Afterward, he started a pot dripping, brushed his teeth, downed two cups of coffee, and then brushed his teeth again. He changed into a fresh set of scrubs and wondered what strangeness the weekend might bring to the Stoneridge ER. Even a slow Friday night tended to have a wildness about it, and in thinking about this, Izzy decided in a moment’s time that he was going to have to call out Saturday night. But first, he wanted to solidify his plans.
Noah picked up on the fourth ring as Izzy locked up and headed down to the parking lot.
“Weird question,” Izzy said.
“Shoot, beautiful.”
“Ever been to a rave?”
Noah chuckled uncertainly.
He said, “No, and at thirty-four I think that particular trend has passed me by, don’t you?”
“You can pass for thirty-three, easy,” Izzy said.
“You sweet talker, you. And I could never believe you’re a day over forty-seven. What’s this all about, anyway?”
“An undoubtedly terribly stupid idea I’ll refuse to back down from. You in?”
“When is this, exactly?”
“Tomorrow night, Riverside and South Congress, where that male striptease joint used to be. I can pick you up.”
“Onward to adventure,” Noah said. “I guess.”
Izzy logged on just before seven and was intubating a teenaged kid with a peanut allergy by a quarter after. By eight thirty he’d treated two drunks, a suicidal grandmother, and a Guadalupe “gutter rat” who broke his wrist trying to do fancy tricks on a skateboard. A code red a couple hours into his shift brought three victims of an automobile accident, one of whom was severely intoxicated. The drunk was in the best shape of the three. The other two were a pair of brothers, one visiting the other at college, aged eighteen and twenty-one, both registering a 0.00 BAC. The older brother presented several cranial contusions and was rushed to the MRI after he was stabilized. The younger brother was pretty banged up, but sleeping it off and expected to recover. A trio of policeman lingered around the ER, waiting for the okay to take the drunk into custody. One of them was Izzy’s old pal Woorten.
“I might have to start charging you rent,” Izzy said to him. “You spend more time in here than you probably do at the substation.”
“Hey, if it was up to me, I wouldn’t bring any of these losers in here to make sure they’re feeling fine,” Woorten said. “Somehow these goddamned drunks always seem to come out of this shit just great, anyhow.”
“They don’t tense up the way people do instinctually,” Izzy said. “Intoxicated drivers tend to go limp like a rag doll at a collision. Their impairment is often to their benefit.”
“Between the DUI, the wreck he caused, the injuries to those boys, and whatever civil suit the family files besides, I don’t see much benefit for that prick. He’ll be lucky if that older kid turns out all right, I can tell you that.”
“So will the kid.”
Officer Woorten shrugged.
“It was up to me,” he said, “the DUI alone would be a mandatory ten years in stir.”
“Seems harsh,” Izzy said.
“Talk to me when your kid sister gets sawed in two because some entitled piece of shit decided to climb into Daddy’s Mercedes after a night on fuckin’ Sixth Street, pal.”
With that, Woorten walked off, sneering. A policewoman hanging out in the hall watched him go by, and gave Izzy a sympathetic look. Izzy made a thin line of his mouth and went to check on the grandmother.
The officer was leaning against the reception desk when Izzy came through, coffee in hand, in search of some sweetener to cut the acrid taste. Woorten smelled like he’d been hot-boxing cigarettes one after the other. Izzy winced at the odor.
As he rounded the desk, Izzy stopped a few feet from Woorten.
He said, “I get it, you know.”
“Yeah?” Woorten came back, knitting his brow. “What do you get?”
“That anger,” Izzy said. “The anger that comes from experience and helplessness. Has a lot to do with why I do what I do. I’d wager the same’s true of you.”
“Bullshit,” said the cop.
Izzy shrugged and continued on. He could feel Woorten’s eyes on him until he turned the corner.
Twenty-Seven
Noah came to the door in a sleeveless shirt so tight it looked like it was sprayed on. He wore skinny jeans and a pair of high top sneakers that glared white, apparently brand new. On his face was a pair of slotted shades. His hair was gelled into a faux-hawk.
Izzy looked him over, then took a look down at himself in his casual slacks, black button-down, and cap toe brogues.
“Well,” he said, laughing, “one of us is going to look a little ridiculous.”
“Last time I wore this to Oilcan’s,” Noah said, “I made an impression.”
“I don’t want to know,” Izzy said, stepping aside to let Noah out. “And this isn’t exactly the gay club scene. I imagine we’ll both have at least a decade on the next oldest person there.”
“Ah, but we’re young at heart.”
Noah ran his eyes from the top of Izzy’s head to his shoes and chuckled.
“I am, anyway,” he said.
Izzy drove them down, though they could have walked it in less than half an hour and not had to look for parking. The building’s meager lot was full, and there was little by way of street space. Izzy ended up squeezing the Mazda into a space barely big enough, between a colossal F250 and an ancient VW bus. It was clear over the South Congress bridge on the downtown side and they had to walk a ways all the same.
“So we’re doing undercover work, right?”
Noah lifted his shades and winked. The bridge was crowded with sight-seers hoping to get a glimpse and a photo of Austin’s famous bats. They weren’t flying today.
“The biggest hole I’ve got is the party she said she went to that night,” Izzy said. “That was around eleven-thirty, and she was found at that house when Maria Gomez came in the next morning.”
“What time was that?”
“The sign on her door said she opens at nine AM, so probably a little before that.”
“What an eye,” Noah said. “You’ll be a crack private eye yet.”
“I just want to get to the bottom of this,” Izzy said.
Noah’s grin melted.
He said, “So that’s a good nine hours unaccounted for.”
“Thereabouts. My hunch is she was here during some of that.”
They stopped on the corner of Congress and Riverside, where the building hid behind a service station turned burner cell phone store. Young people approached in small groups, smiling and laughing and smoking cigarettes. Izzy felt old beyond his years, an interloper. The music thumped from inside, ebbing and flowing with the opening and closing of the doors facing Riverside.
“It’s been a week?” Noah asked.
“It’s been a week,” Izzy said, studying a cluster of about a dozen kids, maybe nineteen or twenty on average, flirting with one another and talking in a pidgin slang of inside jokes and abbreviations that was almost completely foreign to his ears. “I hate crowds.”
“You’ll do fine.”
“Thanks for his.”
“You ready?”
Izzy nodded. They moved down the sidewalk for the doors.
Once past the guy at the door, who took ten dollars from each of them, Izzy decided he was thankful not to be epileptic. The lights pulsed rapidly—big banks of them on rafters and swirling sabers of them shooting from sources on the floor and the DJ’s stage at the back. Sound clips from old movies he vaguely recognized intermingled with pounding bass beats, quick staccato thumps like machine guns. Electronic noises he could not identify as any instrument he knew filled up the spaces in between. The two hundred or so bouncing, undulating, shouting bodies crammed into the place seemed to absolutely love every aspect of it. Izzy squinted and heaved a sigh.
“I was never young,” he said.
Noah said, “What?�
�� His shoulders were rotating, his head moving with the rhythm.
My kingdom for Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, Izzy thought.
He scanned the periphery of the wide, open room, where he saw the occasional wallflowers and broad-chested security guys posted in every corner. There was no bar, but drinks abounded, in bottles and cans, red plastic cups and little plastic shot glasses like the ones that came with cough syrup. Glow sticks traced neon streams in the dozens. A twenty-year-old dressed like a schoolgirl sucked on a pacifier while she grinded her behind against a white guy with cornrows and fake plastic bling hanging from his neck. Elsewhere kids snorted bumps from the tips of keys and swallowed handfuls of pills in plain sight.
None of it seemed like Cynthia’s scene. Izzy knew for certain it wasn’t his.
“You ever want to have kids?” he shouted into Noah’s right ear.
“I don’t know,” Noah shouted back. “Why? Do you?”
“Not anymore.”
“Come on.”
Noah took him by the hand and pulled him into the throng. Sweaty bodies slinked past him, bumped into him. The music and the bass and the lightshow penetrated his skull like millions of tiny arrows. His head spun and his heartrate sped up. Izzy recognized the onset of an anxiety attack.
He set his jaw and kept after Noah, who came to a halt somewhere in the middle of the crowd and put his hands on Izzy’s waist.
“What are you doing?”
“Dancing.”
“Are you crazy?”
Noah laughed.
“It’s okay,” he said. “That’s the point.”
“No,” Izzy said. “Not for me. That’s not why I’m here.”
He pulled away from Noah and held his arms up in front of him to battle his way back to the outer edge of the dancefloor. His chest felt tight, his legs shaky.
Noah remained where he stood, looking stunned and confused. Izzy let it go and looked for the nearest security guy.
He stood at attention a few yards from the stage, his back to the wall and arms crossed over his chest. He wore a black beard and a fierce scowl. Izzy thought he looked like Bluto from the old Popeye cartoons. He decided not to mention that as he strolled up.
The security guard only afforded Izzy a quick glance before returning his gaze on the room as a whole. There was a walkie-talkie clipped to one side of his belt, and what looked like a stun gun on the other. Izzy unlocked his phone and brought up a photo of Cynthia, which he turned around so the guy could see it.
“Excuse me,” Izzy shouted. “Did you see this girl here last weekend? Saturday night, sometime between eleven PM and eight AM?”
“You a cop?” the guy boomed. His eyes never left the crowd.
Izzy said, “No.”
“Then piss off.”
A slight Australian hint to his accent, Izzy thought. Assholes were international.
He left the Aussie and went down the west wall to the next man keeping watch. Before he got to him, the guy took his radio from his side, listened, and then looked at Izzy walking up. The guard just shook his head and pointed sharply away. Izzy put up his hands and groaned.
“No luck?”
He spun around to face Noah.
“None,” he said.
“They don’t look very helpful, do they?”
Izzy started to answer that they weren’t, but the DJ cut him off with a roaring cry of, “You ready for this?”
The crowd screamed and the music cranked louder still, synthesized notes shooting out of the massive speakers onstage like enemy fire. Most of the people on the dancefloor started to bounce on their heels or jump in the air, screeching and yelling. Izzy grimaced.
Noah said, “Do you want to go?”
“Yes,” Izzy said. “More than anything. But I need to keep trying.”
He peered back into the horde where people danced spastically, pumped their fists in the air, locked mouths in desperate, tongue-lashing fits of lust. In the middle of it a young woman whipped her flimsy, pale pink top off over her head and whirled it around like a captured flag. Scores of young men hooted and hollered, grinning and leering at her small, bare breasts as she tossed the top into the mob and fell into a hip-thrusting routine. When one of the men slithered behind her and clamped his hands on her chest, Izzy wondered with some horror whether she even knew him. Noah watched the debacle with unmasked derision, blinking rapidly and hunching his shoulders.
“Bad scene,” he remarked.
The young woman didn’t seem to mind the man behind her, but then another man slid up to her and put his hands on her waist. Izzy was about to look away when the man yanked down on the woman’s skirt, trying to pull it off. Her face contracted into something between rage and fear, and she pulled away from both of the men, gripping protectively at the skirt and covering her breasts with one arm. The guy who’d been grabbing her chest lunged at the other man and slammed a fist into the center of his chest. The second guy flew back into the crowd, colliding with a dancing couple and sending all three of them sprawling to the floor. The man who punched him kept coming, hauled him up, and delivered an open-handed slap across the other man’s jaw.
By then the woman was sobbing and backing out of the crowd, shaking her head. Someone on the dancefloor started to wave her pink top high above all the bobbing heads. Izzy frowned and made a beeline through the mob for it.
Security rushed the floor to break up the fight. Izzy made a wide arc around the melee and found a glassy-eyed girl in white kabuki face paint twirling the top around and watching it with drug-addled wonder, her lips flecked with spit. He snatched it from her without a word and went in search of the top’s owner.
He found her in a huddle on the floor, her back against the wall, half-obscured by a large plastic waste bin overflowing with booze bottles, beer cans, plastic cups, and a couple of disposal syringes. Izzy crouched near her. The woman’s eyes were red, the skin around them pink and raised. She looked at him with some difficulty, like she couldn’t focus and was having trouble staying alert. He tried handing her the shirt, but she didn’t take it.
Behind him, the scuffle escalated, though the music did not stop. On went the pounding bass, even as most of the security detail circled the fighting men and restrained them, two security guards for each fighter. Still the guys thrashed and shouted, kicking their legs while they were dragged from the dancefloor, past the parting crowd to the doors.
Izzy gently took the woman’s left arm and raised it to slip one of the top’s straps down to the shoulder. He got her head through and awkwardly managed the other arm in before pulling the rest down as far as it went, which was about six inches above the waist. She was through crying, though he suspected it was only from exhaustion.
“Hey,” he said. “Where are your friends? Who’d you come with?”
She didn’t answer. She’d passed out completely.
Noah squatted close by, looking on with concern. He said, “Is she okay?”
“No,” Izzy told him. “Unconscious. One or both of those guys probably gave her something. Go see if those security guys will sit on them ‘til the police can get here, then call 911. If there isn’t rohypnol or ketamine in her tox screen I’ll pass out, myself.”
“Jesus,” Noah said. “You taking her to the ER?”
“Tell the emergency operator there’s an unconscious woman who might be drugged,” Izzy said. “They’ll send an ambulance faster than you can get the car here. But hurry, before they let them go. Or kill them.”
Noah nodded, sprang up, and sprinted around the thick middle of the crowd. Izzy stayed with the young woman, checking to be sure she was still breathing and making certain her airway wasn’t blocked or hindered. He counted her respirations per minute and kept track of her pulse. Both were lower than normal, but she wasn’t dying yet. No one came around to check on her. No one seemed to be with her, or even acknowledge her.
The dancefloor filled back up fairly quickly after that, like batter sliding to the bottom
of a bowl, sealing the gaps. The same assortment of dazed, open-mouthed faces filled Izzy’s field of vision as he scanned the room. The minutes dragged, time measured in stretches of hypnotic beats, strings of throbbing, acidy synth growls. The woman did not move, but she was breathing. After a while longer, he picked out Noah’s face in the crowd, coming near but impeded by the movement of the tightly packed bodies. Izzy raised a hand to him and made eye contact, but he caught someone else’s attention, too.
Between Noah and him a bandanaed head whipped around, beneath which a pair of large green eyes widened at Izzy. It took him a moment, but he remembered the girl from the Lost 40 house on Rosewood. The girl with the toddler. Mike had called her Mags.
Izzy narrowed his eyes to focus in on her, and Mags ducked quickly into the crowd, shouldering people out of her way as she rushed from the floor and vanished from view.
“Shit,” he spat, and leapt to his feet. Noah worked his way over, and Izzy hurried toward him, motioning wildly at the unconscious woman on the floor.
“Stay with her!” he shouted.
Noah tensed and pushed through, reaching Izzy.
“Where are you going?”
“Just stay with her,” Izzy repeated. “Tell the EMTs what I told you. I’ll be back.”
Unquestioningly, Noah went to the woman’s side and watched Izzy melt into the sweaty, spasming throng.
Twenty-Eight
She cleared the doors when Izzy reemerged from the crowd, veering right. Several people hung around, inside and out, gossiping excitedly about the brawl. Izzy jutted out his elbows and bullied his way out to the parking lot.
Mags threw an anxious glance over her shoulder, huffing as her tattered, gray sneakers hit the sidewalk and she spun off to the left, following it north, away from South Congress Avenue. The beefy security guys were standing around the two fighters, who sat on the asphalt looking sullen and defeated. In the mid-distance a siren cried, signaling the imminent arrival of the police and paramedics. Izzy didn’t stick around to greet them—he fell into a stumbling trot and developed it into something more like running as he picked up speed on the Riverside sidewalk.
The Irish Goodbye (Izzy Bishop Book 1) Page 14
