Angels (Nevada James #3) (Nevada James Mysteries) (2 page)

Chapter 2

Two hours
later I was sitting on an adjustable bed in a small treatment bay at Sharp
Memorial Hospital. It smelled like antiseptic and bleach. All around me were a
variety of high-tech machines, very few of which I knew the purpose of. It
didn’t seem important enough to ask about, since I wasn’t actually hooked up to
any of them. A nurse had taken my vitals when I’d arrived and there hadn’t been
anything out of order enough to require monitoring. There was just a great deal
of blood to be dealt with.

I’d
gotten away from my ill-advised superhero impression with six stitches in my
cheek, four more in my forehead, and a sprained ankle that was now tightly
wrapped in a bandage. I’d bitten the back of my tongue during my landing, but
it hadn’t been serious enough to require treatment. Other than that, I only had
a few minor scrapes, and I was guaranteed some bruising. I was also going to
need a new jacket; I’d been wearing leather and it had held up better than I
might have expected it to, but it was definitely on its last legs now.

All in
all, things could have been a lot worse. Nothing was broken. I’d probably be
sore for a few days, and I wasn’t going to be jogging for a while, but I could
live with that. I’d once taken two bullets in the abdomen while trying to bring
down a killer-for-hire. Anything else seemed pretty trivial after that.

Between
all the time stitching me up and shaking their heads at me, the doctors had
also taken a hell of a lot of my blood away to be tested. I hadn’t actually
seen a doctor since I’d detoxed almost a year ago. Quitting drinking cold
turkey had seemed like a good idea at the time, but it turned out to be exactly
the wrong thing to do. I’d always thought
delirium tremens
was something
that happened to people after a lifetime of drinking. I was still fairly young.
But I’d made up for my lack of years with a commitment to alcoholism that would
have made W.C. Fields blush. Two days after I’d given up the bottle I’d started
having seizures. That had been…less than ideal. When they’d released me they’d
told me to come back in a month for a follow-up, but I’d never bothered. Now
here I was.

The
blood work made me nervous, but I hadn’t thought to object when they started
sticking syringes in me. The bad news was inevitable, though, and trying to
avoid hearing it wasn’t going to make it go away. My liver was probably half
dead from what I’d done to myself. If I was lucky I’d have a few good years
left. That was good enough for me. I had a couple things I still wanted to do.
Finding and killing the Laughing Man was foremost among them.

A cop
was stationed just outside the half-drawn curtain that kept other people’s eyes
off me. He stood at attention, facing outward, as if he were guarding the
President. I didn’t really need to be here anymore; the doctors were done with
me, but I’d been told to wait. I wasn’t under arrest, but I was pretty sure I
was going to get yelled at soon. I was getting bored waiting for it, though.

“You
sure I can’t go?” I called to the cop outside. He was some uniform I didn’t
know. He looked young enough to be in high school to me. I wondered if that
meant I was old.

He
turned slightly but didn’t look at me. “I’m sorry, Detective.”

“You
know I’m not a cop anymore, right?”

“Yes,
Detective.”

“So…” I
tried to catch his eyes. “You know you don’t have to call me that?”

“Yes,
Detective.” He turned back to his original position, perhaps scanning the area
outside for scoundrels who might want to attack me. It seemed unlikely that
there were any scoundrels nearby, but I guess a person couldn’t be too careful.

I
sighed. This was silly. There was no reason I had to get yelled at
here
.
My house was just as good. “I’m still not under arrest, right?”

“No,”
the cop said. He didn’t look at me.

“If I
leave are you going to try to stop me?”

He
didn’t say anything for a moment, but from where I was sitting I could see the
side of his mouth twitch nervously. “I won’t put hands on you, Detective,” he
finally said, “but if you leave before he gets here I’ll probably lose my job.
So could you please just…not?”

“Fine,”
I said. “Don’t worry about it.” The next time I had to come to the emergency
room I was going to have to remember to bring a magazine with me. Or a book.
Anything to kill the boredom. Treatment bays didn’t come with televisions or
entertainment centers. They didn’t come with much of anything other than beds
and machines I didn’t know how to use. Not that I was probably allowed to use
them, anyway.

It was
another fifteen minutes before I heard the footsteps coming. They were fairly
distinctive, heavy and determined. I’d heard them plenty of times before,
usually coming in my direction for something like this. “You can go,” a voice
like rumbling thunder said to the cop outside. The cop nodded once and hurried
away.

Dan
Evans drew the treatment bay’s curtain back and looked at me. “Hey, boss,” I
said.

Dan was
captain of the San Diego Police Department’s homicide division. He was also
probably number one on my very short list of friends. And he was a bit of a
scold. That was putting it lightly, to be honest. I hadn’t been able to bring
myself to fight with him for a while, though. I’d put him through a lot.
Watching me trying to kill myself with vodka in the old days had been torture
for him. He’d been there for my first seizure almost a year ago, and had been
the one to take me to the hospital that day. He hadn’t left my room the entire
time I lay in a bed shaking and sweating, hooked up to fluids that were all
that kept my body from shutting down entirely. It had been close. Too close for
him. I suppose it had been too close for
me
, too, but somehow I was
always less concerned about my own life than others were.

“Nevada,”
Dan said. “You look like shit.”

“Yeah.”
I nodded. “You know, that’s kind of a recurring theme in our conversations. I
say hi. You say I look like shit. I tell you to go fuck yourself. You could
almost set a clock to it.”

“Are you
telling me to go fuck myself?”

“No.” I
shrugged. “It’s fair enough. I usually do look like shit.”

Dan
stepped forward and closed the curtain behind him, giving us some modicum of
privacy. “I’ll tell you something, Nevada,” he said. “I actually didn’t believe
it when I got the call. Nevada James beat up a paparazzi, they said. No, I
said. That can’t be right. Why on Earth would Nevada beat up a paparazzi?”

“It’s
actually
paparazzo
,” I said. “
Paparazzi
is the plural form.” Dan
stared at me. “You know, I wasn’t sure that little nugget was all that
interesting, either.”

“It’s
not.”

“But at
least you learned something today, right?”

There
was a small chair against the wall next to the sink. Dan took a seat. He looked
almost comically large there. Dan was a big bear of a man. If he grew out a
beard, he might actually be mistaken for a bear in a navy blue suit. I decided
not to mention that to him.

“You
want to tell me your side of this?” he asked.

“There’s
not much to tell. I saw him twice in one day. He was taking pictures of me. I
thought it might be the Laughing Man, or maybe someone that worked for him. It
never really occurred to me that he might be the paparazzi.”

“Paparazzo,”
Dan said.

I
snapped my fingers and pointed at him. “That’s right! I was testing you! Good
testing!” He didn’t laugh. Damn it. I’d thought that was hilarious. “Anyway,
you know the Laughing Man keeps tabs on me. Always seems to know where I am.”

“He’s
quite committed to that,” Dan said.

“So my
theory wasn’t an unreasonable one. It was just wrong. But I had to be sure.”

Dan
nodded slowly. “That was more or less what I thought. His story checked out,
though.”

“Oh,” I
said. “So you talked to him?”

“Where
the hell do you think I’ve been all this time?” he asked. “Of course I talked
to him. I talked to him at some length, Nevada. We confirmed everything he
said, though. He sells his trash to the
Sneaker
and a couple other
garbage rags on the Internet. Real shitbag stuff. But he’s got nothing to do
with the Laughing Man. So we let him go.”

“No
charges filed?”

“He’s
not pressing charges, no. And he’s not suing you, either.”

“I meant
charges against
him
, really, but I guess all that’s good, too.” I
squinted at him. “Wait. How do you know he’s not suing me?”

“I
explained to him that it would be a bad idea.”

“Oh,
dear,” I said. “You threatened a…” I waited for him to finish the sentence.

“Fuck you,
Nevada.”

“Come
on, Dan. Say it. You threatened a…” I put a finger to the side of my forehead
like I was struggling with a thought. “Now was it
paparazzi
or
paparazzo
?
I can’t remember. Show me what you’ve learned, Dan.”

“I
didn’t threaten anyone. I’m a goddamn captain, Nevada. I don’t make threats. I
explained my position to him in simple terms. I can’t help it if I’m…” he
trailed off and I thought he might look vaguely guilty.

“Terrifyingly
large?” I guessed.

“Blame
my parents.” He shrugged. “Anyway, you
are
going to have to pay for the
window you broke. Which…” He stopped and I watched something strange happen to
his face. For a moment I couldn’t identify it, and then I realized he was
trying to keep himself under control. Whether he’d been about to start crying
or start screaming at me I didn’t know, but I didn’t really want to see either
thing happen. “You jumped through a second-story window,” he said, his voice
unusually quiet. “You just jumped right through it.”

It
wasn’t a question, but I answered it anyway. “Yeah.”

“Nevada…”
He stopped again.

I
decided to angle for the short version of this conversation. “It was extremely
dangerous and I wasn’t thinking, okay? I just had in my head
go
and so I
went. That’s what I do.” He glared at me. “I’m not defending it, but it’s who I
am. I’m sorry, though. I know after everything I’ve done the last couple of
years you’d really like to stop worrying about me, and I don’t make that easy.
So next time I’ll try to take the stairs, instead.”

Dan
shook his head. “You just can’t do anything the easy way, Nevada. You never
could. God knows I’ve tried to…”

“Let’s
be serious here for a minute,” I interrupted. “I’ve never had the
option
of
doing things the easy way. Not even before this shit with the Laughing Man
started. Not when I was a kid. Not when I was a woman coming up in a department
dominated by men who used to tell me to get them coffee when I was a better
detective than all of them put together. Not when you gave me the worst cases
we got in…”

“You
wanted those cases. You insisted on them. And you closed them.”

“Yeah.
And I didn’t do any of that because I was worrying about dotting
i’s
and
crossing
t’s
. I did it because I acted.”

“I’m not
sure I entirely agree with that.”

“Agree
with whatever you want to. Convention has never worked for me. And like I said,
all of that was without the Laughing Man. Now I’ve got a serial killer out
there who has exactly one goal: Play with me before he kills me. And he’s
proven at every turn he’s faster than me, he’s smarter than me, he’s
stronger…and somehow he knows goddamn
everything
about me. He sees the
entire board and I’m still digging my bishops out of the box.”

Dan
stared at me. “That was a chess analogy,” I explained. “Maybe it wasn’t so
clear.”

“I got
the analogy.” He rubbed his eyes. “I’m not sure how we got there from you
jumping through a window, though.”

“Me,
neither. I had a train of thought, but it kind of went off the tracks at the
end there.”

“That’s
also typical.”

“I’m
sober, though,” I said, trying to change the subject. “So there’s some progress
for you.”

 “Yeah,”
he said. “You
are
sober. I was a little surprised.”

I
crossed my arms in front of me. “I think I’ve earned the right to be insulted
by…” I stopped abruptly. “Wait. How do you even know that?”

“I used
my intimidating presence to make a nurse tell me before I came in here.”

I nearly
couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “Are you saying you cornered some poor
woman and…”

“No,” he
said. “It was a man. Nurses are often male, Nevada.” He smirked at me. “Sexist.”

I tried
to scowl but wound up cracking a smile instead. “Fine. I should have known
you’d ask.”

“I was
only a little surprised,” he said. “It’s your blood work I’m more interested in,
honestly. They’re doing a liver function test.”

“I’m
really looking forward to that.”

“You
never know.”

“My last
test didn’t look so good.”

“Your
last test…you were also having seizures at the time, and you were on a
potassium drip to keep your heart beating. It’s not really a surprise things
didn’t look so good.”

“Yeah.”

“That
was a year ago. We’ll see what they have to say about it now.”

I was
pretty sure what they were going to say. There was no way my liver had survived
the damage I’d done to it. I might forget to answer the phone when they called.
Or would it be a mortician calling, asking to fit me for a casket? Did
morticians do that? Probably not. But what did I know about morticians, really?
“What were we talking about, anyway?” I asked.