Stagger Bay (8 page)

“You’ll have interview requests from newspapers, from television networks. It’s going to happen – your only choice is in how you use it, how you consume this energy. Are you ready for that kind of attention?”

I shook my head. “No, I’m not. Okay, so my face and name are bouncing around right now. But it’ll be a flash in the pan – I’ll endure my fifteen minutes of fame, and then they’ll all lose interest.”

Alden stepped closer and looked at me with eyes wide and brows lifted. “That’s my point. We have to strike while the iron is hot, and that’s what I do best: I’ll make a better fifteen minutes of fame for you, with a fatter financial reward for your actions.”

“I’ll have you on daytime, primetime, and late night. I’ll get you on syndicated and satellite radio,” he said. “I’ll get you book contracts and movie deals, athletic gear and men’s cologne sponsorships; I’ll put you on the lecture circuit and have you do mall openings. You’ll have lunch at the White House and maybe even throw the opening pitch at the World Series – hell, I’ll have you giving seminars on close combat tactics at Quantico, and at Coronado for the Teams. The possibilities are endless, if you’re interested.”

“I’m sure you mean well,” I said. “But can’t you see I hate this kind of attention?”

Alden pursed his lips and shifted gears. “That was a noble thing you did that day, Markus. I’m here to tell you, you deserve to get paid – and I’m going to make you a lot of money. You’ve got it coming – I know you’ve been through a lot, the false imprisonment thing and all.”

“That’s the past,” I said. “It’s not even worth talking about.”

“I’m not sure about that,” Alden said. “Seems to me a man with a background like yours has a lot to talk about: the kind of childhood you must have had, and being an innocent man in prison like so many others. About doing what you did in a situation where you had no chance at all, and pulling it out of your hat like that. If you do this with me, you’ll have the biggest soap box in the world to speak your piece from.”

“I wouldn’t know what to say.”

Alden grinned, his perfect array of teeth resembling a shark’s. “Oh, I think when the time comes, once you get used to it, you’ll have a lot to tell us. I’d venture to say we won’t be able to shut you up; you’ll get hooked on it like everybody else does. We’ll make a camera whore of you yet.”

“What are you doing with my patient?” Nurse Dorcas asked from the doorway. As she watched Alden bid me farewell and leave, she was visibly upset. “These media people. They’ve been awful, Markus, just awful.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

She looked at me, thought for a moment with her chin cupped in one plump hand, and then turned on the TV. The sound was off, muted. On the screen a woman newscaster stood in front of yellow crime scene tape at the school, yakking away soundlessly.

Behind her on the screen, through the open double doors where I’d first made my stand, CSI technicians poked around in the relative dimness of the ruined stretch of hallway where Wayne met his end. Even on the TV’s grainy screen I could clearly see the dark stain on the vestibule wall where I’d been shot.

Inset in the upper left corner of the screen, above the silently gesticulating newswoman, they had one of my old mug shots on display. I’m not particularly photogenic, and they hadn’t gotten my pretty side.

“Jeez Louise,” I said.

The station cut from the newscaster to close-up footage of me lying on my hospital bed with the left side of my face bandaged, talking away. Chief Jansen was prominent, flanked by uniformed cops crowding the walls of the room – the same room I was in right now. Someone in the Stagger Bay Police Department had sold my deposition video to the networks.

As Dorcas turned up the volume, the scene cut again and the newscaster did a voiceover: “A neighbor with a camcorder was eye witness to some of this, and we’re fortunate enough to have footage of what happened outside the school at least. We give fair warning here – the following images are shocking and intense, and we recommend a parental advisory.”

I saw the school entrance again. I stood there onscreen with my stiffened back toward the camera as I shouted like an irate baboon; next to me, the mortally wounded principal sat pawing my leg. It was amateur footage – the shaking camera lurched over to pan on the shattered cop car for an instant, then jerked back to zoom in on my back as the door crashed open, and Slash and Wayne rolled out leering like clockwork monsters.

I watched the grainy film of Slash raising his pistol, heard a muted bang from the TV as I watched parts of me splash onto the wall next to that poor one-eyed schmuck trapped forever inside the video loop. My doppelganger turned to look at what dripped down.

I shut my eye as even more noises emitted from the TV’s speakers. “Turn it off please, Dorcas.”

She did so, and when I opened my eye she was blinking back tears. She went to the window and opened the drapes. Sunlight flooded the room, and I squinted as I rose up on one elbow to peer outside.

Stagger Bay Hospital was built in the shape of a big square C, and I was on the second floor of one of the arms. I could see the main entrance to the hospital, as well as the parking lot with its medevac Flight of Life helipad off to the side.

It was a three ring media circus out there. The parking lot was crammed with dozens of news vans, almost all with satellite antenna masts and dishes deployed like electronic trees. Most had major network logos plastered on them; some of the news service names were in foreign languages and alphabets.

Newscasters made antic gesticulations for their camera crews, or were being made up in preparation to do so. Hundreds of non-local people, most of them well dressed, milled around talking to one another. Every person who entered or exited the hospital, whether civilian visitor or medical staff, ran a gauntlet of microphones.

Paparazzi were stationed in ambush at the main door of the hospital, but they didn’t click away at everyone entering or exiting. They were saving their film for bigger fish. Maybe for a one-eyed old ex-con.

“Jeez Louise,” I said again.

Dorcas nodded with her pale lips crimped together. “I’m sorry, Markus. They’ve been trying to get up here this whole time, but we’ve managed to hold them off so far. None of us want this for you. I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault,” I said, lying back to stare at the ceiling as Dorcas closed the curtains and left to continue her busy rounds. “It’s all good.”

Chapter 16

Dorcas went off shift and the night crew took over. I didn’t know them, having been unconscious during their previous ministrations. I closed my eye and pretended to be asleep when any of them came into my room.

As if I hadn’t felt trapped enough by my injuries and the cops’ attentions, now the media folk made me understand how any mouse felt with a hungry cat licking its dainty chops outside that rodent’s hole. I couldn’t stay at this hospital; I had to get away. Technically it was the medical equivalent of dining and dashing, but I was sure the hospital administrators would be warmly sympathetic to my plight.

I waited ‘til after midnight to make my move, when things had quieted down. It took some effort to wrestle myself vertical, but I finally managed to sit upright on the edge of the bed.

I pulled the IV catheter out my arm and stood, tottering. The linoleum floor felt arctic against the soles of my bare feet.

I shambled like a reanimated corpse to the closet, looking for something to wear, and was surprised to find my prison release clothes, still stained and tattered from the school. By all rights they should have been disposed of as biohazard, or put in the SBPD evidence locker.

But Stagger Bay was a small town – I counted my blessings and put them on. The dried blood made them stiff.

I peeked out the door: No one in sight. From the right came the murmuring unhurried activity typical of any nursing station in the wee hours.

I headed left. At the end of the corridor was a lit exit sign and I clung to it like a beacon, aiming my body at it in a slow decrepit stroll, leaning my shoulder against the wall and sliding along.

Every second I expected hospital staff to call out ‘stop;’ every room I passed, I expected paparazzi to leap out with cameras blazing. But I reached the exit door without event and pushed it open to see a flight of stairs wending downward.

It would have been entertaining for a second party to watch my progress down to the first floor, but for me it wasn’t quite so amusing. I got a death grip on the railing and leaned my forehead against it with my eye closed. It was a drunken, slow-motion scramble, often head first, with only my sliding grip on the rail preventing a total nose dive down the stairwell.

I was proud of how neatly I negotiated the reverse at the landing; felt like I was doing some complicated gymnastics move. I followed the next rail to the bottom, then straightened up, opened my eye, and reeled across to the exit.

I opened the door a crack. I was at the corner of one arm of the hospital. The parking lot was to my right, well lit despite the hour; to my left was a barrier of blackberry thickets.

The news trucks still dominated the parking lot. If anything, there were more of them than before. Satellite antennas aimed at the sky, pumping live broadcasts to viewers around the globe. Newshounds stood around in clumps, sucking on coffee and staring at the front of the hospital like a dog pack eying treed prey. Freelance photographers prowled the outskirts, scavengers awaiting the crumbs dropped by their betters in this digital Serengeti.

I slunk away to the blackberry thicket, squeezed through an opening and through the clawed, grasping branches until I reached a wide open space on the far side. The edge of a marsh was at my feet.

I knew this spot well from before prison. A large creek came down from the foothills and delta-ed into this marsh before finally draining to the southern wetlands of the Bay. It was a soggy low-lying area dotted with raised tussocks of mud, swamp grass, assorted shrubbery, and carnivorous plants. The air was moist and pungent with the smells of life and decay; the only native sounds were those of birds and frogs, insects and slow-moving water.

When Sam was a boy we’d ridden our bikes here for nature hikes on numberless occasions. There were tadpoles in season, and the big predatory water beetles they called electric light bugs, because of their habit of flopping across the ground toward any source of artificial illumination. The beetles were huge things that looked like they’d be better suited to co-starring in a Japanese horror movie than haunting a backwoods swamp.

There were crows and snakes and possums here too, as well as skunks and lots of mud. It was a little boy’s paradise and Sam always loved it. Tell the truth, I hadn’t minded it too much myself, being a big-city boy who’d never come closer to Wild Kingdom than on the picture tube of my TV.

Frogs throbbed out their mating song, the shrill chorus seeming to mock me and my current situation. Once, with Sam, this had been one of my favorite places on earth. Now it seemed eldritch and menacing in the moonlight.

Weakness overcame me and I sank to lie on my side in the mud at the edge of the water, staring into the dimness of that inhuman swamp. I closed my eye and fell asleep to the frogs’ malevolent piping and the rustlings of all the little swamp creatures going about their nocturnal business.

Chapter 17

I woke at dawn and the air was clammy; I was engulfed by a white fog that had risen off the swamp to hide the world in a numb blank swath. Despite the chill I was sweating.

I was on fire; I had a fever, bad. To add to the fun the dope they’d been pumping into me at the hospital had worn off, and my missing eye was really kicking up a fuss; the pain was the worst I’d felt since it had been blown out my skull.

I rose to hands and knees, swaying like a sickly dog as I coughed again and again, each cough a deep, gluey, rattling boom. I finally convulsed up a thick wad of chunky green phlegm, spat it onto the ground in front of me, and studied the gross little puddle clinically from a few inches above. I was in bad shape here.

I got to my feet and commenced shambling slowly through the fog, the swamp water slopping up next to the muddy path I followed. Behind me the hospital bulked up to darken the haze. As long as I was headed away from it, I was going in the right direction.

I hit a path leading uphill away from the marsh and turned that way, toiling up a slight incline that I wouldn’t have given a second thought to in better circumstances. Right then it felt like Mount Everest, and I found it harder and harder to breathe with every step. I felt like I was drowning with each labored rattling breath. My legs were rubbery stilts, stretching an infinite distance from my whirling head to the teetering ground below.

At the top of the path was a sidewalk on an empty street. The fog was thinner here but it still prevented me from seeing more than maybe twenty-five yards in any direction.

Memory failed me; my thoughts were less and less coherent. I had no idea where in Stagger Bay I was.

At random, I turned left and continued slumping along. The further I got from the marsh the thinner the fog got, until it finally disappeared.

I was on a wide street, brand new – an avenue, really. It looked out of place in this uninhabited corner. Both sides of the road were bulldozed and graded flat in preparation for construction, the lots all laid out. Surveyor’s stakes were everywhere, connected by string and fluttering with orange plastic ribbons. Cement sidewalks and curbs were poured and cured – inlets to what would be courts and cul-de-sacs broke the lonely curbing at architecturally appropriate intervals; concrete curves and spirals led off to ghost houses yet to be constructed.

I passed a bulldozer and grader parked next to a prefab contractor’s hut on concrete blocks. The wide avenue teed into a pot-holed cross street leading to my left, into a lurking cluster of identical bungalows, all of them in need of a paint job.

Now I recognized where I was: I’d stumbled my way straight to the Gardens. It was a jarring contrast between those run-down hovels and the pristine blank area I was passing through.