Silencer (29 page)

She lifted the handset from the bedside table. She punched Drumm's number. A woman answered and introduced herself as Sergeant Betty Friedman.

Amanda asked, ‘Is Willie available?'

‘He's out of the office,' the sergeant said.

‘If he calls in, get him to phone me at the Valley of the Sun Memorial Hospital immediately. My name's Amanda Scholes.'

‘Amanda Scholes?'

‘Scholes. You want me to spell it?'

Betty Friedman said, ‘No, I'm pretty familiar with your name. It's funny though, because I saw Willie about twenty minutes ago and he was rushing out, and when I asked him where he was buzzing in such a heart-attack hurry, he said he'd received a message to meet you.'

‘A message to meet
me
?'

‘What he said.'

‘I don't know anything about any meeting. Did he say where it's supposed to be?' Something caught and fluttered in her throat.

‘He just boogied out the door. I guess maybe some wires got crossed along the way if he isn't with you.'

‘Do you know where the message came from?'

‘He never said. I'll see if I can find out. You want to hold?'

Amanda said, ‘Sure.' A message, she thought. A message she'd never sent. She stared at the open door. People still passed back and forth along the corridor, a shuffling procession, funereal in its lack of energy.

Sergeant Friedman came back on the line. ‘Nobody seems to know who received the message, Miss Scholes. Could be the officer has gone off-duty.'

‘Can you contact Willie?'

‘If he's not in his car, it's a problem. He carries a cellular, but he keeps it switched off when he feels like it. He says a man needs some private space, time to think.'

‘The number here is nine four nine seventy seventy, extension three eight nine eight,' Amanda said. ‘I need to talk with him – badly.'

‘I'll get back to you.'

Amanda put down the receiver.

Rhees said, ‘Problem?'

‘Somebody left a message for Drumm to meet me.'

‘We don't need three guesses, do we?' Rhees said. ‘Dansk can predict your future. He knows you'll call on Drumm for help, so he lures Willie away with a story.'

She thought of Dansk trespassing in her head, forecasting her moves. He'd sent a message luring Willie away. Something about this bothered her.
Luring Willie away
. Before she could think it through any further, the telephone rang. She picked it up and heard Betty Friedman's voice.

‘Sorry, I can't raise Willie,' she said.

‘Please keep trying, it's important.'

Amanda hung up. This wasn't going to do it. Waiting here balanced on a piano-wire, waiting for Drumm. She couldn't just linger until some totalitarian head nurse told her visiting hours were over and ejected her, and she couldn't go, leaving John on his own. She'd left him once before and she wasn't abandoning him again. Ever.

‘Who else can you call?' he asked. ‘What about Drumm's boss. What's his name?'

‘Kelloway's a hard-ass who doesn't like me.'

‘The Irishman then. Maybe he could help in some way.'

‘I don't see Concannon walking into a situation without knowing how the odds are stacked. What am I supposed to tell him? We need your help but it might be dangerous?'

‘So we're in a box and it's just you and me,' Rhees said, ‘and either we stay inside it or we try to get out.'

Amanda thought, This is no longer a hospital, but another kind of institution altogether, one of danger and high risk where a surgical mask might conceal a killer's face, a rubber glove a murderer's hand. She searched her mind for a small pocket of clarity. She thought of the parking-lot at the back, getting John to the car, getting him away without being seen. She thought of waiting here in the hospital for Drumm to call. Inside outside, a bind.

‘I'll get you out of here safely, John. I swear.'

‘Then what? The house is out of the question. The drive to the cabin in my present state would be gruelling, and we can't go to your father's, because I don't see any reason to drag him into all this.'

Her father. She hadn't had time to think of him. She owed him a phone call, but this wasn't the moment. ‘Then we drive downtown. The mountain goes to Muhammad.'

Rhees said, ‘I hear the click of the little steel ball in the roulette wheel.'

‘What you're really hearing is my heartbeat,' she answered.

53

She pushed the wheelchair close to the bed. ‘We'll do this as quickly as we can. First the shirt.'

She slipped the hospital gown from Rhees's upper body and looked at his strapped ribcage. She draped the clean shirt she'd brought loosely around his shoulders. ‘I need your legs next.'

Rhees groaned when he swung his legs in stilted fashion towards the edge of the bed. ‘Jesus
Christ
,' he said.

She bent, drew the jeans over his bare feet and rolled them halfway up his legs. His bloated knee looked raw and awful. ‘I've got to get you into the wheelchair, so I need you to stand up. I know it hurts. Grab my shoulder with your right hand.'

He reached out and moaned. His fingernails dug into the flesh around her shoulder. He was halfway up, his body bent forward awkwardly.

‘I'm tottering, Amanda. The knee's fucked.'

‘You can't afford to totter. Come on.'

He was upright now, all his weight on his good leg. She eased him into the wheelchair. She drew his jeans to his waist and buttoned them quickly and slipped his bare feet inside his canvas espadrilles.

She wheeled him to the door where she looked for the guy with the flowers, but didn't see him, which didn't mean he wasn't around somewhere, lingering, watching, waiting. Her whole life was a book lying open and somebody with the power of life and death was reading the pages.

Rhees had his upper body angled forward. His breathing was shallow. She tried to remember the way back to the service elevator. Her memory skipped a beat. Blank. She took a chance, turned right, then glanced back the way she'd come. An overweight woman in a baggy hospital gown stood propped up by a walking-stick, a kid with a bandaged head bounced a rubber ball on the floor, an old guy in a walker was being helped along by an elderly woman who had one leg in a metal brace. It was like the Lourdes Express had just disgorged its passengers.

She rolled Rhees through a door and faced another corridor. She recognized the colour scheme ahead: sky-blue and lemon. Quick, quick as you can. The service elevator was about 20 yards away. An orderly was waiting outside the door. The elevator arrived, the orderly held the door open for them and Amanda pushed the wheelchair inside.

The orderly looked at Rhees and said, ‘He OK?'

‘He's fine,' Amanda said.

The elevator started to descend with a cranking sound and a shudder. Rhees had his eyes shut. ‘Looks like he needs rest,' the orderly said.

‘I want to get him out of here.'

‘Yeah, this hospital experience can really be a major bummer.' He was skinny and whitefaced and had the look of a guy who spent all his leisure time travelling the deepest arteries of the Internet until his eyes popped.

‘Say, you taking this guy out without authority? This some kind of escape from the Gulag?'

‘In a sense,' Amanda said.

‘Cool. Anarchy.'

Amanda had the slight suspicion that this orderly had been dabbling inside the pharmacy, maybe a little speed to propel him through the day.

‘I wonder if you'd do me a favour,' she said. ‘My car's parked out back. Would you get it for me? Reverse it right up to the back doors, so I don't have to push this wheelchair all the way across the lot?'

‘You're asking me to assist you in an unauthorized escape?'

‘I guess I am.'

The orderly said, ‘Sometimes I kinda imagine this whole place is a penal colony floating in outer space, you know? Like the patients are really prisoners of some oppressive regime that injects them with experimental drugs? And I'm on this secret mission to scope out the truth.'

‘Outer space, huh,' Amanda said. Boy, you really know how to pick them. ‘Maybe you can pretend my car's some kind of mini space shuttle.'

‘Yeah, I could get into that.' The elevator stopped, the door opened. ‘Just gimme the keys and point the way.'

‘It's a yellow Ford parked near the ambulances.'

She pushed Rhees in the direction of the sign marked LAUNDRY. The laundry door was open and steam floated out and fogged the air. The exit was just ahead.

‘Back the car as close as you can possibly get,' she said.

‘Gotcha.'

She looked in the direction of the Ford, 30 yards away. She scanned the parking-lot and saw a crew of guys washing ambulances. Pressurized water whizzed from black hoses, smacked against the panels and gathered in glittering oily puddles. BMWs and Jags were parked in the physicians' slots. No sign of the bearded guy with the flowers, and yet everything was charged and tense, as if somewhere nearby, perhaps inside a trash can, perhaps stashed under the chassis of an ambulance, there was Semtex attached to a ticking clock muffled in old newspapers, or someone hidden in the shadows with a gun.

The orderly walked to the Ford, got in and backed up at speed, docking the shuttle.

He squeezed the car all the way inside between the open doors, a narrow margin. He got out and surveyed the distance separating car and door-frame, a matter of maybe a foot on either side.

‘That close enough for you?' he asked.

‘Terrific,' she said.

‘Lemme help you get your friend in.' He opened the passenger door. There was just enough room for Rhees to slide in, but it was a difficult manoeuvre, even with the orderly's assistance. They raised Rhees out of the wheelchair, but when he had to bend to get into the passenger seat, he gasped.

‘I think we'll rip off the wheelchair,' Amanda said.

‘I'll fold it for you,' the orderly said. He collapsed the chair and placed it behind the front seats.

‘What's your name?' Amanda asked.

‘My earth name's Jonas.'

‘Jonas, I owe you.'

‘Consider me an agent of justice,' he said.

She got behind the wheel and slammed the car into the great bright vacuum of the day, tall date palms whipping past in a blue-green blur, groves of citrus trees flaring under the withering masonic eye of the sun.

‘I don't recognize the car,' Rhees said.

‘It's another story, John.'

He sat with his head against the back of his seat. ‘It's going to get worse,' he said.

She wasn't sure if he was referring to the heat or his pain or something else altogether.

54

Willie Drumm waited outside the shopping mall. He drank coffee from a cardboard cup and checked his watch every so often. He was a patient man by nature, but this situation was beginning to test him. The message on his desk had read, ‘Meet Amanda Scholes, Metrocenter, 11 a.m.' It had been received by a young cop called Lazarus, whom Drumm barely knew. Lazarus had gone off-duty, so Drumm hadn't been able to question him about the message. Had it come directly from Amanda? How had she sounded? Did she say anything else?

It was eleven-twenty now. He wondered how much longer he should give her. She'd always been a stickler for punctuality, at least when he'd worked with her. Her resignation had created a void in his life. He'd enjoyed the regular leisure hours they'd spent drinking, chatting, talking cases, crimes, the state of the nation.

He wandered up and down, scanning the parking-lot. It was packed with cars, people hurrying out of the sun and inside the mall as if this was the last shopping day in the history of the universe.

He realized he was hungry. Inside, you could get pizza, kebabs, stir-fry, anything you liked except it was all indigestible. He didn't want to go in and grab a sandwich because he didn't want to run the risk of missing Amanda when she showed up. He didn't like these consumer malls anyway. He preferred corner grocery stores and small family operations, when you could find them these days.

He strolled up and down. He'd give Amanda five more minutes then he'd call in and check his messages. She might have cancelled. He tapped the face of his watch.

This wasn't his day so far. He'd gone to the Carlton only to find that Anthony Dansk had checked out fifteen minutes before. No forwarding address, and now here he was waiting for Amanda.

She'd said she was on her way to visit Rhees, and that he should telephone her at the hospital after he'd seen Dansk. Maybe her plans had changed for some reason – hence the message, maybe she'd been delayed somewhere. He took the mobile phone from his pocket. He couldn't stand these things, they made him feel like a late-blooming yuppie. He didn't like electronic doodahs. Computers and modems and e-mail and all the rest of it were beyond him. Another world altogether.

Drumm punched the buttons and got himself connected to Betty Friedman.

‘Finally,' she said.

‘Why? You been looking for me?'

‘Your friend Amanda called. Says it's urgent you get back to her.'

Drumm had an odd little feeling: somebody walking on his grave.

‘She's at the Valley of the Sun Memorial. Got a pen, I hope?'

‘I got a pen.' Drumm went through the pockets of his jacket and found a toothmarked stub of pencil attached to a frayed loop on his notebook.

Betty Friedman read him the number and the extension. He wrote it down.

‘When did she phone?' he asked.

‘About half an hour ago.'

‘She sound OK?'

‘Odd you should ask. She doesn't know anything about this meeting with you. It was news to her.'

‘She didn't
know
about our appointment?'

‘Nope.'