Only
he hadn’t counted on Muffin and me regaining consciousness. Or on Bobby Ray and
Claudette showing up. Bobby Ray helped me to my feet. Claudette scooped up
Muffin, who was too dazed to bite. “This poor little fella is bleeding,” she
said.
“We’d
best get both these folks to the emergency room,” Bobby said.
They
bundled me along to their car, a roomy old Buick with tufted velvet upholstery
that appeared to have been through a few kids and grandkids. Gently, they
arranged me in the backseat with Muffin cradled in my arms. I wanted to
apologize to them for getting dirt all over their car, but I was afraid that if
I opened my mouth I’d throw up. My head throbbed, the world twirled, and I was the
axis.
Lying
back on the seat, I stroked Muffin, who was bleeding from a graze on his back.
Bear’s shot must have stunned him into temporary unconsciousness, but his thick
fur had blunted the impact. Half an inch lower and his spine would have been shattered.
He didn’t seem to be in any pain though; in fact, he seemed to be in excellent
spirits.
Why
hadn’t Bear used a gun on me, too? Because shooting someone was messy and I
might bleed all over Charlene’s environmentally friendly bamboo wood floors?
Because it meant having to dispose of a gun?
And why did Bear
want
me dead?
The
answer was there somewhere, floating above my head like Marabelle Akin’s ghost,
but my befuddled brain couldn’t seize it. I was in shock. Not medical shock,
the kind that shuts down your vital organs, but the kind of shock and disbelief
you feel when a close relative suddenly dies. My best friend, the man I’d unreservedly
trusted—okay, the man who’d starred in a few of my fantasies—had
betrayed me. He’d been my hope, my hero, my angel for all these years—and
then he’d savagely turned on me, drugged me, told me I was trash.
Bear
thought I was trash.
It burned; it festered; it rankled. I
felt
like
trash. I felt abandoned, shaken from my moorings, worthless. I was the kind of loser
who couldn’t even control her bladder! Tears spurted from my gritty eyes,
streamed down the sides of my face, created muddy trails on my filthy skin.
Claudette
leaned over the back of the seat and took my cold hands in her warm ones.
“Whoever did this to you, child, is so low he’d have to look up to a snake’s
belly. Lucky for him he didn’t know he was burying you above the mortal remains
of Marabelle Akin, the saintliest woman who ever walked the earth.”
Bobby
Ray made a sound that could have been a snort or a throat clearing. Claudette
smacked the back of his head. “Don’t you go doubting my mama. All the mess we
had to deal with today—see Mama’s lawyer, take her flowers to the
retirement home, haul Bobby Ray’s brother to the airport—well, I was knock-down-dragged-out
tired. But I just had this feeling we needed to come here and check, see
whether the cemetery planted Mama’s grass like we paid for.”
She
adjusted her wide-brimmed black straw hat. “Well, now I know what that funny
feeling was all about. That was Mama, telling us to come get this person off
her bed of eternal slumber.”
Escape tip #20:
The only time a girl should
put her feet in stirrups is
when she’s riding a horse.
“Pupils
dilated,” intoned the intern. “Heart rate eighty-five. Bloodshot eyes.
Contusions on face consistent with physical assault. Appears to be
disoriented.” The intern, who was about twelve years old—he had pimples
and wore colored braces—was dictating to a nurse who was scribbling notes
on a chart.
I was lying on a
gurney in the trauma unit of County General Hospital. Not by choice. Hospitals
were scary at the best of times, but in my present situation were absolutely
terrifying. So far I’d managed to avoid revealing my name, rank, and insurance
number by playing dumb and drugged out—not a great stretch—but
hospitals are run by a bureaucratic steamroller that would soon clank into
gear. The sympathy and concern would turn to suspicion, and then the
thumbscrews would appear.
Zo, you refuse to cooperate, eh? Igor,
bring in za number 92 needle—za harpoon size!
“
Roofies,
betcha anything,” said the orderly, who looked like he ought to be out on the
gridiron sacking quarterbacks. He’d been the one who’d lifted me onto a gurney
when Bobby Ray and Claudette had driven me to the hospital’s emergency
entrance. While the medical personnel were preoccupied with me and Muffin—who
had already recovered to the extent that he was attempting to bite people—Bobby
Ray and Claudette had hurried back to their car and vamoosed. I didn’t blame
them. I would have taken off too if I’d been in any condition for it.
“Roofies?”
My intern, probably preoccupied over who he was going to ask to the sock hop,
gave him a blank look.
“Yeah,
Doc. Somebody slipped this little gal a
roofie
. You know—R2, Rope,
Trip-and-Fall, Forget-me—”
“We
use correct terminology on this ward,” snapped the nurse, shooting the orderly
a scathing look. “What he means is
rohypnol,
Doctor.
Flunitrazepam.
Illegal
in this country. It’s a date-rape drug. We’ll know for certain when the lab
sends up the results.”
These
would be the results of the blood sample the nurse had taken a few minutes earlier,
stabbing a needle into my finger with the zeal of a born torturer. I looked around
for Muffin. He was somewhere nearby; I could hear him barking up a storm.
Probably he was locked in a broom closet. Couldn’t they see he was hurt and
needed treatment? Why didn’t they have a veterinarian on call here?
A
woman in scrubs, either a doctor or nurse—who could tell these
days—breezed in with a computer printout. “Positive for roofies,” she
said.
“Told ya,” the
fullback crowed.
The
intern cleared his throat and looked at me. “Miss? Were you sexually
assaulted?’
I
shook my head.
“She’ll
have to have a pelvic anyway. Regulations,” said the nurse. Paris Island had
lost out on a crack drill instructor when this one had gone into the health
care field. “Rohypnol causes anterograde amnesia. She was probably assaulted
but doesn’t remember. The couple who brought her in said she’d been wrapped in
a trash bag and buried in the ground. So we have an attempted homicide in
addition to assault—we’ll need to get the police involved in this.”
That
wouldn’t be hard. The room was chockablock with cops. It was one in the
morning, prime time for drive-by shootings, bar brawls, and car crashes.
Bloody, moaning people lay stretched out on gurneys and cots. A few of the
bloody, moaning people were handcuffed to police officers who weren’t about to
let their perps slip away just because their wounds were being stitched up. The
trauma unit was a happenin’ place. Orderlies were hauling gurneys in and out,
doctors were shouting orders, gang members were yelling obscenities, the PA
system was blaring garbled announcements, and a big-screen TV set was blasting.
At
the moment it was tuned to CNN.
“U.S. Marshal Irving Katz and his team are
following up reports that escaped convict Mazie Maguire was sighted this
afternoon in Milwaukee,”
a newscaster was reporting.
“The following
video was taken earlier today by a surveillance camera in the downtown area of
the city.”
The video showed a figure in dark shirt, pants, and cap. There I
was, truckin’ along Wisconsin Avenue, Muffin racing ahead.
Just
in case anyone had forgotten what I looked like in the five minutes since the
last broadcast, my face flashed on the screen. My mug shot, taken when I’d been
booked for murder, with a deer-in-the-headlights expression and a big zit on my
chin. Public Enemy Number One.
“Authorities
are asking the public to phone in any tips that may lead to the fugitive’s
apprehension,”
the news guy resumed.
“But the latest polls indicate that
fifty-one percent of Milwaukeeans claim that they would assist Maguire, while
only forty-eight percent would turn the fugitive in to authorities. One percent
of those polled believe Maguire is a space alien receiving assistance from an
invisible mothership.”
Quick
shot of a vendor standing on the corner of Wisconsin and Third, grinning as he
displayed a T-shirt with my photo on the front, neon pink letters splashed
across it:
Free Mazie.
Next, a shot of a Marquette University frat
house, a back-to-school kegger, the college kids wearing black-and-white
striped prison suits and half a dozen frat boys waving a sagging, beer-stained
banner at the camera:
U Cn Crash with the Delta Delts, Mazie!!
It
hadn’t occurred to anyone that the wanted fugitive might be lying in the middle
of County General’s emergency room at eye level with the blue backside of one
of Milwaukee’s finest.
“Well
. . . okey-dokey, then,” said Doctor Doogie. “I’ll put her down for a pelvic.”
Pelvic.
It sounds so innocent. Like they’re going to tap your hipbones with a
rubber-tipped mallet, when in fact a pelvic is a gross invasion of your most private
orifices. The orderly helped me off the gurney and Nurse Nasty escorted me to a
nearby curtained-off cubicle.
“Now we’re going
to take off all our clothes,” she said.
“Underwear too?”
“Of course. I
noticed we weren’t wearing a brassiere,” she said disapprovingly. “Next, we
place everything in this evidence bag.” She shoved a large baggie at me.
What was this
we
business?
I
was the one who’d be getting the finger up the
cha cha.
“Once we’re
stripped, we’re going to put on this gown.”
Gown?
Excuse me while I laugh so hard I drool roofie-flavored slobber all down my
front. The thing was a scrap of cotton the size of a Kleenex, designed so it
flapped open over the heinie.
There
are phrases you never want to hear—
We’re auditing your tax return. You
tested positive for a brain fungus. We don’t carry pants in a size that large.
But
the worst one is:
Now put your feet in the stirrups and scootch down.
I
have never seen the point in dying happy. I don’t want to die in the midst of
scarfing chocolate walnut brownies or lying on a beach in Jamaica. I want to
kick off this mortal coil just as I’m about to have a pelvic and the doctor is
making menacing moves toward my private parts with a speculum the size of a
windshield scraper.
I
stood there, wondering how I was going to get out of this, nervously fingering
the cotton gown, wondering whether they all come from the same ugly geometric
prints factory.
“Hurry
up,” snapped the nurse.
“Umm
. . . I’d like some privacy?”
“Don’t
be ridiculous. Do you think I
enjoy
watching people undress?”
Yes.
“Hospital policy
requires attending personnel to keep their eyes on drugged patients at all
times. Regula—” Her voice suddenly broke into a piercing shriek as a
small, snarling ball of fury attacked her ankles. She stumbled backward,
ripping down the curtain and overturning a cart of surgical instruments.
Yapping and snapping, Muffin tore around like a pint-sized Tasmanian devil,
eluding the orderlies, flashing like a hairy laser beam between the legs of
panicked patients, doctors, and cops, spreading spectacular chaos.
I
made a run for it. All my synapses back in working order, I bolted out of the
trauma unit, scrammed through the adjoining X-ray department, and exploded into
the hospital’s main corridor.
The
loudspeaker system crackled to life.
“First
responders to the
Emergency Room. Stat,”
it boomed.
My impulse was to
run, but I forced myself to walk, trying to look like an accident victim’s
relative innocently searching for the coffee machine. Half a dozen guys in
security uniforms charged past, looking as though they hoped they’d get to bust
some heads. A female security officer rushed out of a room marked Hospital
Personnel Only,
its door swinging shut as I dived for it. Squeaking
through, I found myself in a women’s locker room.
Ashamed of my
evil deed but excusing it on the grounds of necessity, I snatched up a tote bag
and nylon jacket left carelessly tossed on a bench—probably by the
security guard who’d just rushed out of here. I slung the bag over my shoulder
and immediately felt better. Real women carried purses. And I had a
big
damn purse now.
Look out, world, comin’ through!
It gave me the same
powerful feeling I experienced when I was wearing matching bra and panties.