Resurrection Express (40 page)

I have to assume they’ve zeroed me.

I start to panic, then I get a grip. I keep my fear handy, but I’m in control. Nobody’s come for me yet—nobody that I know about.

But I have to assume the worst, at all times.

I manage to haul my entire body a few feet above my bed, isolating my upper arm muscles to do the job, not using my abs at all. I practice the exercise for two hours.

The wheelchair is just five feet away.

Soon.

•  •  •

T
he dream is more vivid now, not surreal. I sit with Toni in an open forest glade, at a picnic table, surrounded by children, by family. This is the life my father never gave me. She smiles and her voice is clear.

Baby, I told you the secret. Right in the beginning.

I knew you would look into the face of God.

And I told you not to.

That’s not what you said.

That’s what the Sarge said.

Before he tried to kill me.

I ask her what’s really going on—I ask her about the end of the world.

Toni smiles at me and tells me there’s nothing we can do. Something about the dominoes already falling. Her voice fades away to nothing as the dream ends.

Fades away to nothing.

•  •  •

T
he next morning, Richard comes in again, all full of pep.

He hasn’t been in since yesterday.

“Hey, buddy,” he says.

It still sounds wrong, even though my head is much clearer.

He changes my bladder bag again, asks me how I’m feeling again, flexes my legs again. Looks at the morphine tube, not hooked up.

“You still doing okay without the drip?”

“It’s better than lung cancer. Can I try the wheelchair today?”

“Not yet. Maybe tomorrow, buddy. Can I get anything else for you?”

“Yeah. Could you tell me what your last name is?”

“Sergio.”

“You’re Italian?”

“Half.”

“Do you see a lot of patients like me?”

“More than you can imagine, buddy. But you’re one of the lucky ones. I once saw a guy shot in his spine—he already had one leg missing. An old hippie guy, a drug dealer who got shot during a buy in a parking lot. He had diabetes and a prosthetic leg. He lost the other one during his recovery, developed permanent brain damage. Spent his last three years as a vegetable.”

“Bad news.”

“They’ll start you on physical therapy in two more days.”

“I’d like to try the wheelchair
now
.”

He laughs. “You in a hurry to get somewhere?”

“I’d just like to try it.”

“We’ll see. Maybe in the morning.”

He walks out of the room after fiddling with my IV machines. Gives me a smile that chills my blood.

•  •  •

I
try to will myself to sleep again.

So I can hear Toni’s voice.

So I can figure this whole thing out.

It doesn’t work.

•  •  •

L
ater that day, a nurse comes in to see me. She’s young and happy, always smiling. Says her name is Shelly, and she’ll be taking care of me during my physical therapy. I ask her what happened to Richard.

She makes a strange face when I say that.

Doesn’t answer me.

“A man has been here twice in the last two days,” I say to her very carefully, evenly, sober as hell. “He says his name is Richard Sergio. Says he’s a fourth-year medical student.”

“I think you must’ve been dreaming, honey. There’s no Richard Sergio on this ward, but there
has
been some staff floating for the last week.”

“What’s that mean? Floating?”

She sighs. “It’s a dirty little secret in the medical world. I guess I’m not supposed to tell you, but that’s how it works in big places like this. We get overloaded and the beds get full, so they have to pull staff and interns off other wards, people who aren’t trained properly. They come in to fill the gaps.”

“They don’t know how to treat trauma patients?”

“Depends. Everyone has to come from nursing school to get a license, you know, but you specialize depending on where you get hired.”

“So this Richard guy, he could be from another ward?”

“I think you just need to rest.”

Her voice cuts me hard, her all-purpose smile dismissing the whole thing. I shut up and don’t say anything else. I have to try for the wheelchair tonight.

They’ve zeroed me.

•  •  •

R
un like hell, baby.

You have no legs but you can still run.

Get the hell out of that place.

•  •  •

T
he nurse comes back an hour later, at three thirty. I hear her in the hall with some other men while I’m doing my exercises, and I lower myself back into the bed just as she enters the room, still smiling. She notices the redness in my face. The pain I’m hiding.

“Hello. How are you feeling?”

“Fine.”

“You have some color, that’s good. Do you think you can handle a visitor or two this afternoon?”

“Who are they?”

“The police. They want to interview you, just for a few minutes.”

“I don’t know . . . I . . .”

“I can tell them to come back later.”

“No. It’s okay.”

I need to look these men in their eyes.

Have to see who I’m dealing with.

Baby, be careful. Really damn careful about this.

The nurse nods to me and goes back out into the hall. I hear hard shoes strike the floor as the two guys come into my room. Both plainclothes guys. Detectives. One of them is wearing a black bomber jacket over a flannel shirt and has dark skin. The other one has a suit on, looks real young, pale. Maybe a rookie, maybe not. Never can tell about these guys. They both wear their badges on plastic laminates around their necks.

“Hello,” the dark one says. “My name is Roger Morales, this is my partner, Jeff Ferrier. We’re both with Houston PD. Hear you’ve had some problems.”

Careful.

“I don’t remember anything.”

“That’s what they told us. We’re just following up on a lead. Need to ask you a few questions, see if it jogs anything. You up for it?”

“Don’t see why not. But . . .”

“Yeah?”

They know something.

“I mean . . . I don’t know what help I can be. I don’t even know what happened to me.”

“Maybe you can remember a face.”

He holds up a photograph.

It’s a Polaroid of a girl with black hair and wild eyes.

A very familiar girl.

I almost say something on instinct, but I hear Toni’s voice again and find myself sticking to the lie.

“I . . . I’ve never seen her.”

“Her name is Heather Stone. She was reported missing six months ago, and we picked her up during the aftermath of something that went down last week.”

“What kind of something?”

“A shootout in a strip bar. She’d been shot in the arm, but she was okay to talk to us. She had a real crazy story to tell.”

Yeah.

I bet she did.

As I look at the photo, I realize it’s definitely her. She looks a lot like my wife, black hair and green eyes . . . but there are imperfections in the design. Things a smart guy could spot. Things I never could have seen a week ago, not right off. And now that my memories have come back, now that I can see Toni’s true face in the endless white of our wedding day . . . I could curse myself for ever buying it.

It wasn’t your fault.

Did someone make her look like you, Toni?

Was Hartman setting me up?

Don’t say a word, baby. They know what’s going down. They’re playing games with you.

“The lady gave us a description of two men who were protecting her,” Morales says flatly. “I don’t know whether to believe her story. You sure you don’t remember anything?”

He gives me a long, hard look.

Then he does something with his eyes.

Something that almost looks like a wink.

What . . . ?

He sees my face ask the question and he looks back over his shoulder, at his partner, who quietly nods. Did I just give them something?

“The doctors won’t let us have any details about your condition,” Morales says. “You have to legally consent to release the information. But since you’re a John Doe, that also raises a lot of issues and opens some gray areas, too. Wanna tell me about it?”

Don’t give them anything. Tell them what they already know.

“My legs are out of commission. I was shot in the side.”

“Will you be up to speaking with Miss Stone, maybe in the morning? It might jog something.”

I nod slowly. Something going down here.

He gives me the almost-wink again.

“One more thing,” he says. “She gave us a name.
Elroy Coffin
. Ring any bells?”

“No.”

He knows you’re lying, baby. He’s checked you out. Knows you’re supposed to be dead. Knows something.

But he doesn’t say anything.

Turns and leaves me there, surrounded by the fear of the doomed.

•  •  •

T
he nurse checks on me every hour after that, says I’m doing great, asks me if I still insist on no pain meds. I tell her it’s fine. A food service guy in a pale gray uniform brings me food and I eat it. Goes down easy, but tastes like shit. Dry meat and canned veggies. I’ve watched the nurse when she works the levers that control the bars on either side of my bed, and figured out how to lower them and use the rollaway table as a method to lever myself off, so I can inch my way over to the wheelchair. It’s my only way out, and I have to do it now, tonight. While the ward is almost empty, during the morning hours.

•  •  •

T
he plot is simple.

I’ll get out of here through the back entrance and steal a car in the visitors lot. It’ll be harder with no legs, but I’ll have wheels to get there. It’ll be cold, wearing nothing but a smock and thin blue pants, but I’ll have to tough it out. It’ll take me at least twenty minutes to get in the chair. Gotta do it careful, so that I don’t come unplugged from my life blipper. Once I disconnect, I have to move quick. They won’t stop me, because they
can’t
stop me, not legally. Unless the cops who questioned me have people in the building now, unless I’m actually under suspicion for something.
I have to take that chance. The noose is closing. I can feel it all around me.

I can hear Toni telling me to calm down, telling me not to panic.

I watch the clock on the wall and wait for one in the morning. They never check on me between one and five.

That’s my window. I count the minutes.

I leave my food on the rollaway table and tell the nurse to keep it there when she comes in for her last visit. She goes along nicely. Leaves my door open.

The lights go dark in the hall, and I reach down and work the lever on the bar to my right. The bar goes down with a dull metal thump. Now, the rollaway. I set the dinner dishes on the bed next to me and pull myself across the table, using only my arms. A sharp pain stitches my side, but I can’t think about that now. Gotta use the bar on my right to push myself off the bed, roll myself over to the chair. It’s just five feet away. I push hard and it works. I roll away. Something snaps in the table. I feel the wheels give, and my center of gravity goes all whacked. The floor comes up hard as I crash there. I go down on my back, not feeling the impact.

Goddammit.

Stupid.

The pain stitches me again. I look down to see if there’s any new blood oozing through the bandages and there’s nothing. Doesn’t feel like I reopened the wound. The fall might not have cost me anything . . . but I can feel the deadweight of my legs for the first time and it’s terrifying. Have to move fast. The chair is three feet away from me, waiting to get me out of here. I get over on my arms and elbows, start pulling my way forward. And that’s right when the voice comes.

“Hey, buddy.”

I look up to see him, standing there in the open doorway.

Richard, the happy intern—or whatever his name really is.

“Getting ready to go somewhere?”

I don’t answer him. I freeze there on the floor.

I see that he has some sort of bag with him. He smiles, closing the door, crouching low, looking right in my eyes.

Pulls a gun from the bag and aims it at my head.

“You know, I was really hoping it would come to this, buddy.”

“They sent you to kill me.”

He laughs, still using his phony bedside manner. “You’re very perceptive. And clever, too. For a while, we thought you really
did
have amnesia. But your charts tell a different story. And you gave yourself away today, asking about the wheelchair.”

You gave yourself away, too, asshole. Your fake smile. Going through the motions. The stories about the other patients you’d seen in here, those were nice touches—but I still had you pegged.

I just glare at him.

“Someone wants to say hello,” he says.

He goes into the bag over his shoulder and pulls out an iPad. Sets it up on the floor, clicking the screen on. A face I wasn’t expecting suddenly stares right into me. Or maybe I was expecting it.

Her smile is deadly and final.

Her voice is focused like a laser beam.

“
Hello,
” she says.

•  •  •

“I
can’t see you, Mister Coffin, but you can see me.
”

Jenison’s voice crackles clearly through the tiny speakers, stabbing my heart without pity, like the cold, evil stare of the killer hovering above me, his gun fixed on the space between my eyes.

She’s got me.

Finally.

“
I’m afraid I’ve had to record this message to you in advance
.
Technical reasons. I’m sorry I could not be there in person to see your final moments
.
I would have liked to. Rest assured, I will see those moments soon. You are about to go down in history
.”

I want to tell her to go to hell, but she can’t hear me. She’s long gone by now, in a place where I’ll never find her. A place where cell signals and Wi-Fi bottom out in oblivion. Underground.