A Man to Die for (31 page)

Business was picking up. There were two paramedics restocking from a trip in and a secretary calling parents on a minor. Millie and Abe were discussing something up by room four. And Hunsacker waited for Casey next to the desk by room six, the notebook back in his hand, a prescription pad atop it.

“Questions?” he asked with a perfectly placid face.

Casey fought the revulsion. “Not one,” she retorted, walking by to drop the pelvic instruments in dirty hold. She knew she wasn’t controlling her expression as well as she should. Hunsacker could probably read every murderous thought that crossed her mind on her way by. It just made him smile.

When she got back to pick up Phoebe’s chart, he was waiting. “You need to remind Phoebe about behaving,” he said, handing over the finished chart. He was watching her closely, his voice intimate and offensive. “It’s your responsibility to make sure she understands that if she doesn’t obey me the consequences are her fault.”

It sounded so innocent, a doctor concerned about a patient’s unwillingness to follow treatment. A man who cared only for his patient’s welfare. Casey shuddered under the impact of his real message. She shook with the effort it took to stay in control.

She couldn’t challenge him. She couldn’t tell him to go to hell, that she wasn’t going to be one of the victims in his game. He wasn’t going to make her an accomplice.

“When do you want to see her?” she asked instead, chanting her litany of survival to herself, her eyes fixed on the flat black of his.

“Next week, unless she has more problems,” he said.

Casey never saw Marva approach. She almost didn’t hear the warning in time. Hunsacker’s attention veered at the last moment. His gaze skipped over Casey’s right shoulder and his eyes widened. Casey turned.

Marva’s mouth was open. Her eyes were white-ringed and astonished. She’d just skirted past the two paramedics and turned toward the dirty hold. Unfortunately, her foot caught the edge of a chair that was out just a little too far from a desk.

“Oh, shit!” she cried, her whole body tipping forward like a felled tree.

She was carrying a bedpan full of urine.

Casey jumped out of the way just in time. Marva stumbled and cursed again. Hunsacker tried to duck left. Marva seemed to follow him. At the last minute she caught her balance, but the momentum was too great for the liquid to be contained. A great yellow wave of it splashed over the lip of the bedpan and cascaded down Hunsacker’s pants leg.

Casey gaped. A funny gurgling noise struggled free of her throat. She could hear Tom shrieking behind her and Hunsacker shrieking in front of her. She couldn’t take her eyes off his shoes, always so fashionable, now sodden and unpleasant.

“You fucking cunt,” he breathed, so low only Casey heard him. His gaze lifted from victim to perpetrator, and for the briefest of moments Marva was treated to a visit from the alien.

“Oh, my God,” Tom cried yet again as he ran over. “Marva, what did you
do?
”

Marva raised unperturbed eyes to her head nurse and shrugged, the bedpan once again quiet in her hands. “I tripped.”

Casey gurgled again. It was getting harder to keep quiet.

“I’m really sorry, Dr. Hunsacker,” Marva announced just as placidly, turning back to him. “You should probably get those shoes right off.”

“Uh, yes,” Casey managed with a jerky nod of the head. “Do you know what pee can do to leather?” Her voice rose on a suppressed giggle.

“Gomer pee.” Marva nodded in agreement. “The worst. God only knows what’s crawling around in that stuff.”

Hunsacker looked as if he’d been hit with a pie. His five-hundred-dollar suit pants were limp and aromatic, and his feet squinched when he moved.

“Scrubs?” Tom begged, wringing his hands. “I’ll have a tech get booties for you. We’ll take care of dry cleaning.”

“It was…an accident,” Hunsacker said, looking back down.

He gave his leg an uncomfortable little shake and then balanced a hand on the desk. Marva stepped closer. Casey held her breath. There was a soft sucking sound when he pulled his foot free. As usual, he wasn’t wearing socks. He held his foot suspended over the terrazzo floor as if he were a wading bird waiting for the tide. A small droplet of urine collected up by his arch and slid along to his second toe to hover, milky yellow and thick, from the pedicured nail.

Casey turned to Marva and lifted an eyebrow in consternation. Marva threw off a shrug of frustration and headed off with the bedpan.

What did they do now? Casey wondered, finally moving herself, leaving Tom to mop up Hunsacker’s drenched ego. His second toe was exactly as long as his first toe. They hadn’t proved anything. But they had certainly helped relocate Casey’s sense of humor.

“When you said you were taking me to lunch, I kind of expected tables and a menu,” Casey observed.

“There is a menu,” Jack informed her with a wave of his hand. “Right there. Now, do you want a hot dog or a hamburger?”

On a bright day, the zoo was a cacophony of color. Red brick walks, vivid splashes of flowers, trees, glistening black seals, exotic birds, long fingers of blue water in the basins, the earth red of the man-made mountains. Crowds of kids in playclothes and mylar balloons bobbing in a slow dance over small heads.

Today it was dark and close, the clouds flat with humidity, the trees dusty, and the animals somnolent. School was out, but there weren’t a lot of kids. More denizens from the nearby Central West End on lunch break. Just like Casey and Jack.

Casey accepted her hot dog and preceded Jack over to one of the picnic tables.

“You just tired of institutional green?” she asked, waving away sweat bees. “Or is this some kind of message?”

Jack put his food down across from her and swung a leg over the bench. “The captain had me in again yesterday.”

Casey had already taken her hot dog in hand. She stopped and looked up at him. “Another cozy little chat?” she asked, suddenly uncertain.

Jack concentrated on the mustard he was squeezing all over his hamburger. He had his hat on again. Casey kept wanting to push it to the back of his head, so he’d look like a Damon Runyan character. The way it sat now, she couldn’t see his eyes. She couldn’t know what kind of trouble he was in.

“I just decided,” he said, spiraling ketchup on top of the mustard without looking up, “that discretion was the better part of valor. I’m on my lunch hour, and unless I spend it with a hooker, he doesn’t have any say about what I do.”

Casey nodded instinctively. “What about the time he does have control over?”

Jack finally looked up, his expression enigmatic. “I’ve been given a deadline to come up with something concrete on Crystal, or it goes to somebody else.”

His words stole the air from Casey’s chest. She couldn’t tell what he was feeling, but his movements were precise and controlled, his jaw as tight as an old virgin. He turned back to his lunch deliberately, and she saw the effort it took for him to remain silent in the face of such an affront.

“That’s not the normal procedure, is it?” she asked quietly, his frustration a hard ache in her chest.

“During election year,” he assured her, “anything’s normal.”

“Why do you put up with it?” she demanded instinctively, angry for him.

Jack looked a little surprised. “How long have you been a nurse?” he asked.

“Twelve years,” she said, her hot dog still waiting in her hand.

“And this is the first time your boss has ever made life difficult for you.”

Casey snorted. He’d read her file. He knew just how well she got along with the brass.

He smiled, a small, contained expression that bonded them as fellow strugglers. “I’ve had enough jobs to know that hierarchy is pretty much interchangeable. Management survives on politics and relies on employees who’ll get the job done. I get the job done.”

She leaned closer. “Why?”

He shrugged, and it was as controlled and self-contained as the smile. “Because it’s what I do best.”

Casey had wanted revelation, explanation. She’d wanted him to give her the reason to work past the current crisis. He’d given her the obvious.

“What
do
you believe in?” she asked.

This time the smile was conciliatory. All the same Casey could have sworn she saw darkness at the edges. “Redemption,” was all he said. Then he picked up his hamburger and began eating.

“I did get the phone tap,” he announced a minute later when he set his lunch down half-eaten.

Casey looked up from checking her potato-chip bag for orphans. “When?”

“I’ll drive back home with you to check it. We’ll have a tape and a tracer on the call tonight.”

“If he makes it.”

Jack looked up, worried. “Did he last night?”

Casey offered her own controlled smile. “He didn’t have to. He tortured me face-to-face.”

That obviously wasn’t the answer he wanted. “I told hold you to stay away from him.”

Casey saw something new pass over Jack’s eyes, something she’d never noticed before. A sharp, fleeting fear. It surprised her. Even more, it unsettled her, deep where she couldn’t explain it. What was he not telling her?

“Virtually impossible to do when he asks specifically for you and your supervisor is eavesdropping to ensure your cooperation.”

“Did he say anything?”

“Hunsacker? Oh, yeah. He took the “Inquisitional Pelvic” to new heights, all the while instructing his patient on how if one misbehaves one must pay the price. It was…charming.”

She didn’t seem to be encouraging Jack in the least. “I mean it, Casey,” he insisted, leaning toward her. “Stay as far out of his way as you can.”

Casey didn’t exactly look away. She kept facing the concern in Jack’s eyes, knowing perfectly well that he was right. Knowing that she should walk off the halls right now and never force herself to be in the same room with Hunsacker again. But there was more to it than that. She didn’t want to back away. She didn’t want to forfeit those confrontations, because for the first time she was holding her ground. She wasn’t the victim, and it was important for Hunsacker to know.

And there was something else, something that was harder to face.

Jack must have sensed her rebellion. “I’m not kidding about this,” he warned sharply. “Winning isn’t going to be any good if you have to be dead to do it.”

“You really think he’d do that?”

Jack almost sighed. “We checked on Mrs. Peebles. She never made a move to report Hunsacker for abuse. No calls, no letters, nothing the family heard that might have suggested it. So, either he did her to prevent problems, or just because she walked out on him. What do you think he’s going to do to you when he finds out we’re closing in on him?”

Casey knew what he wanted her to say. Still, she couldn’t. She took a deep breath and set her hot dog down, her gaze turned to where beads of sweat crawled down the side of her red-and-white cup. “I don’t think you understand,” she managed, knowing she had to dredge up the worst for him to at least understand. Hesitantly setting into his hands something that no one else but Poppi knew. “A big part of his game is humiliation. He doesn’t want to kill me. He wants to see me crawl. He wants…” A fire lit in her chest, the same fire that had finally given her the courage to escape for good. “He wants the satisfaction of knowing that I’m totally helpless against him.” She looked up, hating the new tears that threatened. Afraid, uncertain, her balance suddenly lost.

Jack kept his silence, his eyes shadowed by the hat. But Casey saw the set of his features and rushed on. “That other person I told you about?” she said, her voice beginning to falter. “He’s married now, living in California. I never pressed charges. I never warned the woman he ended up marrying after I moved out. I just begged him to leave. I…” She’d sworn she’d never live through this again, that she was past it. But the shame swelled like a noxious cloud in her, suffocating and rancid. “I got down on my hands and knees, just like he asked, and I begged. Over and over again, promising anything I could think of, agreeing to…anything. But it didn’t satisfy him. It just seemed to egg him on. He fed on it like, like blood. He needed it.”

It was too much. Casey bolted upright and walked off, hands jammed in pockets, breath struggling past the acid. A peacock strutted past her, its tail spread, its mournful cry echoing over the water. Two little kids escaped their mother’s clutches to chase ir. Casey watched just as long as it took the tears to recede. Then she straightened her shoulders and prepared for confrontation.

She knew Jack would wait where he was, as careful about interloping as Marva. Even so, his eyes gave him away. Deep beneath the shadow of that hat, dark and hot and knowing.

Casey stiffened her resolve. “I asked for it once. I won’t do it again.”

Jack looked surprised. “You think you
asked
for that?”

But Casey couldn’t go any further. Beyond this point lay dragons. When she thought about Frank she thought about reasons and weaknesses, and the shame overwhelmed her. The idea that she’d somehow invited his abuse, perpetuated it with her docility. She’d made it this far away from him by simply turning away. Looking back would be too horrible.

She stood rigidly before Jack, closed off and defensive, afraid now of even the suspicious softness in his eyes, because it meant he might demand inclusion. He might see more than she wanted. “What else have you found out about Hunsacker?” she asked instead.

For just the briefest of moments, Jack looked as if he were going to protest. Casey challenged him eye to eye, silent and certain, even through the desperation. Terrified of his concern, aching for the cool wash of his pragmatism.

Finally Jack crumpled up the rest of his lunch. “Let’s go see the seals,” he said and climbed to his feet.

The seals didn’t care much one way or the other. Stretched out on the lagoon rocks, they waved at the heavy air and groaned in sealish turpitude. Casey carried her soda along, sipping through the straw just as she had when she’d walked the zoo paths as a kid, when Helen had still remembered to bring them. Jack had his hands jammed in his pockets, his gait clipped and precise, his gaze scanning the visitors rather than the inhabitants.