“My sister’s thirsty-could we get some ice water in here?”
“Sorry, no can do.”
As the old bat brushed by him to check Missy’s vitals and plump her pillow-all the little as-long-as-I’m-here- anyway nursing attentions-Simon caught a whiff of stale sweat. It didn’t seem right, somehow-nurses weren’t supposed to smell. He rose and pushed his chair back. “What do you mean, ‘no can do’?”
“Fluid retention. Doctor has her on a diuretic-the orders are no liquids by mouth until we get the edema down.”
Simon grabbed her by the arm, just above the elbow. She glared up at him; he glared back until he saw a flicker of fear, then released her. “Look here, I won’t have my sister suffering.”
“I’ll…I’ll bring some ice chips for her to suck on and some glycerine for her lips.”
“Would you?” said Simon, as pleasantly as an alcoholic who’s just had a much-needed nip. “We’d
“Simon, I want to go home.”
“I’m going to be talking to Dr. Yo later this morning. Let’s see what she has to say, first.” The nurse returned; Simon took the carafe from her, held a sliver to Missy’s sunburned lips.
Missy didn’t have the strength to throw a tantrum-pitching a royal, Simon called it-but there were other approaches; when it came to getting her way, Missy’s IQ was in the genius range. Much as she wanted that ice, she turned her head away. “Home.”
“Honey, your poor lips, they’re all cracked and-”
“Home.”
“I’ll talk to Dr. Yo as soon as-”
“Home.”
Home. It took a few hours to work out the details, sign the waivers Dr. Yo required before she would discharge her patient, arrange for round-the-clock private nursing, then rush home to be there before the Home- Med techs arrived to set up the hospital bed in the living room (no stairs for Missy-Dr. Yo had been quite insistent on that point). None of it came cheap, but it was worth every penny-by noon, Missy and her day-shift nurse were playing Candy Land in the living room, and Simon, at long last, was free to visit the basement. By his reckoning, close to twenty-four hours had passed since Dorie had broken her nose. She ought to be ready for a game by now, Simon told himself. He certainly was.
3
Linda Abruzzi was a city girl, born and raised. Several times during the night she had awakened with the sense that something was terribly wrong; eventually she figured out that it was the quiet that was bothering her. It seemed unnatural, somehow-it wasn’t until the birds began singing in the gray faux-dawn light that she was able to get a few hours of uninterrupted sleep.
Unfortunately, the metallic burr of her windup Baby Ben alarm clock was among the noises that failed to interrupt Linda’s sleep, so she ended up racing through a truncated version of her morning routine, skipping her PT exercises and chasing her vitamins and supplements with instant coffee instead of a smoothie. Luckily, it wasn’t one of her Betaseron mornings (self-administered subcutaneous injection of.25 mg every other day), so she was spared that painful and time-consuming task.
She made it to the office on time. Pool handed her an old-fashioned pink while-you-were-out slip. It was the first such slip Linda had ever seen with every blank filled in-date, time, caller, reason for call, action requested, message taker’s initials-even though according to the time entered, the call, from Thom Davies, at the Criminal Justice Information System, had come in only two or three minutes ago.
“Great,” said Linda. Having struck out in her own attempts to locate someone from the PWSPD Association by phone, she was anxious to see what Thom had come up with. “I’ll call him right back.”
“I’ll get him for you.”
“No, that’s okay; I’ll call him myself.”
Fat chance-Davies was on the line by the time Linda reached her desk. “Thank you, Cynthia,” Linda called.
“No problem,” was the reply from the anteroom. “But please, call me Pool.” Then, before Linda had a chance to examine her feelings to see how badly they were bruised: “All my friends do.”
Linda felt absurdly better. “Thank you, Pool. Hi, Thom-whaddaya got?”
“Nuttin’-and plenty of it. Are you quite sure you haven’t hallucinated this entire PWSPD Association business?”
“Sure I’m sure-I was logged on to their web site just the other day. Phobia-dot-com.”
“Try it now-I’ll wait.”
Linda logged on. “I got a No URL.”
“Try a search engine-any search engine.”
She tried Yahoo, then Google. “No hits either way-not even cached pages.”
“Precisely. And I have access to some databases you’ve never heard of-and if you had, I’d have to kill you- that could tell me who your date was at the Junior Prom.”
“Tony Guglielmino. No wonder I struck out with four-one-one.”
“Whoever did this is a real wizard. So what we need now is a wizard of our own. The best one I know of is Ben Wing, with the Nerd Squad in San Jose. I left a message for him to call me when he gets in. That’ll probably be around noon, our time-if you’d like, we can make it a three-way.”
“Yes, please, a thr-I mean, a conference call would be great.”
“Oh, you’re no fun,” said Davies.
“You’d be surprised,” said Linda.
4
“Here’s to the hair of the dog.” Pender raised his recently refilled glass.
“Ed, the fucking dog is bald by now.” Two o’clock in the afternoon, and by Sid’s count it was Pender’s fourth drink of the day-one Jim Beam on the rocks at the airport bar in Monterey, a Bloody Mary on the connecting flight to San Francisco, and now, after receiving the call from Linda about the disappearing PWSPD Association, another Jim Beam at the airport bar in SFO.
“Don’t nag me, man-I’m feeling very vulnerable.”
“I know.”
“I was being facetious.”
“The hell you were.” Sid reached across the too-high, too-small round pedestal table, the kind you find only in airport bars, to give Pender’s beret a sharp sideways tug. “There, much better.”
“What was that all about?”
“If you insist on wearing a brown beret with a plaid sport jacket, the least you can do is adjust it properly.”
“I was going for jaunty.” Pender glanced at his drink and seemed surprised to find it half empty. “You know what doesn’t make sense?”
“I can think of a few things. What did you have in mind?”
“Your whole life, they tell you clean up after your mistakes. You break it, you fix it. Then you reach a certain age, you screw up, and now it’s ‘Get the hell outta here, pops. Go home, grab a nap, we’ll take it from here.’”
“I believe that’s covered in the book of Ecclesiastes,” said Sid. “To everything there is a season. One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh. It’s the way of the world, Sparky-you might as well get used to it.”
