Jaguar (23 page)

“Did the police do this to you, Eddie?”

Eddie struggled with the reply, “Nuh. Nuh.”

“Maryellen? Did Maryellen do this?”

“Nuh! Nuh!”

The cell door jerked open and the deputy stood back to let the aid crew in.

“I’m Dr. White,” he introduced himself. “He’s shocky, pretty mashed up on the right. No lung involvement yet, so go easy. My guess is that broken clavicle lacerated his subclavian and he’s bleeding out into his chest. Get a blood sample for chemistries before you start an i-v. I’ll meet you there after I get a story here.”

Mark told Eddie, “You’re going to the hospital. I’ll be there with you.”

Eddie grunted, and gripped Mark’s forearm tight. Mark took his hand and squeezed it back.

“They’ll take care of you. I’ll be right there.”

Mark stepped into the corridor and pushed the deputy aside. Two other deputies, both of whom he recognized, hurried down the hallway towards him. Between them, looking grim, strode Kurt Prunty.

“You can do some fast talking to me or you can do some slow talking in court,” Mark growled. “He tells me that you guys didn’t rough him up. Who did?”

“He was like that when they found him. . . .”

“Bullshit, Mr. Hubbard.” Mark tapped a finger on the deputy’s nametag. “He got that way in your presence or he wouldn’t be in a cell right now, and you know it. He’d be in the ER where he belonged in the first place. . . .”

Kurt stepped between Mark and the deputy as the medics wheeled the gurney out of the cell and past them down the hall.

“What’s up, Doctor?”

“One of our outpatients, Eddie Reyes, got picked up for attempted murder of one of my patients, Maryellen Thompkins. She’s in the ER. I got here and found Eddie severely beaten, in shock with signs of an internal bleed,” he nodded down the hallway. “That was him. Nobody’s talking, here, and I’m just getting pissed off, so I’ll leave these public servants to double-talk you while I get some answers at the hospital. . . .”

“Now wait a minute, Doctor.”

The only deputy with a mustache, Dusty, tapped him on the shoulder. “You just came busting in here, didn’t ask anybody anything, and expect to have answers. Hubbard, here, is new and wasn’t even on the scene. I, personally, was on the horn to the aid crew when you came in and I, personally, saw to it that you were called down here. So don’t give me that crap.”

Mark stuck out his hand, and Dusty shook it.

“All right, thanks, Dusty. I need to get up to the ER. Fill Kurt in with everything you have and he’ll meet me up there. Tell me this, though. What makes you think Eddie tried to kill her, and how did he get so messed up?”

“Drugs, we thought,” Dusty said. “Both of them down by the river in the rain, really knocked out. He came around a little bit but she’s gone to the world. . . .”

“They do that, Dusty. That’s why I’m their Doc. It has nothing to do with drugs. Those two won’t even take the drugs that I prescribe, and that’s part of the problem. What made you think it was drugs?”

“Well, the girl’s daddy, Mel Thompkins. He put in the call and met us down there by the river.”

“He said, specifically, that it was drugs?”

“That’s right. Said that she wasn’t to be seeing him because they’d already had some hassle about that.”

“So, he was the one who beat Eddie up?”

Dusty looked at Kurt, at Hubbard, then down at his shoes.

“Why don’t you get on up to the ER, Doc. I’ll talk to your man here. Don’t worry, he’ll get the whole story.”

“Was it Thompkins who did it?”

“Shit,” Dusty hissed. “Yes, it was Thompkins.”

Mark thought it out on the five-block drive to the local emergency room.

Thompkins found them and led the police to them. They would have sent Eddie to the hospital if he’d been found beat up. So Thompkins must’ve beaten Eddie after the cops arrived. Why didn’t the aid crew take Eddie, too?

Mark concluded that Eddie had been beaten while the ambulance was at the scene, while everyone else was watching Maryellen.

And besides me, Maryellen is the only one who knows that he was absolutely defenseless at that time.

They must have known a cover-up would be pretty feeble.

Good,
Mark thought.
They’ll get on Thompkins and give me some backup.

The small emergency room was jammed with the usual half-dozen sick kids, sprained ankles, a chain-saw bite out of a foot, a very smelly old man in for alcohol detox and a drooling lady having a stroke. Only two beds behind a thin blue curtain, so the stroke lady and Maryellen were inside. They prepped Eddie in the hallway just outside of surgery, and the rest of the people cried and cursed and smoked along the beige walls. Mark identified himself to the receptionist and walked in.

Mel Thompkins snapped him a glance that would kill but KC, the emergency room nurse, seemed very glad to see him.

“I didn’t get much of a chance to assess your boy,” she said. “The duty doc is prepping him for surgery. As you can see, it’s a zoo in here.”

“You didn’t take this job to be bored,” he said.

KC was the only nurse who made Sara uneasy. She had enormous brown eyes and a quick smile. She was young, athletic, bright, aggressive . . . and made the wives who didn’t know her check their makeup. She was good at her job, and that made the docs look good, so they all talked about her a little more than their wives would have liked. She only dated boat builders, and claimed she was looking for Noah. This late spring afternoon her hair was a little damp from stressful work in a tiny room but her eyes still said, “Hi, good to see you, come on in.”

“Nobody’s bored today except the patients,” she waved her hand towards the waiting room. “But that’s why they call them ‘patients.’“

KC launched right into her report without missing a beat, all the while watching the two cardiac monitors on Maryellen and the stroke.

“Your girl’s a mystery. No neurologic deficits at all, reflexes brisker than normal, if anything, and pupils react equally and appropriately. No sign of trauma. Vitals normal, even healthy, not shocky like your boy. Blood studies so far say her electrolytes are fine, white count and crit are swell. Urine negative for sugar and proteins. Normal temp. Frankly, if it wasn’t for all this confusion I’d say she’s just sound asleep.”

Mark oversmiled his relief and spoke up for Thompkins’ benefit.

“Thanks, KC. She and the boy have both been treated for sleep disorder, as well as some other problems, and you’re guess is probably in the ballpark. Let’s keep her until the drug screen comes in, then if she’s still unresponsive I’d like her transferred to The Hill. . . .”

“Bull
shit
!”

Maryellen’s father pushed KC aside and poked Mark in the chest. Mark noted the heavily abraded knuckles and the dried blood on his hands and shirt.

“It’s
your
hospital and
your
studies that started this mess. The Reyes kid can’t fool me like he can fool you. It’s drugs; it’s been drugs all the time. My girl was fine until she met him. I had a hunch they’d be meeting, even after I forbid it. So I called the law.”

“How did you know where to find them?”

“I said I had a hunch, didn’t I?”

“Pretty strong hunch, to call the law without locating them first.”

“Are you calling me a liar?”

“Not yet,” Mark said.

He slapped away the hand that poked his chest and Thompkins winced in pain.

“I can see by your hands you’ve been picking your nose,” Mark said. “You give me some straight answers and you might stay out of jail. If there’s an attempted murder charge floating around here, it’s your ass it’s going to stick to.”

Mark saw KC wink at him over Thompkins’ shoulder. He took a deep breath.

Thompkins looked much older than Mark knew him to be. He had alcohol on his breath and the haggard, disheveled look that went with the disease. But there seemed to be something more. . . .

Maybe he’s got the same thing she has,
he thought.
Maybe that’s why he’s been such a bastard all along. . . .

Thompkins had got to blow off his adrenalin, so Mark knew he was headed for the maudlin stage.

“Did you think you could get away with killing him, right in front of the deputies?”

“I . . . I wouldn’t kill him, even if he is a shit-pot. I wouldn’t do that to my daughter.”

Thompkins rubbed his beard-stubble, then moved to stand beside Mark so he could continue to watch his daughter. It gave him a good excuse to avoid looking Mark in the eye.

“I can’t stand it, when she goes up there. She’s
not
a loony, not like this Reyes kid. . . .”

“Maybe it’s the word ‘loony’ that’s the problem,” Mark said. “We don’t use it, ourselves, and for good reason. It scares people, they see how close they come themselves, and even when they need help they don’t go get it because they’re afraid people like you will call them ‘loonies.’“

Mel Thompkins glanced at Mark, then back to his daughter. Mark remembered when Maryellen’s father was still a handsome young man who cared for himself, who owned a small gun shop but was able to attract Maryellen’s stepmother, generally considered a classy catch locally. Alcohol, bitterness and nagging had taken its toll. Mark hoped to spare Maryellen some youth.

“Have you ever had the kind of dreams these kids talk about?”

At that moment Kurt and Dusty pushed open the door, and Mark waved them back outside, indicating “one minute” with his index finger.

“Well, not really. Today I was . . . taking a nap. I dreamed that this guy called me on the phone. He said something like, ‘I’m calling from The Hill. Eddie Reyes got into our drug cabinet this afternoon and he’s got your daughter.’ I . . . had a few before I dozed off, and the dream was so clear that I thought maybe I
did
get a phone call. Anyway, I knew where they’d probably be, that fishing shack. Eddie’s family used that spot for years. I don’t know why I called the sheriff, like you say.” He began picking the scuffed skin from the back of his hand. “All the way there I kept thinking how I’d look like an idiot if they weren’t there. But they
were
. . . which makes me wonder for sure whether it was a dream or a phone call. Jesus Christ! they were just laying out there in the rain, soaking wet. . . .”

Mark picked up Maryellen’s chart from the counter.

“I ordered a drug screen,” Mark told him. “I suspect it’ll be negative, you heard KC’s report, but I knew you’d want to be sure. I assume that’s ok?”

“Yeah,” Mel said. “Yeah, thanks.”

“I’d like to get one on you, too, if you don’t mind.”

“What! Me?” Thompkins strode towards the doorway but Mark didn’t step aside. “You can’t make me do it.”

“I probably can,” Mark said. “When you work on The Hill, you learn all kinds of tricks. And what I don’t know, Mr. Prunty has covered. But that’s not what I want. It’s more important for you to tell KC exactly what happened with Eddie, so she can relay details to surgery. Dusty will want to talk with you as well, but right now saving Eddie’s life takes priority. . . .”

Thompkins started to interrupt, but Mark put up a hand to stop him.

“I don’t care what you think about the boy,” he said. “
Your
future depends on us saving his life. I’ll let you know what’s happening with Maryellen.”

As KC took Thompkins aside, Mark pulled the curtain behind him so he could have some privacy with Maryellen. His exam verified what KC had told him, and what he’d already suspected. Something must have gotten out of control with their dreams. Mark had seen Eddie this far out of it before, but not Maryellen. The hairs on his neck and arms stood up.

What if they’re right?

Mark had tried every theory, from brain dysfunction to hysteria, and still had no idea what was going on with these two: Neither schizophrenia nor multiple personality disorder; something real, observable, and absolutely out of the realm of the literature.

Well,
Mark thought,
maybe it’s time for some new literature.

Stories go to work on you like arrows.
Stories make you live right.
Stories make you replace yourself.

—Benson Lewis, Cibecue Apache;
On Nature,
Daniel Halpernen

The experiment started in the day room on The Hill the first Monday in July. Eddie wrote down his thoughts and dreams in a fat new journal, and Maryellen sketched out the photographs that she would take if she could take her camera to the other side. Between them, Dr. Mark hoped to capture a complete picture of the other side, and how they got there. He warned Eddie that going back to high school would be impossible unless the experiment worked. He did not say how he would know that it was working.

Eddie had been around The Hill long enough to recognize the serious signs—short-term trials of various psychoactive drugs, dietary changes, control of visitors and environment. Dr. Mark’s superiors wanted results, and they wanted them soon. Eddie felt the Thompkins family voice and fist behind every move.

“They’re doing this for you, you know,” Eddie told Maryellen. “As far as this town’s concerned, I’ll always be the bad guy. They don’t
want
me better, they want me
here.
”

Eddie’s drug therapy included several
accidents
, like the 50mg-instead-of-5mg error that lost him a week. When the mind-drool of the drugs lifted, Eddie accused Maryellen’s father of influencing the staff. A new notation appeared in the charge nurse’s hand at the bottom of his chart: “paranoid ideation.”

Eddie could forgive anything if Mel Thompkins had been a good father to Maryellen.

I’m better off alone than with a father like hers,
he thought. Dutifully, he scribbled the thought into his notebook.

Mel Thompkins slapped her occasionally, marking her face and lips. More often, he screamed at her, loud enough and often enough that the police had been called to their house more than once. Worse, in Eddie’s mind, was the stepbrother. Maryellen quit talking about him a couple of years ago, and by her silence Eddie inferred a problem. A big problem. A problem that he felt a father should solve.