Killerwatt (11 page)

After backing out of the garage into fading
sunlight, Rhetta stole a glance at her watch. Although not limited to certain
visiting hours because Randolph had a private room, she’d wanted to get to the
hospital early enough to visit with him before his nighttime meds. It was
already almost eight o’clock. She wanted to be there for him in case he got
thirsty or needed help, since the nursing staff was always busy. She knew
Randolph hated being a demanding patient. Discovering Peter’s body had
definitely messed up her schedule.

Taking Cami up to 45 mph down the gravel road was chancy.
Large rocks were deadly to the low-slung Camaro. She drove as fast as she
dared, and prayed she wouldn’t throw any rocks into the oil pan. She urgently
needed to talk to Randolph. If he felt up to it, she had to ask him about what
he and Billy Dan had discussed.

The county road crew had come through earlier that
day and graded the gravel roads; the washboard ruts were gone. The realization
that the county had worked on the road made Rhetta slow down. More than once
following the county’s road ministrations she’d managed to get a sharp rock in
her tire that resulted in a flat. Changing Cami’s tire in waning daylight
wasn’t high on her list of fun things to do. In fact, she didn’t find changing
a flat at anytime particularly enjoyable. She could, however, do it competently
if she needed to.

Her mother, Renate Caldwell, an independent, strong
woman, not unlike herself, had taught Rhetta how to jack up her car and change
a flat a long time ago. The recurring loneliness tugged at her now, like it
always did when she thought about her mother. Many people who knew her mother
said that Rhetta favored her. Rhetta loved hearing that, although her deep
green eyes were unlike her mother’s cerulean orbs. Her eyes were her father’s
legacy, she assumed.

When an aneurysm resulting from cancer claimed her mother
nearly ten years ago, Rhetta got mad at God and stopped going to the church
that she and her mother had regularly attended. If her father, who had
abandoned them right before Rhetta’s second birthday, had heard of Renate’s
death, he didn’t bother showing up for the funeral. Rhetta prayed all
right—prayed that she’d never run into him and prayed he was dead.

She forced her melancholy back to its dark place and
concentrated on her driving.

She made it safely to the highway and opened Cami
up.

Flashing blue lights filled her rear-view mirror. A
glance at her speedometer revealed the needle nosing past 65, ten miles over
the posted limit. Slowing down did not stop the flashing lights. The police
car, now right behind her, blasted once on the siren. Understanding exactly
what that meant, she coasted to the shoulder and stopped.

The highway patrol officer exited his car and donned
his flat brimmed Mountie-style hat. With flashlight in hand, he approached her
driver’s door. Rhetta powered down the window.

“Good evening, ma’am.” The officer, a sergeant,
touched his hat. “You were driving a little fast when I met you. I clocked you
at 68.”

Crap.

He shone the flashlight beam around inside the car.

Before Rhetta could answer, he said, “May I please
see your operator’s license and car’s registration?”

While waiting for her to rummage through the glove
compartment and then to fish through the black hole of her purse for her
wallet, the officer scanned around the outside of her car, then back inside.

She was proud of how beautiful Cami was. She and
Randolph found the car four years ago and had gutted the stock interior and
redone it in navy blue with white upholstery. The two-tone blue-on-silver blue
exterior glimmered. Maybe the officer was admiring the car.

Rhetta removed her license from its case for the
second time that day. She handed it, together with the registration, out the
window to the officer. Her heart skipped when she read the name on his badge:
Sergeant Q. Meade.
The officer who responded to Randolph’s accident.

With her license and registration in hand, Sergeant
Meade turned to walk to his patrol car. She knew the normal procedure would be
to run her car’s plate numbers along with her license number, then write up the
citation. After just a few steps, Meade, who had begun to examine the license
in the narrow flashlight beam, stopped, then returned to Rhetta.

“Mrs. McCarter?” Meade asked, needing to bend his
tall frame at the waist to talk through the window.

“Yes?”

Meade handed the license and registration back to
her without an accompanying ticket. “How is your husband?”

Rhetta exhaled. “He had surgery for a head injury.
The doctors tell me he will recover completely.”
Thank you, God.
She
dropped the license and registration into her open purse. “You were the officer
who responded to his accident?”

Meade nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”

She peered at his rugged tanned face. Even in the
dim light, she spotted faint lines at the corners of his eyes. Meade had to be
at least forty. “The report says you found an empty Jim Beam bottle, so you
must have searched the interior. Did you find a manila envelope?”

 “No, ma’am.”

A quick scan of his expression told Rhetta he was
telling the truth.
Where did the darn thing go? Could she ask him if anyone
else was standing around the accident scene?

“Thank you for your help at the accident, Sergeant.”
He touched the brim of his hat, and turned away. Rhetta called after him.
“Excuse me, Sergeant, can I ask you something else? Were there any witnesses
who saw the crash?”

“No one came forward claiming they saw exactly what
happened. A family from Marble Hill heading to Cape glimpsed the taillights
down in the creek bed when they crossed the bridge. Luckily, the wife made her
husband pull over. That’s when they spotted a truck nose-down at the bottom of
the creek.”

Hearing Meade say “nose-down” resonated with Rhetta.

That’s exactly how Al-Serafi’s
car was found.

Meade continued. “They flagged an oncoming car to
call 9-1-1, since their cell didn’t work on the bridge. They stayed and waited
until I showed up.” He switched off the flashlight, and tucked it into the
keeper on his belt. “Nobody was around the truck, because getting to it
required climbing down a steep embankment. The emergency team thought they
might have to airlift your husband, but they managed to haul him up the
embankment on a stretcher.”

Rhetta forced herself to smile. “I appreciate your
help and everyone else’s too. Thank God someone spotted him so quickly.” She
shuddered at what might have happened had the family not stopped.

Randolph could’ve died.

CHAPTER
22

In her side mirror, Rhetta watched Meade return to
his patrol car. When he opened his door, she turned on her left blinker and
eased back out onto the highway. She managed to hold Cami to the speed limit
the rest of the way to the hospital.

A glance at the dash clock told her that she had
left home nearly an hour ago. She lucked into a parking spot close to the door
and ran to the building.

Once through the hospital’s revolving doors, she
surveyed the main floor in search of a faster route to the fourth floor post-op
area. A stainless steel door marked STAIRS and AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY
appeared to the right of the main door. Without hesitation, she strode to the
door and pushed it open. She didn’t know exactly where the stairs led, but
providing they went up four floors, she calculated that she should come out
very close to Randolph’s room. Avoiding the labyrinth that was the medical
complex in order to reach the elevator was worth any effort of the stairs.
Climbing them didn’t bother her. She was used to running every morning.
Inhaling, she grabbed the handrail and began.

Through the glass on the second floor doors, she
recognized the rear of the emergency room triage area. The revolving doors she
used to enter the hospital were on a level lower than the main floor level
where the ambulances pulled in. The hospital complex had so many additions that
it had become a maze of specialty wings connected by a warren of hallways and
stairs.

Reaching the fourth floor, Rhetta paused to fish a
tissue out of her purse to dab the sheen off her forehead. The stairwell, she
noted, didn’t enjoy the frigid air conditioning of the rest of the hospital.
With shoulders back, she pushed through the door with an air of importance, as
though she was ‘authorized’ to be using those stairs. She needn’t have
bothered. No one was around to notice. She quickly got her bearings and was
pleased to find herself one door away from Randolph’s room. She fist pumped.
Outstanding
shortcut
!

Randolph’s room was quiet—lights low, machines
humming softly. As she began tiptoeing past his bed, a piercing alarm shrilled,
causing her heart nearly to explode. Afraid that she’d set a machine off by
tripping over a cord, Rhetta searched frantically to identify which one of the
several machines clustered around Randolph was screaming.

Seconds later, a nurse threw open the door and
immediately switched on the lights, flooding the room from the powerful
overhead fixtures. The entire time the woman scanned the machinery, adjusting
and checking knobs and dials, Rhetta noticed that Randolph didn’t stir. The
piercing wail should have awakened not just him, but all the other patients on
the floor, and a few souls from the nearby cemetery. Rhetta felt helpless. Her
pulse raced in fear. All she could do was step back and let the nurse take
charge.

Finally, after interminable shrilling, the machine
fell silent. Randolph lay motionless. Hand flying to her chest, Rhetta
whispered, “Is he all right? What’s happening?”

“Mr. McCarter is not responding, ma’am. I’ve paged the
doctor.”

Rhetta’s head pounded. She willed herself to remain
calm. “Not responding? What does that mean?” Randolph lay very still, his
breathing shallow.

“We’ll have to wait for the
doctor.” After checking the computer and making notations on a chart hanging on
the foot of his
bed,
the nurse frowned. Her hands found the wireless mouse, which she slid back and
forth to bring the monitor to life. With fingers flying over the keyboard, the
nurse quickly located a computer file. Then the nurse read the screen, which
Rhetta couldn’t see. She next reached for the chart and compared the chart to
the screen.

A slender blond man wearing a lab coat over navy
dress slacks and a stethoscope dangling from his lab coat collar, hurried
through the door. From his awkward gait, Rhetta guessed the man had a wounded
leg or a handicap. His ID badge read Henri Marinthe, M.D. He barely nodded to
Rhetta before checking Randolph’s vital signs.

“I am Doctor Marinthe,” he said to her, after
examining Randolph. “When did you first notice your husband was unresponsive?”
His soft voice had a lilting, musical quality.

“I had just come into his room when the alarm, or
whatever, began going off,” she said, gripping the rail alongside Randolph.
“Just a few minutes ago.”

Marinthe nodded. “I will have blood work done and
follow that with an MRI to see what is going on in his head. As you can see, he
is unresponsive. He appears to be in a coma. I shouldn’t think there could be
brain swelling now, but we must not overlook that possibility.”

Rhetta collapsed into the chair. Propping her elbow
on the arm, she pressed her forehead into her palm. “What does this mean,
Doctor? What’s going on?” Unable to stop a tear, she slapped it away with the
back of her hand. “He was doing so well when I was last here. What could’ve
happened?”

Marinthe turned toward her. “This isn’t good. We’ll
scan him immediately. Then we will know what we are dealing with.” The nurse
had unplugged the machines, which continued running on the battery back-up
units as evidenced by periodic beeping.      

A lab tech holding a tray of dozens of rubber-stoppered
tubes used her elbows to push the door open enough so that she could enter. She
deftly snapped a rubber tube around Randolph’s arm, swabbed the inside of his
arm with a cotton ball she removed from a jar, and inserted a needle into the
bend of his arm. Three vials quickly filled with his crimson blood. She
finished labeling and hurried to the door. “I’ll be running these the moment I
get to the lab, Doctor,” she called. Her blue lab coat billowed behind her as
she sailed out of the room.

Doctor Marinthe approached Rhetta’s chair. She
peered up at soft blue eyes that radiated caring and kindness. He patted her
shoulder. “I will be here all night, and I will monitor your husband personally,”
he said.

She nodded, registering for the first time that his
English, while flawless, had a soft accent. She wondered where he was from.

“I will contact Doctor….” He leafed through the
file. “I see here Doctor Reed is his surgeon.”

Rhetta nodded.

An orderly with shoulder-length dreadlocks hustled
through the door, announced he was from radiology, then pushed Randolph’s bed
out into the hall. “Please wait here, ma’am,” he called over his shoulder,
wheeling Randolph expertly toward the elevator.

“Will you still be on duty when my husband returns
from having the MRI?” Rhetta asked as Doctor Marinthe’s fingers flew across the
keyboard.

“Yes, certainly. I have a call in to Doctor Reed,
too.” He slid the keyboard drawer back into place. He rose slowly, avoiding any
weight directly on his left leg. She noticed then that his left leg appeared to
be shorter than the right.

“Where are you from?’ Rhetta asked, finally
succumbing to her curiosity. “I can’t place your accent.”

“I am from Libreville, which is in Gabon, a country
on the shore of Western Africa. Have you heard of it?” He turned to smile at
her.

“I’m not very familiar with Gabon, but I have
friends who live in France who spent a dozen years there,” Rhetta answered,
remembering her college roommate and her husband who moved to Gabon to work for
Shell Oil.

Marinthe nodded. “My parents were from Antibes in
the South of France and emigrated to Gabon also to work in the oil business.
They moved there because it was one of the few French-speaking oil producing
countries. At that time, it was also a Muslim community that welcomed French
Muslims.”
Of course, his accent is French.

Marinthe glanced up when he heard the speaker page
him to the nursing station. “I will be back whenever your husband returns from
the testing, Mrs. McCarter.” He turned off the computer and limped to the door.

The room fell deadly quiet—no machines whirring, no
activity, no Randolph.

CHAPTER
23