you know.”
“I had my suspicions that you are,” Mr. Lyss said as he returned to the bureau to select a sweater.
Nummy sat on the edge of Poor Fred’s bed. “I keep seeing the lady.”
“What lady?”
“The one she reached through the bars, asked me could I save her. I feel sad I didn’t.”
“You’re a dummy. Dummies aren’t smart enough to save people. Don’t worry about it.”
“You’re not a dummy.”
“No, I’m not. But I couldn’t save her, either. I’m a bad man. I’m the worst of bad men. Bad men don’t save people.” He turned from the bureau, holding up a red sweater with orange and blue stripes. “What about this one?”
“It’s awful bright, sir.”
“You’re right. I don’t want to attract attention.” He threw the sweater on the floor.
“Why are you a bad man?” Nummy asked.
“Because that’s what I’m really good at being,” Mr. Lyss said, throwing more clothes on the floor.
“How did you get good at it?”
“Natural talent.”
“Is your whole family bad people?”
Mr. Lyss showed him a light-brown sweater with checkers that were a little darker brown. “You think I’ll look good in this?”
“I told you true how I can’t lie.”
Frowning at the sweater, Mr. Lyss said, “What’s wrong with it?”
“Nothing wrong with it, sir.”
“Ah. I see. So you’re saying I’m such an ugly lump I won’t look good in anything.”
“I don’t want to say that.”
Mr. Lyss put the sweater on a chair. From the closet, he took a pair of khaki pants and put them with the sweater.
“What are we doing next?” Nummy asked.
Taking socks and underwear from another drawer, the old man said, “If we go out the front or back door, there’s a risk one of the cops at your place will look this way. So we either go out a window, keeping this place between us and them, or we wait till dark.”
“What about Norman?”
“I’m still thinking about you. It makes no sense bringing you, but I’m thinking. Don’t push me about it.”
“I mean my dog, Norman.”
“Don’t worry about him. He’s fine.”
“He’s over there alone with them.”
“What’re they going to do, take him to the pound and gas him? He’s a toy dog. You’re as dumb as dumb gets, but don’t be stupid.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t say you’re sorry all the time. What’ve you got to be sorry about? Tell me-do I stink?”
“It’s not nice telling people their faults.”
“Take a walk on the wild side. Go ahead. Tell me if I stink.”
“Some people they might like the way you smell.”
“Who? What people? What the hell kind of people would like the way I smell?”
“You must like it. So other people like you, they’d like it.”
Gathering the clothes he had chosen, Mr. Lyss said, “I’m going to take a shower before I change. Don’t try to talk me out of it.”
Nummy followed the old man into the hallway, to the door of the bathroom. “What if you’re showering, the doorbell rings?”
“Don’t answer it.”
“What if the phone rings?”
“Don’t answer it.”
“What if Mrs. Trudy LaPierre comes back?”
“She won’t.”
“What if-”
Mr. Lyss turned on Nummy, and his face twisted up so he looked every bit like the worst kind of bad man that he claimed to be. “Stop badgering me! Stay away from the windows and sit somewhere with your head up your butt till I tell you to take it out, you clueless, useless, fumbling, flat-footed retard!”
The old man stepped into the bathroom and slammed shut the door.
For a moment, Nummy stood there, wanting to ask a couple of questions through the door, but he decided that would be a bad idea.
Instead, he went into the kitchen. He circled the room, studying everything.
He said aloud, “Faster is disaster. Easy and slow makes it all go just so. Think it through double, you’ll stay out of trouble.”
The phone didn’t ring.
Nobody rang the doorbell.
Everything was going to be all right.
chapter 37
When Bryce came out of Room 218, no one manned the nurses’ station. Her back to him, Doris Makepeace proceeded to the farther end of the main wing and disappeared into a patient’s room.
No other nurse, orderly, or maintenance person could be seen. Even for a hospital, the long hallway struck him as uncannily quiet. Especially for a hospital. The impression of serious understaffing seemed to confirm that the remaining nurses were making a pretense of normalcy to conceal some unpleasant and perhaps alarming truth.
With the nurses’ station unattended, the moment had come for Bryce to get to a staircase without being noticed. He wanted to check out lower floors to learn if the conditions here were universal.
The building was shaped like a squared-off C, with three wings of equal length, one running north-south and two running east-west. The main wing offered central stairs and elevators, and the east-west wings each provided a staircase. The hallway at the south end of the building was the nearer of the two, and he headed for it.
As he passed rooms where doors stood open wide, he glanced at the patients. For this time of day, an unusual number appeared to be asleep. Few TVs were on. He saw a couple of visitors sitting at bedsides, waiting for the sleepers to wake.
He should have told Travis to pretend to take any pill a nurse might bring, to hold it under his tongue and spit it out the moment she left the room.
In the south hall, he went to the west end, where an exit sign identified the emergency stairs. He descended two flights to the ground floor.
This was the main level, with the lobby and gift shop, with the labs and surgeries. It also provided additional patient rooms.
Bryce cracked the door, peered out. As he remembered, before him lay the technical wing, where MRIs, X-rays, and other tests were performed. To meet requirements of the hospital’s liability insurance, a patient here would always be in a wheelchair, being taken to and from his room by a member of the staff.
If Bryce was going to risk being stopped and escorted back to his room, he preferred first to have a glimpse of the lowest floor, the basement. The voices that he’d heard in the return-air duct had seemed to come from a distance even greater than the basement, but they had certainly originated below the main floor.
He eased the door shut and descended two flights to the bottom of the stairwell. The basement door bore the
