An Arm and a Leg (25 page)

“I’ve seen you before.” Frankie’s voice sounded raspy, like she’d been smoking for the past fifty years or so. “What’s your name?”

“Mister Larry H. Littlefield, at your service.” Larry stepped back a bit and performed an awkward Sir Walter Raleigh bow.

“You were there when my house burned.”

“Yeah, but you’ve seen me a lot more’n that. I been going everywhere you went. Filled my car with gas at the pump next to the one you used. Opened an account at your bank while you were talking to a teller. I even said good morning to you while you shopped for clothes a couple of days ago, but you never spoke to me.” The young man moved his face close to Frankie’s. “It kind of made my stomach feel funny, you know, kind of like you were ignoring me. But then, I figured you were just being your lady self. Ladies don’t talk to strangers.”

“Where are we?” Frankie said.

Larry moved his hand in an arc. “This here is what’s left of the old hospital. It’s supposed to be torn down sometime or other, but Bellamy still uses it some.”

“Are you the one who warned me about the fire?”

“I am the very one.” Larry smiled beatifically.

“Did you start it?”

“It wasn’t me, I’d never hurt you. That was Mel.”

“Mel?”

“I figure it was him brought you here. You’ve seen him before, too. He was right there watching your house burn.”

“Baby Face?”

“Yup.” Larry shook his head. “I’ll say this about Mel, if there’s one thing he’s good at, it’s sneaking. I always said he could sneak away before his own shadow knew he was gone. I saw him coming down off your roof. I saw the flames through your picture window.”

“He was on my roof?” Frankie frowned. For some reason her brain seemed to be working in slow motion. All her precautions and her security—all for nothing.

“Yessir,” Larry said. “He poured a couple quarts of liquid candle wax down your chimney and threw in a match. It’s a trick I taught him. I’m kind of surprised he remembered it. Lucky for you I fell asleep in my hiding place or I’d have been at home in my own bed. Sad to say, you’d be history.”

His hiding place?

“But why would Mel want to kill me? I don’t even know him.”

“I guess Bellamy told him to. Or maybe he just took a notion. Mel has been known to take some pretty serious notions.” Larry rubbed his chin, a thoughtful look on his face. “But it needed some figuring for him to set that fire, and Mel isn’t too strong on figuring.”

“I’m glad you’re here.” Frankie moved her arms up and down against the restraints on her wrists, rattling them. “Would you please unbuckle these? I must be a mess, and I’d like to clean up.”

“All in good time.”

“Please, Larry. I really need to go to the bathroom.” Frankie struggled to stay calm. Every cell in her body shrieked that time was running out.

The young man seemed unperturbed. He combed his fingers through Frankie’s hair. “Your hair’s so pretty.” He pointed to the scrap of ribbon on his arm. “I wear this everywhere. You recognize it?”

Frankie started to shake her head, but thought better of it. Every action, every word had to be chosen with care. “It makes a nice bracelet for you.”

“It’s not much to look at now, not good enough for you to wear in your hair again.” A strange look came over Larry’s face. “But I’ll never take it off, no matter what.”

Before Frankie could respond to that, someone shoved the door open. The hollow metallic sound as it ricocheted off the wall set her head pounding with renewed vigor. She closed her eyes and reopened them as Mel strode into the room.

Mel’s nose was covered with flesh-colored bandaging, and his nostrils bulged with packed white gauze. Without even so much as a glance at Frankie, he strode over to Larry.

“Where’ve you been?” Mel said. If it hadn’t been for the dark look in his eyes, the voice would have sounded almost comedic as it worked its way through the packing in his nose. “You said you’d come back to the farm.”

“I got busy with other things.”

“Bellamy thinks you skipped out. You know what he’ll do if he finds you here?”

“He won’t. I checked his schedule and he’s in surgery.”

“Are you coming back?”

“No, Mel, I’m not coming back.”

“Then what’re you doing here?”

“I came for her.” Larry motioned toward Frankie.

“You can’t take her.”

“You don’t want to try and stop me. You know what he’ll do to her.”

“Yeah, I know.” Mel grinned. His eyes moved to Frankie’s midriff, a portion of which lay uncovered by her shortened tee shirt. He rubbed his disfigured little finger. “But she can’t go. She knows enough to make bad trouble for all of us. Besides, she’s a freak. Hey, maybe there’s other freaky parts. I mean, maybe she has two belly buttons—or three tits.” He giggled, the sound like something out of a B rated horror movie.

Larry put a hand on Mel’s shoulder and gave it a little shove. “Come on, man. Don’t talk like that in front of her.”

Mel kept his eyes glued to Frankie’s midriff. “Maybe you know something I don’t, what with watching her undress and all.”

“I said shut up.” Larry shoved Mel again, harder. As Mel stumbled backward, Larry turned toward Frankie and began unbuckling the strap at her right wrist.

“She’s not leaving.” Mel reached for Larry’s arm and tried to spin him around.

Larry gripped the hand clamped on his arm and twisted the other man’s fingers until he let out a howl. “What’s gotten into you?” The look on Larry’s face was one of incredulity.

“You and me’ve been friends a long time,” Mel said. “It’s always been just us, you watching out for me and me watching out for you.”

Larry shook his head. “One thing we’ve never been is friends. I let you hang around ’cause you had nowhere else to go. But you’re a slob and you got no people skills. I’m moving on.”

“This ain’t you talking, it’s her. She’s got you hippertized.”

Mel jerked his fingers free of Larry’s hold and the two grappled. They moved around the room in a macabre dance, each one struggling to gain control of the other. Flailing arms knocked a tray of surgical instruments off the counter. Metal rained down on linoleum tiles, the clatter adding to the charged atmosphere. A flying elbow knocked over a black examination lamp. Its high power light bulb exploded against the floor with a pop, and tiny shards of razor-sharp glass skittered across the room. A knee bumped into a cabinet door. Boots thumped and rubber-soled shoes squeaked as they slid across the floor.

Then as suddenly as it had begun, the fight ended. The sounds of blows, grunts and cursing ended with a final thud as something soft and heavy fell to the floor.

Mel lay on his side next to the cabinet, his face turned toward Frankie. A pool of blood oozed from his head onto the floor beneath it. Bloody hair and pieces of flesh smeared the protruding corner of the Formica-topped counter above him.

A look of stunned surprise on his face, Larry stared down at the dying man. “Dammit. Dammit-all Mel. Now look what you made me do.”

Mel’s eyes were riveted on Frankie’s. The hatred reflected there made her blood run cold.

She watched his light dim, and then wink out. The smells of feces and urine filled the room.

Frankie’s stomach convulsed. She turned her head toward the wall and vomited.

Larry pulled a handful of paper towels from the holder and dampened them under the faucet. Gently, he wiped the vomit from Frankie’s face and clothes. When he’d cleaned her up to his evident satisfaction, he turned his attention to Mel’s body. He studied the scene for several seconds, seemed to reach some resolution, and without another glance at Frankie, left the room.

Within a few minutes, he returned with a canvas laundry hamper. He reached inside it and retrieved what appeared to be a box of dark green lawn and leaf bags, along with a roll of gray duct tape. He pulled two plastic bags from the box, and slid one inside the other. He folded Mel’s body into a fetal position, then rolled and slid the corpse until he finally managed to get it completely inside the plastic bags. He twisted the tops, taped them closed, and wrapped duct tape around the bundle several times.

While Larry’s attention was diverted from her, Frankie contorted her hand inside the loosened leather binding, bending her wrist at a nearly impossible angle until it felt it would break. If she could just pull her fingers a little further back…

Larry squatted next to Mel’s body, secured a grip on the corpse’s elbows and knees and struggled to lift the bundle into the laundry hamper. When the plastic bags began to tear, he laid the laundry hamper over on its side and rolled the body into it before lifting the whole thing onto its wheels. With what appeared to be a look of satisfaction on his face, he opened the door and pushed the hamper into the hall. The door closed quietly behind him.

Chapter Thirty-Two

Nick turned on the pickup’s radio to crowd out the images he’d begun envisioning after his chat with Ted. Although tempted to turn on his lights and siren and kick his speed into the stratosphere, he kept to the limit. A tic started up in his left eyelid, the flesh jerking in sync with the rhythm of the music pounding into his cab.

Maybe Pritney would be able to find something helpful. The more Nick had dug into the workings of the Cottonwood Hospital and the attached convalescent center, the more worried he had become.

Although there was nothing he could put his finger on, something about the setup felt wrong. On the surface, the locally owned inpatient facility subscribed to an altruistic approach to medical care. Very low income individuals and vagrants received topnotch care. The costs not covered by Medicare or Medicaid were often paid for by funds from a foundation set up by several local philanthropists.

The hospital specialized in geriatric and terminal illnesses. Through its body, organ, bone, and tissue donation and retrieval programs, patients unable to pay for various high cost, life changing surgeries could now access them.

But it seemed to Nick that an inordinate number of the patients were dying. Added to that was the much higher than average number of lawsuits, ranging from simple patient negligence to wrongful death.

Nick had called the state medical examiner’s office. Unable to make direct contact with the person who held that position, he’d left an extended message and requested a return call. If he didn’t hear back soon, he’d pay the M.E. a personal visit. But first he had to find Frankie.

He pulled into Lola Bridger’s driveway, turned off his engine and stepped out of his pickup.

“Frankie told me she’d stay in touch,” Lola said to Nick as he stood on her front porch. “I offered her and Collette a room, but she said it wouldn’t be safe for me if she stayed here.”

“Have you heard from her?” Nick said.

“No. She was going to stay at a motel until she could find someplace to lease while her house is being rebuilt. I haven’t heard from her since she left just after noon yesterday. And I’m a little worried, especially after what she said about someone coming after her. I called the police, but they can’t do anything until she’s been missing longer.”

Nick frowned. “She called me yesterday. But I was out of range, and now she’s not answering her cell. Do you have a phone book I could borrow?”

“Sure do. You come on in and sit down, I’ll get it.”

Nick followed Lola into her living room. He sat for a few seconds before his twitching nerves took complete control of his body and he jumped up. He paced back and forth in front of the sofa.

The phone call he’d received from the state medical examiner’s office a few minutes ago had disturbed him. The family of an elderly man was suing the hospital’s director and main surgeon Dr. Bellamy for malpractice and wrongful death. The family members insisted their father’s health was fine two days prior to a needless kidney removal, the complications from which resulted in his untimely death.

The lawsuit was not for the removal of the healthy organ. In fact, Nick was surprised to learn it was not illegal to wrongfully remove a healthy organ or to amputate a healthy limb. About twenty percent of all appendectomies performed by even the best surgeons would be on healthy tissue. Any more than twenty percent indicated excessive caution on the part of the surgeon, while less than twenty percent meant not enough.

According to the M.E.’s office, a nurse had called claiming to have firsthand knowledge of illegal activities. An investigation into the hospital was pending. And now Frankie had vanished.

Nick’s body sizzled with the need for action. He drummed the fingers of his right hand on his thigh.

When Lola returned, she carried a stack of various white and yellow-paged phone books. She placed them on the coffee table and pulled a phone from somewhere inside her bra.

Nick sat on the sofa and opened an Albuquerque phone book. “I’ll start with the A’s. Why don’t you begin with the last entry and work your way forward. Hopefully, by the time we meet in the middle of the list, we’ll have found the motel where she’s staying.”

The two bent their heads over the phone books, and began making calls.

****

The noise from the room known as the lockup drew Hector’s attention away from his work. More out of curiosity than anything else, he walked up the hall toward the sounds of struggle. But by the time he neared the area, the uproar had already died down.

As the lockup door began to open, Hector dropped down on one knee behind an old metal desk awaiting a trip to the dump. He knew all too well the atrocities that sometimes took place in this part of the hospital, and had no intention of bringing trouble down upon his own head by making his presence known. At least, not until he found out what was going on.

When Larry stepped through the door, Hector smiled in relief, glad to see his friend alive and well. Especially since rumor had it that Bellamy either had him killed, or he’d fled the country.

Hector knew Larry had done some bad things. But he also knew only too well how a man could get caught up in things beyond his control.

Larry had always treated the cutters with respect. He often stopped by to drink a soda and talk about sports or his latest money making idea. He even occasionally pitched in to help when the cutters got swamped.