shifts. He found the milieu peculiar to this period between the close of visiting hours and lights-out. It reminded him of what choir vespers used to be. Something between the busy prayer hours of day and compline, the night prayer. For those patients who were not suffering, this was a restful period. Everything gradually slowed in preparation for sleep.
No one on the elevator. Good. He hadn’t really expected anyone, but there was always the chance. Actually, every successful step he took was for him a pleasant phenomenon. He was almost beginning to permit himself the thought that he might succeed at this. Was it possible?
The door hissed open. The second floor and no one in sight. He walked quickly to the end of the hallway and peered around the corner. A miracle: No one was at the nurses’ station! Of course that was as he had planned it.
At this time of evening, a reduced nursing staff was usually busy bringing final medications and answering call bells. It was a good possibility that the station would be vacated. Whitaker just couldn’t believe his luck. It was working!
He moved into the station, trying, despite his excitement, not to botch this just when everything seemed to be moving like clockwork.
Just as Whitaker began fingering through the medical charts, George Snell turned the corner at the far end of the corridor. Immediately, Snell spotted him. Whitaker was too far away for Snell to be able to identify him in any fashion. But something wasn’t right. Snell was certain of that. He moved rapidly toward the station.
“You! Down there! What are you doing?” Snell spoke just loudly enough to be heard by the person in the nurses’ station without disturbing the patients.
Whitaker heard the challenge. No doubt about it: The ball game was over. He had not planned for the eventuality of being discovered. It would not have mattered. Even if he had prepared some sort of explanation, Whitaker knew he would be too nervous and nonplussed to carry it off. And so he was. He stood frozen while his knees turned to pudding.
“Where ya goin’, big fellah?” a sultry voice called out.
Snell froze in midstride. The voice was familiar. Familiar enough for him to turn and investigate. Aha! The terrific aide of the evening of his triumph . . . what was her name? Helen. Helen Brown. But what a time to show up! What a goddam time!
“Well, where are you going, anyway?”
“There’s somebody . . .” Snell had no idea what to do next. He was the human embodiment of the donkey standing between two bales of hay.
“C’mere, big fellah,” Helen Brown beckoned.
Snell had to give this situation serious, if hurried, thought. He had no idea who was in the nurses’ station. It could very possibly be a legitimate staffer. It probably was. Why would anybody else be there checking things out? Especially someone in a hospital frock?
Added to which, there was this willing young woman. And, added boon, she was the sole person in the world who knew he was no hero. She had been alone and very intimate with him when he had tumbled from the bed and flattened the CEO’s assailant. With her, he would betray no trust . . . there was no trust to betray.
No contest. Time enough to find out more about whoever was in the station. For the moment, he would explore Helen Brown. It was kismet.
From his vantage under bright lights, Whitaker could not see clearly down the corridor, although he could see well enough to identify his challenger. He did not know the man’s name, but he knew it was the guard who had almost apprehended him the other night.
What Whitaker found utterly incredible was that the guard had stopped halfway down the hall. Whitaker could not see Helen Brown standing in the shadows of a patient’s room. All he could know was that, for whatever reason, the guard had halted and had apparently lost interest in him.
It was so unexpected and unlikely a development that Whitaker could take it only as an act of God. As far as he could figure things, he had been on God’s side through thick and thin. But now God seemed to be on his side. Well, it was about time.
Whitaker returned to his endeavor with renewed confidence. For once, things were working out perfectly. Until now, he would not have described anything in his entire life as “perfect.”
“Well, if it ain’t Ms. Brown.” Snell had turned his complete attention to the task at hand. “Have somethin’ in mind?”
“Seems to me we got some unfinished business from the other night. When we were so rudely interrupted you was about to show me some kind of movement.”
“Maneuver,” Snell corrected.
“Whatever.”
“Well,” Snell looked about, “not in the hallway.”
“Follow me, big boy.” Helen led the small procession down the hall in the direction whence Snell had come.
Snell followed gladly, focusing intently on the rhythmic undulation of her tight bottom.
Helen Brown entered Room 2218, tailed, almost literally, by George Snell. Almost at once, by a magical wave of her hand, Helen’s clothing dropped on an empty chair. As wondrously expeditiously as Helen disrobed, Snell would have won that race, but he was momentarily distracted.
“Somebody’s in here! There’s a patient in the other bed,” he protested.
There was. Even though the curtain had been pulled shut around the bed near the window, a soft light outlined the bed and its diminutive occupant. And there was the steady, muted sound of chewing.
“Don’t you worry your head, big boy. That’s just old Alice Walker. She’s been in here off-and-on a hundred times maybe. Believe me, she don’t know what’s going on. She’s just chewin’ her crackers before she goes to sleep. Believe me, this room is the best shot we got tonight. Come on, big boy, I’m waitin’ for your movement.”
“Maneuver.”
“Whatever.”
George Snell decided to take his time. By his standards, it had been a long while since he had frolicked in the sack, an activity which showcased perhaps his greatest talent.
Having completed his disrobement, Snell observed Helen Brown as she climbed onto the narrow hospital bed. Such confined quarters might have proven too constricting to the average practitioner of concupiscence. To Snell, it was no more than a small challenge inventively met.
When it came to women and sex, a single concept in Snell’s lexicon, he was an omnivoluptuary. He lusted after them all. Each had her own peculiar attraction. Of course some were declared off limits by society due to the veneration of old age or the proximity of relationship. Snell was willing to go along with this. There were some conventions of middle-class morality that made some sort of sense. But George remained eager to accommodate all women not proscribed by society’s mores.
However even an omnivoluptuary had his predilections. And among George’s favorites was a zaftig frame such as that of Helen Brown. Which is why he derived particular joy and arousal from studying Helen in bed nude. The soft light from behind Alice Walker’s curtain highlighted the curves, the hills and valleys, of Helen’s tantalizing body. As far as Snell was concerned, the greatest declarative statement in the English language, whether or not the Ape Man ever said it, was, “Me Tarzan! You Jane!”
But enough of philosophy—to bed!
He clambered onto the bed and enveloped her body almost as completely as water in a pool.
“Do we start where we left off, big boy?”
“Oh, no. That’s the piece of resistance. We’re gonna start with the hors d’oeuvres.”
“If they’re as good as last time, that’ll be fine with me.”
Both George and Helen could testify that hors d’oeuvres could be better the second time around and their barely restrained moans and groans blended with Alice Walker’s barely audible, rhythmic mastication.
In the nurses’ station, Bruce Whitaker’s hands trembled as he manipulated stickers on a medical chart.
Whitaker’s amazing string of luck would, in an ordinary human, have engendered feelings of growing confidence. The ordinary human might well feel that this was his lucky day and be loath to go to sleep and end that day.
Not Whitaker. The longer his good fortune continued, the more he expected doom to strike at any
