Blood Shot

24

I had passed out again. When I slowly came to I was wet all through. Water had oozed into my hair and was tickling my ears. My shoulders felt as though someone had stuck iron bars into them to separate them from my breastbone. Somehow, though, the sleep and the cold muddy water had healed my head a little. I didn’t want to think-it was too scary. But minute by minute I could still make it if I used a little sense.

I rolled to one side, the blanket heavy with mud. Using every ounce of strength, I pushed myself to a sitting position. My ankles were bound together and my hands were tied behind me at the wrist-there was no way I could work them to the front of my body. But by pushing them down at my tailbone I could brace myself enough to inch forward with my legs.

I had to assume they’d taken me down the same track where they’d dumped Nancy-it was the farthest from the road, anyway. After some time of trial and error, which left me gasping for breath inside my muddy cocoon, I reckoned that the water lay to my right. I carefully made a one-hundred-eighty-degree turn so that my inching motion would take me back toward the road. I tried not to think of the distance, tried not to compute my probable speed. Forced thoughts of food, baths, bed, away and imagined myself on a sunny beach. Maybe Hawaii. Maybe Magnum would appear suddenly and cut me out of my prison.

My legs and arms were shaking. Too much exertion, too little glucose. I had to stop every few pushes and rest. The second time I stopped I fell asleep again, waking only as I fell over into the grasses. After that I forced myself to a counting pattern. Five shoves, count fifteen, five shoves, count fifteen, five shoves, count fifteen. Legs wobbling, brain turning, fifteen. My fifteenth birthday. Gabriella had died two days before. The last breath in Tony’s arms while I was at the beach. Maybe there really was a heaven, Gabriella with her pure voice in the angelic choir waiting for me with wings outstretched, her arms opened in boundless love, waiting for my contralto to blend with her soprano.

A dog’s bark brought me back to myself The red-eyed hound. This time I couldn’t help it: I was sick, a little trickle of bile down my front. I could hear the dog coming closer, breath heaving, short, sharp barks, then a nose pushing into the side of the blanket, knocking me over. I lay on my side in a helpless tangle of mud and blanket, kicking uselessly in the air, and felt paws press heavily into my arm.

I kicked helplessly at the blanket, trying to force the hound away. Little tears of fear slid into my nose. All the while on the other side fangs pulled at my head, my arms. When it had bit through the blanket, how would I protect my throat? My arms were behind me. It wasn’t minding my feeble thrashing.

Panic roared in my ears, turned my useless legs to water. Over the roaring I heard a voice. With the tiny energy left in me, I tried to cry out,

“You got her? You found her? Is that you, doll? Are you in there? Can you hear me?”

Not the hound of hell after all, but Peppy. With Mr. Contreras. My euphoria was so great that my sore muscles felt momentarily healed. I grunted feebly. The old man wrestled feverishly with the knots, talking to himself all the while.

“I mighta known to bring a knife instead of this wrench. Should have guessed that, you stupid old man, why do you want to go carrying pipe wrenches when a knife is what you need? Steady in there, doll, we almost got it, don’t give up the ship now, not when we’re this close.”

He finally managed to rip the blanket away from my head. “Oh my, this is bad. Let’s get you out of here.”

He worked frantically, clumsily, on the knots behind my back. The dog looked at me anxiously, then started to lick my face-I was her long-lost puppy found in the nick of time. All the while that Mr. Contreras freed my hands, rubbing some semblance of circulation back into my arms, she kept washing my face.

He was shocked to see me in my underwear, afraid I’d been raped, could hardly take in my assurances that it was just drowning my assailants had been after. Leaning heavily on his shoulder, I let him guide me, half carrying me, back to the road.

“I got some young hotshot here. Some lawyer, he says. Didn’t believe you could really be down here, so he waited at the car. When her royal highness came back from the lake without you, I got kinda worried. Then this snot-nose shows up, says you was going to meet with him at nine and where was you, he can’t wait all day. I know you don’t want me breathing down your neck, doll, but I was there when the guy called, I heard that little friend of yours say they was going to dump you in the marsh, so I made him drive us down here. Me and her highness, you know, I figured we could find the place after you showed it to me on the map and all.”

He went over and over it on the way to the road. Ron Kappelman stood there, leaning on his beat-up Rabbit, whistling lightly, looking at nothing. When he saw the three of us coming he leapt upright and sprinted across the road. He helped Mr. Contreras lift me over the fence and into the backseat of the car. Peppy gave a little bark and shoved past them to push her heavy body next to mine.

“Damn, Warshawski. You miss an appointment, you do it in a big way. What the hell happened to you?”

“You leave her alone, young man, and don’t go talking dirty like that. There’s plenty other words in the English language without going around swearing all the time. I don’t know what your mother would think if she could hear you, but what we gotta do is get this lady to a doctor, get her patched up, then you want to butt your nose in and find out how she got where she was, maybe she’ll feel like talking to you.”

Kappelman stiffened as if to fight back, then realized the futility of it and got into the driver’s seat. I was unconscious before he had the car turned around.

I don’t remember anything of the rest of the day. How Kappelman flagged down a state patrol car and got us an eighty-mile-an-hour escort to Lotty’s clinic, Mr. Contreras stubbornly insisting he wouldn’t let them take me to a hospital without her say-so. Or how Lotty, taking one look at me in the back of the car, summoned an ambulance to take me to Beth Israel at top speed. Or even how Peppy wouldn’t relinquish me to the paramedics. She apparently seized a wrist in her strong jaw and refused to let go. They tell me they woke me up long enough to make her drop the guy’s arm, but I don’t have any memory of it, not even as a dream fragment

I finally resurfaced around six Thursday morning. After a few puzzled minutes I realized I was in a hospital bed, but I couldn’t imagine what I was doing there or how I’d come to be there. As soon as I tried sitting up, though, my shoulders sent out so severe a message of pain that memory came flooding back.

Dead Stick Pond. That horrible cocoon of death. I held my arms out in front of me, despite the agony moving them brought. My wrists and hands were wrapped in gauze; my fingers looked like bright red sausages emerging from the white bandages. An IV needle was taped to my left forearm above the gauze. I followed it to a series of bags overhead and squinted at the labels. D5.45NS. That told me a lot.

I touched my fingertips gently together. They were swollen, but I could feel. I lay back again, filled with a peaceful satisfaction. I had survived. My hands were all right. They had tried to kill me, tried to humiliate me at the moment of my death, but I was alive. I fell back into sleep.

When I woke again it was to the full bustle of morning hospital routine-blood pressure, temperature, rounds-and no questions answered: doctor will tell you. After the nurses came a brisk intern who looked at my eyes and stuck pins into my feet. The pin seems to be neuroscience’s most advanced piece of technology. Another intern was busy with my roommate, a woman my age who’d just had cosmetic surgery. After they’d finished Lotty herself swept in, dark eyes bright with nonclinical feeling. My intern hovered at her elbow, anxious to tell her his findings on my body. She listened for a minute, then dismissed him with an imperious wave.

“I’m sure your reflexes are all in perfect order, but let me see for myself First let’s have your chest. Breathe. Hold it. Exhale. Yes.” She listened to me fore and aft, then had me shut my eyes and touch my hands together, get out of bed-a slow, lurching process-and walk on my heels, then my toes. It wasn’t much compared to my usual workout, but it left me panting.

“You really should have children, Victoria-you could produce a whole new breed of superheroes. Why you are even alive at this point is a medical miracle, let alone that you can walk.”

“Thank you, Lotty. I’m pretty pleased myself Tell me how I got here and when I can leave.”

She gave me the details of Peppy and the ambulance men. “And your friend Mr. Contreras is waiting anxiously down the hall. He stayed here all night, with the dog, totally against hospital policy, but the two of you are well matched -stubborn, pigheaded, with only one allowable way to do things-your own.”

“Pot calling the kettle black, Lotty,” I said unrepentantly, lying down. “And don’t tell me the dog didn’t stay here with your connivance. Or at least Max’s.”

I frowned and bit off my words, remembering my last conversation with the hospital’s executive director. Lotty looked at me sympathetically.

“Yes, Max also wants to talk to you. He is feeling a bit remorseful. And that is no doubt why the dog spent the night in the hospital. But she must go home now, so if you will tell your tiresome neighbor you’re going to live to tilt at more windmills, we’ll get them to leave. Meanwhile, since your brain is no worse than usual, I’ll get someone to take that needle out of you.”

She whirled off at her usual forty knots. Mr. Contreras came in a minute or two later, his eyes filled with tears, his hands shaking a little. I swung my feet over the side of the bed and held out my arms to him.

“Oh, cookie, I’m never gonna forget the way we found you yesterday. More dead than alive, you was. And that young snot not believing you could be down there and me having to practically knock him out before he’d drive us. And then I couldn’t get the nurses here to tell me anything about how you was doing, I kept asking and asking and they wouldn’t say because I wasn’t family. Me, not your family. Who has more right, I’d like to know, I says to them, some cousin in Melrose Park who don’t even send her a Christmas card, or me who saved her life. But Dr. Lotty showed up and straightened it all out, her and Mr. Loewenthal between them, and put me and the dog in an empty room down the hall from you, but we had to promise not to disturb you.”

He pulled a giant red handkerchief from a back pocket and blew his nose loudly. “Well, all’s well that ends well, and I gotta take her highness home and feed her, but don’t go telling me to mind my own business anymore, cookie, not when you got guys like this on your case.”

I thanked him as best I could, giving him a tight hug and a kiss. After he left I lay back down again, cursing my lack of stamina. Lotty wanted me to stay here another day-she said I wouldn’t rest if I went off on my own. She was right: I was already in a pretty fretful state, made more irritable by my sore shoulder muscles. But she’d thrown out all my clothes and wasn’t going to bring me any more until Friday morning.

As it turned out, most of the people I would have tried to see came to visit me, along with a few I could just as well have done without, such as the police. Lieutenant Mallory arrived in person, a sign not of my importance but of his angry concern-angry because I should have stayed clear of police business, concern because he’d been close to both my parents.

“Vicki, put yourself in my place for a change. One of your oldest friends dies and every time you turn around his only kid is thumbing her nose at you. How do you think I feel?”

“I know how you feel; you’ve told me six billion times,” I said churlishly. I hate having to talk to people in a hospital gown-it’s like you’re a kid in bed and they’re tucking you in for the night.

“If you’d been killed, I would have carried that responsibility to my grave. Can’t you understand that? Can’t you see when I give you orders it’s out of concern for your safety, because of what I owe Tony and Gabriella? What will it take to pound some sense into you?”

I glowered at the bedclothes. “I’m self-employed just so I don’t have to take orders from anyone. Anyway, Bobby, I did agree not to go to the state’s attorney about Nancy Cleghorn. And I agreed to tell you if I ran into anything that looked like a lead into her death. I didn’t.”

“You obviously did!” he shouted, pounding the bedside table so hard that the water pitcher fell over. That put the cap to his anger-he yelled out the door for an orderly, then shouted at the man until the floor was cleaned to his satisfaction. My roommate turned off The Dating Game and scurried out to the lounge.

When the place was dry again Bobby made an effort to smother his anger. He took me through the details of the episode, waiting patiently at the spots that were hard for me to talk about, prompting me professionally when I couldn’t remember something. The fact that I had a name, even just a first name, cheered him slightly-if Troy was a pro tied to any known organization, the police would have a file on him.

“Now, Vicki”-Bobby was genial-“let’s get to the heart of the matter. If you didn’t know anything about Cleghorn’s death, why did someone try to kill you in the same manner, and in the same place that they murdered her?”

“Gee, Bobby, the way you put it, I guess I must know who killed her. Or at least why.”

“Exactly. Now let’s have it.”

I shook my head, gingerly, since the back was still on the sore side. “It’s just the way you put it. The way I look at it, I must’ve talked to someone who thinks I know more than I really do. The trouble is, I’ve talked to so many people the last few days and all of them have been so unpleasant that I don’t know which I’d choose as my grade-A suspect.”

“Okay.” Bobby was determinedly patient. “Let’s have who you’ve talked to.”

I looked at the water stains on the ceiling. “There’s young Art Jurshak. You know, the alderman’s son. And Curtis Chigwell, the doctor who tried killing himself in Hinsdale the other day. And Ron Kappelman-SCRAP’S counsel. Gustav Humboldt, of course. Murray Ryerson-”

“Gustav Humboldt?” Bobby’s voice went up a register.

“You know, the chairman of Humboldt Chemical.”

“I know who you mean,” he said bitingly. “You want to share with me why you were talking to him? In reference to the Cleghorn woman?”

“I wasn’t really talking to him about the Cleghorn woman at all,” I said earnestly, turning to look at Bobby’s clenched jaw. “That’s what I meant-I didn’t talk to any of these people about Nancy. But since they were all more or less unpleasant, any of them might have wanted to dump me in the swamp.”

“For two cents I’d get someone to put you back there. It’d save a lot of time. You know something and you think you’re going to be a hotshot again, go looking without saying squat to me about it. They almost got you this time. Next time they will, but until they do I have to waste city money by having someone keep an eye on you.”

His blue eyes glittered. “Eileen’s all upset about you being in here. She wanted to send over flowers, she wanted to take you home with her and fuss over you. I told her you just ain’t worth it.”