'Do I? The phone has been driving me crazy. But I do feel sort of blah. As if I'm coming down with a bug.'
'Can you get somebody to take over?'
'Y'm trying.'
'I think I'll come on out.'
'4I... I'll be glad to see you.'
Meyer left. I locked up the Flush, went over to the parking area, and cranked up my ancient Rolls pickup, the electric-blue Miss Agnes. The replaced power plant yanked her along too fast for her tall antique dignity, like a dowager blown into an unwilling trot by a gale-force wind. I made a stop on Spangler and picked up a pair of quarter-pounders with cheese, on the assumption that Gretel wouldn't have had time for lunch either.
I went all the way over to the University Drive intersection and turned north past the new plazas and shopping centers, the caramel-colored condommiums, the undeveloped flatlands where the pal
The Green Ripper motto still grew, the clusters of wooden town houses with roofs cut into steep new architectural cliches to shed some unimaginable snow load. Bonnie Brae had marled their entrance with squat fat brick pil- lars on either side of their divided-lane driveway. It curved off to the right to the big parking area near the renovated Cattrell place now used as clubhouse, fat farm, and administration building. When the gusty wind slowed, there was heat in the sun. I could see people bobbing and trotting about over on the tennis courts.
I went into the foyer of the building, hoping to find somebody who would direct me to Ladwigg's new house. A man came out of a room at my right and walked up to me, hand out.
'Mr. McGee?' He was a boyish thirty-something, with apple cheeks, a bushy blond mustache, thinning blond hair carefully adjusted to hide the thinning, bow tie, gray tweed jacket with leather elbows. When I nodded he shook my hand heartily and said, 'Tm Morse Slater. Maybe Gretel has mentioned me.'
'The manager, yes.' He had a bumbling kind of effusiveness about him, a shoe-clerk willingness to please, which was given the lie by the ice-blue eyes, intent, aware, measuring I said, 'What I want to know is how I find the ~
'Gretel told me to look out for you. I just took her up the Drive to the hospital. Got back minutes ago.'
'What happened?'
'Some sort of bug, I thinlr.She seemed to be in a half faint, and she felt so hot to the touch it frightened me. So I took her right to Emergency and signed her in. They took her temperature and checked her into the hospital and began tests. A Dr. Tower seemed to be the one giving the orders. We accepted financial responsibility, of course. All our people have insurance which... but you're not interested in that. Room one thirty-three.'
I think he tried to say something else, but I was already on my way. The hospital was on the same side of University Drive, and a little more than a half mile away.
I managed to talk my way to the nurses' station and then down the corridor to the room where Gretel was. It was a two-bed room with an old woman asleep and snoring by the windows, with a curtain drawn between the two beds. I pulled a straight chair close beside Gretel and took her hand. It felt dry and hot.
'What's going on?' I asked her.
Her lips were swollen and cracked, and her brown hair was damp and matted. She moistened her lips and gave me a small wry smile. Yt's one of those days,' she said. 'Oh, boy. I got up and busted my favorite coffee mug that you gave me. Herm Ladwigg died in the street. A bug gave me a hell of a sting in the back of the neck. Later on, when I
The Green Ripper began to feel dizzy, I fainted and fell and brolce one of the big lamps in the Ladwigg house. And here I am. It's one of those days.'
'What do they say is wrong?'
'.They don't say. Fever of unknown origin. My ears are ringing so loud you should be able to hear them. I really feel weird.'
'They're running tests, aren't they? They'll find out what you've got.'
A little bit of a sallow blond nurse came hur~ying in. She had a fifty-year-old face and a twenty- five-year-old body. She gave me a disapproving glance, took a temperature reading with an elect Ironic gadget, then took blood pressure on the left arm, pursed her lips, came around and displaced me, and took the pressure on the other arm. She trotted out. I moved close. Gretel found my wrist with her hot dry hand and held tight. array, I feel so hot. [m burning up. I feel terrible, Trav. Terrible.'
When I spoke to her again, she didn't answer. She seemed to be asleep, her eyes about one third open, breathing so rapidly and shallowly through her mouth, it scared me.
I went plunging out to find somebody and ran into a couple of orderlies pushing a stretcher. I asked them what was going on, and they said they were taking a patient named Gretel Howard to Intensive Care. Other than that, they knew nothing.
I followed along, after they had raised the bed and pulled her across onto the stretcher. They tried to keep me from getting into the elevator with her, but it didn't work. But they did stop me at the door to the Intensive Care area. I told a very large white-haired nurse that if somebody didn't come and tell me within ten minutes what was going on, I was coming through that door.
The doctor who came out said his name was Tower. Vance Tower. He led me over to some rattan chairs near a window and we sat down and he said, '] need some background here.'
'What's the matter with her?'
He had taken a little Pearlcorder out of his At and put it into dictation mode. 'name, address, and occupation, please,' he said, and held it up between us. They make you play their game their way, and if you want a lot of delays, just re- fuse to go along. Travis McGee. Slip F-18, Bahia Mar Marina Salvage Consultant.
'Relationship to patient?'
I hesitated, then said, 'Common-law husband.' After ale she had lived aboard the houseboat tenth me for a lot of weeks.
He was a dumpy- looking man, soft and pale and too heavy, going bald, short of breath, looking out of tired little brown eyes at me, showing no react lion at all to my answers.
'How can we contact her close relatives?'
The Green Ripper
'There aren't any. Parents and only brother are dead. She is divorced from her first husband. No children. I think there may be some distant kin, second cousins and so on, but I would have no idea how to reach them.'
'Where has she been lately? Geographically, that is.'
'Lately? Up until May she was living in Timber Bay over on the west coast. Then we came around to Lauderdale aboard my houseboat. We took our time. Got here in early August. She dived aboard and then moved to one of the model houses at Bonnie Brae to be closer to her work. A temporary arrangement.'
'Did she go out of the country at any time since last May?'
'No.'
'Has she been in swamp country?'
'No. Why?'
'Jo you know if any of the people she has been associated with have been taken seriously ill, quite suddenly?'
'I don't know if this is what you mean, but one of the owners of Bonnie Brae fell old his bicycle this morning and '
'I know about that. I mean an illness like hers, characterized by extremely high temperatures, spo- radic delirium, cardiac arrhythmia, and fading blood pressure.'
'I can't think of anyone we know who's been sick lately. What's wrong with her?'
'I've ordered every lab test I can think of. I don't approve of the shotgun approach to antibiotics, but I'm giving her a wide range of those. If we can't knock that fever down any other way, I'm going to try packing her in ice.' He sighed heavily. 'The big problem with treating something when you don't l~now what it is, you can male diagnosis all that more difficult.'
'Can I see her?'
He thought it over, then nodded. 'They'll be busy in there. You can see her five minutes out of every hour. I'll approve that It won't be pleasant for you, and I doubt if she'll know you're there.'
A nurse came out and motioned to him, and he got up and plodded in, through the double doors. Man at work. A very tired man. But he was an empathetic man because, about ten minutes later, he beckoned to me and took me to her bedside. The rapid shallow breathing had eased. There was an LV. rigged, dripping into the vein in her arm. Her cheeks seemed hollower than they had looked an hour before, in her room, her eyes more sunken.
He said in a low voice, '~e knocked the fever down almost one degree. First sign of progress.'
We walked out together and he said, 'I'm making a full report of all our findings to Disease Control in Atlanta. Do you know anything about the red welt on the back of her neck?'
The Green Ripper
'She told me she was bitten by a bug this morning. She said it stung her.'
'Symptoms bear no relation to anaphylactic shock. We've taken some tissue from the area It's being packed in dry ice and flown to Atlanta along with blood samples and so forth. Got more sophisticated analysis systems available up there. Paper chromatography. Thin-layer chromatology techniques.'
The hours blurred. I went in as often as I could. Night and day
