The Devil's Right Hand (17 page)

“
We don’t have time to wait for them,”
he said. “We’ll take her in your car.” He scooped the pager and
cell phone off the table. Each had a plastic clip for fastening to
a belt.

“
Damn it, Keller,” Marie said, “She
needs a doctor.”

Keller clipped the devices onto his belt and
bent down to lift the girl. Her body was a sodden dead weight in
his arms. He grunted as he lifted her.

“
She needs a doctor now,” he said, his
voice taut with the strain. “By the time the ambulance makes it
here, it might be too late.” He set off down the hall.

“
This is crazy,” Marie protested, but
she followed him. He burst into the sunlight. Marie jogged ahead,
pulling her keys from the pocket of her jeans. She threw the back
door of her Honda open. Keller tried to lay the girl gently into
the back, but lost his grip and she tumbled onto the back seat. A
grunt escaped her as she landed and her robe fell open
again.

“
You know CPR, right?” he asked
Marie.

“
Yeah, but--”

“
Hop in the back with her, then,” he
said. “In case she goes into cardiac arrest. I’ll
drive.”

“
You are out of your mind,” she said as
she got in the back. “I can’t give CPR in the back seat of a WHOA!”
Keller had started the car and begun pulling away. Marie barely had
time to pull the door shut.

They drove in silence, broken only by the
screech of tires and the angry blare of horns as Keller ignored
stop lights and yield signs. He stole a glance at Marie in the
rear-view mirror. She had her eyes on the girl whose shallow
breathing seemed about to cease at any moment. Keller heard a
slight chirring noise and felt a vibration against his right hip.
He reached down and plucked the pager off his belt. He looked at
the number displayed on the pager’s LED screen. He memorized the
number and put the pager down on the seat.

“
What was that?” Marie said.

“
Her pager. Someone’s trying to reach
her. Maybe someone who can give us a lead.”

“
It’s probably her pimp,” Marie said.
“Or her dealer. What would they know about her cousin?”

“
I don’t know,” Keller said, “but I’m
out of other ideas.”

They had reached the emergency entrance of
the hospital. Keller slammed to a stop at the front door and leaped
out. Marie opened the back door and Keller reached in for the girl.
Marie stopped him with a hand on his chest. “Don’t try to move her
again,” she said. “They’ve got gurneys. And doctors.” Keller
stepped back as Marie stood up and ran to the entrance. The heavy
automatic sliding door was barely open before she bolted inside.
She was back in moments with a white-coated man and a pair of
nurses wheeling a gurney between them. They elbowed Keller out of
the way and descended on the back seat of the Honda. They briskly
loaded her onto the gurney and sped back through the front door.
Marie followed, spitting out the statistics of Crystal’s condition
in abrupt, precise sentences. It was left to Keller to close the
car doors and move the vehicle away from the front entrance. He
found the ER visitor’s parking lot and parked the car. He was
headed back towards the entrance when he saw Marie walking out. He
stopped to wait for her. She was shaking her head and putting her
sunglasses on as she reached him.

“
Get in the car, Jack,” she said. “And
I’ll drive, if you don’t mind. It
is
my car.” He handed her the keys. They walked back to the car
and got in.

“
Keller,” she said as she started the
car. “That was a really stupid stunt.” He said nothing. She put her
hand across the back of the seat and looked back as she backed out.
“I mean, I know you’re not real crazy about cops right now.” She
put the car in gear and drove off. “And let’s face it, they’re not
all that fond of you, either. But that girl could have died while
you were trying to do it all yourself.”

“
I figured you could handle it,” he
said.

She made a face. “Thanks,” she said. “But
next time, let’s get together on the decision. Or better yet, leave
this kind of thing to the pros, all right?”

Keller shrugged and said nothing. Marie
sighed. “I’d like to find that girl who sang about ‘where have all
the cowboys gone’ and slap her in her silly face,” she muttered.
That made Keller laugh. “Okay,” he said. “You win.”

The cell phone chirred again on the seat
between them. Keller looked at Marie. “Maybe you should get that,”
he said.

Marie looked at him in amazement. “Why
me?”

“
Because a man’s voice might cause them
to hang up.” He handed her the phone. She shook her head, but
flipped it open and put it to her ear. “Hello?” There was a sudden
burst of words from whoever was on the other end. Keller couldn’t
make out the words or the voice, but he could sense the anger and
the threat in the voice even from across the car.

“
Whoa, Whoa,” Marie said. “Amber’s not
here. She’s, ah, sick.”

Another blast of sound from the phone.
Marie’s face reddened. “Listen, you,” she snarled, “this is--”
Keller reached out and plucked the phone from her hand. He put it
to his ear.

The voice was so deep and raspy that Keller
at first didn’t realize it was a woman. “...tell that little cunt
if she doesn’t get her lazy ass back to work, I’ll fuck her face up
so bad her own Mama won’t want to kiss her. You got that,
bitch?”

“
I got it,” Keller said. “But I doubt
she’ll be much good for work for a few days.”

Silence. Then: “Who the hell are you?”

“
A friend of the family,” Keller
replied. “Crys--I mean Amber’s in the hospital. She’s at
Fayetteville General if you want to...” there was a click and the
line went dead. Keller put the phone down.

“
You told her where to find the girl,”
Marie said. She didn’t sound happy.

“
Yeah,” Keller said. “Drop me off at my
car. I’ll double back to the hospital and see who shows
up.”

“
I don’t think I like you using that
girl as bait,” Marie said.

“
It’s possible that DeWayne might hear
about it, Marie. The guy who killed your partner. He might show up
there. Then he’s all ours.”

“
All yours, you mean.”

“
Hell, you can have the collar,” Keller
said. “It might get you back in good with the
department.”

She shook her head. “I feel like I’m making a
deal with the devil.”

“
Welcome to my world,
Marie.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

They had moved him out of intensive care into
a private room. Raymond had overheard an argument over that.
Detective Barnes clearly didn’t want to commit the city to paying
for a private room. He faced off outside Raymond’s ICU cubicle with
some guy from the hospital who refused to put another patient in
with a “dangerous criminal”. From this, Raymond surmised that they
had matched up the slugs from Leonard Puryear with the ones from
the gun found with Raymond. In the end, fear of citizen lawsuits
had prevailed and Raymond was left pretty much to himself. He
suspected that the doctors were keeping him in the hospital longer
than they normally would because they knew he was headed straight
to jail to await trial once they turned him loose.

The city may have been forced to spring for a
private room, but they weren’t going to give him a TV. Raymond
spent much of his time staring out the window at a narrow blue
strip of sky between two other buildings. The only breaks in the
monotony of his days were when they got him up and made him walk up
and down the halls for exercise. Raymond was stashing his pain
medication rather than taking it. It hurt his gut like fire to walk
up and down the halls, but he bore up.

He was always escorted on these walks by a
uniformed cop who looked bored when he wasn’t flirting with the
nurses. The pair of them sometimes drew odd looks from visitors,
but the rest of the staff by now hardly gave them a second
glance.

It was on one of these morning
constitutionals that he noticed a familiar figure sitting in one of
the visitor’s lounges. The lounges were glass-windowed enclosures
to which family members and friends of patients were banished
whenever it came time for the nurses to perform some uncomfortable
and humiliating ritual on the patient. This morning, the lounge was
empty except for a big man in a flannel checked shirt sitting in
one of the chairs. The man held a magazine up before him, but the
ice-blue eyes that could be seen between the top of the magazine
and the baseball cap pulled down low on the man’s forehead were
fixed on the hall. As Raymond passed by, the magazine lowered to
reveal Billy Ray’s face. Raymond gave no sign other than a slight
nod. The nod was returned, barely. The cop, who was busy talking
about movies with a chubby blonde nurse, never noticed. Raymond
turned around and started the slow trek back to his room. The cop
followed, looking disgruntled at his interrupted conversation. When
Raymond reached the door of his room, he stopped and leaned on the
doorjamb as if to catch his breath. He saw Billy Ray pass. His eyes
flicked to the number beside the door, then swung back to look
straight ahead down the hall. He walked around the corner, out of
Raymond’s sight.

Raymond shuffled slowly back to the bed and
got in slowly, grunting with the pain as the motion flexed his
ripped and torn muscles. The cop stood by, waiting with the cuffs
to secure him back to the bed.

“
I don’t know why you got to use
those,” Raymond complained. “I’m so busted up I ain’t going
nowhere.”

“
Yeah, right,” the cop said. “You got
these doctors fooled, Raymond, but not us.” Raymond sighed with
theatrical resignation, then lay back on the bed and lifted his
arm. The cop snapped one cuff on Raymond’s right wrist and locked
the other to the bed rail. Then he walked out to take up his
position in the chair outside Raymond’s door. Raymond turned his
head and looked out the window, waiting.

Keller entered the hospital through the front
entrance. He walked to the front desk, where a middle-aged woman in
a blue and white striped uniform was talking on the phone. She had
dark hair shot with streaks of white, cemented in place with enough
hair spray to give it a shellacked appearance. Keller started to
speak, but she silenced him with an upraised hand. “Fayetteville
General,” she said in a singsong voice. “I’ll connect you..” He
waited while she answered and routed several calls. Eventually,
there was a lull in the traffic and she looked up at him. “May I
help you?” she chirped.

“
I’m trying to locate a Crystal Lee
Puryear?” he said.

The woman turned and began tapping the keys
of a computer terminal in front of her. “Are you a family member?”
She asked. “It says here she’s to receive no visitors
except...”

“
I’m her brother,” he lied.
“Leonard.”

“
Room 433,” she said after a moment.
“Follow the green line on the floor to the elevators, go up to the
fourth floor, and follow the yellow lines to the patient
rooms.”

“
Thanks,” he said, but she was already
on another call.

He found the room with only slight trouble.
The door stood slightly ajar. He pushed it open gently.

It was a double room. Crystal Puryear lay in
the bed closest to the door, her face nearly as pale as the sheets.
She was asleep or unconscious, and there was a thin clear oxygen
tube crossing her face under her nose. There was a girl seated in
the chair next to the bed, her hand resting lightly on Crystal’s.
The girl stood up quickly as Keller entered.

The girl was tall and painfully thin. Her
narrow face was pale and nearly green in the glare of the harsh
fluorescent light over the bed. Her light-brown hair was plaited in
cornrows that hung in braids to beneath her shoulders. The braids
were woven in with colored beads that rattled and clacked when she
moved. She was dressed in a ragged midriff top that did what it
could to emphasize almost non-existent breasts. A pair of frayed
jeans was slung low on her slim, boyish hips.

“
Who are you?” she said. Her voice
sounded slurred and Keller wondered if she was drunk. Then he
noticed a flash of light reflecting off the metal stud through the
girl’s tongue.

“
My name’s Keller,” he said. “I’m the
one that brought her in.”

“
I’m Rita,” the girl said. She gave him
a professional smile with no actual warmth.

“
She going to be okay?” Keller
asked.

The girl looked back at the pale figure on
the bed, chewed her lower lip. “She’s going to live,” she said,
“but she ain’t nowhere near okay.”

“
She been shooting up long?”

The girl sat down and shook her head. “She
never did anything like that before. Said she was scared of
needles. She just did a little reefer, a little blow, nothing
serious. But after her brother and her parents got killed, Jesus,
in the same week and all--I guess she just decided what the fuck,
y’know?”

“
What about that cousin of hers,”
Keller said. “You know, DeWayne. Anybody contact him?”

Another shake of the head. “Nobody knows
where he is. They say he shot a cop. He’s on the run.”

Keller shrugged, trying to appear casual. “I
just thought, he’s the only family she has left. He ought to be
here.”

The girl laughed bitterly. “Right,” she said.
“They hardly ever saw each other. Me and Mara, we’re the closest
thing she has to family.”