As they turn away, a journalist catches hold of my arm, asking if there’s anything I can tell him, anything he can report back to his boss. “That would be unethical,” I say with a smile.
He nods, slips me a business card and a hundred. “Well, if you change your mind after you get off, give me a call.”
I nod back and slide the money and the card into my pocket. With that, I push my way through the crowd to the elevator, slip down to the parking garage, and disappeared into the Omaha streets.
Chapter 8
JAMIE
BARELY HANGING ON
When I woke, I found myself in a strange room, full of beeping and air that had somehow found a way to be both sickly and sterile. I didn’t recall the agony of hellish flames licking at my body while the blackness took me, so I hadn’t died. I wish I had. I can recover from any injury while I’m dead, but alive, I’m as fragile as anyone. More so now because I found myself suddenly a sexagenarian, or whatever you call the sixty-year-old version of an octogenarian, and all of Bill’s bad life choices, things like sausage and gravy for breakfast every morning and deciding regular exercise was for the birds, they were all coming back to haunt me like a ghost that isn’t content to just kill the guy who offended it but to get everyone who ever crossed his path too.
A cough welled up from deep within my chest. Struggling to breathe, I felt like I had mud coming up, and when I finally let the cough out, the sensation of sledgehammers crushed down on my ribs. Punctured right lung. Cracked ribs. I would guess three. Second from the bottom on the left. Third and fourth from the bottom on my right. My right arm had a compound fracture just above the wrist. I couldn’t feel anything below it, so I assumed I had severed a nerve somewhere, and had no way of knowing what shape my hand was in. I had a cracked pelvis, a broken leg, some internal bleeding, and several other injuries I no longer felt like dwelling on. My vision blurred a bit in my left eye, and for a moment, I suspected damage to my retina or cornea, but when blinking caused no real pain, I figured I had probably simply lost a contact lens falling down those stairs. One fewer injury to deal with. Yay.
In my long life, I’ve been maimed and battered and killed in every way imaginable it seems, so I’ve gotten disturbingly good at diagnosing myself based on exactly when, where, and how things hurt. I tried being a doctor once, thinking it might give me an edge, but it didn’t really. It’s easy when you can feel the pain yourself and can tell if it’s a sharp, grating pain or a jagged sandpaper pain. It’s a lot harder when patients simply point and say, “It hurts real bad right here, doc.” Plus, I didn’t have the mind for med school. I did once, long ago, but at the time I matriculated, the body I wore didn’t have a brain with a working sail plan. It turns out, becoming the guy who has the best grades and enrolling at a different med school doesn’t guarantee you’ll have a high performing brain. Sometimes it just means you look like a guy whose parents bought the school a new dormitory.
Knowing the many things wrong with me didn’t make the pain more manageable, but I did at least know what not to do. For instance, scratching my nose would hurt like the dickens. To be fair, doing anything would hurt like the dickens. With a catalogue of injuries a mile long, the list of what I could do included “wallow in pain” but not much else. I figured I was at a hospital somewhere, probably in Omaha. In my condition, I wouldn’t dream of transporting me anywhere. That being said, I was in Omaha, and who knew the sort of medical facilities they had here. For all I knew they had shipped me to the Mayo Clinic for special treatment. I could have been unconscious for days. I may have even slipped into a coma.
I wiggled the fingers of my left hand. They always put some kind of button near your hand so you could access it as soon as you wake up. It didn’t take long to find two buttons. One, I assumed called the nurse. The other would dispense morphine. I didn’t know which was which, but I figured if the nurse showed up, she could push the morphine button for me.
The nurse did not come. Instead I got the sweet relief of heavy duty narcotics, the sort I could only dream of while getting my leg amputated in the Genpei war. Of course, centuries of use, including a decade of addiction, had tempered its effect on me. On the other hand, millennia of injuries had inured me to everyday pain and made the rough stuff more tolerable as well. I imagine if actual Bill had been here without morphine, he would have gone into shock long ago.
Eager to put my newly numbed nerves to use, I looked around the room and discovered a garden of flowers, which was pleasant. Not being the real Bill Thompson, I knew they weren’t technically for me, but it was nice to feel appreciated just the same. I could see my limbs as well, and was relieved to know my wounds had been dressed and bones set.
As I rested, a nurse entered, her eyes wide in shock when she saw me conscious. “Mister Thompson! You’re awake!”
“I was going to go with ‘alive,’ but awake works too,” is what I tried to say. What came out was a garbled mess of sounds and a new pain I hadn’t noticed before. I must have cracked my jaw as well. Fantastic. I was just thinking things were going too well.
“Don’t try to speak, Mister Thompson. You broke your jaw.”
I had to remind myself that she wasn’t used to patients who had endured more broken jaws than she had treated. I nodded to her to show I understood, but that hurt as well. I wondered how she intended to communicate. Probably the old blink code, once for yes, two for no.
She told me she was going to ask me a few questions, and explained how I could answer. I blinked once to let her know I understood. She asked me about my injuries, and what happened, but she never considered asking if my fall was accidental. Why would she? She was a nurse, not a cop. My report would have to wait.
And then I realized I was damaged beyond belief and what that meant for me, for Bill. How long would I have to recover for him? He couldn’t fake these injuries for the months or years of physical therapy it would take to get back to his level of health. I doubted he would pay me for that much time, and I know I couldn’t fake being him for that long, having to bluff my way through business meetings. Not unless I had a brain injury, which I didn’t think I did. My thoughts were too clear, morphine considered. No, there wouldn’t be any brain damage to blame it on.
I answered her questions to the best of my ability. They were simple and straightforward, which let me focus my thoughts on how to proceed with Bill. I hadn’t really considered how this sort of work might play out. In my mind, it was all being killed and then tossed into a river or buried in the woods, someplace where I could conveniently come back and write off the absence as an unplanned vacation. It never occurred to me that the assassin might fail disastrously, leaving my clients stuck having to feign paralysis or some other such injury for the rest of their lives. I really wished my mind were clearer so I could think things through.
The nurse finished playing Twenty Questions: Diagnosis Edition, and brought in the young girl from Bill’s memory. Victoria? Veronica?
“Billy?” she asked. “I don’t know if you can see me or hear me or what. It’s me. Valerie.”
“Va…la…rie...,” I said, taking my time to sound it out, both to help ease the worry in her voice and to help me remember her name. More pain. Good job, me.
“I know you said you didn’t want to see me, that we couldn’t be together but when I heard…”
I tried to say I understood, but the words slurred together, like trying to do a portrait with too thin paint. Broken jaws and morphine do that. The sentiment must have gotten across, because she came close and took my hand, and gave it one of those concerned pats you give when you don’t know what to say, but you actually do know and just don’t want to think about it, don’t want your mind to put it to words.
I wanted to ask her about us, or rather her and Bill. I don’t know why I said us. Maybe it was the morphine causing the confusion and letting Bill’s biology trump my consciousness.
I guess she saw the bewilderment in my eyes and mistook it fo
r something else. “I couldn’t… I thought I lost you… the nurses say… Well, I could never forgive myself if I didn’t come to see you.”
I muttered a few unintelligible words that she interpreted as agreement because she leaned in and kissed me. Softly first, on the cheek, then forehead, then lips, and her passion overwhelmed me. Her hands took hold of the sides of my face and she seemed determined to share her life with me in a literal sense, like she could kiss years into me. The fall must have busted me up worse than I thought, because I thought for sure Bill’s body would react a bit more in the trousers than it did. Still, though she was not my lady love, kissing her, being near her, smelling the scent of off the rack soap on her neck and hair intoxicated me, and I felt loved like I hadn’t felt in years. Bill was a lucky man to have this and a fool for sending her away. If he didn’t want it, I would gladly take it for him.
Without a moment’s thought, I kissed her back, getting lost in her lips, her aroma. Even the salty scent of tears intoxicated me, as they ran down her cheeks, soaking between her palms and my face. Despite the cries from my neck and back as I leaned into her, I could not stop. She was more potent than morphine.
Then she pulled away. I felt blood on my lip and assumed our tender moment had caused cuts to reopen. All the pain I had ignored stabbed into me at once and I whimpered not from happiness or longing, but agony.
“…you…” I said, barely getting that single word out, but she nodded, smiled, and squeezed my hand again.
We sat there in each other’s silence for several minutes when the nurse returned, calling out “knock, knock” as she entered.
She came in with a smile and Tyler Hanson. I swore aloud, but no one could tell, thanks to my broken jaw. The look on his face told me he did not expect to see Valerie, and the way she leapt to her feet, releasing my hand as she did, said the same held true for her.
“Dad?” she asked, stunned
“Valerie? What the hell?”
Then the confrontation scene of an after school special played out before me in glorious Technicolor. What was she doing here? What was he doing here? What had I done to her? How dare I sully his daughter’s integrity? You don’t understand, dad. I love him. I came on to him. Leave him out of this. How could you? He’s my boss. Like I care who is who to you. You weren’t even a blip on my radar growing up. Well, that was your mother’s decision, not mine, and all the other greatest hits. I should have paid more attention, I’m sure. These were real lives unfolding before me, but the only thought circulating my mind was, Hanson was not out to kill me for getting together with his daughter. He may be now, but not when this started.
For several minutes, this went on and could have run all through the night, except a nurse entered with a security guard and talks of changing my bedpan. She wore scrubs and gloves, which made sense to me. Almost no one wants to get someone else’s waste on them. The face mask, however, took me by surprise. Was I so bad, they didn’t dare risk someone breathing on me? It made no sense. They let Valerie and Tyler in without masks. The other nurse didn’t have one. Perhaps this one was paranoid about disease.
It also occurred to me that I don’t know that I had a bedpan. They had that gauze stuff taped to me to catch my feces, and they had a catheter in me. What sent off warning bells, however, was the way she rolled me. I had broken ribs, along with several other “do not move” injuries, and yet she reached to roll me over.
I cried out, trying to warn the guard, to tell him she was no nurse but an assassin, but between the broken jaw, the pain killers, and the torment of mishandled injuries that got through the meds anyway, all that came out was an inhuman, zombie moan that sent the security guard scrambling for the door with mumbles about a problem outside.
She checked my chart, I guess to see how close to death I was. I imagine she didn’t want a repeat of the stairs. I can’t say I blame her. I hate having to drive all the way across town to work on a job I thought I had already finished. It didn’t make me any more eager to die, but at least this time she would do it right, I could heal, and have a head free of pain to figure out what to do next. Not that I had any good options. No matter how this played out, live or die, Bill was screwed. Either she dropped the ball again and I faked being him for the next few years while I healed, or she kills me, I resurrect, and suddenly everyone wants to know how Bill recovered from a massive list of life threatening injuries overnight. I could try to see a faith healer, but I don’t believe in that sort of thing. The last thing I want to do is give one of those con artists a celebrity endorsement.
There was also the very real possibility I would die, and the nurses would charge in before I resurrected. With these heart monitors everywhere, they would know the instant my heart stopped and would rush to my rescue. Perhaps they might revive me, but in my condition, they might not be able to. I would be dead for however long it took my body to heal these injuries and revert to the shape Bill was in when I turned into him. Surely Bill would be pronounced dead and sent down to the morgue. What would he do then?
My killer put down her chart and reached into a pocket, pulling out a small vial. After unhooking my IV, she popped open the glass container and injected the liquid into my arm. I tried to slap her arm away, but my injuries were too great, and my arm flopped sickeningly around. Maybe it would make her spill it, or at least dislodge the needle so whatever it was didn’t slip into my bloodstream. No good. I fought for as long as I could, but I found myself winded almost instantly. Damn lung injury. Gasping for breath, I forced what scant few words I could through my numb lips.
“You… coffee… killer…”
I couldn’t stop her, but at least I could let her know she wasn’t as slick as she thought she was.
She shrugged and reattached the IV to the needle. “You got me, Bill. But look on the bright side. You were supposed to be dead yesterday at the golf course, so take a moment to appreciate the extra time you got to enjoy, you bastard.”
I tried to call out for help, but didn’t have the lungs or strength for it. But I did have a call button! I thumbed it madly, a wild desperation blooming within me.
“Yeah, that’s not going to work,” she said. “I disabled it just a second ago. All of it. But if it makes you feel better, press away.”
Damn. Not as slick as she thought, but still better than I gave her credit for. I inhaled a rasping gasp of air and squeezed out my last plea. “…don’t…”
“Sorry, but you pissed off some rich people. Instead of begging me not to kill you, maybe the thing to do would be to re-evaluate those life choices that made someone hate you enough to want you dead.”
Rich people? Like Presario or perhaps the head of some rival company I never even considered. Maybe I could get her to monologue like some James Bond villain. “…who…?”
“No idea. It’s all fake names and shell e-mails, but good try.”
She busied herself around the room, no doubt trying to remove any evidence. I tried one last time to call out, but I could barely get any breath at all, like a weight had begun to press down upon my lungs. My arms, too, began to feel leaden. Muscle relaxers. Focusing all my strength, I reached for my heart monitor cables and pulled. Surely if I flatlined, the real nurses would charge in not only save me, but catch her in the act. The monitor came off with a good, hard, yank but the steady beep of a heartbeat continued. I don’t know what my killer had done to the machine, but no one would be coming for me. I tried to protest, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t even lift my middle finger to her. She just smiled a cold smile, reattached the monitors to my chest, and walked to the door.
“Have a nice life,” she said as she left the room.
She couldn’t understand me, I’m sure, but I told her to fuck right off.
The weight came down harder, pressing the last of the air out of my lungs, my arms hanging limply, ineffectually by my sides. I braced myself for darkness and flames.
When I woke, I could still see sunlight, but it was paler. I glanced
at the wall clock. Just after seven a.m. It had taken all night to heal those many injuries. I would have guessed longer, but I assumed because the physicians had set my bones, they were able to mend much quicker. Still, it was more than a little disconcerting that I had been dead for more than twelve hours and no one noticed. The machines all worked away with their steady beeps and clicks. How over-reliant had we become that doctors no longer physically checked to see if a patient is alive? So long as the EKG kept a regular blip, blip, blip what did they need to touch me for? They must have assumed I slept when they pronounced me unresponsive, and who could blame them, after the trauma I had suffered and the morphine I had flooded my system with before my most recent death? I’m sure it did not help either that my body doesn’t cool much while I’m dead. I don’t know why, but I always assumed it was much the way a person becomes feverish when fighting off infection. Death was the infection, and my body could get pretty feverish when it fought it off. The more I thought about it, the more I couldn’t blame them for not catching on I had passed away.
There would be a shift change soon, which meant a new nurse would come in, maybe even a doctor. This one might even be attentive, so they might notice how not seriously injured I was. Physically, I felt great. I could climb out of bed and make a run for it if it weren’t for two things, these braces and splints that held my arms in place and the guards stationed at my door.
I could move decently well, given all the slings I was in, but freeing myself quietly would still be a trick and a half, plus I didn’t know how to slip out undetected. Shaking my right arm loose, I reached for a phone by the head of the bed, no doubt there for patients they did not think as gravely wounded as I had been last night. I hoped they didn’t monitor when it was in use, or I would have some serious explaining to do. Plucking the handle from the wall mount, I punched in the Marquis’s number and waited for a response.
The Professional Corpse (The Departed Book 1) Page 9
