Authors: Jada Ryker
Marisa met Brandon’s frantic eyes. “It’s okay, Brandon. I’ve got this.”
Reluctantly, the receptionist gave up his brief security guard duty, and released Jonah. With a parting glare at Jonah, Brandon headed back to his post. “You call me if you need me, Marisa.”
Jacobs idly pulled at his flexible watchband. “Instances of wayward children taking up employees’ valuable work time are never favorable on an audit. Especially imaginative children babbling about ghosts and monsters!”
Jeez, I forgot all about him,
Marisa thought in chagrin.
The horror faded from Jonah’s face as he focused on the other man.
Jacobs sneered. “Perhaps you should put your son in time out so he doesn’t interrupt the adults in their work.”
Jonah focused on the other man and put one long, slim finger to his full lips. “You know, I saw a guy in a strip club last night who reminded me of you.”
Jacobs laughed in derision. “Wrong guy. I’m new in town.”
Jonah’s eyes narrowed in speculation. “That’s odd. I’ve seen him in the club many times over the past year or so. He had on shades and a baseball cap.”
“That’s a definitive description.” He pulled at the metal watchband.
Jonah smiled, showing even white teeth. “I never saw his face, but he had an annoying habit of plucking at his watch band.”
Jacobs snapped himself with the band.
Marisa had to hide her smile. “Jonah, I’ll call you later.”
With a wary look at Jonah as if he was a skunk armed with a missile of stench, Jacobs held up his hand. “No need for him to leave. I can find my own way to Mr. Caldwell.”
As soon as the auditor hurried out, Jonah collapsed into the chair in front of Marisa’s desk.
“You’ve obviously been at the nursing home this morning. Whenever you visit your grandmother, you always wear your standby gray suit. I suppose it was easier for you to give into her demands for you to look nice, rather than defy her. Although I must say, you look quite spiffy—”
“Marisa, shut up!”
She fell back into her chair in shock.
“I need for you to be quiet and listen. Besides, I don’t even know what ‘spiffy’ means.” Jonah’s half-hearted attempt at humor failed.
Marisa threw her hands up in surrender.
Jonah leaned forward. “You are not going to believe it!” A tiny trickle of perspiration traversed Jonah’s forehead in an irregular slide.
Marisa’s gut clenched. In all the time she had known Jonah, she had never seen him sweat. “Wait. Let me get the door—”
Jonah sputtered in frustration.
Marisa hurriedly negotiated the narrow space around her desk, pushed at the door, and scooted back into her chair. Fleetingly, she felt the warmth of sun on the back of her neck through the open blinds on her window.
Jonah straightened in his chair, and gripped the arms with his hands.
She leaned forward on her desk, the pinched edges of Jonah’s sharply angled face gleaming in the sunshine streaming through the window at her back. “Jonah! What on earth is going on?”
“Marisa, you are not going to fucking believe this.” He sprawled in the chair, his head back on the seat, his hands pressed to his eyes.
A quiet creaking sound sent Marisa’s eyes to her office door. Damn, she didn’t push it closed hard enough. It was ajar, and she knew she and her visitor would be clearly visible through the glass panel. On the other hand, there was no one to see or hear. Janie, the human resources secretary, had been laid off after the last round of Payton’s budget cuts, and the outer office was empty. Marisa shrugged. Since visitors to her office always announced themselves, she decided to leave the door.
Slowly, as if he was an old man rather than barely twenty-one, Jonah rose. He planted his palms on the desk and stared down at Marisa. “I’ve gotten myself in too deep, Marisa. I—”
A tremendous explosion ripped the air. Dimly, Marisa saw Jonah tumbling forward toward her in slow motion, his eye wide with surprise.
His eye?
His thin body fell onto the desk, knocking the phone aside with a clatter, and slid in slow motion to the carpet. Marisa raised her hands to her face and found with a dim, thick-as-molasses astonishment it was wet under her quivering fingers. She brought her hands away from her cheeks and found them shockingly, incongruously red.
Choked and shaking, her voice was the only sound in the strangely silent room: “Dear Lord above.” Her eyes focused beyond her hands to the top of her desk. “My desk is red.”
Marisa’s trembling hand hit the phone, knocking it to the floor. The harsh sound fell on Marisa’s frozen stasis like a pebble tossed into a mirror-still pond. The ripples waved out in her mind, forcing her to think beyond the incomprehensible red and the one astonished brown eye which filled her mind to the exclusion of all else.
One eye… But Jonah should have two eyes…
By firmly planting both hands on the desk, Marisa found she was able to rise. Her knees were shaking, she thought she would fall, but she had to get moving.
Check on Jonah. Call someone.
As she bent to retrieve the telephone from the floor, she noticed a pink phone message slip, covered with Brandon’s loopy handwriting, now crimson, was stuck to her palm. He had suggested he email all messages to her, but she had held firm on the use of the pink slips.
Although definitely passé in these electronic times
— Marisa clamped down on her wayward thoughts. She grabbed the telephone receiver, and after three tries, she punched the digits for the overhead paging system. Marisa had to clear her throat twice to announce the code: “Code Brown, human resources office.”
Dazed, Marisa managed to stagger around her desk by gripping the cool wood tightly and moving one step at a time.
Code Brown
, she thought. The hospital code for “The Shit Has the Fan.” Not a fire, not a tornado, not a gas leak, but something very bad. Code Brown was used to discreetly let the staff know something bad happened without letting the patients and visitors know.
Might need a new code now,
Marisa thought as she fell to her knees next to the unmoving gray and white mound on the carpet.
How about a code red?
She pushed at the mound, and then stared at her hand.
Definitely a code red.
Marisa leaned over.
The entire side of his head was gone. Completely, unutterably, horribly gone.
What code do you use for that?
Without warning, the office was filled with white-uniformed, bustling professionals and a blue-shirted, shouting security guard.
Marisa’s dilated eyes found the wide, shocked green ones of Tara, and she managed to push her way through the excited, babbling crowd to fall into her friend’s arms.
Code Blonde, Code Blonde, Code Blonde.
Dimly, as if from the end of a long, echoing corridor, Marisa heard the heaving, muffled sobs. With a numbed sort of surprise, she realized the sounds were coming from her own throat.
Standing in the doorway, he eased his head out into the disinfectant-scented hallway.
He looked up and down.
He listened.
Deserted. Quiet.
Clay Napier slipped into the nursing home room, located down the hall from his own room. As he entered, he nearly retched from the smell.
Rotted meat. It’s no good, it’s sickening, throw it in the dumpster.
Leaning against the door frame, he buried his nose and mouth in his crisp handkerchief and willed himself to become more accustomed to the smell. After a few moments, breathing carefully through freshly laundered linen, Clay approached the bed.
The blinds were closed against the summer sun. In the murky, near darkness, illuminated by a dimly glowing lamp on the table, the lump on the bed didn’t stir.
Hands tight on the metal bed rail, Clay looked down at the swollen face. The heat in the room caused sweat to trickle under his arms.
Pillsbury Dough Boy, poppin’ fresh right from the oven. How about a sammich, got plenty of meat to put on the bread.
Even with the white puffiness of the face, Clay could see its lines of pain and age. The head was nearly bald, with just a few wisps of white hair limp on the pink, scaly scalp.
Clay reached out to touch the arm, the skin shiny and stretched taunt, seeming to strain to hold back the swelling tissues.
He stopped.
If I touch the skin, will my hand sink into the putrid flesh? Will it be swallowed up? Suck in my hand, my arm, all of me. Will I join him inside the skin? Is that why he’s so freakin’ huge and puffy? How many other people have joined him in there?
Clay shook his head to clear it of his grotesque thoughts.
He touched the skin of the swollen arm gently, half expecting his fingers to sink into it.
The sunken eyes, almost swallowed by the huge, round face, opened. Hazy brown eyes met Clay’s. The man admitted to the nursing home under the name of Horace Jones frowned in confusion. The mist which clouded his friend’s mind lifted, as it sometimes did when Clay visited this room.
“What in heaven’s name is that smell?” The head moved slightly on the pillow as the eyes darted around the room. “Where are we?” The ancient man sniffed hard, and then wrinkled his nose in disgust. “That horrible smell of rotted flesh and evacuated bowels.” He frowned in fierce concentration. “The intense heat, threatening to incinerate us to ashes, to blow away on an ill wind. The South American massacre? Is that where we are?”
“No,” Clay answered sadly. “We’re in a nursing home.”
Shaking his head, sending the jowls into an obscene jiggle, he frowned. “But that smell! There’s no other smell in the world like it.”
“It’s you. The smell is coming from you.” Clay blinked his eyes to clear them of the sudden tears welling in them.
The sparse eyebrows rose. “Me???” Struggling under the light blanket, he tried to sit up.
“It’s gangrene, my old friend. It took your foot, then your leg…it’s up to your hip now.”
Looking like rubber gloves filled with water nearly to bursting, the old man’s hands plucked at the blanket. Clay pressed a restraining hand on his friend’s shoulder. He grimaced against the mushy feel of the flesh under his hand. “You really, really don’t want to look.”
With a shuddering sigh, the massive man fell back on the pillows. “Jesus Ch—” The old man’s phlegmatic coughing fit was the only sound in the room.
How about some nice, juicy sauce to go with the meat? Yum! Yum!
“Help me! Get me out of here!”
“I will, I swear I’ll get you out of here, first opportunity!” Clay tried to grip his friend’s shoulders. He shuddered when he fingers sunk in the flesh.
“Help me! Help me!” The frantic screams were becoming louder.
Clay grabbed the device dangling from the bed rail, and pressed the button which would summon a staff member to the old man’s side. He backtracked to the door.
“I promise, I’ll be back.”
In his room, the stench of rotten flesh still clung to Clay’s nostrils.
He stripped off his clothes, every stitch, and bundled them in with his dirty laundry. As an extra precaution, he stuffed the laundry bag into the bottom of his closet and slammed the door.
Then, he jumped into the hot shower, washing his skin again and again with lavish handfuls of body wash until his flesh wrinkled.
Although he stared at his foggy reflection in the nursing home’s mirror, Clay was seeing the lump in the bed down the hall.
Decades ago, his friend had been a respected leader, responsible for other lives. Calm and cool, his confidence had been tangible, touching his peers and his subordinates.
My best friend, the one person in the world I could trust. Now…How did it happen? Was he smart and savvy and competent one minute, and then a bed-ridden wreck the next?
No, it was insidious. Gangrene in the toes, hey, who needs toes, you can rumble right along fine though life without your toes. But then the gangrene spreads, the old fashioned cousin of the more modern flesh-eating bacteria.
The body sucking up liquid, greedily retaining all of the fluid, too stingy to excrete it.
And the brain, loss of its consciousness of self, its orientation to reality, folding in on itself. Sometimes, the moment was lucid, a fleeting wrinkle in the brain tissue, allowing brief contact with memories.
Am I destined to turn into that?
With searching eyes, Clay studied his mirrored self, noting the fine lines around his eyes and mouth, the slight shadow of white whiskers on his cleft chin and strong jaw line. No signs of swelling flesh in his angled cheekbones or the handsome, willful nose.
Because of his daily workouts, continued in the nursing home’s gym area, his shoulders remained broad and muscular, and his tummy was flat. In the mirror, his gaze followed the tapered lines of his slim hips and legs, still straight and firm. Thank heavens his legs weren’t bowed and crooked, like those of most of the elderly male residents.
Not a tasty snack cake yet, all gooey on the inside.
Not like the lump on the bed.
“I’ll keep the promise, my friend,” Clay addressed his reflection in a slightly muffled, gravelly voice as he passed a wet washcloth over his face. “First opportunity.”
Rustling noises from his room stilled Clay’s hand.
Barely breathing and moving in slow motion, he palmed his straight razor.
Clay jerked open the bathroom door.
The man staggered backwards. He bumped into Clay’s night stand, and sent the lamp crashing to the floor. “Mr. Napier! Oh my goodness, I am so sorry.” The visitor’s feet crunched in the broken glass. “I’m Russell Meeks, the nursing home’s payroll coordinator, in case you don’t remember.” He bent over to retrieve shards of glass.
Wondering if the other man had heard him talking to himself, Clay snapped, “I know who you are, young man. What I don’t know is what you’re doing skulking around my bedroom and bathroom!” Clay stealthily folded the straight razor. He grabbed his black dress pants and slipped them on. Since he was commando, he very carefully zipped them.
Holding pieces of broken glass in his hand, Russell ducked his dark, cropped head and hunched his shoulders under his baggy navy jacket.
“Stand up straight, young man! You’re cowering there like a whipped hound dog just waiting for a sharp kick!” Clay bent over for the garbage can. “And throw that glass in here before you slice and dice yourself with it!”
Russell obeyed and tossed the glass into the can, flinching at the loud crashing sound of the shards. Fiddling with his old-fashioned, black-rimmed glasses, Russell lifted his head so he could meet the old man’s eyes. Behind the lenses, his vague eyes skittered away from the undisguised anger in the venomous glare shooting from the older man’s gray ones.
Russell shuffled his large feet. “I knocked on the door of your room, but I guess you didn’t hear me. When I poked my head in the door and called out to you, I thought I heard you answer me from the bathroom.”
Certainly not going to admit he’d been talking to himself, Clay bent over to retrieve the scattered bits of glass. “I’m busy. I need to get ready for lunch.”
Russell tried a smile to break the older man’s crusty reserve. “I hear lunch today is a bit of an experiment by the chef. It’s his invention, a version of homemade hot pockets. It’s meat and a savory sauce, wrapped in a crispy shell.”
Clay choked down the bile which rose in his throat at the thought of the huge hot pocket down the hall from him. “I think I’ll pass,” Clay managed, “and I’ll have a nice, green salad instead. Now, since I doubt you’re here to discuss the menu, please state your business and then let me get back to what I was doing.” He straightened, and as added punctuation, he tossed the remaining ceramic shards into the garbage can with the rest of the pieces.
“I understand you spoke to Mrs. Graham’s grandson, Jonah Graham, this morning.”
Clay’s face reddened and stiffened with anger. “It’s bad enough you control every aspect of our lives in this God-forsaken place. Now you’re trying to control the residents’ families! If you want me to help you track the visitors’ movements, you’re barking up the wrong old elm tree!”
“I have an extremely good reason for asking.”
Clay stared into the young man’s eyes, trying to read them through the thick lenses. He thought he caught a glimmer of some strong emotion in the other man’s eyes. Fear? Excitement? Determination to stay until he got the information he wanted?
“Let me at least get my shirt on,” Clay grouched. “Considering the crazy society in which we live, there’s no telling what kind of wild rumors could get started by my holding a half-naked, male tête-à-tête in my room.”
Russell obligingly tried to steer Clay toward his shirt, hanging over a chair.
Clay slapped the solicitous hands away as if they were annoying insects. “I’m perfectly capable of walking around this room on my own, Mr. Milds.”
“Meeks, sir. Would you like to lie down here on your bed and I’ll just take the chair by the window?”
“I’m a grown man who doesn’t need to be in that bed unless I’m sleeping or entertaining female company, damn it! You sit there and I’ll take this chair!” A slight scuffle ensued as Russell tried to help the older man to the chair.
Slightly breathless, Clay gasped, “Good heavens, man, you’re wearing me out! At my age, my energy is a precious commodity, not to be wasted in silly wrestling matches with clumsy pups half my age.” He leaned over to snag his pristine white shirt off the chair and shrugged it on. His stiff fingers fumbling with the small buttons, Clay growled, “What is this really about?” Seeing Russell’s hesitation, Clay waved his arms in frustration. “Don’t try to sugar-coat what you’re thinking, boy! Just because I’m stuck away in a nursing home doesn’t mean I’m senile and unable to cope! Spit it out!”
Russell awkwardly placed a gentle hand on the older man’s arm. “I’m sorry, Mr. Napier.”
“Sorry about what, Mr., er, Milks.”
“I’m afraid I have bad news. Earlier today, Jonah tragically lost his life.”
Whatever Clay expected, it hadn’t been the death of a youngster like Jonah. Living in a nursing home, all of the residents knew the specter of death hovered near each and every one of them. For a kid like Jonah, death should have been only a dim, fuzzy vision. Now, it seemed, the vision had come sharply into focus. “Jonah is dead? What happened? A car wreck?”
“No, sir. Someone deliberately shot Jonah in the head.”
“Jonah was murdered after he left here this morning?” Clay’s head jerked up as the significance of the words penetrated his shock. “Please tell me exactly what happened to him.”
“…And that’s all I know. The police officer told me Ms. Adair, a friend of one of our residents, was the last person to see Jonah alive. However, he wouldn’t tell me if Jonah told her anything before he died.”
Clay frowned. “What about Jonah’s grandmother? The police should question Mrs. Graham.”
Russell’s eyes were unreadable behind the thick lenses. “I’m afraid it’s impossible. When the nurse went into Mrs. Graham’s room to tell her about her grandson’s death, the old woman was lying across her bed, dead. She appears to have died of a heart attack.”
Clay sucked in a shocked breath. “Mrs. Graham? Dead?”
“The police are here now, gathering information. An officer is waiting in the hall to speak with you.” Russell rose and shuffled to the door. “Officer,” he called softly, and turned back to Clay. “Since you saw Jonah this morning, the police officer needs to take your statement.”
Clay motioned the uniformed young man to the neatly made bed. “Make yourself comfortable, son, and I’ll tell you everything I know.” He hesitated, and glanced at Russell.
The officer’s mouth twisted. “The nursing home administrator has…strongly insisted her employee Mr. Meeks be present at all interviews with the residents. Please, sir, if you could …?”
Clay forced his disordered thoughts from chaos to order. “Mrs. Graham and her grandson had taken a turn on the grounds early this morning. I saw them through my window. They came back into the facility, and I heard them in the hallway outside my room, quarrelling. When I came out of my room, Mrs. Graham, her huge body, encased as usual in her too-tight polyester smock and pants, was jiggling with anger as she focused on him. ‘I can tell you know more than you’re telling me! You’ve got to go to the authorities!’