From Black Rooms (17 page)

Serena gave an arid laugh. "Child, I am old. What do you have in mind?"

14

Greener Pastures

DISGUISE ELEMENTS IN HER backpack--basic

makeup, colored contact lenses, an alternate wig, and a change of clothes for both her and Serena--she had not anticipated having to age her friend about thirty years. With neither the time nor the resources for a

professional Hol ywood makeover, they improvised. While Serena procured the components of her costume, Natalie looked up a geriatric supply outlet in the local Yel ow Pages and cal ed a cab to take her there.

"You ever deal with Greener Pastures?" she asked the store manager as he rang up her purchase.

Although she'd put in her pair of brown contacts, the way the manager stared at her made Natalie wonder if one of the lenses had slipped out. "Greener Pastures?" he asked, his tone incredulous. "The state shut that place down more than a year ago."

Natalie acted surprised, though she wasn't. Not a bit.

"Oh! I guess we'l have to find Grandpa some other place. Thanks for the heads-up."

She slipped her debit card back in her pocketbook and scooted the secondhand wheelchair she'd bought out to the taxi. The driver had left his meter running while she shopped. Serena had promised to reimburse her for al of these costs out of her Corps expense account, but in the meantime it was fortunate that Natalie's checking account stil contained some of the fifty grand in cash she'd received for the Munch Self-Portrait.

By arrangement, she ordered the cabbie to drop her off outside a convenience store about a block from the rest home. " 'Bout time you got that cussed thing here, child!" an irate voice exclaimed as she pul ed the col apsed wheelchair from the taxi's backseat and unfolded it. "Arthritis is paining me somethin' fierce today."

Natalie laughed as she saw the woman with the stooped posture and sour expression who hobbled toward her from the shade of the store's canopy. If she hadn't known that Serena had used the mini-market's lavatory as her dressing room, Natalie might not have

recognized her. Serena's years with the C.I.A. had made her an expert at disguising herself with whatever materials came to hand. She'd frosted the short, frizzy hair of her wig with gray highlights from a spray can she'd found in the costume section of a local party store and shaded in the wrinkles and creases of her face with subtle applications of dark eyeshadow and grease from a black eyeliner pencil. To make her martial artist's physique appear feeble, she wore a frumpy dress two sizes too big for her and some scuffed penny loafers she'd bought at a Salvation Army store. She

accessorized the outfit with support hose and a pair of flat-topped reading glasses from a pharmacy.

"You look great," Natalie said, lips twitching as she tried to keep a straight face.

Serena didn't break character, even to crack a grin. "Go

'head and laugh, missy. See how good you look when you get to be my age." She lowered herself into the chair with the strain of decrepitude and slapped the arms with impatience. "Let's get this train a-rol in'!" Adopting her role as caregiver, Natalie began pushing Serena up the street toward Greener Pastures. "Where's the bike?" she asked when they were alone.

"Right over yonder, honey, in case we need to bail." Serena nodded in the direction of the Harley, which rested on its kickstand along the curb opposite the hospice.

The sight of a ready means of escape heartened Natalie enough to proceed to the rest home's entrance and its two hulking orderlies. She wheeled Serena up to the doors at a leisurely pace, cooing over every detail of the geriatric gulag as if it were Buckingham Palace.

"Just look at those roses! It's al so beautiful." She petted Serena's shoulder. "I know you're going to love it here."

Serena gave an unimpressed harrumph, and Natalie

pushed her straight at the automatic double doors of the entrance. She stopped only when she was about to

col ide with the orderlies, acting surprised and insulted when they wouldn't make way for her.

"We're here for a tour," she said in the condescending tone of a prospective customer.

The larger of the two orderlies, a corpulent black man, regarded her like a gnat he didn't consider worth the effort to swat. "Sorry, ma'am. This is a private facility."

"Damn wel better be a private facility," Serena cut in.

"What we're paying, I don't want no rugrats running

'round."

Natalie gave her an indulgent pat. "We think Mom wil find a wonderful home here."

The orderly compared her pal or to Serena's rich

mahogany complexion with evident skepticism. "She's your mother?"

"Mother-in-law, actual y." Natalie bristled. "You don't have a problem with that, do you?"

Her political correctness tongue-tied him. Nonplussed, he looked to his partner for a response, but the freckled, redheaded orderly just shrugged with an I'm-not-gonna
touch-this grimace.
Serena arched her bel y up in the wheelchair, moaning.

"Oh, child, do I feel a BM coming on!"

"Oh, my!" Natalie fluttered in distress, then beseeched the first orderly. "Her Crohn's is acting up. Do you have a ladies' room, Mr....?"

"Name's Block."

"Mr. Block?"

He rubbed his bald head and puzzled over the two

women, struggling to keep up with the latest

developments. "Ma'am, we aren't supposed to--"

"That's okay," Natalie said. "We can find it." Serena wailed louder. "Lord have mercy, I'm fit to
explode!"

Unnerved, the redheaded orderly backed up, and

Natalie took advantage of the momentary opening

between the two men to charge at the automatic doors.

"Hang on, Mom!"

Block sidestepped to keep the wheelchair from running over his toes as Natalie and Serena barreled past him.

"Wait! You can't--"

The automatic doors whooshed shut behind them,

muffling the orderly's shout. Rather than slowing, though, Natalie leaned her paltry weight against the chair to hasten it to the intersection ahead, where the entry hal crossed another corridor. Orange carpet, grimed by decades of foot traffic and blotched by spil s of either food or bodily fluids, whispered beneath the wheels. Eager to get out of the orderlies' view, she steered Serena around the corner to the left. Behind her, she heard the automatic doors sweep open again.

Natalie had become wel acquainted with long-term care facilities during her late mother's lifetime battle with mental il ness, and she could tel immediately that this place was no rest home. The giveaway was the smel --or rather, the lack of one. No bedpans, no disinfectant, only the mustiness of disuse.

Serena had fal en silent as she tuned her mongoose senses to the row of semiprivate rooms they passed. Judging by the ones whose doors stood ajar, they were al vacant.

Aware of the footsteps thumping fast upon her heels, Natalie bent close to Serena's ear. "Where to?" From the end of the hal came the hammering of fists against glass, fol owed by a bottled yowl.

"Never mind," she said, and barrowed the wheelchair in that direction.

They came abreast of a lengthy window on their right that ran along what must have once been a dining or meeting room. It had only one occupant: a solitary patient in a shapeless hospital gown, who pressed up against the window and thudded his hairless head

against it with the slow regularity of a funereal drumbeat. The glossy skin left a greasy smear on the glass. Natalie pushed Serena up for a closer look but froze when she saw the tattooed node points that

specked the man's shaved scalp.

Evan?

As if in answer to her thought, the man slammed

himself against the window, his yel muted by the barrier. Natalie recoiled, believing that it was Evan, that he had seen her and would lunge through crashing glass to tear open her throat and rip out her eyes...

The window shuddered but held, and when the man

pressed his cheek against the glass, he did not look at Natalie. Rather, he cast his gaze upward, and the name he cried was another woman's.

"A
my!"

The man was not Evan, but Natalie blanched as if he were. Although they had never met, she knew him, his face stamped indelibly on her memory a decade ago by photos in dozens of newspapers and magazines after Evan framed him for the Violet Murders. But those eyes did not belong in his face, or in anyone else's. Each iris was two-toned, its ring an irregular crescent of blue completed with an arc of violet, giving the orb a bifurcated, reptilian repulsiveness. Even Serena gaped at him, aghast, over the tops of her reading glasses.

"I can't hear you, Amy!" The lizard eyes leaked tears as the man clutched his temples. The pose reminded

Natalie of the way Calvin had tried to ward off the whispering voices that assailed him. "There's too many of them. They won't let me hear you."

He sagged against the glass, sniveling. Transfixed by the spectacle, Natalie forgot about the footsteps closing in on her until a hand clapped onto her upper arm. The redheaded orderly spun her around and jerked her

forward until they were close enough to kiss.

"The bathroom is this way." He clenched his jaw, his mouth nearly buried in the rusty bush of his beard. "Use it and get out."

Serena hastily resumed her grunts of indigestion. "Yes, hurry, child, 'fore I have an accident!"

Natalie rotated the wheelchair and let the orderly herd her back down the hal , past the intersection, where Block waddled to catch up with them, and into the opposite corridor. They halted at a door with stylized plastic male and female logos mounted on it. The

redheaded orderly opened it for the two women, not as an act of courtesy but as a reminder that he would be waiting right outside.

Serena kept puffing and moaning until Natalie had pushed her into the restroom. The moment the orderly shut the door behind them, however, she lowered her voice to a hiss. "You wanna tel me what the hel Clem
Maddox is doing here?"

Relieved to hear Serena echo her own thoughts, Natalie didn't dare to speak above a breath's sigh. "You recognized him, too?"

" 'Course I did. Simon has me monitor every Violet stalker nut-job in the country, and they al seem to be working for Carleton Amis. What gives?"

"I don't know." Natalie sifted her memory for what Dan had told her about Clement Maddox during the Violet Kil er investigation. "He was obsessed with trying to contact his dead wife. Maybe Amis promised to make him a Violet, too."

"Oh, great. Why doesn't he just open a drive-through?

Violets 'R' Us!" Serena wagged an index finger at the toilet. "Do me a favor and flush that thing so I don't have to get out of this dang chair."

Once they had provided sufficient sound effects, Natalie braced the bathroom door open and nudged the

wheelchair back into the hal . Serena favored the unsmiling orderlies there with a toothy grin.

"Bless you, boys! Made it in the nick o' time." The orderlies made faces that said she'd already told them more than they wanted to know. The redheaded one motioned her on down the corridor. "That's swel , lady. Let's move along."

She stiffened with indignation. "Fine! Don't have to take sass from no young gangstas like you."

Natalie wheeled her back toward the entrance, the orderlies corral ing them from behind. At intervals, they would hear another sob from Maddox reverberating

along the hal . As they reached the intersection of the two corridors, however, the megaphone acoustics of the institution's concrete wal s amplified other voices: two men in heated conversation. The discussion emanated from somewhere off to the right, but it was neither loud nor clear enough for Natalie to make out what was said. Fil ing her lungs with air for courage, she veered the wheelchair around the corner to the right, instead of left toward the exit.

"What the--STOP!" the redhead shouted.

Natalie hastened to keep a few paces ahead of him. If she could hear even a snatch of the conversation...or tel who was speaking...

A few yards ahead of her, one of a pair of double doors stood open. The declamation that oozed from the room could only have come from Carleton Amis.

"...this subject's going to end up like al the others. That is not satisfactory, Dr. Wax."

Dr. Wax. Natalie filed the name away for future
reference.

"What did you expect, Mr. Pancrit?" came the peevish response. "I told you it wouldn't work." Though she did not recognize the pedantic deliberation of the diction, Natalie had heard that voice too many times in her life to mistake it. Evan--he must be inhabited by this doctor named Wax. But why had he cal ed Amis "Mr. Pancrit"?

"And I told you what would happen to your pretty pictures if you disappointed me," Amis intoned with an imitation of regret, "yet you insist on a demonstration." Natalie didn't get to hear the rest of the dialogue, for the redheaded orderly skidded to bar the wheelchair from the open door. "I warned you."

She played the ingenue, flustered and flighty. "I--I'm sorry. I guess I got turned around. I'l go." Before she could rotate the chair, he aimed his stun gun at her chest. "No. You'l stay."

"I don't know, Tackle," Block said behind her. "The boss says we're not supposed to attract attention."

"Oh, yeah? Let's ask him. Hey, boss! We got a
situation!"

The escalating argument in the room ahead abruptly ceased. "What the devil?" Carleton Amis muttered as he emerged into the hal way.

Natalie jerked the handles of the wheelchair upward. Serena took the cue, hitching up her skirt and jumping out on her left foot as the chair tilted forward. Tackle adjusted his aim, but too late. With her right foot, Serena high-kicked the stun gun from his hand. His right hand injured, he shot out his left fist to clip her jaw, but she deflected the blow with her right forearm, balanced her stance, and catapulted the heel of her left palm into his throat. Gagging for breath through his injured windpipe, he caromed backward into Amis,