The Siege (25 page)

“There, is that better?” she asked when they finally broke off the kiss.

Dale nodded, but she could tell by the tension in his body that it wasn’t better, not by a long shot!

“I was thinking, one thing we could do is pick up where we left off last night,” she said, her voice low and husky close to his ear. “I don’t want to sound too easy, but I’m willing to go all the way.’”

Dale looked at her, and her eyes were sparkling with humor at her use of such an old-fashioned phrase; but beneath the humor, there was a smoldering longing, a need to be loved. His heart thumped heavily in his chest.

“One thing before we go,” he said, backing away from her. “I want to walk up to the crest there and take a look around.”

Donna sighed deeply, and as he turned to go, reached out and snagged him by the arm. “And after that, you’ll let it drop?”

Dale looked her squarely in the eyes and said, “After that I will. I promise.”

Donna smiled and nodded. “Well, then, while you do that, I think I’ll just wait in the car and have a cigarette if it’s all right with you.”

“Just make sure you open the window,” Dale said, frowning.

VII

T
he hospital doors slammed open, and the Medcu emergency team quickly rolled the stretcher into the emergency room.

“Get someone here. Stat!” one of the men shouted when the desk nurse came over toward them. But before she could respond, a thin man with black hair and thick glasses came out of the doctors’ station. The name on his badge read:
Steven Wayne—Physician’s Assistant
.

“Steve!” one of the Medcu team shouted as soon as he saw him.

“What have you got?” Steve said as he quickly scanned the man lying on the stretcher. He was young, probably around thirty years old, had sandy hair and a fairly hefty build. Right now, Steve saw, he was alive and conscious, but obviously in a great deal of pain. “Did you get vitals?”

The Medcu man nodded. “Pulse and BP are all right. His name’s Reginald Perry, from Mars Hill. He was out harvesting on a farm along Bates Ridge. He stumbled and fell, and a tractor ran over his chest. From what I could gather, he was damned lucky. He fell in between two rows, and the tractor tire sort of pressed him into the ground. It was soft where it had just been dug. Otherwise, we could’ve just slipped him under the door at Rodgers’.”

“Oh—gee,” the man on the stretcher said, gasping loudly. “Thanks for the—” He coughed, high and tight, and his voice cut off with a gasp.

“Don’t worry, Mr. Perry,” Steve said. “You’re going to be just fine.” He peeled back each eyelid in turn and held a penlight close to check pupil dilation. Then he took an ear scope and checked for bleeding inside the ears. After a quick stethoscope check, Steve nodded to the Medcu team.

“We’re looking okay,” he said. “No cuts or serious contusions. Get him down to X-ray right away. My only concern right now is any lung punctures. There’s probably a cracked rib or two.”

“It—hurts—like—
hell
—to breathe,” Perry said. His eyes were tiny slits; when he tried to cough again, the best he could make was a watery rattling sound.

“Let’s get him down to X-ray,” Steve said. He backed away as the Medcu team and two nurses shifted Perry onto a hospital stretcher.

“My insurance card is in my wallet,” Perry gasped.

“We’ll take care of everything. Don’t worry,” Steve said as watched Perry get wheeled away. “I want to see him as soon as he’s through in X-ray,” he called out just as the stretcher rounded the corner and was gone. The Medcu team turned and rolled their stretcher back out to the van; then one of them came back to fill in the necessary emergency forms.

An hour later, with a tube stuck down his throat to keep his throat clear, an IV line jabbed into the back of his hand, an oxygen mask over his nose, and a strong jolt of painkiller doing cartwheels in his system, Reginald Perry resting about as comfortably as possible, considering the internal damage he had suffered. The room where he was sleeping was silent except for the steady beep of the monitors that registered his pulse and other vital functions. Late afternoon sunlight, sliced into thin bars by the closed Venetian blinds, reached across the floor and up onto his bed. Perry wasn’t sleeping deeply, merely hovering somewhere in a drugged haze of pain.

The door to Perry’s room, Room 217, swung slowly open. Steve Wayne quickly entered and hushed the door shut behind himself. For a few seconds, he stood there motionless, watching his sleeping patient and listening to the steady beep of the monitors. He had his left hand in the pocket of his white doctor’s jacket; his other hand repeatedly swiped at the sheen of sweat that glistened like dew on his forehead and upper lip.

Prison bars
, he thought as his eyes focused on the narrow bands of light crossing the bed.
Great… just great
…

He took the padded chair from the corner of the room and slid it over in front of the door, bracing it so the top was jammed up under the handle. He gave the door a hefty tug to make sure it would stay shut, then went over to the bed.

Reginald Perry’s breathing was short and shallow, and Steve could hear a slurping sound from deep inside the breathing tube. With his left hand still in his jacket pocket, he gingerly peeled back the blanket covering the sleeping man. The thickly-muscled arm, tanned a deep brown, lay heavily on the clean, white sheet. Twisting blue veins twined over the inside of Perry’s forearm.

“I promise you,” Steve whispered hoarsely, “this won’t hurt you at all.”

Saying that, he gave the sleeping man’s arm a squeeze just below the biceps, probing until he found the artery he wanted. Then he withdrew his left hand from his jacket pocket and held an empty syringe up to the light. The clear barrel caught a ray of sunlight and reflected it. As Steve slowly drew back the plunger, the needle tip made a thin whistling sound. Steve froze when Perry stirred on the bed, but the man’s eyes remained shut, and his breathing remained shallow.

“Almost ready,” Steve said softly. He held the needle poised and then slid it into Perry’s arm with a quick jab.

“Auggh!” Perry cried, his eyes snapping open and widening with fright as Steve pressed in the plunger and shot a bubble of air into Perry’s brachial artery.

Steve reached over and turned the monitor volume down, but not off. That would look suspicious. He stood back, a thin smile playing across his lips while he waited for the effect he knew was due within seconds. The bubble of air, no larger than a BB pellet, would rush to Reginald Perry’s brain and
pop!
one dead emergency room patient!

Steve quickly pocketed the blood-tipped syringe, pushed the chair back into the corner of the room, and, calmly as he could, walked out into the hospital corridor. He let go a hissing sigh of relief when he saw that the corridor was deserted; no one had seen him either enter or, more importantly, leave Perry’s room.

So far, so good
, he thought as he walked briskly down the corridor. Just beside the waiting room was a bank of pay phones. Dr. Joseph Foster, the emergency room director, had made it clear on several occasions that he didn’t want the personnel using the hospital phones for personal use, so he knew it wouldn’t look unusual when he entered one of the booths and swung the door shut. He wanted to be sure he could make this call without being overheard!

His fingers were shaking as he fished change out of his pocket, counted out two dimes, and dropped them into the slot. As soon as he heard the dial tone, he punched the buttons for a number he had dialed more times than he cared to remember. While he waited for the other party to answer the phone, he thought, again, of the bars of light slicing across the bed in Room 217.

Prison bars!
he thought...
If they ever find out about this, that’s what I’ll be looking at.

“Hello?” a gruff voice said on the other end of the line.

“Hello. This is Steve Wayne, up at Northern Med.”

“Yesss…” The voice drew the single word out in a long sibilance.

“I’ve got a fresh one for you,” Steve said, cupping the mouthpiece with his hand. His eyes kept flicking out in to the corridor every time someone walked past the phone booth. Already, the booth was heating up, filled with the sticky stench of sweat.

“Oh? You do?” the voice said, almost purring.

“Just came in a little while ago,” Steve said, glancing nervously at his watch. It had been almost three hours since they had wheeled Reginald Perry into the Emergency Room; less than five minutes since the air bubble had popped into his artery. By now, there should be a nice, solid flat line on his monitors.

A sudden flurry of activity outside the phone booth caught his attention, and Steve watched, almost smiling, as two nurses hurried down the corridor. He opened the phone booth just a crack, and then smiled when he heard a voice on the public address say, “Code nine. Room 217. Code nine. Room 217.”

“They just found him,” Steve whispered into the receiver. His left hand was tucked down into his jacket pocket, clenched around the smooth barrel of the hypodermic needle. He knew he had to get rid of that soon; he wouldn’t want to be found holding onto an empty, blood-tipped needle, especially not when the blood matched that of the recently deceased.

“Well, then,” the voice on the phone said softly, “I suppose I should hang up, now. I assume I will be getting a call soon from the hospital.”

“Uhh—” Steve said quickly as a doctor walked briskly past the booth, heading toward Room 217. “Before you hang up. About my payment...”

“Don’t worry,” the voice said. “You’ll be taken care of soon.”

Steve’s smile widened. “I know this might not be the time to mention it, but I’ve been thinking lately that since
I’m
the one who’s taking most of the risk here, I think I ought to be getting maybe a little more than usual.”

“We’ve already established a price,” the voice said, and there was more than a hint of iron in the tone.

Steve took a shallow breath and held it. “Yeah, well, I think the price just went up,” he said, fighting to keep control of his voice. “Just wait ’till you see this one. He’s a good one.”

There was a long pause at the other end of the line, and Steve could hear the other party take a deep, rasping breath. “Tell you what, Mr. Wayne. I’ll wait until I actually see this one, and I’ll consider whether or not you’re due for an increase. Is that fair?”

“Look, I’ve got to go,” he said. “I guess—yeah that sounds all right.”

“We’ll be in touch,” the voice said, and there was a soft click on the phone, followed by dead air. Steve slowly cradled the receiver and, casting a furtive glance each way, left the phone booth. First he’d dump the hypodermic needle; then he’d rush on up to Room 217 and see what the commotion was all about. He occupied his mind with thoughts of what he was going to do with the money once he got it.

VIII

T
he loneliness of the road, now that Donna was waiting for him in the car, intensified as Dale walked along the dirt-rutted shoulder, scanning his eyes back and forth. The sun was close to the horizon, so what few beams of light made it through the trees cast long shadows. Night came fast in the woods, but Dale wanted to survey the road, and the fatal turn, from the crest of the hill. He had to see what was surely the last thing Larry Cole saw!

He walked slowly, keeping his eyes to the ground until he was at least a hundred yards from his parked car. Then he stopped and turned around. The spray-painted graffiti on the rock stood out as though it was lit in neon, but Dale had to remind himself that Larry had been driving late at night. All he would have had to see by were his headlights.

Would they have been enough?
he wondered as he looked back along the last hundred yards of road his best friend ever got to drive. He kept telling himself:
Larry had grown up here… He knew the turn and the rock were here! So why in the hell was he driving fast enough to plow so far into the woods?

Dale’s eyes started to sting as he looked back along the road in the fading light. The quiet and loneliness ate at his nerves. He could almost imagine Larry’s ghost, still shocked at the suddenness of his death, hovering in the mist-shrouded trees, its face a ghastly, bloody mess. The finality of it all jabbed through him like a spear, and he didn’t bother to wipe away the tears that now flowed freely down his cheeks.

He could see the dim silhouette of Donna’s head, the pale blue cigarette smoke drifting out of her window as she waited for him in the car. Along with his questions about Larry, several dozen questions shot into his mind about her, too.

How much do I feel for her?
he wondered.
What do I actually feel?

In some perverse way, Dale felt like he was still working out his feelings for Natalie in his attraction to Donna. He had been so strongly and so immediately drawn to her, he couldn’t help but think she might be little more than an emotional lifeline for him, the first available anchor he could grab to help him deal with this fresh loss.

Am I being fair to her?
Dale thought.
Am I stringing her along so she could be my emotional crutch for the next few days? Maybe I see her subconsciously as a surrogate for Natalie, just to help get over losing Larry
.