Lifeblood

by Penny Rudolph

  “What are you doing here?” Her voice was thin and hoarse. She tried to clear her throat but the effort made her chest hurt. “Why am I here?”

  He nodded at her, raised a cell phone to his ear, pushed a button with his thumb and said something into it she couldn’t hear. Then he moved to the side of her bed and put his hands on the steel crib railing. The bright white of his shirt made his face seem even darker than it was.

  “Welcome back,” he said, his eyes soft and dark. “We were hoping you would decide to stay with us.”

  A woman in white pants and tunic pushed through the door to the room, moved immediately to the bed and put her fingers on Rachel’s pulse, her eyes on her own watch. The fingers were cold.

  Morris went back to his post at the door while the nurse took Rachel’s blood pressure, then took her temperature with an electronic gadget that pinged.

  “Well, now,” the nurse said cheerily, “this looks very good.” She jotted something on a clipboard and left.

  Not to me it doesn’t.

  The nurse had barely disappeared when the door swung open again and Emma, in a loose green dress and open white coat, strode to the bed.

  “Why am I here?” Rachel asked as the doctor lowered the bed rail and went through the exact same process the nurse had.

  “So we can monitor your progress. You were in critical care for a few hours. This is excellent improvement.”

  “What happened?” Rachel asked, her voice still husky but becoming stronger. “How did I get here?”

  “You were shot, Rachel. One of your lungs is collapsed, but it will re-inflate and you’ll be good as new.”

  “Why was I shot?”

  Emma’s eyes went blank. “I have no idea.”

  “I think you do know, Emma. I think this whole thing, this whole cycle of strange happenings is tied together. And I think the link is this wing of this floor of this hospital.”

  The three sentences exhausted Rachel. She looked at the ceiling, then back at Emma. “This thing have a contraption so I can sit up a little further?”

  “Of course.” Emma pushed a button on the side of the bed and the head of the bed slowly began to rise.

  “What do you know about something called La Eme?” Rachel tried to say it, then spelled it.

  Emma’s brow wrinkled. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard the term.”

  “How about the Mexican Mafia?”

  “Of course I’ve heard of them, but I can’t say I know much about them.”

  “Well, that’s how the guy who shot me identified himself. He was no mugger, he didn’t even try to take my purse. He didn’t try to rape me. I asked him what he wanted from me and he said nada. Then he shot me. Seems that all he wanted was me dead.”

  “Maybe.”

  “That’s my problem,” Rachel said. “I can’t think of anyone in the whole world who would want me dead, especially bad enough to pay to see it happen. Except you.”

  Emma drew back, looking shocked. “Me?”

  “I threaten your little operation here, don’t I?”

  “Rachel, I have never in my life wanted to see anyone dead. And certainly not you.”

  Rachel looked over at Dan Morris, who appeared to be napping in his chair by the door.

  “Why is he here?”

  “To guard you.”

  “Why do I need a guard?”

  Emma sighed, raised the bed’s railing, snapped it into place and leaned her elbow on it. “Someone shot you. They may try again.”

  “Does your little operation here have anything to do with the Mexican Mafia?” Rachel gulped a breath.

  “I’m told they are the only ones we can rely on to hire the coyotes. In Mexico, it isn’t regarded as criminal activity. The coyotes and brincadores are service providers.”

  “Like UPS or FedEx.”

  “Something like that.”

  “Why does someone who calls himself Mexican Mafia want me dead?”

  “I want to know that myself,” Emma said.

  “Why am I in this ward?”

  “You were brought in by ambulance. Jefferson was the nearest emergency room. Apparently a couple of police found you in the trunk of a car they had chased down.”

  Rachel felt a chill as the fog in her head lifted a little and she began to remember.

  “The driver got away,” Emma said. “I heard it was a choice of getting you to the hospital in time, or catching him. They opted for you. I happened to learn about your admission to critical care and when you stabilized, I had you brought here.”

  “Something about all this doesn’t pass the shudder test. I want to trust you, Emma, but I don’t.”

  The doctor rubbed her temple and Rachel noticed how tired she looked. “Obviously someone tried to kill you. You say it was Mexican Mafia. Maybe it was. Whatever, you’re probably safer in this ward than somewhere more open to the public.”

  Chapter Sixty-two

  Soledad had slept the first night on the bench in front of Rachel’s garage. It was cold, but she had been colder. The next morning, she woke to someone gently shaking her shoulder. She leapt up from the bench, but it was only Irene.

  Soledad told her as best she could what had happened.

  Irene’s face went from worried to stricken. “That’s a terrible, frightening tale, dear child. Something dreadful must have happened. Rachel would never have left you alone. Never on this earth would she do that. Has anyone reported her missing?”

  The girl gave an eloquent shrug.

  “I will do so immediately. I will talk to the Gray Panthers. They may know something. And I will call her friend Goldie. Her young man is in the hospital, but I should call him, too. Here, take the key. Run up to the apartment. Clean yourself up and I’ll see what I can do. I’ll let you know the minute I find out anything.”

  Soledad took the key. But she had no intention of waiting to hear news of Rachel from Irene.

  She changed clothes, carefully folded the worn ones and put them neatly in the laundry basket in Rachel’s bathroom. Then she went down the stairs and out the side door where Irene wasn’t likely to see her.

  Minutes later, she was at the hospital.

  The lobby seemed vast. Soledad had never seen such a huge room, except maybe the church in her village. The problem was, she had no idea where to go from there. She had never seen any part of the hospital except the area where her own room had been. She and Rachel had left the hospital by a side door. She tried to walk as though she knew where she was going and hoped none of the adults would stop her.

  Turning left, she passed the cashier and a shop with furry toys. Then, through a glass door, she saw Gabe. Thrilled at her luck, she pulled open the door and ran to the counter.

  He looked up, then rounded the counter, hands out. “Thank God, little one. Thank God.” He squatted down and put his hands on her shoulders. “Where have you been? Where is Rachel? I have tried to call the garage, but the woman who answered was as worried as I was.”

  Soledad shot a stream of Spanish at him like a verbal fire hose and he had to think for a moment. Then he said he had tried to get into the garage the night before and hadn’t seen her on the bench.

  His Spanish was okay, but his accent was different, so she had to listen carefully. He told her he had called the police, but they hadn’t sounded like they planned to do much real hunting for Rachel anytime soon. He took a card out of his pocket, scrawled something on the back, and handed it to her. “That’s my teléfonos, aquí y mi casa. Here and at home. You know how to use a phone?”

  She nodded.

  “Call me as soon as you find out anything about Rachel, or if you need something.” He walked her to the door and waved as she left the hospital.

  But Soledad didn’t want to leave. She wanted to see her friends in the hospital. She went back into the lobby and this time turned to the right. That led her to a bank of elevators. She didn’t understand elevators. But there was a door just beyond the elevators. Soledad opene
d it and was pleased to find something she did understand: stairs.

  She ran up the steps, stopping on each floor to open the door, but nothing looked right or smelled right, so she kept climbing. When she reached the top, she realized she would have to leave the staircase and look around a little. The hall where her room had been had to be somewhere in the building.

  After prowling what seemed like miles of corridors and becoming thoroughly confused, she found the place she was looking for just a floor above where she had begun her search. She hugged the wall where the main hall began. She wasn’t sure why she didn’t want to be seen here; after all, this was where she belonged. But somehow it seemed better to be invisible.

  It was early. The breakfast trolleys had not arrived yet, but they would be coming soon. Soledad ran to the first room and shook the boy in the bed closest to the door. “Luis!”

  He turned over and sat up when he saw who it was. “Su amiga está aquí,” he blurted out immediately and added that everyone was worrying about Soledad.

  “Ra-shel aquí?” She ran to the door of the room, then back to the bed. “Dónde, dónde?” she wanted to know. Where?

  He went to the door with her and pointed down the hall. “Cuarto tercero.”

  Soledad thanked him and sped down the hall.

  Rachel was almost masked from the door by a dull green curtain gathered at the wall by the bed.

  Soledad rushed in, eyes flashing with worry. She touched Rachel’s cheek and began chattering.

  Rachel opened her eyes, shook her head slowly, and put a finger over Soledad’s lips. “English…if you can.”

  Soledad’s eyebrows drew into a straight line and she touched the clear plastic tube that passed below Rachel’s nose.

  “Oxygen,” Rachel said, knowing the girl wouldn’t understand. She took a couple breaths to try to demonstrate, but that made her cough. “No, no. I’m all right,” she said as the girl’s expression became even more worried.

  By the time they had told the briefest outlines of their tales, they could hear breakfast trays rattling in the hall.

  “Can you get out of here okay?” Rachel pointed toward the door.

  “Yes.”

  Rachel motioned the girl closer and whispered into her ear.

  Soledad drew back, looked into Rachel’s eyes, and nodded slowly. When she turned, she noticed for the first time the man in the chair by the door. She threw an alarmed look at Rachel, who responded, “Not to worry. He’s okay.”

  “Have you been there all night?” Rachel asked him when Soledad had gone.

  Dan Morris said that he was.

  “You know about what’s going on here?” Rachel thought he must indeed know everything and wondered why she still felt comfortable with him. Maybe it was because his face seemed so honest. But she well knew how deceptive looks could be.

  “I guess I do,” Morris said, trying to smooth his tie and shirt and not having much success.

  “Those packages you were sending from my helicopter pad were stolen organs, weren’t they?”

  The man frowned and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Well, not exactly stolen.”

  “What would you call it? Not exactly borrowed, were they?”

  “You just don’t know how bad it gets, do you?”

  “How bad what gets?”

  They were interrupted by the arrival of breakfast. The pretty girl who brought it was fair-complected, annoyingly cheerful, and looked barely sixteen. She left a tray for each of them.

  Rachel pushed the button to raise the head of her bed and drew the tray table toward her. Balancing his tray on his lap, Morris said, “Desperation. How bad the desperation gets.”

  “I know a little about desperation.”

  He gave her a long look. “People handle it different ways.”

  “Like having me arrested?”

  He heaved a sigh. “Okay. I know you can’t see it any other way. If I were in your shoes, I’d see it that way, too.”

  “Does a kid like that one with the trays know about all this?”

  “Of course not.” Morris picked at his pancakes. They finished their breakfasts in silence.

  Rachel clicked on the television and was dozing through a Sunday news show when Soledad burst through the door carrying a shopping bag. She presented it to Rachel, who propped it under her arm.

  When Soledad left with instructions for Irene to look after the girl, written on a piece of paper Morris provided, Rachel asked him to draw the curtain around her bed so she could sleep.

  999

  Soledad was watching television in Rachel’s apartment. She had started with a Spanish channel, but flipped to English. Maybe that would help her learn the new words faster. Having the command of a television was still an amazing thing to her. There was only one TV in her village. That was in the cantina and it didn’t work very well.

  When the commercial came on with a man in a white coat, she remembered Gabe. She had forgotten to call him. Taking Rachel’s phone from the kitchen, Soledad carefully punched in the numbers written on the card he had given her that morning.

  Chapter Sixty-three

  She was awakened by cool fingers on her wrist. Emma. “Don’t you ever get a day off?” Rachel mumbled.

  “Tomorrow, maybe. One of the on-calls is sick, so I took the late shift tonight.” The doctor thrust a thermometer into Rachel’s mouth.

  “It’s night?” Rachel asked as soon as the device pinged.

  “About eight. They said you ate a good lunch, so we didn’t wake you for dinner. If you’re hungry I could probably have something sent up.”

  “No, I’m fine.”

  Emma finished taking Rachel’s blood pressure. “Actually, you are. I didn’t expect you to make so much progress so fast.” Emma tapped the mattress. “I don’t want you lying flat, but we could put the bed down a little.”

  “It’s fine, thanks.”

  The doctor started to step back through the curtain that surrounded the bed.

  “Wait,” Rachel said. “I do want something.”

  “Yes?”

  “But it’s not food. I want you to fix a birth certificate for Soledad.”

  Emma gave her a long look before answering. “All right.”

  “I’d like to take it with me when I leave here. Is that possible?”

  “Probably.” Emma turned to go. “You want a book or a magazine or anything?”

  “Not right now,” Rachel said, then, “Is that guy still out there?”

  “Dan? No, they decided to let him get some sleep.”

  “Is anyone out there?”

  “They decided it probably wasn’t necessary.” Emma slid the curtain back partway and disappeared before it occurred to Rachel to wonder who “they” was and why they thought she was now safe.

  She lay awake watching the play of lights on the on the curtain from somewhere on the street beyond her window.

  The door to the room opened. She rolled startled eyes toward the figure that halted in the shadows at the curtain opening.

  “Rachel?”

  She knew the voice.

  “Can I come in?” Gabe.

  “It depends.” Rachel pulled the sheet up, then reached for the light on the table beside her bed and clicked it on. The glow it threw was pale, leaving Gabe still in the shadows.

  “On what?”

  “On how much you had to do with this whole mess someone has made of me.”

  Gabe moved forward, out of the shadows, but stopped several feet short of the bed. “Jesus. How can you think such a thing?”

  “Hey, from my point of view, it isn’t hard. For one thing, you took me to Olvera Street where some thug abducted me.”

  “Jesus,” he said again. “I don’t know any more about why or how that happened than you do.”

  She frowned, wanting to believe him, but not quite ready to. “What about that OxyContin? Who planted it on me?”

  Gabe shrugged. “I wish I knew. This whole damn thing is pretty
horrifying. Even from my point of view. I’m going to look for another job. This place is beginning to smell as bad as Denmark.”

  “Pretty rotten, all right.” She waited for him to say more. When he didn’t, she asked, trying not to sound suspicious, “So how did you know I was here?”

  “Soledad called me. She probably told you we got separated when the gunshots stampeded the crowd. We reconnected at the pharmacy. She knew I was worried.”

  Rachel studied his face for a moment. Finally, “Okay. Maybe I’m stupid, but I believe you.”

  “Ask Soledad.”

  “I don’t mean about that. You going to look for another job in LA?”

  “Nope. I never much liked it here, and now I’m liking it even less.”

  “You going back to Albuquerque?”

  “Maybe,” he sighed. “Probably. I don’t want to lose touch with my daughter.”

  They were interrupted by a nurse. This one, wearing thick glasses and no lipstick, marched toward the bed.

  “I guess I’ll be going.”

  “Thanks for coming by, Gabe. I don’t mean to be disagreeable.”

  “If I were in your shoes, I’d be downright surly,” he said, and left.

  The nurse was taking Rachel’s pulse. The name tag on her white pocket read Anne Christian.

  She proceeded to retake her blood pressure as well. “Ah, very good,” she said, as if Rachel had deliberately produced the desired results. Taking the steel pitcher from the tray table, she poured water into a paper cup and handed that to Rachel. Then she handed her another paper cup, this one tiny and fluted as if made for baking miniature muffins. Inside were two pink tablets.

  “What are these for?” Rachel asked.

  The nurse gave her a surprised look that said patients simply didn’t ask such questions. “Doctor’s orders,” she chirped. “Swallow them down. Go on, now.”

  Nurses had given her medications earlier when she was too out of it to question anything, but Rachel didn’t like swallowing anything when she didn’t know what it was. Well, that’s how it happens in a hospital.

  She tipped the tablets into her mouth, and took the water.

  “There, now,” the nurse said. “Should I turn out the light?”

  “Huh-uh.”