Dead Man Dancing

Ten

Feeling like fifth wheels, Hutch and I followed the ambulance in his car, running traffic lights willy-nilly until I expected the cop who was riding in the ambulance with Ruth to pop out the back doors, waving his ticket book.

Hutch made a right turn against the light on to West Street, then veered immediately left on Admiral Drive, following the old back road to the hospital. He took the left at Jennifer Road on two wheels, ran a red light at the firehouse, nearly knocked into a pedestrian in the cross-walk of the County Detention Center, then ran another red light before turning off on to Medical Drive.

‘Drive around to the ER,’ I ordered. ‘You get out there, and I’ll take the car into the parking garage.’

The ambulance was offloading Ruth on a stretcher when we pulled up under the ‘Emergency’ portico. An oxygen mask covered her nose and mouth, and an IV dripped clear fluid into a vein in her arm. Poor Ruth! I hurried around to the driver’s door and gave Hutch a reassuring pat on the cheek as he climbed out of the driver’s seat and hurried after the stretcher. ‘Stay with her,’ I called as I eased behind the wheel. ‘I’ll be back as soon as I can.’

It took forever, of course, to find a parking space. I scoured the garage, spiraling upward ever upward until I managed to squeeze Hutch’s BMW 750 sedan into a space on the roof clearly designed for a compact. Once I’d wormed my way out of the narrow space between the BMW and the SUV next door, I punched the lock button on the keyless fob, and made a mad dash for the elevator, which took me down eight floors and spit me out into the main lobby. I turned right, straight-armed the swinging door, rushed past the visitors’ desk – I knew my way around Anne Arundel Medical Center so well I could draw a map from memory – and hustled down the long hallway that led to the ER waiting room. When I got there, Hutch was standing at the reception desk, filling out a form.

‘They’ve taken her to X-ray,’ he told me. ‘The policeman is with her.’

When I next saw my sister, she was in a treatment cubicle, half-sitting/half-lying on a gurney, with a blue surgical dressing draped lightly over her leg. Someone had stuffed her clothing, including the torn and bloody tights, in a plastic bag and stuck it on a shelf underneath the gurney. There was no sign of the policeman.

‘It wasn’t bone,’ Hutch informed me, relief written all over his face. I knew he was referring to the object we’d seen sticking out of Ruth’s leg. ‘It was a fragment of wood from the bat. They’ve cleaned out the wound, and stitched it up.’

‘How many stitches?’ asked Ruth, sounding competitive and more like her usual self.

‘Only three,’ her fiancé teased, ‘so don’t expect any sympathy from me.’ Hutch turned to face me. ‘But her tibia is definitely broken, Hannah. A clean break, thank goodness. They’re going to start her on antibiotics, pump some fluids into her, and keep her overnight for observation. They’ll set the bone in the morning.’

‘Tibia,’ I said, scrambling to remember the litany of bones I’d had to memorize for some long-ago zoology class at Oberlin College. ‘That’s the shin, isn’t it?’

‘That’s correct.’ A nurse wearing white pants and a colorful surgical top decorated with teddy bears stuck her head into the room. ‘We’ll be admitting you shortly, Mrs Gannon, so don’t go anywhere, OK?’

Ruth smiled. ‘As if.’

‘The policeman told me to tell you he’ll be right back,’ the nurse said, and then she disappeared as mysteriously as she had arrived.

Thinking about the policeman, I asked, ‘What were you able to tell him, Ruth?’

Ruth rested her head against the pillow and sighed. ‘Not much. He seemed to think that the guy followed me from the store, that he knew I had the receipts with me. But, I don’t think so. The creep came out of the parking lot of the Rapture Church.’

‘Did you hear anything? A getaway car starting up, for example, or a motorcycle?’

As tired as she was, Ruth still managed to follow my train of thought: the Harley-Davidson motorcycle dealership was next door to J & K. ‘Harleys are popular with badass dudes in their 50s and 60s,’ she said. ‘This guy didn’t look the type. Black, maybe sixteen or seventeen. I doubt he could afford a Kawasaki, let alone a Harley.’

‘What’d he look like?’

My sister shrugged. ‘Like any other African-American teenager on America’s Most Wanted.’ She held up an index finger. ‘But when they find him, he’ll have an ugly scratch on his neck.’ She examined her fingernail carefully for a moment. ‘Wait a minute! Can’t they get some DNA from under this?’

‘Maybe they’ll take a scraping,’ I suggested, ‘but I doubt the police will place a high priority on DNA analysis for a simple robbery and assault. It’d be expensive, and even then it’d take months for the results to come back.’ I sidled up to the gurney and patted her good leg. ‘Not likely a petty crook will be in the CODIS database anyway.’

‘What? No fancy machines, no flashing lights, no instantaneous test results like you see on TV?’

‘No, ma’am.’ The policeman had returned. ‘No designer suits and two-hundred-dollar haircuts, either. But, we’re sending a sketch artist over in the morning.’

‘Thank you,’ Ruth said, and closed her eyes.

In less than a minute, she was asleep. Leaving Hutch sitting by her side, holding her hand, I took the long walk down to the cafeteria – where the use of cell phones was allowed – to telephone Paul and let him know what the bloody blazes was going on.