Hard Stop

SEVENTEEN

HOSPITAL WAITING ROOMS are designed to guarantee that the experience of waiting is so dreary, monotonous and dehumanizing that you’ll think twice before ever going to the hospital again. Wait long enough and you’ll begin to question relationships with people close to you who might sometimes need to go to the hospital, like your parents or children.

The person at the hospital who sat at the reception desk behind a small set of sliding glass doors seemed busy and engaged in what she was doing, so much so that it was impossible to make eye contact with her. A television, hung from a bracket off the ceiling, was set on a show where nice-looking people made sober accounts of the day’s events while a confusion of ticker-tape messages scrolled along the bottom of the screen. Though Amanda had occasionally tried to explain modern television to me, I still found it impossibly strange. Luckily, the volume was below audible, reducing the thing to a simple distraction, like a spoiled child running around a train car, or a drunk in a nice restaurant.

“You’re sure we shouldn’t just take this directly to the police?” Amanda asked, pointing to the bundle I held in my arms.

“Nah. We’ve already wrecked the crime scene. And I can’t wait for all the official pronouncements. We’ll call Sullivan as soon as I get Markham’s opinion.”

The woman behind the glass doors finally noticed we were standing there. She slid one of them open.

“Yes?” she said.

“I need to see Dr. Fairchild,” I said.

“What’s the nature of the emergency?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I need to see him.”

She slid a clipboard over the opening.

“Fill this out,” she said.

After a few moments, she realized I hadn’t taken the clipboard out of her hand. She looked up at me.

“I don’t need to fill that out. I need to see the doctor. He knows me. Just give him a call.”

“I’ll call someone,” she said, the words burdened with the weary residue of constant repetition. “But I need you to fill this out first.”

Amanda leaned into me and stuck her head through the opening.

“Dr. Fairchild will be very disappointed when he learns we were here to see him and he wasn’t informed,” she said.

“You think so?” the woman said, slightly more sincere than sarcastic.

“I do,” said Amanda.

She frowned, but picked up the phone. Amanda did her best not to look too pleased with herself.

It was another half hour before Markham showed up, time we spent playing a variation on “blissful ignorance” you might call “flagrant denial,” dissecting the performances of the baseball players on the TV and utterly ignoring the fact that I had a brain in the gym bag on my lap.

I always felt Markham approach before I saw him. Probably because his density and mass affected the local air pressure.

I stood up to shake his hand. He looked me over.

“So I don’t need a gurney,” he said.

“Just a quiet place out of the public eye,” I said, holding up the bag. “Something with stainless steel tables and running water.”

He looked over at Amanda and smiled.

“Dis fella never fail to keep t’ings entertaining,” he said.

“Indeed.”

He took us up a level to where they did on-site lab work. The usual cast of anonymous people in white coats, blue scrubs and face masks wrapped around their necks buzzed around with a look of distracted intensity. They all smiled at Markham, but gave him wide berth, advisedly.

The room fit my specs. I set the gym bag on the table and handed out rubber gloves from a dispenser mounted on the wall. Markham shook his head at my offering and pulled a pair of his own out of his pocket.

“Triple XL,” he said.

I used two hands to pull out the gallon-sized Ziploc bag and set it on the examination table, then backed away. Markham hummed with curiosity as he dug his hand into the bag and picked up the rubbery mass within. He held it up and turned it in his hand, squinting with concentration.

“Ris de veau. Who brought the chives?” he said, after a few minutes.

“Ick,” said Amanda.

“Technically, ris de taureau. A big one,” he said.

“Bull brains,” I said.

“Not a definitive conclusion, but most likely. Unless you slaughter a bison, or maybe African water buffalo. Herbivore for sure, bigger den a deer, smaller den elephant. Much smaller. For that you need a bigger bag.”

“Locally available?” I asked.

He nodded.

“For sure. Out on Montauk dey got a regular cattle ranch. I sometimes get to patch up holes these beauties leave inna cowboy’s thigh.”

“Can you trace the exact source? Through DNA?”

He enjoyed that thought.

“Not me, Mr. Acquillo. But maybe somebody can. They don’t cover that at Georgetown Medical School.”

I held the Ziploc bag open for him so he could drop it back in. I asked him if we could leave it in one of his refrigerators so the cops could pick it up in the morning. I had to endure some more jovial sarcasm, but he said okay. I thanked him for his time, and he did me the honor of letting it go at that.

When we made it out to the sidewalk I called Joe Sullivan, waking him up.

“I think I discovered the brains of the operation,” I said.

I waited while he apologized to his wife and found a quiet place to talk.

“This had better be good,” he said.

I didn’t disappoint him. Except that I’d waited until then to call him. I didn’t offer any sort of defense, and he was too tired to rail at me for more than a few minutes, so I got off the phone in relatively short order.

“So what now?” Amanda asked.

I looked around the hospital parking lot, searching for guidance.

“I know a place a few blocks from here that serves drinks by the glass,” I said, as if assaulted by a revelation.

“How novel,” she said.

“I think it’s gonna catch on. With the right public support.”

The hostess at the big restaurant on Main Street found two stools to pull up to the crowded bar, a courtesy I credited to Amanda’s effective social graces. Between the pumped-up stereo and competing conversational blather, it was almost too noisy to talk. The ubiquitous flat-screen TVs blinked and flashed at the corner of my eye, but the vodka was cold and the light a warm amber glow, making the women look as great as they hoped for and Amanda impossibly beautiful.

“So,” said Amanda, “as you’d say to me, theories?”

“You need to go stay with Burton. Have the biggest guys off your crew pick you up and drop you off. Maybe get a dog. Eddie’ll write up the specs.”

“You’re concerned.”

“I am. I’m not used to this kind of heat. A few meatballs here and there, no problem. But these people, out of my league. I don’t want something to happen to you or Eddie because I didn’t take it seriously.”

“What people?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I need to concentrate, which’ll be hard if I’m constantly worried about you.”

Faced with that kind of indisputable logic, there wasn’t much she could say.

“No way I’m being driven out of my own house. I’ve faced worse than this. Just give me one of those guns you took off Con Globe security. My mother taught me how to shoot,” and more of the same.

I waited it out.

“I’ll call Isabella,” I said. “She’ll get the east wing ready.”

On the stagger back to the car she put both arms around me and squeezed.

“You don’t want me to be horribly murdered,” she said. “But you don’t think I care if the same thing happens to you.”

“It won’t.”

“You don’t know that. I can’t bear another gigantic loss.”

Loss was something Amanda knew a lot about. When I first met her, she’d lost her only child and only parent. Her grief was most of what was left. And I was a fine one to turn to, addled by loss and regret of another sort. Now here we were, in a truce with grave misfortune, which I was threatening for no other reason than the death of my old boss’s girlfriend.

“I’m in it, now,” I said. “The only way out is through.”

A faint breeze, cool and hollow, blew between us, but she squeezed harder and left it at that.

We drove back to Oak Point. While Amanda packed up her things and connected with Isabella, Burton’s major domo, I put a few weeks’ worth of Eddie’s food, Big Dog biscuits, tennis balls, dog bed and the only chew toy he hadn’t chewed to oblivion into a big garbage bag and brought it out to Amanda’s Audi.

“He’ll have to forage locally for rotten logs and bird carcasses.”

“I didn’t tell Isabella about a dog.”

“Better a surprise.”

On the way over Burton called my cell phone. I told him about what I knew, and what I feared. He backed the plan.

“I’ll have Fernando and Jarek join her crew. Both handy with pneumatic nailers and throwing knives.”

The atmosphere inside the Audi was tense and quiet. Eddie sat up in the back seat and panted. Amanda fiddled with her seat belt and sighed.

“You’ll visit,” she said.

“I’ll visit, I’ll call, I’ll write long letters.”

The big white gate that guarded the entrance to Burton’s long driveway opened as we approached. We made the four-hundred-mile drive through the bordering privet hedges in decent time, and were met at the front porch of the main house by Isabella, along with a tall, tattooed ghoul with kinky pink hair and another hard case that looked like Charles Bronson’s anemic, mentally ill younger brother. Part of Burton’s domestic staff, most of whom had stayed on after his defense practice saved them from long jail terms, or worse.

Introductions were made all around, after which we got Amanda and Eddie settled in, and spent a few hours talking things over with Burton. By then it was pretty late, so it was easy for me to slip away and drive back to Oak Point, where I sat up for another few hours and smoked a month’s ration of cigarettes, nursed a single tumbler of Absolut, listened to Etta James and pretended I wasn’t spooked by every little sound in the night.

I was back where I’d started. On Oak Point, alone in the dark.