At all costs

by John Gilstrap

  The duty paramedic arrived first, a college student named Dan. Rather than burst in, he strolled. “Hi, Gladys. Whoa!” he exclaimed with a wince, recoiling just a bit. “Ain’t she pretty?”

  Gladys was too busy to laugh. “Shut your mouth, Mr. Stand-Up,” she snapped. “Give me a hand here.”

  “Always the boss,” Dan sang out cheerily. Precious few people were permitted to carry knives in the cellblock, and he was one of them, in anticipation of this very event. Then again, he never went down there unless someone was either dead or dying, and even then he’d often wait until all the inmates were locked down. He preferred to work in a controlled situation.

  He removed his Leatherman from its holster on his belt, fished for the knife blade, then reached high to saw through the nylon. When he was done, both prisoner and matron fell in a heap on the floor. “You okay, Gladys?” he asked, suppressing a grin.

  “No, I’m not okay. Get this bitch off of me!”

  Two more staff members arrived at the door, one of them wheeling a crash cart, loaded with all the equipment necessary to perform CPR.

  Dan knelt next to his patient and paused a moment to don latex gloves. With the tension of the rope removed, her color looked nearly normal, other than some bruising around the area of the rope burn. He pressed two fingers deeply into the flesh of her neck, just slightly off midline, and arched his eyebrows high.

  “Hey, we got a live one,” he announced. “Pulse is a little thready, but it’s there. Time to go to work, people. Anybody called Fire and Rescue yet?”

  “On their way,” someone said.

  Over the course of the next thirty seconds, Dan found nothing but good news. His stethoscope found good lung sounds on both sides, as well as a patent airway. One of the most critical complications of what the incident report would euphemistically call a near-hanging was the fracture of the larynx, the voice box. Vascular as hell, a fractured larynx would bleed like a son of a bitch and swell up to the size of a grapefruit, cutting off the flow of air through the patient’s windpipe. That would have required him to do an emergency tracheostomy, a procedure he hadn’t tried in over a year. As it was, the rope seemed to have avoided the critical structures of the throat entirely.

  Dan plucked a penlight from his breast pocket and flashed the beam first into one eye and then into the other. The pupils performed as they were supposed to, contracting uniformly to the beam of light.

  “I’ve got normal breath and lung sounds and perfect pupils,” he announced to the still-gathering crowd. None of them knew the exact significance of his words, but the banter helped him concentrate. “Quite an audience,” he observed lightly.

  There wasn’t much to do, actually. The patient was stable; breathing on her own and clearly perfusing oxygen. In the world of the road doctor, that was called a save. To kill some time, he started an IV of dextrose and water, flowing at just a high enough rate to keep the patient’s veins open, in case something catastrophic happened and she decided to crash. With the line in place, they could administer virtually any drug they wanted to.

  “Hey, Doc!” someone called.

  Dan looked up. He loved it when they called him Doc. “Yeah?”

  “I got somebody from the FBI on the phone. Wants to know if this one’s gonna get a bed or a coffin.”

  Dan laughed. “Tell ’em that Dan Schearer’s on duty. I only do beds.”

  Barely 6:00 A.M., and the streets of Little Rock were still deserted. That didn’t stop Irene from using the bubble light and siren, though. Paul sat planted in the front seat next to her, looking like he still hadn’t come to grips with morning. Irene had given him only five minutes to pull himself together and meet her in the lobby.

  They’d got to within three blocks of the jail when George Sparks called on Irene’s cell to inform her that Carolyn was still alive and en route to St. Luke’s Hospital. The turn Irene executed in the middle of the street would leave marks on the pavement for years to come.

  For his part, Paul pulled his seat belt tight. Between being ejected out of a good night’s sleep, Irene’s driving, and the absurd tale she relayed from the night before, he’d have sold his soul for a stiff drink.

  “Say that again slowly,” Paul said, his tone dripping disbelief.

  Irene smiled and nodded her head. “Yeah, you heard it right. I think this whole mess was started by Frankel and that he’s still running it.”

  Paul gave a low whistle. “Jeeze, Irene, if I ever piss you off, will you at least give me a fair warning?”

  She laughed. “This isn’t a grudge,” she insisted. “I’m telling you, it’s a solid case.”

  “Referred to you by none other than Jake Donovan,” Paul finished. “At least there’s no conflict of interest.”

  She changed lanes. “Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think we have an indictment here, but I’m telling you the pieces fit.” She ran through the coincidences of the notes and the locations. “And let’s not forget the munitions George Sparks was tracking down in the desert. But here’s the real kicker. You ready?”

  “Holding my breath. You do see that parked car up there, don’t you?”

  Actually, she hadn’t. She swerved violently to the left, then back into her own lane, siren and horn screaming the whole time.

  “Sorry about that,” she said sheepishly. “Woke you up, though, didn’t it?”

  He answered with a look.

  “Okay,” she went on. “Here’s the kicker. Let’s assume that the arms were stolen and sold in the early eighties.”

  “By our boss.”

  She waved him off. His defeatist attitude really grated on her sometimes. “Doesn’t matter. Not for now, anyway. Just assume they’re being stolen and sold.”

  “Got it. Stolen. Sold.”

  “Bite me, Boersky,” she growled. “Well, what do you know? Up until then, nary an article was published on chemical warfare incidents anywhere in the world. Then, starting in early ‘84, we got incidents popping up all over the world. Iran, Iraq, Libya, even Tokyo, for crying out loud!”

  Paul looked at her disapprovingly. “And because people are getting gassed, you think Frankel did it? I’m afraid I don’t see the nexus.”

  She tried again. She pointed out that no one incident was enough to draw a conclusion, yet taken together, as a tapestry of events, it all started to make sense. Frankel was the common denominator. He was in the article about General Albemarle, he was involved in the right-wing rag’s prophetic allegations about Newark, and he friggin’ ran the investigation after the explosion. Then, there was the business of the notes and the inherent flimsiness of the case itself.

  “Tell me this,” Irene challenged. “Why didn’t Frankel keep digging? Why doesn’t the file have interviews with friends and coworkers and teachers?”

  “It does,” Paul scoffed. “The file is full of them. I’ve read them.”

  She shook her head emphatically. “Uh-uh. No, you haven’t. Look again. What are those interviews really about? The investigators back then were trying to catch the Donovans; they weren’t trying to build a case against them.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “There’s a huge difference! You look through those files again, and you’ll see it. Frankel and company only asked questions about where the Donovans might have run to. Nothing about whether they might have done it. No one ever noticed the sloppy work, because everyone thought they already knew the answer. Frankel was going to rest his whole case on the note and their escape.”

  Paul let the words settle into his brain while she negotiated a treacherous series of turns through the center city. “And that other guy? Tony Bernard? He was just a bonus kill?”

  “No. At least not at first. I think he was the original patsy. But when the Donovans survived, the bad guys had to regroup in a hurry. That meant killing Bernard.”

  “And leaving a note.”

  She nodded. “Yes. And leaving a note. Chances are, there was a whole other note already d
rafted, to frame Bernard. How big a deal could it be to rewrite it?”

  “You’re crazy, Irene.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Travis was tired of the pain. He was tired of being checked and poked and peeked into. Most of all, he was tired of this tube they’d shoved down his throat to help him breathe. It helped some that it didn’t hiss anymore unless he told it to; unlike before, when it made him breathe.

  The hissing snake. When he was first climbing out of the deep cave of his unconsciousness, in those horrible moments when the line between reality and fear was blurred, all he could think about was the snake in his mouth. He’d panicked, clawing at the tube with both hands to pull it free. They said he was strong, too. It took two doctors and a nurse to keep his arms pinned to the bed. The struggle didn’t last long, of course. Somebody injected something into his IV line, and right away, everything changed. He wasn’t afraid of the snake anymore. In fact, he wasn’t afraid of much of anything.

  Gushing apologies, and assuring him over and over again that he’d done nothing wrong, the doctors and nurses went on to put fleece-and-leather handcuffs on his wrists-they called them restraints-and tied his arms to the metal bed rails. “We can’t afford to have you pulling that tube out,” one of them explained.

  He understood, but he wished there was a way to make them trust him again. Better still, that there was a way for him to rub his nose. He’d have apologized by now, but he couldn’t make a sound. Apparently, this mile-long piece of plastic went right between his vocal cords and kept them from working. They told him not to worry, though. At the rate he was going, the tube would be out in a day or two. “Remarkable progress” is what they called it.

  Of course, the mere fact that he couldn’t talk didn’t stop anyone from asking him questions. Tons of them. Can you feel this? Can you hear that? Can you squeeze my hands? On and on, with his only possible reply being a nod of his head. Happily enough, as far as he could tell, he’d given nothing but right answers.

  He just wished that they’d get their act together. Every new face that came to see him asked the same questions as the face that preceded it. And the winner in the category of most frequently asked question by a doctor in ugly clothes was: Does it hurt when you breathe?

  Thank God the answer to that was finally a no. If he never had to endure another night like last night, he’d die happy. Now, if they could just do something about the damned monitors. Between the hissing of the respirator and the incessant bleep-bleep of the EKG, he felt like he was going nuts. Those sounds made him think too much about things you were never supposed to be aware of-things that the body was just supposed to do. He kept waiting for that time when the noise didn’t happen. He knew from television that that would be the moment when he died.

  Try to block it out.

  He wanted his mom. He knew it was wimpy to think such a thing, but it was the truth. She loved him more than anything, and if she were here, he could relax a little more; let her do his worrying for him. If it weren’t for the cops, he knew she’d never have left his side. She’d have just sat there, holding his hand and talking nonstop about nothing.

  He worried about her. He could still see that look on her face in the car, right before his vision had begun to sparkle. He didn’t like seeing his mom wrapped that tight. It brought back memories of the awful days when she was drinking, and he berated himself for being the cause of a potential relapse.

  He missed his dad, too, but in a different way. Dad could take care of himself. But Mom needed him.

  A lady named Jan-she called herself a physician’s assistant, whatever that was-told him his mom and dad were both okay but that they wouldn’t be able to come by to visit. He didn’t know what that meant, exactly, but in his heart, he knew they’d come for him sooner or later. They’d have to. He’d seen the look in his dad’s eyes as he took him away from Mr. Menefee’s school. Sometimes his dad was too intense, but once he set his mind to something, there was no stopping him. Just ask the FBI. The thought made him smile.

  Of all the doctors and nurses he’d met in the past few hours, Jan was far and away his favorite. Besides her quick smile and her perfect teeth, she always took the time to explain stuff to him. It was like she could read his mind, zooming right in on the questions he wanted most to ask but couldn’t. If he was alone and he had a question, all he had to do was turn his head to the right, and she’d catch his eye through the window separating his room from the nurses’ station. Seconds later she’d be right there by his side.

  She was the one who told him about the heart monitor; how the shape of the little squiggles on the screen showed that his heart was working perfectly. “That’s your good-news monitor,” she said.

  He’d seen those green tracings a million times on television and never even thought about them. Up close, though, it was cool. That those sticky white pads on his chest could record every contraction of his heart made him wonder at the science of it all. Maybe one day he’d become a doctor himself, he decided. Or maybe a physician’s assistant. From what he could tell, they had the best of all worlds: they got to do all the cool stuff without having to go to school forever.

  “I want you to think of me as your mom away from home,” Jan told him. “If you need anything at all, just press the call button here on your controller.” She showed him a beige plastic box that was roughly the shape of a fat letter T. “I’m gonna loop it around your bed rail here so you can reach it easily. Just push the button at the bottom here.”

  As she demonstrated, he thought he could hear a distant ding out in the nurses’ station. He tried it once, and it worked, but between the restraints and the IV crap dangling from his arm, it wasn’t easy.

  As always, Jan interpreted his look correctly. “Maybe later this afternoon we’ll lose the restraints, okay? For right now, though, I think it’s the safest way to go.”

  He nodded, but his face showed his disappointment.

  She leaned in close and said in her most conspiratorial whisper, “Hospitals suck.”

  That brought a smile, despite the intrusion of the tube. The buttons along the top of the controller were marked “Television,” and he tapped them with his finger.

  Her expression darkened, and she broke eye contact. “Um, in your current condition, the doctor said you can’t have any television.”

  Right away, he knew she was lying. Well, okay, fibbing. He liked her too much to think she’d lie.

  “Tell you what, though,” she added quickly, clearly announcing the birth of a new idea. “I’m going off duty soon, but I’ll be back tonight at six. How about I bring in a VCR and a bunch of tapes so you don’t get too bored?”

  He nodded again, but without much enthusiasm. Too late for that, he thought. It wasn’t possible for time to crawl by any more slowly. I just hope it’s not a lot of little-kid Disney stuff.

  She patted his hand and left. That was an hour ago, probably, and nothing much had happened since.

  The sound of sudden activity startled him. Normally a quiet, laid-back place, the nurses’ station exploded with activity. Through the window to his right, he saw everybody launching from their seats, tipping over chairs and coffee cups as they hurried off, out of his field of view. They looked scared, too, like maybe there was a fire or something. He tried to sit up to follow the action, but they were gone.

  He lay back onto his sheets to begin the task of counting ceiling tiles when he saw a doctor peer in at him through the window. Yet another new face.

  Gee, I wonder what he’s going to ask me?

  The doctor moved on, and a few seconds later Travis could hear him talking to somebody outside his door. Finally, he entered and closed the door behind him. “Hello, Travis,” he said.

  He wore the tie and the lab coat of several doctors he’d already seen, but this guy looked different somehow. He made Travis feel uneasy. Maybe it was the way he smiled. The lips pulled back the way they were supposed to, but there was something missing. Something import
ant.

  This guy also seemed like he had all the time in the world. Where everybody else in the hospital always seemed like they were trying to do a half hour’s work in ten minutes, this doctor moved like he was on his lunch break. And why on earth was he putting on surgical gloves? Travis watched as he twisted the miniblinds shut.

  “Just want us to have a little privacy,” he said.

  Now, that was really weird. So far as Travis could tell, nobody in the hospital gave a rat’s ass about privacy. So many people had seen him naked by now, it almost didn’t embarrass him anymore. So what was this guy up to? Whatever it was, it made him feel nervous as hell.

  Who are you?

  The doctor turned to him after darkening the room. “I talked to your mother last night…”

  George Sparks went straight to St. Luke’s Hospital and was waiting in the emergency room when Carolyn’s ambulance arrived at the double doors. Little Rock was a violent town for its size, and nothing about this case caused anyone to get particularly excited. From all indications, in fact, as relayed via radio from the ambulance, this one was borderline inconsequential. An attempted suicide. Big deal.

  Clearly, things had changed between the last radio transmission and the moment the gut bucket backed into its designated spot. The crew seemed agitated, hurried, as the doors flew open, and they struggled clumsily with the cot. The E.R. doc, a Generation Xer named Oscar LeGrand, saw the flurry of activity through the windows and left his current patient in midsuture to see what was going on. Sparks followed.

  As the doors opened, the pulse of air brought a rush of profanities and cries for help from the patient, who obviously had found her way back to full consciousness.

  “He tried to kill me!” she shouted. “And he’s going to kill my son, goddammit!”

  The paramedics exchanged rolled eyes and knowing smirks. This was a live one, all right. “Okay, Carolyn,” one of them said. “We hear you, honey, but just relax, okay? I don’t see a single murderer out here.”