Naked Tao (18 page)

Finally, I saw a nurse dressed in blue scrubs hovering over a patient who might be her.  I was about to duck around the corner and wait for the nurse to leave when I noticed he was wearing sandals. There was something familiar about those sandals, and while I searched my memory, I let my eyes drift over the rest of the nurse’s body. The blond ponytail gave him away. 

I should have kept my mouth shut. What did I care if Pony Tail wanted revenge against Slotter. I couldn’t, of course. Such was the pain of my loss. 

“Take your hands off her,” I said. “She’s mine.” 

When he turned to face me, I think what surprised me the most was how open Pony Tail seemed. There was nothing adversarial about him. He wasn’t guarded. He didn’t look like he was buried under the weight of many secrets. He seemed authentic. His smile was real. Go figure. 

Pony Tail took a step to the side, and with a graceful sweep of the arm, invited me to claim my prize. A part of me wanted to remain cautious, to expect some kind of trick, but I didn’t listen to that voice. If I had, who knows what dark turn the moment might have taken. Instead, my feet led me to Ginny’s side. Her cheeks were rosy. Her chest rose and fell with a strong breath. And then her eyes opened. 

We hope you enjoyed reading
Naked Tao
.  This is Robert’s first book.  You will also love his second book,
The Nostrum Conspiracy.  
Robert is working hard on the third book in the series which will be available in 2016.

I allowed a single tear to follow the path of least resistance to the corner of my mouth, before wiping it with the tip of the tongue.  Savoring the slight burn from the salt, I tried to remember the last time I wept.  No luck there.  I’m sure I’ve cried before.  A man would have to be emotionally bankrupt to have never cried.  

I had been a monster, but there’s one thing I knew for sure, this was the first time I remember shedding a tear of joy.  Ginny was alive.  I don’t know how, but she was alive.  Somehow she survived the gun shot and still looked radiant.  By comparison, I felt like I had been kicked by an ornery mule.  

Ginny didn’t need the sexy clothes her company designs to make her beautiful.  Even in a flimsy hospital gown, she was stunning.  Tall and athletic, her flawless legs led the eye upward toward a tight little behind, while waves of soft dark brown hair fell gracefully onto her broad swimmer’s shoulders spotted with a few freckles despite her olive skin tone.  

Her eyes sparkled with life.  Even though I’ve known her as long as I can remember, I find their color difficult to pinpoint.  It is an unusual shade of blue or green that is best described as the color of a tropical sea.  

The rest of Ginny’s face is equally magnificent.  She has an aristocratic high bridged nose set between wide cheekbones that narrow into a high forehead.  It is a beautiful face that was enhanced with the flush of radiant good health.  

As happy as I was to see her like this, I thought I might be hallucinating.  The last time I saw her she was lying in a pool of her own blood, pale and lifeless.  Yet now I find her in a hospital bed, the model of good health.  How the hell is that possible?  

“You’re alive,” said Ginny.  

I shook my head as if that would wipe away any illusions.  Still, there was no mistaking her musical voice.  It was time to test the waters.  

“You died,” I murmured.  

“I knew Slotter was going to pull the trigger before she did,” said Ginny.  “Everything happened so slowly.  When the hammer fell I only had one thought…deflect that bullet.  I knew, without a doubt, I could do it…but I failed.”  

Kim Slotter was a war hero gone bad.  She had kidnapped Ginny and held her at an abandoned warehouse in the wrong end of town.  I took a ragtag group and tried to rescue her, but the heroic deed went south and we were shot by the bad guys.  

“You succeeded in deflecting the bullet, but that shot was intended for me, not you,” I said.  

Ginny absentmindedly massaged the spot just above her heart.  Without thinking I mirrored her movement and felt the bandages covering the exit wound.  I was lucky.  If the bullet had been slightly lower it would have killed me.  

“You’re wounded,” she said.  “I failed.”  

She thought only of protecting me and damn near got herself killed doing it.  Without thinking, I gathered her into my arms and held her tight.  

I had never done anything so rash in my life and had a moment where I thought maybe I had overstepped a boundary between us.  The moment of doubt passed when Ginny melted into me like she had been there a thousand times before.  

“You did not fail,” I said.  “It wasn’t Slotter who did this to me.  I was shot in the back by one of her minions.”  

The brush with death opened my eyes to a few things.  Introspection has an annoying way of doing that.  The thing that hurt the most as we lay together in an expanding puddle of blood was the regret.  

I couldn’t understand why I had ignored her all of those years.  None of the reasons that once seemed adequate withstood the test of final judgment as we faced death together.  

Once the wave of grief passed, I wiped the tears from her shoulder and reminded myself that somehow she was miraculously alive and well.  The grief was replaced with self-doubt.  She couldn’t still be alive.  I must be dreaming, or worse, experiencing a psychotic break.  

Neither was acceptable and I was thinking of giving myself a good hard pinch, when our tender moment was interrupted by a disapproving voice.  

“What do you think you’re doing?”  

A young nurse with a fake smile plastered across her face stormed into the room.  Her dirty blond hair had been hastily smoothed back, leaving a few stubborn strands that refused to comply.  Instead, they curled around a flushed cheek, as testament to her refusal to follow the straight and narrow.  On the opposite side of her face, a streak of dark mascara ran a quarter-inch from the corner of her left eye.  

She was dressed in rumpled surgical scrubs.  A wet spot in the seat of her blue pants wasn’t quite dry yet and the buttons on her top were out of alignment.  She smelled of sweat and sex from a quick tryst in some dark corner of the hospital.  

She had a name tag that I didn’t bother to read.  Instead, I dubbed her Ms. Quickie.  Whatever name her mother gave her couldn’t possibly be a more accurate description than the nick name I tagged her with.  

She was trying hard to be perky, but failed miserably.  I had the sense Ms. Quickie was trained to be upbeat, but it didn’t come naturally to her.  It was obvious she wasn’t pleased with me.  

“This patient is in critical condition,” she said coldly.  “I’m going to change her bandage and afterwards you need to leave so she can get some rest.”  

For someone charged with patient care, she was shockingly unobservant.  She hadn’t once looked at Ginny and seemed content to glare at me instead.  

I nodded toward Ginny.  Ms. Quickie followed my eyes.  At first she didn’t seem to register what was in front of her, but when it finally sunk in that Ginny was the model of good health, she muffled a small scream with her hand.  

“That’s impossible,” gasped Ms. Quickie.  “She’s at death’s door and Doctor Wiemp doesn’t expect her to make it through the night.”  

It irked me that she gave more weight to what the Doctor said than what her own eyes revealed about Ginny’s condition.  Clearly, she was not at death’s door.  Ginny was alive and well.  

I wanted to point this out to her, but resisted the temptation and asked instead, “How do you explain it then…a miracle maybe?”  

Ms. Quickie ignored my question.  Instead she made the sign of the cross, as if that would somehow protect her from something she didn’t understand.  I can’t be certain, but I think I also heard her whisper something about God’s own miracle.  

I wasn’t serious about the miracle comment, but that didn’t seem to matter much to her.  Once she completed the religious rituals, her nurses’ training took over and she busied herself with Ginny’s bandage.  

At first she seemed hesitant, as if she feared what lay beneath it.  Her fear didn’t last long before she made up her mind to do her job and began to slowly remove the blood crusted dressing.  

While she fussed with the bandage, I turned to ask Pony Tail what he knew about Ginny’s condition, but he was nowhere in sight.  Weird, I thought.  He had been dressed in nurse’s scrubs and hovering over Ginny when I walked into the room a few minutes earlier.  I sure didn’t hear him leave.  

“Maybe the other nurse knows what happened to Ginny,” I said to Ms. Quickie.  

Her attention was on the bandage and I wasn’t sure if she heard me at first.  I was about to repeat it when she finally answered.  

“I’m the only one working this shift,” she said.  

“There was a male nurse in here a few minutes ago,” I said.  

Since she ignored me, I added a description of Pony Tail to give her memory a boost.  

“He’s in his mid-twenties, medium height, brown skin, and blond hair,” I said.  

I still didn’t get a response from her, so I added a bit lamely, “He wears his hair long, but tied back in a ponytail.  You can’t miss him.”  

She finally responded with a shake of her head and said, “There’s no one like that here.”  

I gave up on Pony Tail and chalked it up as one more strange mystery to follow-up at a later time.  

While the nurse fussed with the bandages I took a moment to look around the room.  Hospital rooms are places where I put on horse blinders, since it’s best not to see too much.  The rooms tend to be stark and filled with unpleasant odors.  For the most part, Ginny’s room was no exception.  However, it did have one interesting feature that drew my eye.  

An odd picture hung on the wall next to the bathroom.  Most art work in hospital rooms is virtually invisible, but this one caught my eye.  It was a wreath, but I saw something odd hidden in its design.  I could very clearly see a snake eating a bird, and the bird swallowing the snake.  

I had seen that symbol somewhere else and was trying to remember where it was, when the nurse gasped.  She had removed the last of the bandages and was staring intently at Ginny’s forehead.  Since she was obstructing my view, I craned my neck to see around her, but still couldn’t see a thing.  

I wasn’t sure what to expect.  I know I saw Slotter blow a hole in her forehead and a sick part of me wanted that hole to be there, so I wouldn’t have to face the possibility I was fucking crazy.  The rest of me wanted Ginny’s forehead to be as smooth as a baby’s butt.  

When Ms. Quickie finally shifted positions, what I saw was a bit of dried blood that the nurse wiped away.  Where there was once a hole the size of my little finger, now there was only smooth healthy skin.  There was no evidence Ginny had suffered an injury.  

I was relieved for sure, but now I doubted my memory of the events at the warehouse.  Was Ginny really taken by an ex-special forces renegade and held hostage in a warehouse in West Louisville?  

A group of us went to rescue her, but all hell broke loose.  I was shot.  Ginny was shot.  The only family I had left was trapped on the roof of a burning building.  I don’t know how Uncle Jim could have survived those flames.  Oh…and my crazy macaw, Bird, went down underneath a tank of a man.  

The only person I care about who managed to get through it unharmed was my best friend, Eric.  When I awoke in the hospital, I found him sitting at my bedside.  It should have been comforting, but Eric was behaving strangely.  He seemed worried about more than recent events, but wouldn’t say what it was.  

Then it got even weirder when my attorney, showed up with a Marine Colonel in tow.  The Colonel is in charge of some hush-hush military investigation involving Slotter, the renegade ex-special forces bitch who shot Ginny.  

They offered me a deal to avoid prosecution for two murders I didn’t commit.  One of the dead men was my boss, John Biggs, who was found hanging from the chandelier in his posh corner office after I showed him a mysterious package of damning evidence that was left on my desk.  

I’m a lawyer, by the way.  At least I was before I got fired.  An expensive separation from my soon to be ex-wife and strangling medical bills for my mother’s long term health care have left me broke.  So, after getting fired, I took a job working as a body guard for a Tibetan monk named Padma Ganesha.  

He wrote a bestselling book about the happiest place on Earth.  Ginny somehow persuaded him to travel to Louisville and speak at a lecture series called, “Ideas to Change the World”.  The lecture series was held in an auditorium on Louisville’s waterfront called, the Center.  When I arrived, I discovered the security guard with a knife buried in his chest.  

The evening went from bad to worse after Pony Tail started shooting.  Thirty-two hundred peace loving hippies fought their way to the exits, only to find themselves locked inside.  They are all dead now.  According to the news reports, there was a gas leak, but I’m not buying it.  

For some reason, the military wanted to cover up the truth and offered me immunity to keep quiet about what really happened.  The deal was a huge insult to my intelligence.  Even though I was in no mood to allow myself to be controlled by some military goon, I went along with it to get rid of them.  

As soon as the Colonel left my room, I slipped out in the hopes of finding Slotter in the intensive care unit recovering from her own gunshot wounds.  Following Slotter’s arrest, a police detective stuck a pistol in her belly and pulled the trigger.  The Jack Ruby moment was motivated by vengeance for the death of the detective’s daughter at the Center.  

Slotter had made a few enemies and we all wanted her dead, but it was beginning to look like she was under the protection of the same Colonel who was trying to hush up what really happened at the Center.  

Instead of Slotter, I found Ginny alive and well in the intensive care unit.  I thought for sure she was dead and now I was beginning to doubt my own memory of what happened.  It was inconceivable that she took a bullet to the head and survived, let alone healed so quickly.  At least it was inconceivable to a sane person.  

I shook off the self-doubt.  Something was amiss, but if Ginny survived by some unknown miracle, then maybe, just maybe, Uncle Jim and Bird also survived.  I could only hope, but for now I wanted to focus on what was right in front of me.  Ginny was alive and that was huge.  

Neither the nurse nor I knew what to say in response to the sight of her perfectly healed wound.  It was Ginny who broke the silence.  

“My father is still alive and I’m going to find him,” said Ginny.  “Will you help me, Grant?”  

Ginny’s father had disappeared years ago.  For some reason, Slotter thought he was still alive and that’s why she kidnapped Ginny.  In some weird way, it must have given Ginny hope.  I didn’t think for a minute the man was still alive after all this time, but I wanted to be with Ginny and she wanted to search for him.  

“Of course I will,” I answered.  “Where do you want to begin?”  

“Brazil…he was last seen boarding a small plane for a tour of the Amazon Rainforest,” answered Ginny without hesitation.  “We’ll begin there.”  

“That’s a long time for someone to be missing,” I said.