The 24th Letter

SIXTY-TWO

O’Brien maneuvered the Jeep around double-parked cars at Jackson Memorial Hospital, found a place at the farthest end of an employee parking lot to park. He pulled on a baseball cap and sunglasses before he got out of the Jeep.

O’Brien lightly knocked on the door to room 215. There was no answer. He opened the door. The name on the door said Elizabeth Barbie Beckman, but the woman in the bed looked like a mummy. Her face had been so badly beaten the swelling had forced her eyes closed. The lumps were the color and shape of dark plums. A knot on her head was the size of a lemon. IVs ran into both arms. One arm was in a cast. He saw dried blood in her left ear canal.

O’Brien stepped to the bed. The woman’s breathing was quick and shallow. He looked at the monitors. Her heart rate was fast, even in her sleep. She made small whimpering sounds, like a puppy might utter. Her body jerked as if she was trying to shake out of a bad dream. O’Brien leaned down, his lips near one of her ears. “Barbie, this is Sean O’Brien. Can you hear me?”

There was no movement. No flutter of the eyes. Nothing. O’Brien thought she may be in a coma. He said, “Barbie, this is Ken, how are you feeling?”

A soft moan, the words trying to rise to the surface. She managed to open her right eye. The entire white of her eye was dark red, the look of a moldy strawberry.

“Ken,” she mumbled. “You’re here…”

“Barbie, who did this to you?”

“He hurt me so bad,” she whispered. Her eyes filled with water, the tears spilling out of the swollen corners and soaking into the gauze.

“Who did it?”

“They’ll kill you…”

“Barbie, who hurt you?”

She sobbed and said in a raspy whisper, “Carlos Salazar.”

“Russo’s guy-”

“Please, don’t…they’re part of the mob…soldiers…life means nothing to them.”

O’Brien held one of her hands, careful not to touch the IV. “Listen to me, no man has the right to do this to you. Do you understand?”

“I’m so scared…he hurt me so…”

O’Brien used his thumb to wipe away the tears from her right eye. He leaned down and kissed her forehead. “I’m going to help you.”

She tried to smile. Butterfly stitches in her swollen lips prevented it. She managed to say, “In my English lit class I read about poetic justice…you know like some Shakespearean play where good beats evil.”

O’Brien smiled. Barbie continued, “Kind of poetic justice that I’m in the same hospital where they brought Jonathan Russo. I read in the paper that they brought him here. You, sort of, put him in the hospital. And one of his guys did the same to me. I don’t understand it though, if good beats evil, then why am I here?”

“It’s not over, yet.”