Helpless

Chapter 53

Tom tensed and gripped his cell phone tighter. He pressed the phone hard to his ear because he couldn’t hear the caller otherwise. The ringing had awoken him from a deep, drugged-induced slumber, and it took him a moment to convince himself he wasn’t dreaming now.

It took less time, though, to realize that the voice he’d just heard belonged to his daughter. He called her name again, but something in the few words he picked up made him stop speaking so he could listen.

“Mitchell… don’t worry… saw nothing… Don’t be angry….”

Tom sat upright in his hospital bed, quicker than he should have moved. Blood rushed to his head. An intense pain exploded from behind his eyes, painting his vision white. He sat still until the pain receded into something he could breathe through again.

“Jill, honey, is that you?” Tom asked into the phone. “Are you okay? Where are you?”

Tom’s voice sounded weak. His throat was parched. Worse than the thirst was the constricting fear wrapped tight around his chest, telling him something was horribly wrong.

A nurse making her nightly room checks glanced at Tom with concern. Tom pointed frantically to the phone pressed to his ear and motioned her back into the hall.

This could be nothing, he thought. What did Jill once call it—ass dialing—when you accidentally called somebody because you sat on the cell phone in your back pocket? Maybe that was all this was. But what had caused the urgency in what few bits of conversation he actually could hear?

No, he had instincts for this sort of thing, and a growing certainty that this was a call for help. The next four words that he picked up, spoken in his daughter’s stricken voice, confirmed those suspicions in the gravest of ways.

“Please… don’t hurt me….”

Tom slid his feet off of the bed. He stood on shaky legs. Had he heard her right? God, where was she? He wanted to scream to her to talk to him but didn’t say a word. What if the person she was talking to didn’t know she’d called him? The situation could escalate if her assailant became aware that she’d dialed for help. But he needed to know her location before he could take action.

Tom took his first few steps in hours and stumbled. He nearly toppled over the food tray by his bed. His IV was still attached. He turned and frantically pressed the call button, summoning the nurse he’d just shooed away.

“Get this IV off me,” he demanded. “Please, do it now. It’s important.”

The nurse looked at him in confusion but failed to take a single step. Tom put the phone tight against his lips and whispered, “Jilly-bean, give me something. Say something. Tell me where you are. Come on. Tell me.”

He held his breath, willing himself to become calm so that he could focus all his energy on listening. Compartmentalizing fear was a battlefield requirement Tom could access in a way similar to muscle memory.

He removed the tape that secured the plastic IV tube to his arm, oblivious to the painful pull against his skin as it lifted. There was tape on his wrist, too, which he unsecured with the same haste. Tom had dressed war wounds before, so he knew to shut off the flow of medicine before extracting the needle stuck into the back of his hand. Blood flowed, but less than Tom had expected. Now he needed to find his clothes.

“Sir… Mr. Hawkins… you haven’t been discharged.”

Tom covered the phone’s receiver before he spoke. “Where are my clothes?”

“Mr. Hawkins, Dr. Prince wanted you here overnight for observation.”

“Yeah, well, that’s not happening anymore. Get me my clothes.”

Tom’s expression communicated his intended threat: “Your way, or the easy way.” The nurse responded by handing Tom his street clothes, which were folded inside a pinewood wardrobe.

Though his legs were wobbly and his balance dramatically compromised, Tom managed to keep the phone close to his ear while he dressed. The pain wasn’t too bad. It was hardest to ignore when he looked down to pull on his jeans and put on his shoes. The room spun as though everything in it were water in a bathtub going down a drain. He shook his head to refocus his thoughts, but that only ignited embers of pain into a flash point.

Gritting through the agony, Tom managed to catch something Jill said.

“Mitchell, take me home… please….”

Take me home. Where could they be?

When Tom was fully dressed, the duty nurse objected once again. “Mr. Hawkins, we can’t authorize your leaving.”

Tom staggered toward her, pushing his way by the woman, who blocked the door. “You don’t have to authorize it,” he said. “Just don’t try to stop it.”

He would have taken the elevator down from the third floor but didn’t want to risk dropping the connection. He could call Jill back, but he worried that the phone’s ringing might put her in deeper peril. So he took the stairs, though his steps were shaky and each footstep felt just the way he expected it would after surviving a major car accident.

Horrible.

“Jilly, come on. Give me something, and I’ll come get you,” Tom whispered into the phone.

The more he moved, the stronger he felt and the faster he moved. He exited through the stairwell door and into the deserted parking lot of Catholic Memorial Hospital.

Tom stood statue still, with his eyes closed and the phone to his ear. He waited for something that would inspire his next move. Some tidbit of information he could act upon. He remembered the GPS location app installed on Jill’s phone. Tom accessed the FamilyWhere app on his Android-powered smartphone, and when he got what he wanted, Tom felt a thousand miles away, though at best he was only a short cab ride’s distance from her.

“You’re scaring me…. I’ll scream….”

Tom heard Mitchell Boyd speak for the first time, and the boy’s words pierced him with fear.

“My dad’s in his office. He can’t hear you scream.”

Tom saw a cab pulled to a stop by the emergency room entrance, some fifty yards from where he stood. He raced over to the cab, careless of the pain that exploded inside him with every stride.

The cabdriver acted surprised that it was Tom who had jumped into his cab.

“Hey, I’m here for a Mrs. Wilcox. You her?” He let out a mocking laugh; obviously, the answer was no.

“Yeah, I’m her,” Tom said. He gave the driver Roland Boyd’s home address. The driver appeared ready to protest, but one look at Tom in the cab’s rearview mirror must have convinced him that Mrs. Wilcox could find herself another ride. Once the cab got moving, Tom closed his eyes tight and cupped the phone to his ear with both hands. “I’m coming, baby girl,” he whispered. “You hang on, and I’ll be there soon.”

“Can you drive faster?” Tom asked the cabdriver.

“If you pay the speeding ticket.”

Tom thought better of it. “No. Don’t get pulled over,” Tom said. “Get me there as fast as you can.”

Tom leaned back against the cab’s hard vinyl seat and closed his eyes. His headache was worsening.

His mind sped through different scenarios. He needed to formulate a plan with the best odds for success. Sergeant Brendan Murphy had single-handedly made it a no-go to contact the Shilo PD.

Tom called Roland’s home number. Roland answered on the third ring.

“Roland, it’s Tom.”

“What do you want, Tom?”

“Is my daughter there?”

“She’s here.”

“Is she all right?”

“She’s with my son. They’re in his room, hanging out. How are you feeling?”

“Roland, I need you to forget about our issues. I need you to just think of me as a father. Forget anything else you suspect, or believe. Now, Jill called me. She sounded like she was in trouble. Can you please go check on her?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Roland! Please. Just check on her.”

Roland sighed into the phone. “Hang on,” he said.

One minute passed… then two.

Roland got back on the phone. “They’re fine,” he said.

“Did you speak to my daughter?”

“She said she was fine,” said Roland.

“Did you see her?”

Roland sighed again. “No. The door to Mitchell’s room was closed. But they said they were fine.”

“Roland, I need you to check again. I need you to open the door to the room and make sure she’s all right.”

“You know what, Tom? I’ve got other things to do with my time than listen to your paranoid delusions about my son. I think whatever pain meds they gave you have gone to your head. You have a good night. Glad you’re all right. Now, get some rest.”

Tom didn’t say anything more. Roland had hung up on him.