Creature (28 page)

But still, at least he’d tried this time.

In fact, he’d sort of enjoyed the fight, he realized as he started home.

The feeling of pleasure in physical combat was something he’d never experienced before.

It had certainly never before occurred to him that he might like it.

17

It had been a quiet morning in the county hospital, and when Susan Aldrich glanced up at the clock suspended on the wall above her desk behind the admissions counter, she was surprised to see that it was only nine-thirty. That was the problem on the quiet days, she reflected—time seemed to crawl. She glanced out at the waiting room, then smiled almost ruefully when she saw that it had already been cleaned up. Nor could she fill a few minutes by setting up a fresh pot of coffee, either, for she had seen Maria Ramirez heading for the kitchen only a few moments ago.

Maria had become a fixture in the little hospital, and as the endless days of sitting next to the bed close by her son had turned into weeks, Maria had slowly begun developing a routine of her own. It had started with the simple housekeeping of Ricardo’s room, but slowly she had expanded her domain, never asking if anything needed to be done, but simply watching the duty nurse and the orderlies as they went about their chores, then quietly relieving them of some of their tasks. At first Susan had tried to assure Maria that she
“You do so much for my son,” she had replied. “And if I can’t help him, at least I can help the people who can.” So Susan, like Karen Akers and the other members of the staff, had left Maria alone to fill her time as she saw fit. By now, much of the routine work of the day shift—and the evening shift, too—was being expertly done by the slim and graceful woman whose dark eyes never seemed to miss anything.

Susan had come to realize that, in a way, Maria was helping her son as well, for all the staff had taken to dropping into Ricardo’s room several times a day, sometimes simply standing next to his bed for a moment, at other times taking a few minutes to talk to him, even though all of them were privately certain that he was oblivious to their presence. Mickey Esposito—the day orderly, many of whose duties had quietly been usurped by Maria—had fallen into the habit of bringing a book to work and spending several hours quietly reading aloud to the inert form held motionless in the Stryker frame. The first time Mac MacCallum had stopped in while Mickey was reading to Rick, the orderly had looked up guiltily and closed the book, but Mac had told him to go on. “None of us knows what’s going on in his mind,” he’d assured Mickey. “We don’t think he can hear us, but we don’t know. And if he can, he must be eternally grateful for what you’re doing.”

Ricardo’s room had become the focal point of the hospital. The small staff no longer gathered around the Formica table in the kitchen on their breaks, but gathered at Ricardo’s bedside instead. Now, with a few extra minutes on her hands, Susan automatically wandered down the hall to look in on the boy. Her eyes, as always, quickly scanned the monitors over his bed, and she frowned. His heartbeat, always so perfectly regular, was fluctuating madly, and his eyes, which had remained closed and still since the moment he’d been brought into the hospital, were moving spasmodically behind his closed lids.

Even as she stared unbelievingly at the screen, an alarm bell sounded outside the room, alerting the tiny hospital to a
Code Blue. Within a few seconds MacCallum appeared, followed by two orderlies and Maria Ramirez.

“What is it?” Maria asked, her voice fearful, her eyes locked on the still form of her son. Then his eyes moved again, and Maria gasped. “He’s waking up!”

She pushed close to the bed and leaned down just as MacCallum turned to Susan Aldrich and began snapping out orders for emergency equipment to be brought in. Maria looked up, the eagerness that had filled her eyes a moment ago now replaced with fear. “What is it?” she asked. “Is something wrong?”

MacCallum’s lips tightened. “He’s going into cardiac arrest,” he said.

Maria’s eyes widened and her face went ashen. Then she looked down at Rick again, and as she watched, his eyes suddenly blinked open and his mouth began to work. A sound—faint and rasping—rattled in his throat. Maria leaned closer, her hand closing on her son’s. “I’m here, Ricardo. It’s going to be all right.”

Ricardo blinked then, and once more his lips moved. Maria pressed her ear close. Even as an orderly hurried into the room with a cart bearing the equipment to apply electro-shock to Ricardo’s heart, she thought she heard her son breathe a single word.

“Good-bye …”

For a split-second Maria wasn’t certain she’d heard the word at all, but then, as MacCallum moved her aside so he could rip the gown from Ricardo’s chest and press the electrodes against the boy’s skin, she made up her mind.

“No!” she said sharply, her voice echoing oddly in the small room.

Everyone around the bed stopped what they were doing and stared at Maria.

“But he’s going to—” MacCallum began. He stopped as Maria nodded.

“He’s going to die,” she said softly. “I know it. He knows it. We must let him go.”

Susan Aldrich gasped, and MacCallum himself flinched at Maria’s words. He glanced at the monitors once more. Ricardo’s blood pressure was dropping rapidly and his heartbeat was coming only spasmodically now. “Are you sure?” he asked.

Maria hesitated only the barest fraction of a second. Her eyes were flooded with tears, but she nodded. “I’m sure. We must let him go. He has said good-bye to me, and so I must say good-bye to him.” Then, as the others watched in silence, she leaned down and gently kissed Ricardo’s lips.

Susan Aldrich took one of the boy’s hands in her own, and Mickey Esposito took the other. Mac MacCallum reached down to lay his hand on the boy’s forehead. Though all of them knew that Ricardo was totally incapable of any kind of speech, none of them was willing to take Maria’s single consolation away from her. A moment later Ricardo Ramirez’s eyes opened once more and appeared to come into brief focus.

What might have been only a spasmodic twitching—but could also have been the barest trace of a smile—worked at the corners of his mouth.

Then his eyes closed once more. The line on the heart monitor went flat. And a single steady note—almost like a dirge—began to sound.

Ricardo Ramirez was dead.

   Half an hour later Mac MacCallum sat in his office, numbly staring at the completed death certificate. Like the rest of the staff at County Hospital, he had been taken completely by surprise by the boy’s sudden death. Like the others, Mac had also taken to dropping by Rick’s room several times each day—not because there was anything specific that needed to be done for the boy, but simply because even in his comatose condition, there was something about the boy that reached out to him. He, too, had come to regard
Rick as more than simply a patient. Quite simply, even though he and Rick had never exchanged so much as a single word, Mac MacCallum had come to regard him as a friend.

Now his friend was dead, and Maria Ramirez, whom MacCallum also had come to think of as a friend, was sitting in the waiting room, only her eyes betraying the depth of her grief, trying to come to terms with the loss of the single thing in her life she had truly loved and believed in. Finally, his features setting harshly, MacCallum reached for the phone and called Phil Collins at Silverdale High School, then waited impatiently, drumming his fingers on his desktop while the coach was summoned from the playing field.

“It’s Dr. MacCallum,” Mac said when Collins came on the line. “I know you don’t really care, but Ricardo Ramirez died half an hour ago.”

“Christ,” Collins swore, but MacCallum was certain the only emotion in the coach’s voice was worry, not regret. “What’s going to happen now?”

“I don’t know,” MacCallum replied. “But I can tell you that I’m very well aware of what you and Ames and TarrenTech have lined up for Maria, and I don’t think it’s enough.” His voice hardened. “I’ve had it with you and your football team, Collins. We had a broken leg in here last weekend, and a ruptured spleen day before yesterday.” He hesitated, briefly wondering whether or not he would be able to back up his next words, then plunged on. “I’m going to suggest to Maria that she institute a wrongful death suit against you, the school, Jeff LaConner, his parents, Marty Ames, and Rocky Mountain High. I don’t know what you’re all up to, but it’s got to stop right now.”

“Now wait a minute,” Collins began, but MacCallum cut him off.

“No, Collins,” the doctor breathed, and gently replaced the phone in its cradle. He didn’t know what, if anything, he’d accomplished, didn’t even really believe a wrongful death suit would get anywhere. But at least he felt better.

In his own office, Phil Collins stared at the dead phone in
his hand for a moment, then rattled the button on the cradle until a dial tone buzzed. He punched the digits for Marty Ames’s private number, then waited, drumming his fingers impatiently in unconscious duplication of Mac MacCallum a few minutes earlier. When Ames came onto the line, Collins repeated MacCallum’s words almost verbatim.

Two minutes after that, Ames was repeating them to Jerry Harris.

“All right,” Harris replied tiredly. He thought a moment, then spoke again. “We’ll have to clean up the LaConner situation right now. Can you make whatever preparations we might need?”

“Of course,” Ames replied.

Before he called Chuck LaConner into his office, Jerry Harris made arrangements for one of the TarrenTech corporate helicopters to prepare to make a flight to Grand Junction, where a Learjet would be waiting.

   Charlotte LaConner felt an empty hollowness in her stomach. She couldn’t have heard Chuck right—it had to be a mistake. Perhaps, after all, she
was
beginning to imagine things, as he’d been insisting since that terrible moment at the Tanners’ the other day—she could no longer quite remember which day it was—when Chuck had as much as told Blake and Sharon that she was losing her mind. Maybe she was even imagining that he’d come home from work in the middle of the morning today. Maybe he wasn’t really here at all.

She shook her head dazedly. “Pack a bag?” she asked. “Now?”

Chuck nodded. “That’s right,” he said. “I’m leaving.”

“But, I don’t understand.”

“I’m being transferred, honey, remember?” Chuck said. “I’m going to Boston.”

Charlotte’s hands fluttered in a helpless gesture. “But I thought—I thought we were waiting for Jeff.…”

“I can’t, Charlotte,” Chuck replied. “I have to go now. Today. There’s a chopper waiting for me.”

Charlotte sighed with relief. Then it was all right. He was leaving, but she didn’t have to. She could stay here and wait until Jeff got better. “M-Maybe I’ll go to Boulder,” she said. “I could be closer to Jeff then.” The fingers of her right hand were working at her left now, the nails—ragged and unkempt from the totally unconscious habit she’d developed over the past few days of biting at them as she sat staring vacantly at nothing—digging into her skin, leaving angry red marks.

But Chuck shook his head. “I’m sorry, Charlotte,” he said softly. He couldn’t look at her now, couldn’t bring himself to watch the pain in her face as he told her what was about to happen to her. “You’re going to have to go into the hospital for a while. I’ve discussed it with Jerry and Marty Ames, and we all agree that you need a good rest. A period of time to adjust to what’s happened and get over these paranoid ideas.”

Charlotte recoiled from the words as if she’d been struck. “No,” she whimpered. “You can’t do that to me! I’m your wife, Chuck—”

“Honey, be reasonable,” Chuck pleaded, but Charlotte was no longer listening to him. She ducked around him, rushing out of the room and stumbling up the stairs to the second floor, where she ran into the master bedroom, locking the door behind her.

She was in a state of panic now. They were going to take her away and lock her up, just like they’d taken Jeff away. But why? What had she done? All she’d wanted to do was see her son, talk to him, tell him she loved him.

But they wouldn’t let her!

Why?

She knew now. It was suddenly clear to her; she should have realized it long ago! They were lying to her, had been lying to her right from the start. Jeff wasn’t in a private hospital at all, not in Boulder or anywhere else. They had him locked up somewhere, where neither she nor anyone else could see him. He wasn’t sick! He was being held prisoner somewhere!

Help! She had to get help before it was too late. She scrabbled around in the top drawer of her nightstand, where she was certain she’d hidden the scrap of paper on which she’d scribbled Sharon Tanner’s phone number. She found it at last, then fumbled with the phone as her trembling fingers refused to obey her churning mind.

It was at that moment, while she frantically tried to dial the number, that she might have looked up and glanced out the window; might have seen the ambulance approaching the house and turning into the driveway. But she didn’t look, didn’t see, didn’t have time to flee from the house.

Her fingers finally found the right buttons, and she waited in panic as the phone at the other end rang four times, then five, then six. What if Sharon wasn’t home? What would she—

Then, to her relief, she heard a breathless voice at the other end.

“Sharon?” she said. “Sharon, you have to help me. They’re going to send me away. They’ve done something terrible with Jeff, and they don’t want me to find—”

“Charlotte?” Sharon Tanner’s voice broke in. “Charlotte, what’s wrong? You’re not making any sense.”

Charlotte forced herself to stop talking and willed her body to stop trembling. She focused her mind, drew a deep breath, and was about to begin again when she heard a banging at the bedroom door. “Charlotte?” It was Chuck’s voice. “Charlotte, you have to let me in.” Then she heard Chuck speaking to someone else, and her carefully constructed calm shattered like a house of cards.