The Summer House

Chapter 87

Special Agent Manuel Sanchez is sitting in a corner of trauma room 2 with a grievously injured Special Agent Connie York in a hospital bed and one dead assailant sprawled out on the floor. Nothing you really see in cop TV shows or movies, but after just a few minutes a freshly shot body starts to smell, when certain muscles relax and let loose body waste, and now it’s been hours, and long hours at that.

Sanchez is on the floor, with a chair and a small cabinet dragged in front to offer some mode of protection. He’s impressed that he’s managed to stay awake during the night. A few hours ago it looked like a small black snake was about to come into the room, but Sanchez knew it was a flexible optic surveillance device, checking out the situation.

He resisted an urge to give it a cheery wave.

Now suddenly a strong male voice comes from the outside corridor. “Hello, the room!”

Sanchez says, “Hello right back!”

The man says, “I’m Lieutenant Harry Lightner, Savannah Police Department. Who am I talking to?”

“Special Agent Manuel Sanchez, US Army CID,” he says. “Nice to make your acquaintance.”

“Same here,” the Savannah officer replies. “We’ve got quite the situation here, don’t we?”

“That’s true, amigo,” Sanchez says.

“You seem pretty concerned about Agent York’s safety.”

“Yep.”

“You said earlier that you’d only allow two medical personnel at a time into the room to check on Agent York,” Lightner says.

“Roger that,” Sanchez says.

“You know we can’t allow that, not with you holding a weapon and having discharged it.”

Sanchez doesn’t know much about emergency medicine, but in looking up at the equipment stationed near York, nothing seems to be in the red or sounding off an alarm.

“Ah, gee, Lieutenant,” Sanchez says, “just when I was beginning to establish a bond of trust with you, you have to go ahead and spoil it by insulting me. I didn’t discharge my service weapon. I shot a guy trying to murder my boss. And you know and I know he doesn’t work for the hospital. I bet you’ve done a head count of the hospital’s security staff and there isn’t one missing.”

Sanchez waits for a reply, and then the lieutenant says, “You know, this yelling back and forth, it sure is cumbersome. How about I slide in a portable phone, we can talk easier?”

Sanchez laughs. “Sure. A portable phone with a hidden microphone and camera or a flash-bang grenade or a tear-gas canister. Not going to happen, Lieutenant.”

He takes out his iPhone, sends off a quick text message. He doesn’t think he’s going to have much more time in here and wants to make things clear to Pierce and Huang as this day proceeds.

“All right,” the lieutenant says. “Can we get you anything in the meantime, Agent Sanchez? Water? Juice? Something to eat?”

He takes another sniff. Damn, is it getting foul in here.

“I want two cops,” he says.

“What?”

“Two cops,” Sanchez says. “Dressed in nothing except their underwear. No shoes, no socks, nothing. They come in with hands out, and they slowly turn around and lower their shorts, so I know they’re not concealing anything. Got it?”

The Savannah lieutenant says, “Are you joking, Agent Sanchez? You can’t be serious.”

“Oh, serious indeed,” he says. “Those two cops come in, just as I say, and they take out the dead guy. That gives you a chance to fingerprint him, do an ID, find out why he tried to kill my boss. How does that sound?”

Sanchez looks at his iPhone. In the upper left-hand portion of the screen, small letters now announce, where they didn’t before: No service.

The cops are blocking his cell phone.

No matter.

Sanchez settles in for a long wait, and looks up to York and says, “Hang in there, boss. We need to know what you know.”

Captain Allen Pierce is driving their rental Ford sedan right behind the dark-brown van of the Sullivan County Sheriff’s Department when his phone chimes, and so does Huang’s.

He says, “What’s up, John? Who’s trying to talk to us? The Atlanta Journal-Constitution?”

Huang holds his phone close to his face. “It’s from Sanchez.”

“What does it say?”

“It says, Still guarding York. Pierce in charge. Protect the Rangers.”

“Text him back.”

“And tell him what?”

Pierce takes a look in the rearview mirror, sees the line of rented cars and vans belonging to the news media streaming behind them like some ghoulish parade.

“Tell him message received,” Pierce says. “Nothing else. Poor guy’s got his hands full.”

Huang’s fingers start working on the handheld’s screen. “So do we. Shit, why haven’t we heard from Major Cook?”

Pierce says, “Maybe he’s gotten held up in some carpet bazaar. Forget Cook for the moment, John. We’re on our own.”

Gus Millner is a maintenance worker and transport assistant at the Memorial Health University Medical Center, and he’s having a busy day. When the ER is busy, he’s busy, and right now he’s carrying a heavy plastic bag that holds the belongings of a female gunshot victim who was admitted yesterday. There was some sort of foul-up yesterday in delivering this bag, so he needs to bring the bag up to the ICU’s nurses’ station. Afterward, there’s a restroom on the third floor that needs attention.

He’s alone in an elevator, going up, when something starts ringing in the bag.

It keeps ringing.

He opens the bag, looks inside. Black slacks, shoes, and—

A heavy phone with a big keypad and a thick, stubby antenna. Not a type of cell phone he’s ever seen.

What to do?

Answer it?

He closes the bag, and when he gets to the right floor for the ICU, it stops ringing.

Good.

Last month one of his buds got shit-canned for answering some patient’s phone in a bag of possessions like this, and Gus isn’t about to lose his job over something so simple and silly.