Elias Hunter was pacing outside the Newburgh Bank of America on Lake Street, waiting to use the payphone. Inside the booth was a round little Mexican woman who hadn’t the faintest idea the importance of the call he was about to make. She couldn’t because otherwise she surely would have ended her sorry excuse for a conversation and stepped out of his way.
Old school as it was, the phone booth was a ten minute drive from Sunnybrook but probably the safest option for the kind of call he was about to make. Bowes’ lack of discretion had once again worked in Hunter’s favor. On his desk Hunter had found a big fat note reading:
Ruma Chaudhuri
Phone number: 212-555-7474
He had copied down the number when Bowes had sent him off to look for another EKG monitor. And if anyone had caught him sneaking into Bowes’ office this time, he had an excuse. Albeit a piss poor one, because everyone knew the EKG’s were stored in the basement. The one thing Hunter hadn’t been able to determine was whether phone numbers dialed out of Sunnybrook were recorded in some kind of directory. He had posed the question to Terrance in what he thought was a rather casual way and saw nothing but suspicion cloud the black man’s normally serene features.
“Why do you need to know that, Dr. Hunter?”
“I just do.”
“Well, it just seems like a strange question.”
“Do you keep a list of outgoing numbers or not?”
“I’m not sure. It might help if you told me why.”
Hunter had paused, perhaps just a second too long. “I think someone’s been using my phone.”
Terrance’s eyes widened. “You sure about that?”
Hunter was kicking himself. Telling a security man a lie like that was sure to blow up in his face, but he hadn’t expected any resistance. He hadn’t been able to think of a reasonable lie fast enough. “Seems like every morning I come to work my phone’s been moved,” he said trying to recover.
The muscles in Terrance’s face relaxed. “Well, that could be Al cleaning your office. Maybe he shuffles things around a bit when he dusts.”
“Yeah, maybe you’re right.” Hunter said, happy to be backing away from a sticky situation.
“But I’ll have a word with Al,” Terrance said. “Make sure he’s not calling any sex lines at night.” The security guard was laughing now and Hunter joined in, but neither man found the joke all that funny and both had some sense that a mutual dislike was fueling their joviality.
“No need to bother Al. But I would appreciate if you could look into what we spoke about and let me know what you find.”
Terrance smiled and tipped his hat. “Will do.”
Hunter was sure after that exchange they’d be keeping a close eye on the calls he made. It got so that he didn’t even trust using his cell phone anymore.
Outside the bank, the fat Mexican woman was reaching into her pocket and pulling out a handful of quarters. The operator must have come on and told her to start feeding the slot if she wanted to continue speaking. Hunter slammed the booth with the palm of his hand. The booth shook violently, but it was the booming sound that made the woman spin around. Her eyes found Hunter and her mouth fell open. The naked terror in her eyes was unmistakable.
Heavy threads of emotion were peeling off of her and trailing into him. He could almost see it. He was feeding off of her like a vampire. Sucking her dry. But instead of drinking her blood he was drinking her fear and he was savoring every drop of it the way a starving man might savor a juicy steak dinner.
“Get the fuck out, bitch!”
The woman scrambled out of the booth. Inside, the receiver swung back and forth like a noose. She was walking away briskly now, looking back over her shoulder as though Hunter were some red faced demon. He picked up the receiver. On the other end a voice was speaking rapidly in Spanish.
“This is the operator. She wasn’t fast enough with the quarters.” Then he flicked the actuator. In went four of the Mexican woman’s own quarters and he dialed Ruma’s number.
“Hello? Yes, this is Dr. Elias Hunter over at Sunnybrook. We met when your mother-in-law’s heart monitor had that little mis… Yes, I know your son didn’t touch any of the buttons, Ms. Chaudhuri. There was a faulty sensor in her EKG monitor so it was nothing more than a technical glitch… I’m sorry, I missed that, can you repeat… No, of course Mrs. Barrett can’t speak, she’s in the deepest coma possible. Level three on the Glasg… That means no motor functions of any kind…your son what?”
Hunter pulled the phone away, gripping the receiver until his knuckles turned white. “The reason for my call today Ruma. Can I call you Ruma? The reason for my call is that I’m laying the foundations for a research paper on Brenda. The idea’s already received tremendous interest from The American Journal of Psychiatry. That is to say, I believe there are aspects of her psychological make up that need to be understood and documented. Cataloguing behavior is the basis of modern psychiatry and I believe it’s imperative that I meet with you, your son and even your ex-husband. Especially your ex—husband… I don’t understand. This research. The paper will help thousands of…five minutes of your time, Ruma, that’s all I’m asking, just five… Hello? Hello, Ruma are you there? Hello?” A crimson flush was slowly rising up Hunter’s neck and into his face. “Are you there? Goddamnit. Hello!” The phone was beeping rapidly. Hunter’s fingers curled around the receiver. In a single, blinding movement, he brought the end of it down against the cradle. Shards of metal and plastic filled the air around him. He brought it down again and again. The feeling was nothing short of pure exhilaration.
And why stop there? a woman’s voice said from somewhere inside his head. It was Brenda. He could feel her with him more and more lately, flitting through the wiring and circuitry of his brain, plucking at the loose ends of his central nervous system like the frayed strings of an old guitar. Never mind that he had never actually heard her speak before. In ways that he didn’t quite understand yet, the two of them had moved beyond the vulgarities of base human speech. That thought took form again in his mind.
Why stop there?
Oh the pleasure he would get from watching it all burn. Who the fuck was Ruma to stand in his way? She was going to help him, oh yes she was. She just didn’t know it yet. And that’s when he saw the fat Mexican woman. She was coming back. Back for round two and this time she had a cop with her. Hunter ducked out of the booth and broke into a brisk run. He was heading back to safe confines of Sunnybrook Sanitarium.
Chapter 23
Tyson was scrubbing the bathtub in his apartment for the third time tonight. Not that it was dirty. You could probably eat a meal off of his kitchen floor and find less germs there than you would on the average person’s dinner plate. But cleanliness wasn’t the goal, it was only the byproduct. The real goal was staying awake and Tyson was prepared to accomplish that goal by any means necessary. A fat painful blister was welling up on the inside edge of his right thumb and the stinging bolt of pain that shot through his hand every time he pressed down was excruciating. Tyson was thankful for the pain, since it acted as a sort of poor man’s cattle prod, jarring him awake with every single movement of his tired, aching arms.
He was also jacked up on caffeine pills, which meant that his heart was clip clopping a furious jig in his chest. The major concern, apart from cardiac arrest, of course, was how long he could keep this up for. In the living room, Bill O’Reilly was preparing to tear into a former DC prostitute turned business woman. On the opposite wall, the stereo was hammering out Guns and Roses’ “Welcome to the Jungle.”
He was trying to distract his mind from Stevens’ death and not having much success at it. He wanted to believe so badly that the man’s murder had simply been a case of ‘wrong place at the wrong time.’ Perhaps he had startled thieves or druggies ransacking the lab. A man like Stevens surely had a whack of enemies, all waiting for an opportunity to pounce. Or maybe some other poor soul who was also part of the study was suffering the same effects as
Tyson and couldn’t afford the hefty price tag Stevens was charging for a few rogue vials? Oh how he wanted one of those theories to be true. The alternative was almost unimaginable. It was enough to send streams of thick bile rushing up his esophagus.
The question he still couldn’t answer was why Stevens?
He needed someone to bounce ideas off of. Someone who might be able to view his situation with a fresh set of unbiased eyes. Ruma was out of the question as was Skip. That left one person. Judy. Tyson knew he might be coming slightly unglued, but he could still tell when someone thought he was downright crazy. But wasn’t one person’s crazy another person’s sane?
To say that his mother was crazy felt like a profound understatement. In one way or another she had continued to hold a grip on him all these years. Even when he figured she was dead and buried, a tiny part of him was always positive she would come back, to reclaim what was hers. Because in her mind, Tyson belonged to her. A piece of property, that’s how she’d always thought of him. He also knew that if there was any way she could come slithering back into his life, however improbable it might be, she would find it. And the frightening possibility that she might have managed to do just that left him feeling like that terrified five-year-old boy all over again.
He was reaching into his pocket for his cell when he realized he didn’t know Judy’s number or where she lived. She had mentioned something about having an apartment in New York, hadn’t she? Up at Lake Harmony, he felt fairly confident he could find Judy’s cabin. Hell, a single dirt road circled the entire lake. But he wasn’t up at the lake anymore and neither was Judy. To make matters worse, the last thing on earth he wanted to do right now was call Skip and ask for her number. He couldn’t forget the way she’d stayed by his side through his asthma attack and the news that Stevens had been killed. She was perhaps the only one who could give him anything in the way of help. The question which remained was whether, after everything she’d seen the other day, would she still want to?
Chapter 24
The X-ray room at Sunnybrook was dim and Hunter couldn’t help but wonder why Bowes had called him in here.
Ruma filed a harassment complaint against you.
That’s what was going through his head. He was getting fired and Bowes had chosen a nice dark room to dampen what the old man expected was going to be a heated exchange. Except that funny look on Bowes’ face wasn’t stress. It was a look Hunter had seen that very first time they’d gone into Brenda’s room. The same mask the Mexican woman had been wearing when Hunter banged on the telephone booth.
The old guy was scared out of his wits.
Hunter could feel strands of fear coming off of him and he lapped them up with delight.
“You’re probably wondering why I’ve called you here,” Bowes said.
Hunter nodded. The dark circles under his eyes looked heavier in the soft pool of light cast by the X-ray viewer.
“What I’m about to show you must remain under the highest confidentiality.”
The grin plastered on Hunter’s face wavered.
Bowes reached into a manila envelope, removed an X-ray and stuck it up on the view screen. The X-ray showed a bone that looked about as porous as a honey comb.
“This is a bone sample doctors removed from Brenda after her first hip transplant back in ‘03. I’m not sure how much you do or do not know about Brenda’s medical condition, but she suffers from acute osteoporosis. Even if she could get up and start walking around, she probably wouldn’t get more than five feet before falling flat on her face and breaking every bone in her body.”
“I didn’t know that,” Hunter said, still wondering what Bowes was driving at and whether the old fuck was ever going to get there. “Not that I would know since I don’t have access to her medical or psych files?”
Bowes didn’t seem to catch the dig, although Hunter suddenly realized that by ignoring Brenda’s medical history he had been overlooking a huge and significant part of the equation.
Bowes put up another X-ray, presumably from sometime further in Brenda’s past because this bone sample looked healthy and strong.
“How long ago were these taken?” Hunter asked.
What little humor remained in Bowes’ tanned face was now completely gone.
“These were taken this morning.”
Hunter took a step back.
“Dr. Hunter, when was the last time you saw Brenda?”
“Uh, the day her daughter-in-law and grandson came by, I suppose.” Which made perfect sense, for although Bowes had hired him with the express purpose of pawning off his responsibilities on the eighth floor, he had continued jealously keeping Brenda all to himself. At least as much as he could.
“I made a point of seeing her first thing during my rounds this morning,” Bowes said. “Given the problems we had with her EKG monitor. I was about to begin the usual series of response tests when I noticed something about Brenda’s face that was different.”
“What do you mean different?”
“What I mean is that I wasn’t sure right then and there. Have you ever seen a woman who’s come straight from the hairdresser? You might not be able to put your finger on why she looks different, but you know something about her has changed.”
“So Brenda got up and went out to have her hair done?” Hunter crossed his arms over his chest. He was beginning to worry. If Bowes was going where he thought he was going then the old man might be on the verge of usurping the research paper Hunter was planning on writing. Perhaps his one chance to make a name for himself, in a discipline brimming with insecure, egocentric assholes. Suddenly, everything he’d been fighting for felt on the verge of being swept away.
Bowes was pointing to the X-ray now. “It was the bone scan that settled it for me. I’ve seen a lot of strange things in my four decades here. Fifteen years ago, we had a patient who could make blood roll down his forehead just by thinking about it.
“Dr. Hunter, every year we see a new batch of patients come to Sunnybrook. If they don’t manage to off themselves within the first six months, there’s a chance they could actually reach something like old age and if their luck holds, they might just die a peaceful death in their sleep.
“There’s something about this place that eats away at you. I’ve seen young doctors fresh out of school, like yourself, look weathered and ready for retirement after less than ten years. I’ve seen it time and time again, but I’ve never seen anyone at Sunnybrook like Brenda. I’ve never seen anyone come here and grow younger.”
“Pardon me?” Hunter wasn’t sure if he believed what he was hearing. “I’m sure there’s a rational explanation.”
“I hope there is, Dr. Hunter, because three months ago Brenda had her seventieth birthday, and judging from these test results, the woman lying there now isn’t a day over fifty.”
But it was what Dr. Bowes said then that chilled the very blood in Hunter’s veins.
“What’s happening to Brenda is nothing short of a medical miracle. Of course, we don’t believe in miracles, but I see you’ve developed something of an interest in Brenda’s case and so I wanted to let you know—”
Hunter rose to his feet. “Wanted to let me know what?”
“I’ll be using Brenda as the subject for a research paper I intend to submit to The New England Journal of Medicine. The initial paperwork’s already been filled out. At this point it’s really a question of data collection, but there’s a slight problem.”
Suddenly Hunter felt the room spinning in slow nauseating circles. He cupped his forehead.
“There isn’t much time left,” Bowes was saying. “You see, patients in a class three coma aren’t permitted to remain on state funded life support indefinitely. There’s a six month grace period I believe and Brenda’s just slipped past that.”
Hunter’s hands came away from his head. “I don’t believe what I’m hearing. First you steal my research paper and now you’re telling me that once you have what you want you’re going to
just unplug Brenda’s life support.”
“Your research paper? Need I remind you, Dr. Hunter, I’ve been a member in high standing at Sunnybrook for over twenty years. And no one can cease Brenda’s life support without the proper authorization. We’ll need consent from surviving next of kin. The proper forms need to filled in. It’s an entire process and in the meantime you’re going to help me get the data I need. I’m not asking you, I’m telling you.”
“Get it yourself,” Hunter said and stormed from the room, slamming the door behind him. He could hear the glass rattling in its frame as he stalked down the hall. A single thought was running through the twisted corridors of his brain, again and again.
“Over my dead body.”
• • •
Hunter had spent the last two hours staring at Brenda in disbelief. The most noticeable change in her appearance was the tightening of the skin around her eyes, cheeks and chin. If Hunter didn’t know any better he would almost have sworn she’d had a face lift.
He’d performed the usual response tests and the results were the same as always.
Nil.
But how wonderful would it be, he thought with a beaming heart, if one day soon she just opened her eyes and sat up in bed?
An imaginary Hunter straightened his tie.
Good morning, Brenda. My name is—
Hello, Dr. Hunter. I know who you are. Thank you for looking after me. You’ve been so very, very caring. How can I ever repay you?
Hunter had come out of that one with an erection the size of the Eiffel Tower. Not long after that the reality of his situation had started to settle over him. Even if Bowes meant what he said about writing his own paper, it didn’t mean Hunter was out of the game entirely. At least not yet. He certainly had a considerable head start, especially when you considered the treasure trove of information he had stumbled onto in her library. Sure the sudden shift in her medical condition was staggering, but what sense would it make if you didn’t understand the woman as a whole.
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