by Fritz Galt
“I bet the funny man has a picksure of her in his little ’lectronic thingy,” Brad surmised.
“Well, I certainly would,” Earl said. Another thought occurred to him. “Say, I wonder if she’s still available. I could do with a little excitement myself.”
Brad shook his head. “Careful. Those Chinese babes are murder.” Then he started to nod off.
In the next instant, Earl heard the sound of brisk footsteps out in the hallway. The hospital door flew open, and two uniformed men entered. One wearing a county sheriff’s badge motioned Earl away from the bed. The other in a khaki Air Force Security Policeman’s uniform rushed over to Brad and handcuffed the hapless patient to the side rail of his bed, waking Brad up in the process.
“Hey,” Earl rose to his feet and objected. “If it’s about that fight in the bar, the girl started it.”
“Bradley Richter,” the sheriff said. “You’re under arrest on suspicion of murdering Colonel Trenton Philips of the U.S. Air Force.”
“Murder? Colonel?” Earl was stunned and intrigued. “The only colonel we know sells chicken by the bucket. Then of course there’s the colonel lying dead in the conservatory bludgeoned by a wrench. Why in blue blazes would Brad have anything to do with murder?”
The Security Policeman, or SP, intervened. “We have an irate letter from this young man complaining about the air base. It contains threatening overtones toward the victim.”
“Brad hasn’t written an angry editorial in weeks. And just what exactly is the alleged murder weapon anyway?”
“A steak knife,” the sheriff said. The SP shot him an annoyed look, but the sheriff went on. “A quick check against the DNA evidence found on the instrument can clear your friend here or send him before a military tribunal.”
Now wait a second. Brad had been eating his mystery meat earlier that day when Jade had shown up and played mumbly-peg on his face with a knife. He looked at Brad, who seemed too dazed and confused to make the connection. The babe in the hot leather suit must have set his buddy up for the murder.
The SP watched Brad’s reaction with interest. “The colonel was stabbed between noon and fourteen hundred hours this afternoon. Where were you then?”
“This afternoon?” Brad managed to stammer, then gazed in wonder at his new hospital ID bracelet and gently tugged against the side rail.
“You’re under arrest,” the sheriff explained.
“You said that already,” Earl said. Then he had an inspiration to help clear his friend. “But you got the wrong guy. This is Brad West. Just check his chart.”
Though Brad’s mother had remarried, she let Brad keep her original married name. Earl knew that frequently caused trouble for bureaucracies of all types, as he was listed both ways at various departments in the university.
Slightly rattled, but not willing to admit a mistake, the SP cleared his throat. “We’ll be staying here until you’re well enough to be moved to detention facilities at Davis.” To the law enforcement officer, who seemed to have jurisdiction at the scene, he said, “You’d better double-check with the nurses’ station that we’ve got the right individual.”
A noisy crowd had gathered outside Brad’s hospital room. Earl sank back into the guest chair and watched as the sheriff opened the door and was confronted by television lights and popping flashbulbs. The poor man was instantly mugged by a mass of microphones.
Earl rocked the chair back and forth while the SP struggled to shove the crowd of reporters out of the room. At last he managed to close the door.
The phone on the far side of the bed made a piercing ring that startled everybody in the room except Brad.
“I’ll get it,” the SP said, and picked it up. He listened, hesitated slightly, then turned to Earl. “You his brother?”
Brad had no brother. But clearly the SP didn’t know that. Either someone on the other end of the line was trying to pass him a secret message, or he had seen too many X-Files reruns.
“That’s me,” he said anyway.
So the officer handed the phone across the bed. The cord dangled in Brad’s face.
“Er, Brad’s brother here.”
“I need you to help me smuggle Brad out of the hospital,” a hushed female voice said. “Meet me in the lobby right away.”
He’d heard the sultry oriental voice before, but it didn’t hurt to clarify. He gripped the telephone tighter and whispered, “Are you the one with the short hair or the long?”
“Just identify me as the resident doctor and hang up.”
Two could play at that game. He’d go catch the sexy she-devil and turn her over to the authorities. Maybe even prove his friend’s innocence. If he was lucky, perhaps this Chinese temptress would try to bargain her way out of inevitable defeat and offer him favors that ordinary girls only frowned upon.
He nodded solemnly. “Okay, Doctor. We’ll notify you at the first sign of a relapse.” He handed the receiver back to the SP.
Puzzled, the military man took it and hung up.
Brad lay facing Earl, away from the SP. When the SP finally turned his attention elsewhere, Earl rolled his eyes toward the door to tell Brad that he was about to leave the room.
Brad just gurgled and smiled pleasantly.
“Well, uh, Bro, I’m off to see about getting you a cheap lawyer.”
As the SP didn’t seem concerned by his exit, Earl quickly opened the door and tried to zip into the hallway, only to run smack into the local news corps.
The bright lights momentarily blinded him, and he stared into a sea of microphones. Thinking quickly, he announced, “First, I’d just like to say that the charges against my client are completely groundless. In fact, they’re a travesty, a travesty and a sham! Why they’re worse than that, they’re a shavesty! And I’m here to tell you now, that we won’t rest, we won’t sleep, we won’t masticate until gay whales everywhere have the same rights as you and me!”
Then, looking left and appearing to see something important over the reporters’ heads, he took off toward his right. He barged his way through the crowd, but still pulled half of the reporters in his wake.
Brad watched with detached curiosity as a young Asian woman rammed through the press corps at the door. She was primly dressed in a white lab coat and wheeled a portable defibrillator.
The strangely familiar woman walked with composure across the room and put her stethoscope to her ears. She swiftly brushed the security policeman away and rolled Brad as far on his side as the handcuffs would allow. She placed the stethoscope against his back under his gown and listened to his breathing.
Brad complied with a deep inhalation.
She gasped. “He’s going into cardiac arrest!”
Was he? Brad’s heart began to race wildly.
The SP looked at her with alarm. She flew to the corner of the room and wheeled the defibrillator over. She pressed a switch, and the control panel lit up. She deftly applied some cream to the paddles and rubbed them against each other until the capacitors reached maximum charge.
Hmm. It reminded Brad of a paramedic show he used to watch as a kid.
He tried to remember the name of the television show while he studied the female physician. She was short, but had the air of a gymnast about her. The closely cropped hair was stylish.
The babe kinda reminded him of someone he’d seen recently. What did she look like in nothing but a bath towel?
She rolled him over onto his back.
Brad opened his one good eye wide. “Code Blue, Code Blue. We’ve got a sexy doctor on duty,” he blurted out. But before he could utter, “You remind me of someone hot,” she placed the paddles on his chest and pulled the trigger. At once, his body stiffened and curled, then his torso involuntarily arched into one gigantic inverted letter C. All he could manage was a strangled, “Unnngu-eh!”
“What can I do to help?” the SP asked nervously.
“We’re going to have to move him to another bed in the OR. So, go down the hallway to the nurse�
��s station and tell her we’ve got a Code Red in room 121. Quickly!”
Where had he heard that voice before?
The SP removed Brad’s cuffs and hung them on his belt. Then he sprang through the crowd at the door.
By the time it dawned on him that he could neither move nor breathe and that it felt like someone had sutured his jaws shut with electrified wire, the defibrillator’s effect began to wear off.
“Where is the nurse?” the female doctor yelled at the crowd. She pointed down the hallway and slammed the door shut in their faces. Immediately, she ripped the sheets off of Brad and pulled the IV needle and catheter tube out with two flicks of her wrist.
“Yow! Wash wha you’re doin’ down there, sister,” he said. “I might need that stuff someday.”
Then she forced him from the bed.
He doubled over from his injuries and the incapacitating shock of the fibrillation. She had to drag him across the room, and soon the toilet came into view. She grabbed at a translucent window and managed to slide it open. With a surgical knife, she sliced through the screen and threw out all his street clothes.
She managed to make him climb over the toilet and had him sit backwards on the windowsill.
“How is this—?”
She gave him an unceremonious shove, and he slid backwards through the torn screen. A moment later, he landed with a thud outside the window.
“—going to work?”
He felt no pain. That Demerol was the greatest.
The gal had a lot of confidence and likely made an excellent physician. But she definitely needed work on her bedside manners.
After dumping Brad out the bathroom window, Jade Wang returned to the hospital room and closed the bathroom door behind her.
She smoothed down her lab coat and straightened her hair. Cleaning up other people’s messes wasn’t her favorite job, and rectifying all the damage caused by Liang was beginning to wear on her. Maybe next time she could pick a less violent individual to suck up to.
Nevertheless, she reviewed her plan of escape. She did many things well, and one of them was preparation. All she had to do now was to carry it out and Brad would be free of the county sheriff and military police.
She took a deep breath, crossed to the door, and opened it wide. The pack of reporters, camera crews and nurses trying to get to the patient tumbled in.
In the chaos that ensued, she slipped through the crowd virtually unnoticed. She turned down another hallway and soon the noise was far behind.
As she walked, she stripped off her doctor’s garb to reveal a custodial uniform. She flipped the coat into a laundry bin, pulled a blue maintenance cap from her back pocket, and headed for the service entrance.
At the loading dock, she grabbed a hand truck and wheeled it outside.
According to her calculations, the young man’s body would only be a short distance away. She pushed the cart quickly to a small courtyard, and there she found Brad crumpled and lying in the corner.
Poor boy. He had slipped from consciousness.
She whipped a black plastic bag from her pocket and pulled it over him. She secured his limp body to the hand truck with three tie-down straps and threw his clothes on top. She wheeled him back to the loading area and broke some sweat pushing him up the ramp to the loading dock.
She counted to three, then rushed him toward a waiting landscaper’s truck. The pickup was loaded with a pile of organic material. Together with his clothes, Brad flew onto the composition of straw and manure.
So far so good, and no complaints from the young American. Would he ever forgive her once he came to? Probably not.
She pushed the hand truck away, hopped behind the wheel, and pulled a set of keys from behind the visor.
Just as she and her human cargo pulled out of the loading area, two squad cars came racing in. The cops spilled out of the cruisers and jumped onto the dock to enter the hospital.
She glanced into the rear view mirror, then slipped into traffic. Just another day in the espionage business.
Some time later that evening, Brad came to. His forward momentum and the bouncy ride had ended.
He slowly moved each limb starting with his legs to take account of his wounds. Knee: D+. Back: C-. Chest: B-. Shoulder: C. Right eye: D. He opened his good eye. His head protruded from a moist trash bag like some Indian woman’s monstrous papoose.
Where exactly was he? He felt a warm softness beneath him that smelled like it came from a stable. Then he remembered. He had been taken out with the trash. Worse, he was the trash. Why were trash collectors hauling bodies around like that? Why were they hauling him?
He sat up still wrapped in black plastic and stretched his bad knee. It hurt like crazy, and his back pulsated in pain.
Then he heard the scrape of footsteps approaching from behind. “There you are,” a familiar accented voice said. It was May.
“Where’ve you been?” he said as casually as possible. With luck she had been born without a sense of smell. “Weren’t you hurt when we fell out of the sky?”
“No.” She shrugged. “But you do not look so conditioned.”
“The NTSB is looking for you,” he said.
“What does an NTSB?”
“They investigate plane crashes.”
“Oh.” She did not seem concerned. “Let me help you out of that cock coon. It must be very warm inside.” She loosened the bungee ties and efficiently ripped the plastic away.
“Sorry, but there’s no butterfly in this cock coon.”
“I never know when you are making fun with me, but I am glad you are still respirating.”
“Oh, I could never make fun of you, darlin’.”
He swore he saw her blush by the dim glow of a porch light. Funny, but how could that girl be so shy, yet a tiger when making out? Must be a trait of females in the Orient.
Only then did he recognize where he was. He was sitting in the driveway behind May and Jade’s condominium.
She helped him out of the rest of the bag and freed his feet. In his backless, legless hospital gown, he slid gracefully off the pile of manure onto the driveway.
There she handed him his wad of clothes, which he pulled on piece by piece with her assistance. Finally he was able to limp with her toward the condo.
But what he saw through the doorway stopped him cold. A powerful stranger built like an inverted pyramid with a buzz-saw haircut flung glassware and picture frames against the walls.
“You’re being ransacked.”
Instead of showing surprise, May became furious. She left him stranded on the last step and flew inside. She cried out accusingly in her native tongue, and the man gave a husky reply. That couldn’t be May’s co-trainee, Mr. SUV and the helicopter assassin. Brad distinctly remembered hearing the NTSB investigator say that he had left town. What was he doing there?
Just then, Jade darted from the bedroom. She was trying to fasten her bra without immediate success.
May glared at the man for a long time. Through the screen door, Brad tried to pick out the words she muttered under her breath. Then the man whispered back with a hiss in Chinese.
Brad shuffled closer, but all he could hear that registered were the menacing undertones.
Suddenly the man lifted his eyes and spotted him through the screen door.
Brad straightened up. “Did anyone order pizza?”
May reached back and slammed the door in his face.
Sorry, wrong address.
Then the door flew open again, and Jade rushed out onto the porch. She straightened her blouse and grabbed his arm. Without a word, she hustled him out onto the lawn.
“What’s going on here?” he said, and winced in pain.
Behind him, May shouted at the man in English for all to hear, “Leave him out of this. He is not my lover.”
He was confused. Had the man accused her of fraternizing with foreigners, or was the guy jealous of him?
Moreover, why was she shouting in English? It al
most sounded like she was trying to send him a message that it was time to bug out of her life.
Well, that wouldn’t wash with him. He made ready to charge back into the house.
“You’d better go now,” Jade told him in a muted yet firm way. Where had he heard that tone recently?
Now that he was clearheaded, he began to put two and two together. Jade had masterminded his remarkable escape from the hospital. “That was some act you pulled back at the hospital, Doctor X. Why are you helping me out like this?”
“It’s all in a day’s work.”
“What are you? A guardian angel?”
She smiled at that. “No. More like a trash collector. I clean up the messes that other people leave behind.”
“Well, I sure feel like a reject.”
She smiled. “Kind of smell bad, too.”
He noticed a dried clod sticking to his shoulder. He peeled it off and flicked it away.
“I’m not about to let that guy treat May like that,” he said, and indicated the domestic violence taking place inside. If he didn’t intervene now, who knows how far the whole thing would go? And if he didn’t do something about it before they left for China, who would?
“Brad, it’s time for you to go.” The professional tone from the hospital had crept back into her voice. “It’s not safe for you around here any longer.”
That troubled him. Just where did Jade’s loyalties lie? For whom was she working? Who was she protecting?
“You’re not well,” she said. “Look at you. You can barely walk. How can you take on that brute?”
“You look pretty in shape. You and I could take him on.”
“Then what? He would only come back. He always will.”
“Well, I don’t buy that,” Brad said. “We can put an end to this right now.”
She squeezed her eyes shut and swallowed hard. “Someday we will. But now is not the time.”
He looked at the two shadows circling each other in the kitchen. Perhaps Jade was right. At the moment, he was powerless to do anything about it.
“You promise we’ll put an end to this?” he said.
