barely touching the floor. Clasping his arms around her hips and buttocks, he raised her to relieve the tension on the taut ties, and hugged her to him as he pressed his head against the cool flesh between her breasts.
He couldn't be sure if the heartbeat he heard faintly was hers or an irregularity in his own racing heart.
'Call nine-eleven!' he shouted to Coreen. But she was already at the phone by the bed, punching out the emergency number.
Nudger reached up and flipped the blue tie out from over the door's top edge, allowing enough slack for him to lower Claudia gently to the floor. Hurriedly, but with a calm that remotely surprised him, he dug at the knot against the side of her neck. His fingernail doubled back, jolting him with pain, but the knot gave slightly. He couldn't undo it, but he managed to get enough of a grip on the material to pull the tie loose from around her neck. He felt a helpless fury when he saw the wide red gouge where it had sunk into her flesh.
After arranging Claudia carefully on the floor, with her hands at her sides, he pressed her tongue back into her mouth flat. Then he pinched her nose between his thumb and forefinger, bent over her, and began administering mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
He worked frantically, rhythmically, pumping air from his lungs into hers. Breath for breath, life for life. Feeling her chest rise and fall mechanically with his effort. He was vaguely aware of Coreen standing over him, saying something he couldn't comprehend. Nothing mattered other than that he must not stop lending Claudia breath. When he stopped, her life would be gone, irretrievably. He learned the meaning of forever.
Claudia's shoulder twitched!
He saw it from the corner of his vision-not his imagination!
She vomited then. He tasted the bitterness of it in his mouth and jerked away, turning and spitting. Claudia was gagging, her head lolled to the side. The gagging stopped and she began gasping with a bellows rasp, kicking one leg feebly, slapping the floor with rigid hands. Breathing! She was breathing!
Nudger crawled over and held her hand, watching her chest heave as she sucked at the air. Sirens were screaming their frantic prolonged yodel outside, close by. Her eyes sprang open, rolled wildly.
He heard the sirens growling animal-like to silence, and seconds later the clatter of footsteps on the stairs and in the hall.
'We'll take it now,' a voice said above him. There were pants legs and shoes all around him. A pair of scuffed brown slip-ons edged closer. He let himself roll out of the way, and someone gripped him firmly beneath the arms and helped him to his feet.
Nudger rode with her in the ambulance all the way to Incarnate Word Hospital, while a paramedic kept an oxygen mask pressed to her face. Claudia's eyes were open, unmov- ing. If she was still drawing breath, it was too shallow for Nudger to see the rise and fall of her breast. Her arms and hands, her fingers, were still.
The paramedics and an RN wheeled her away and out of sight immediately, and Nudger was told to go to the Emergency admittance desk.
He signed Claudia in, scrawling his signature on a flurry of papers, assuming responsibility for payment. A stout redheaded nurse assured Nudger that the hospital would check with Kimball's Restaurant to see if Claudia had any employee group insurance there. None of that mattered right now to Nudger. He couldn't make them understand that, so he only listened to them, staring and nodding numbly.
For over an hour he sat in a molded plastic chair in a waiting area. Half a dozen other people waited there with him. Everyone's eyes followed the white uniforms who came and went through wide swinging doors. No one in the waiting area spoke except in soft and polite monosyllables. No one wanted to shatter the crystalline vessel of hope held out for whomever they knew behind the doors. Tattered Newsweek and Time magazines lay untouched.
Behind the admittance desk, the redheaded nurse sat joking with a bespectacled man wearing a white outfit with a name tag. Nudger thought he could make out the 'Dr.' before the name. Didn't the bastard have something more useful to do than chat with the admittance nurse? People in the building were suffering, dying. The man said something through a crooked smile and the nurse laughed like a giddy teenager. Nudger felt like walking over and punching them both through the wall.
Then the nurse busied herself separating carbon copies and placing them in the right file folders. The 'doctor' straightened up from where he'd been sitting on the edge of her desk, came out from behind the low partition, slung a pushbroom and mop over his shoulder, and meandered away down the hall. Nudger told himself to take it easy.
His bout with Springer and Company at Headquarters had drained his body of resilience, but left him mentally hyped up and dazedly overreactive.
He slouched low in his plastic chair, closed his eyes, and half-dozed, his mind a writhing mass. He didn't like what he saw behind his eyelids, but maybe time would pass faster this way.
Snatches of the interrogation kept coming back to him: 'You knew from the beginning that Jenine Boyington was out for revenge, didn't you, Nudger?…' 'Co-conspirator…' 'Withholding evidence…' 'Hang your ass out to dry…' 'Helped a potential murderer…'
Finally a louder voice said, 'Mr. Nudger? I'm Dr. Antonelli.'
Nudger opened his eyes and looked up to see an unkempt, frazzle-haired man in a dirty green smock. He looked as if he should be mopping floors.
'How is she?' Nudger asked, standing up with the slow tentativeness of an arthritic.
Dr. Antonelli narrowed his eyes and appraised Nudger. 'Right now, she's not much worse off than you appear to be. The area around the cricoid and trachea wall is badly bruised, the hyoid and larynx to a lesser degree. And there's some muscle and tendon damage from the weight of her body. All that isn't as bad as it sounds. So far there seems to be no brain-cell damage from lack of oxygen. I think she'll be all right, Mr. Nudger, but we'll make her ours for a few days to be sure.'
Nudger ran a hand down his face and grinned. He felt thirty pounds lighter.
'The ties she tried to hang herself with were cheap polyester,' Dr. Antonelli said, 'so the material stretched far enough to allow her toes to touch the floor and take some of the strain off her neck. That saved her life. If they'd been expensive silk ties, she'd be dead.'
'Can I see her?'
'Sure. But not for long. She's under sedation. And she shouldn't try to talk for a while.' Dr. Antonelli ducked slightly so he could see Nudger's neck more clearly. 'Excuse me for asking, Mr. Nudger, but has someone been trying to strangle you?'
'What room is she in?'
Antonelli shrugged. He was busy enough with patients who wanted his help. 'Four-o-five. Elevator's at the end of the hall and around the corner.'
'Thanks,' Nudger said. He patted the doctor's arm and hurried away.
Four-o-five was a semi-private room, but the other bed was empty. The walls were pale green, to go with the room's faint medicinal scent of mint. There were two small white metal cabinets, white bedside tables, and matching blue chairs for visitors. A framed print of snow-draped pine trees silhouetted against a moonlit lake hung on the wall between the window and the door to the lavatory. A cool room, in decor and purpose.
Claudia lay on her back beneath a crisp white sheet. When Nudger entered the room, she didn't move her head, but her eyes picked him up when he got close to the bed. Her pupils were dilated and Nudger wasn't sure she could see him, but she smiled weakly, with obvious pain. She was barely conscious above the pull of the sedative, and her neck was swollen and turning a livid purple. She moved her lips, said nothing.
'We'll talk later,' Nudger told her. He bent down and kissed her forehead. A nurse pushed into the room, made a note of something, then turned with a sole-squeaking swivel and dutifully scurried back out.
Nudger rested his fingertips on Claudia's cheek. 'Don't try that again,' he said. 'Please. For me, don't try that again.'
She nodded. The effort hurt her. Nudger shut up and just sat there with her. Neither of them moved. Claudia closed her eyes as the sedative gained ground on her.
Half an hour passed that way, and then the door swung open and Dr. Antonelli slouched into the room. When he saw Nudger he shook his head in a gesture of hopeless disapproval.
'She's going to be fine,' he said. 'Go home, Mr. Nudger. You're useless here. Come back this afternoon. She'll be awake. Bring flowers.'
'What time this afternoon?'
