Parked off to one side was a Ford Bronco, with Rudy standing there alone, leaning against the hood. Just beyond the Bronco, close to the trees, stood a massive mobile home. Lights from inside the RV shone through the huge front windows.
Rudy waved her over. He was wearing tight-fitting jeans, tooled cow boy boots, and a colorful long-sleeved sport shirt. Just a fine looking man, Sandy thought.
'Hi,' she said.
'You look great.'
'Thanks, where's Greg Lumpert?'
'Oh, his wife called. Some sort of problem at home. We were just about done, anyhow, so I told him to go ahead.'
'You sure it was his wife? I was pretty certain I heard she died a few years ago.'
'I thought that's what he said,' Rudy replied, 'but I coulda misheard. I had other things on my mind.'
He nudged Sandy's arm for emphasis, and gave her a gunslinger smile. From his two visits to the Big Bend, she knew he was well built, but tonight he seemed even bigger and stronger than she had pictured.
'So, what's with the bus?'
'Callin' that just a bus is a little like callin' Jessica Simpson just a girl.'
Sandy decided against mentioning that she couldn't stand Jessica Simpson.
'Does it belong to your company?' she asked instead.
'It's like my home away from home when we're doin' site work. Wanna peek inside?'
Suddenly, inexplicably, Sandy felt uneasy.
'Some other time, maybe. It's like, I don't know, it's like that's your hotel room.'
'I don't see it that way,' Rudy said, 'but suit yourself.'
Sandy looked around at the absolute blackness of the forest. The traffic noises from the highway were barely audible.
'Maybe we should get going to the club,' she said nervously. 'I hear the band they have playing there is great.'
'What's the rush?' Rudy asked, not moving from his spot by the truck.
'Rudy, please, let's go. This is starting to creep me out.'
'Trust me, darlin', there's nothing to be creeped out about.'
She stood just a few feet away and watched in confusion and mounting fear as he took a handkerchief from his pocket, folded it neatly on the hood of the Bronco, then doused it thoroughly with something poured from a metal flask.
Sandy gauged the distance to the Mustang. It wasn't a good bet that she could make it. Then the sickly sweet odor of chloroform reached her. At that exact moment, the door to the massive RV opened, and a young woman, thin, shapely, and blond, stepped out.
'Hey, Sandy,' she called out cheerily, 'come on over and let us give you a tour of this thing.'
Reflexively, Sandy swung around toward the voice. In that single second, any chance she had to resist vanished. Rudy closed the distance between them with two quick steps and clamped the chloroform-soaked rag across her mouth and nose so tightly that she could not even struggle. In just moments, the scene around her began to swirl, then dim. Terror exploded through her mind, but was immediately replaced by a single image, a single word. Teddy. The vision of her boy was the last thing Sandy saw before darkness engulfed her.
Fifteen minutes later, the magnificent Winnebago Adventurer swung left onto the Brazelton Highway. It was followed not too closely by a bright red Mustang convertible. Eighteen miles down the highway, the RV pulled into a rest area while the Mustang bounced down a two-mile-long dirt road that ended at Redstone Quarry — a small lake that was reputed by the locals to be bottomless. The drop from the cliff's edge to the water was fifteen feet. The empty Mustang had vanished into the blackness before it hit the surface.
No one, except the man who had called himself Rudy Brooks, heard the splash.
CHAPTER 21
Would not he who is fitted to be a guardian, besides the spirited nature, need to have the qualities of a philosopher?
Natalie, you're supposed to be starting back on your surgical rotation next week.'
Dean Goldenberg held up the stack of paperwork that had been generated in order to get her back on track at school.
'I know.'
'And you say that physically you think you can handle such a trip?'
'From the moment I finished making all those calls to Brazil, I've been spending three hours a day or more in rehab. My pulmonary function studies have improved nearly twenty-five percent since the first time they were measured after the fire. I'm even able to jog.'
'But now you want to take more time off.'
'I feel that I have to.'
Goldenberg's office looked the same as when Natalie had been suspended from school, except that everything had changed. The people there this time, in addition to Natalie and the dean, were Doug Berenger and Terry Millwood. Veronica had offered to come along for moral support, but Natalie saw no reason for her to take time from her obstetrics rotation.
After her initial flurry of calls to various departments at Santa Teresa Hospital, Natalie had spoken to several police stations around the city of Rio. To the best that she could tell, there was a law requiring hospitals to report all gunshot wounds, and no such report had been filed on her, nor did the police themselves have a record of responding to her being shot.
First thing the next morning, she had brought her mother over for another try. The results were all the same, with one additional failure — the failure to find any Dr. Xavier Santoro on the staff of Santa Teresa's or, in fact, in the entire city. Within an hour of her mother's last call — this one to the Rio de Janeiro State Medical Board, where there was no record of any Dr. Xavier Santoro — Natalie was at the gym, dragging herself through a series of aerobic and anaerobic exercises. The next morning she called her pulmonary therapist with an apology and a request for more time — much more time.
'Terry, you have a note from Natalie's pulmonologist'' Goldenberg asked.
'I do. Rachel French dropped it off with me because she couldn't make it this morning.'
Millwood passed the sheet over, and the dean scanned it, nodding that the conclusions were clear.
'Natalie, you are behind on your schedule if you wish to graduate with your class,' he said. 'And you, yourself, said that this whole business in Brazil is probably a misunderstanding due to language barriers and the difficulty in negotiating through a hospital system that is half a world away.'
'If I get there and discover that the hospital and the police do have records of me, I'll be home on the next available flight. I won't even try and find out who and where Dr. Santoro is.'
'Doug, you spoke with this Dr. Santoro?'
'Once,' Berenger replied. 'According to Nat, the man said he knew who I was, although I had never heard of him. Mostly I spoke with a surgical nurse, whose name I just don't remember.'
Goldenberg looked nonplussed.
'Natalie,' he said, 'as you know, with your permission, I spoke to Dr. Fierstein, your therapist. She does not think it is in your best interest for you to go. Apparently you have been having some sort of serious flashbacks surrounding the evening you were shot.'
'I started having them when I was still in the hospital in Rio. Dr. Fierstein is calling them a manifestation of PTSD.'
