and drove to the church. I wasn't planning to talk to anyone. I wanted to be alone and to pray.
I needed wisdom to know what to do next.
On the way, I thought more about Mickey. If Kelly Brandt had indeed been murdered, clear thinking said it was unlikely that it was Mickey.
In no way was it impossible, but it was unlikely. He was videoing the last night she was alive. It was very likely that he caught the actual deed on camera by mistake.
He wouldn't have been videoing himself committing a crime. That would be stupid.
And furthermore, if he'd done it, he certainly wouldn't post the thing online. It seemed that the video had indeed been up online for a short time. Then it was pulled down, but the page that went with it remained up until I reminded him of that fact.
Then it came down too.
He was definitely a man with a lot to lose. There was no question that he wanted me dead because he thought I could be the key to undoing him, but by focusing my attention on him, I was distracting myself from my real purpose.
I needed to find the truth of what happened to Kelly. It was time to stop playing games with Mickey. He was merely a distraction.
At the church, I pulled up and parked. Only one other car was in the lot. No one had been following me. Yes, I had been checking.
However, to be safe, the gun was still concealed on my person.
As always, the church doors were open. I let myself inside and went and knelt in one of the back pews. The kneeling bench was already down and I situated myself on it.
I began to pray. At least I tried as best I could.
I didn't grow up religious. As a teenager and young adult, I hated anything Christian. Then incidents occurred that forced me to go on the run and take on personas that weren't me.
The one I was now was Ray Crusafi. I was Italian, or at least I pretended to be. I dyed my hair black (all of my body hair), and I took up Catholicism. In the beginning it was an act. It was part of the persona, and I thought it made me even harder to spot because originally the real me had been so anti-religion, and that was no secret.
But something strange happened. I found God. I realized that I had faith.
I'd become a Christian. It was no longer an act.
It was spooky to me, but there was no denying it. The outward Ray was Catholic because he'd grown up that way, but the inner me was now a true believer like the outward show.
I attended mass every week.
Honestly, I was a lousy Christian. Many, many bad habits followed me. They were ingrained into who I was. Like the whole killing people thing.
It was as much a part of me as breathing, and working to overcome that was a real struggle, but I did struggle with it. I was trying.
I sat there in the slightly darkened church for hours. Candles burned up at the front, and I remained in the shadows at the back. There I prayed as best I could.
Night time came, but I didn't leave yet. There was no one to go home to, and I still wasn't sure what to do about Mickey. I needed to get him off my back, but now I didn't feel right about jamming a 9mm bullet in his head either.
A little past midnight, I realized what had to be done, and I got up. The candles up front had burnt low, and no light was coming in from outside, as it was night out.
In the deep shadows, I stretched the stiffness out of my muscles, and I walked back to my car.
I drove to Mickey's condo address. There was time to kill, but this was what I was a natural at. It felt like a stakeout, and that was my specialty.
There were probably six or seven hours to go before he'd show up. That was fine by me, and I started doing my mental tricks that I did to keep myself from going crazy.
My favorite involved imagining a giant whiteboard. An imaginary black marker hovered over it. I closed my eyes for a moment to make the image clearer in my mind.
With the image clear in my head, I opened my eyes again.
Now I drew a large mathematical problem on the board. It was a huge problem and it involved dividing fractions and solving for two different variables. I even had one of the variables with a negative square root.
Time passed, and I mentally worked on solving the problem. In my head, the whiteboard filled up with writing. The more I mentally wrote on it, the harder it all became to remember all the contents of the whiteboard.
It kept me occupied until the sun came up and morning came.
About seven o'clock Mickey's front door opened up. He came out and headed to his car.
I honked my horn. He looked up, and I waved at him. Watching him visually start when he saw me was worth it.
Chapter 17
He whipped a cell phone out and started making a call. I started my car and crept forward. Working the controls on my door, I rolled the window down on the passenger side.
"Hey, Mickey!"
He covered the cell phone with his hand and lowered it. "What?"
"I'm going to follow you to your office. Not only that, but the cops know where I am and what I'm doing. Call your goons off. They can't finish the job today."
His face became paler. He turned away from me and spoke hurriedly into the phone, and then he put it in his pocket.
He got in his car and drove off. I followed tightly. Perhaps he drove this way every day, but he was really slow. Most likely the whole thing was shaking him. That was exactly what I wanted.
It took more than twenty minutes to reach his office because of the speed he was driving at.
He parked in his preferred parking spot, and I parked right next to him in a visitor spot. We walked in together. He was stiff as a board, but I wasn't having the same problem.
He made his way back to his office, and I followed him. Inside I shut the door. He went to his desk and sat down behind it, and I waited.
For several minutes we were there in silence together.
"What is this?" he finally said.
I walked over to his desk and leaned over it. I kept leaning until I was inches away from his face. He leaned back to give himself more room.
"I need you to understand something," I said. And then I said nothing else.
He waited. "What?"
"Promise me something. Promise me, you'll stop having people try to kill me," I said.
He looked confused. "Are you crazy? What are you talking about?"
"It had better stop," I said. "Or I'll find you, and I'll do to you what you've been trying to do to me."
He shook his head. "I have no idea—"
I jumped over the desk. It made my surgery wounds hurt. I crashed into him and knocked him and his chair over.
Then I took him by the hair and pulled him to his feet. I slammed him against the wall. "I'm really not messing around here," I said. "There were four attempts on my life in the last day. That's a little excessive, don't you think?"
He started blathering something incoherently.
>
I slapped him hard across the face. "Shut up."
He quieted down.
"You've tried and failed. See? I'm still here. I'm damn hard to kill. Got it?" Now I wrapped my fingers around his neck. "But I'd guess that you're not so hard to kill."
My fingers constricted around his neck to the point where his face was red and he was wheezing and whistling for air. His fingers clawed at mine.
"One more lousy attempt to kill me, and you're a dead man." I let go. "Tell me if you understand."
He nodded. "I understand."
I took him by the neck and threw him to the ground. He crashed loudly to the floor and groaned on impact.
"And if I find out it was really you who did Kelly Brandt, I'll be back."
With that I left. The receptionist was hurrying to Mickey's office and ran right into me.
I lowered my shoulder and took her off her feet. Papers and doughnuts flew like a fountain up into the air. She screamed. I walked right out and got to my car.
I'd had it with Mickey, and hopefully he got the point.
At this juncture, I wasn't exactly sure what to do. Honestly, I felt disoriented. The whole bomb in the office thing really messed me up. Like I'd lost my whole train of thought.
There was no real point in going to my office. I didn't have a computer or notes there. That was all gone. So, I tried to think back and remember where I'd been in all this before things got crazy on me. I remembered my interview with Macy, and I thought of the button.
The maid. The maid might know something that could help this break loose. It all felt like a log jam. Something was there waiting to be discovered, but I needed to clear out the mess so I could see it.
Maria Vasquez was the maid's name. I headed to my favorite motel, the Sleep EZ Inn.
There was yet a different person behind the counter at the Sleep EZ Inn.
The person stared at me as I walked up to the counter. I stopped in the worn spot in the carpet in front of the counter.
The young man looked sullenly at me.
"I'm looking for Maria Vasquez," I said.
He shook his head. "She doesn't work here."
Death of an Escort Page 13
