Magic City (15 page)

Thorn ditched Alexandra's Toyota in a shopping center a mile from the Riviera Motel. The Toyota was the vehicle the cops would be searching for. Not Sugar's five-year-old white Taurus with a dent in the rear fender.

Sugarman drove; Thorn sat silent. Buck lay across the backseat.

“There's a twenty-four-hour animal hospital on Twenty-seventh Avenue, Knowles Clinic,” Thorn said. “The dog first, then Alex.”

He looked back at the Lab. The dog was panting. In the motel room before they left, Buck drank a full bowl of water. He wasn't bleeding anymore from his shoulder wound, but he'd lost the use of his front left leg. Gimping three-legged out the door to the car.

Thorn hoisted him into the back, and Buck groaned and stretched out.

“She's not going to talk to you, Thorn.”

“Then I'll talk to her. And she can lie there and listen.”

“There could be a cop waiting for you to show.”

“So be it.”

At Knowles Clinic they were buzzed in by a heavyset Cuban guy. Sugarman handled the paperwork, gave his credit card. Used Thorn's cell phone as their contact number.

Buck lay on the tile floor and watched them blankly.

Five minutes later they were in an examining room. A slender woman came in, said a curt hello, then squatted down in front of Buck and inspected his shoulder. She shook her head and clicked her tongue three times.

“Gunshot? How'd it happen?”

“Don't know,” Sugarman said. “We found him like this.”

She looked up at Sugar, then at Thorn. She wasn't buying Sugar's story and wasn't much impressed with Thorn, either.

“His name is Buck,” Thorn said. “You think he'll make it?”

“This wound is hours old,” she said. “Lost a lot of blood. I don't know. If he survives the night, there's a chance.”

“He's a good dog,” Thorn said. “He's a damn good dog.”

Buck looked up at Thorn and gave a single thump of his tail.

“They're all good,” the vet said.

 

Sugarman drove south on Dixie to Kendall Drive and turned west. Twenty minutes. Finally a lull in traffic between one and five in the morning.

He found a space on the third tier of the parking garage.

“I'll be right here.”

“Ten minutes,” Thorn said.

Sugarman gave him the room number, directions.

“Tell her Buck's going to make it. Be sure to tell her that.”

Thorn shut the door and fired a finger pistol through the windshield. Sugar didn't fire back.

 

They changed Alexandra's room. She didn't ask why. Couldn't if she wanted to. A disconnect between her brain and vocal cords. They moved her out of ICU into a double room with a hacking, wheezing woman, then an hour afterward moved her into a private one. Her medical plan kicking in.

Then she remembered her father. The memory bloomed like poisonous haze, choking off the air and light. She remembered him in her arms. His spirit departing. His body losing heft, a flutter in the air. It wasn't a dream or hallucination. A flicker of energy moving invisibly past her face.

In the murky light of her hospital room, gravity drew her deep into the mattress. Lungs laboring, heart trudging on. She felt again his body in her arms. The frail weight, his bones as delicate as the stems of wineglasses, an expression on his face, his last look into this world, first glimpse of the next. That second between. Stepping across. She'd seen that moment, the love leaving his face, the yearning and pain, and entering his eyes was a flush of boyish wonder. Something beyond this realm opening up. Leaving her behind. His face full of light, calm, and beauty.

Filtering in from the hallway was the noise of human traffic. Nurses speaking in normal tones as though the sick and dying, the injured and doped-up, would not mind, or could not object. Business as usual. Their days going on, their gossip, their light banter and laughter, the world Lawton had left behind. The world where his footprints were already disappearing. His scent dispersing so not even Buck could track him down.

Alexandra felt the drug, whatever it was. Felt the numb flesh enveloping her, lethargy, sadness clogging her veins. She listened to the voices, the electronic pings, the jangle and squeaks of passing carts and gurneys. The pad of shoes. A shadow, then another passing by. Her door was cracked open an inch. A narrow slit of light. Looking out from the dark room into that fluorescent world. The way her father must have done at the end.

Lawton Collins. A vital man. When she closed her eyes she saw him mowing the yard outside her childhood window. A vision of him pushing the lawn mower back and forth. The smell of fresh-cut grass thick in the air. He was sweating. His muscles showing, the mat of hair on his chest already going gray. Shirt off to the sunny summer day. She watched him, half naked, in his prime. Back and forth he marched in straight lines. Baggy gym shorts, laceless tennis shoes stained green by years of cutting that same grass.

He worked in choppy strokes around the legs of her swing set. Halting for a moment to wipe sweat from his eyes, propping a hand against the red metal bar of the swing set, taking a breather, then looking at the cylinder of metal beneath his hand, this apparatus he'd purchased for his only daughter, so she might rise into the sky, kick up her feet, come whooshing back, pushed higher and ever higher by his strong arms. Then her father, Lawton Collins, turned slightly and shifted his eyes to Alex as if he'd known she was watching at her window. He'd felt her gaze.

He stood there a moment in the sunshine of his manhood. Sweat glistening, resting a hand on the red swing set, the mower idling, air full of grass scent. That was all. A simple look passing between father and daughter on a summer afternoon. But it was everything. That flash across the humid air, that love in his eyes, that half smile of strength and certitude. It was everything he was. His essence. A man sweating in the summer sun, a weekend of chores. Keeping the grass trimmed, his family fed, his daughter reassured that she was safe and well loved, and that any dream she might have, any aspiration, that sweaty man in the yard would do all within his power to help her achieve.

Alexandra opened her eyes and her sweaty father was gone and the hospital reappeared. She gripped her right hand around the small oval of the cell phone. Before they started the IV, before she was wheeled into surgery, while she was still alert and could talk, could assert herself, “I'm keeping this,” she told the surgeon. “Don't make me get physical with you.”

Drawing a laugh from the female doctor.

So it was there in her hand. The battery running down. It might be dead by now. Under the dazzling lights of intensive care there'd been only two bars left on the battery signal. Probably dwindled away to nothing.

Not that it mattered. She couldn't see to dial, couldn't lift her hand, and if Thorn did think of calling, she couldn't answer. Couldn't speak, probably couldn't even punch the
ON
button. And the fact was, she didn't want to talk to him. Not now.

Light swung into the room. A nurse in her white uniform entered. Patty or Sarah. A name like that. Alex had been told but couldn't recall. A chunky middle-aged woman, a career nurse. Short curly hair, glasses. Going to check her chart, add a scribble, the late late shift. Efficient, a degree away from brusque. Seen it all, wiped up after. Whatever compassion brought her to this work had long ago burned off. Now she chattered, filled the room with white noise that Alexandra's brain was too slow to process. Caught a word, then another a moment later. Snatches. Something about the television. The news. Alex a big deal. Mayor King. A long time ago, but Patty remembered. Heard stories about the boys. A couple of losers.

Alex gave up trying to decipher it all. Closed her eyes, gave herself to the pillow, the drugs. Feeling the cold, empty presence of the phone in her hand.

Then a man in the doorway. His voice opened Alexandra's eyes.

He was older, a bushy mustache, bald head gleaming. White doctor's smock with a plastic ID clipped to the pocket. She'd seen him before. He was somebody. Somebody she knew but didn't know.

The doctor shut the door behind him.

The shadows deepened, the room lit by the glow of night-lights.

“How's our patient?” the doctor said to Patty. He had the exasperated tone of a man with better things to do.

The man was looking past the nurse at Alexandra.

Patty handed him the chart, and the doctor held it without looking at it.

The man smiled at Alex, something evil in it. Something inhuman. Then he turned the smile on Patty.

“Wait a minute,” Patty said. “I know you. You're that guy.”

“No, I'm not,” he said. “I'm Ms. Collins's doctor.”

“Well, you look exactly like that guy. That television guy, the politician.”

“Oh, please, not a politician.”

“Okay, yeah, not one of those. But government, FBI, something like that. On TV. Yeah, I know. You're the guy that stood up to Congress, didn't take any crap. That war down in Costa Rica or somewhere.”

“You can go, Nurse. I'll take it from here.”

“That
Hot Seat
show.” She snapped her fingers. “
Runyon's Hot Seat
.”

“Oh, darn,” the doctor said. “I wish you hadn't.”

“You must get it all the time. You're a dead ringer.”

Alexandra was staring at him, gripping the phone, trying to dig her thumb between the lid and body, open it.

“I loved that show,” Patty said. “I guess they moved it to a different time slot. That, or switched networks.”

“Canceled,” the man said.

“My husband thought Runyon was a total nut job, but he watched anyway. He was into it, answering back, you know, arguing with the TV.”

The man nodded.

And the smile came back. Malevolent. It was so clear to Alex. She wondered why Patty couldn't see it. Probably attention deficit disorder, her mind pinballing from one thing to the next. Amazing she was a nurse.

Beneath the white jacket the man wore a green Hawaiian shirt, khakis. His head shone in the light, bushy mustache. Wrong, very wrong.

Alex got the phone open. Used her thumb to feel for the speed-dial number. One for Thorn. A monumental effort that required her full concentration.

The man stepped close to Nurse Patty. She tightened up, tried to smile, squinting at his name badge.

“Dr. Blas? Reynaldo Blas? You're not him. I know Dr. Blas.”

Something happened out of Alex's view, and Patty slumped into the man's arms.

Alex pressed the button. One for Thorn. Battery was probably dead. Or Thorn back home in Key Largo now. Hunkered down, disappearing into all that water and sky the way he always did. Becoming one with the blue.

Out in the hallway she heard a phone ring. Down toward the nurses' station. The identical ring tone she'd chosen for Thorn. First ten notes of “Yellow Submarine.” Something goofy for the man she loved.

Down the hallway she heard those ten notes play again as the man, Runyon, stepped to the bed and lay a hand on Alexandra's throat. Testing to see if she would struggle. She wouldn't. She couldn't.

He wore surgical gloves. Dry and cool against her flesh. Unnatural. His right hand was malformed. There were hard stumps where the first two fingers should have been. A bony nub that prodded against her airway.

The man's shadow enveloped her. Alex smelled his breath. Green peppers, something meaty. Tacos, empanadas. He was going to strangle her one-handed. Didn't even require both to do the job.

Alexandra heard Thorn. His electronic voice in her hand.

“Alex? Alex? Hello? What room are you in? I can't find you. Alex?”

Thorn coming to save her. Delayed by her call. Delayed just long enough for Runyon to finish his work.

Runyon peeled back the sheet and pried the phone from her hand and clicked it shut. Then got back to work, his deformed hand pressing against her windpipe. Alexandra's hands fluttered beneath the sheets. She was a fighter, always had been. Scrapping for everything, having to try harder, being a female in that cynical man's world. Cops, cops, more cops. She held her own. More than her own. Traded jab for jab. She was tougher than most of the guys she worked with. The karate was one thing, but it was deeper down than martial arts. The spirit she'd inherited from Lawton, his gristle.

She pictured a move to knock Runyon's hand loose. She'd fire the heel of her right hand at his nose. Break it, send him reeling. She pictured it, what she'd do if she weren't drugged. But she could do nothing but wiggle her fingers feebly as if she were waving good-bye.

She kept her eyes on him, memorizing his face for later, for the lineup. Until after a few seconds, it began to come clear that there would be no lineup. No later. No more Thorn. No Buck, that smart dog, so eager to please. No more anything. And she shut her eyes because this man, this Runyon, was not what she wanted for the last thing she saw on this planet.

She closed her eyes and felt the pressure on her throat, felt her body shudder, but no pain, she was just fine down inside where it counted, still and quiet and accepting, then once again she saw Lawton Collins with his mower, marching back and forth in straight, even lines across the backyard. The air dense with sweet green cuttings. The sweat on his back sparkled and his muscles rolled. His mouth was shaped into a wide grin as he looked across the yard at her, an impossible distance between them, and he winked at her, father and daughter separated by such vastness, but in that second, no more than that, she snapped across those years, those empty miles, flying back to that hot summer yard into her father's strong arms. Her protector. Her shield.

And everything was fine again, exactly the way it had been on that Miami afternoon many years ago. Perfect. Just perfect.

 

Thorn saw the doctor bent over Alex. He went into the room. Stayed for a moment at a respectful distance. Didn't want to interrupt a procedure.