‘And you’re a friend of Daniel Parmitt’s.’
‘Yes. I’d really like to talk with him.’
‘So would I,’ Farley told her. ‘Rank gets its privileges here. I go first, then we’ll see if the doctor says it’s all right for you.’
‘I’ll wait,’ she said, ‘however long it takes.’
So she was thatkind of friend, a little more than a friend but not quite family. Farley said, ‘You can probably tell me more about him. We’ll talk in a while.’
‘All right,’ she said.
Farley turned away, giving Meany a quick frown and head-shake that meant don’t-let-her-leave, then went out and down the hall toward Parmitt’s room.
This was only the second time he’d visited Parmitt, the first being shortly after the man was brought in, when visiting him was nothing but a waste of time. Parmitt was a real wreck then, shot, nearly drowned, and some of his ribs caved in.
What had happened was, he’d been shot in the back, the bullet passing through his body, hitting nothing vital, missing the spine by an inch, nicking a rib on the way out. Then the killer rolled him into the water, unconscious, and by the time the war with Hardawl’s crew was over, the fella was drowned.
One thing you had to give Hardawl credit for and Farley hated to have to admit it he did give his people good training, including drowning rescues and CPR. They knew enough to lay the man on his stomach, head to the side, somebody’s finger in his mouth to keep him from swallowing his tongue, while somebody else did some heavy bearing-down on his back, in slow rhythmic movements, to get the water out and start the process of breathing again. This can crack ribs, the way it did this time, and this time was even worse, because that was rough treatment for a torso that had just had a bullet pass through it, but Hardawl had realized there was no choice. If you don’t get the water out, the man’s dead anyway.
Well, he was a tough son of a bitch, Parmitt, and he survived the drowning rescue just the way he survived the shot and the drowning, but when they brought him in and Farley got that one gander at him, he sure did look like a candidate for the last rites. So what would he look like now?
Not that much better. They had the upper half of the bed cranked partway up, to make it easier for him to breathe, and his entire torso was swathed in bandages. His eyes were deep-set and ringed with dark shadow, his cheeks were sunken, and that snaky little mustache looked like somebody’s idea of a bad joke, painted on him as though he were a face in an advertising poster. His arms, held away from his body because of the thicknesses of wrapping around his chest, were above the blanket, lying limp, the big hands half-curled in his lap. He was breathing slowly through his mouth, and when he saw Farley the look in his eyes was dull and without curiosity.
A white-coated intern was in the room, looking at the patient, just standing there, and he turned to say, ‘Sheriff.’
Farley never bothered to correct people’s use of titles; he was in the tan uniform of the sheriff’s department, so if they wanted to call him Sheriff or Deputy or Officer or Trooper or anything else, he knew it didn’t mean much more than hello, so why fret it. He said, ‘How’s our patient?’
‘Conscious, but barely. I understand you want to question him.’
‘More than you can imagine.’
‘Try to make it short, and if he starts to get upset, you’ll have to stop.’
‘I understand,’ Farley said ‘I’ve been at bedsides before.’
There were two chrome and vinyl chairs in the room. Farley brought one over to the side of the bed and sat on it, so he and Parmitt were now at the same height. ‘Mr Parmitt,’ he said.
The eyes slowly moved to focus on him, but Parmitt didn’t turn his head. Maybe he couldn’t. But it was a strange gesture; here the man was the victim, nearly dead, weak as a kitten, but in that eye movement he suddenly looked to Farley extremely dangerous.
Which was foolish, of course. Farley said, ‘How do you feel, Mr Parmitt?’
‘Where am I?’ It was just a whisper, no strength in it at all. The intern, at the foot of the bed, probably couldn’t make out the words.
So Parmitt gets to ask the questions first. Okay, Farley could go along with that. He said, ‘You’re in the Elmer Neuman Memorial Hospital, Snake River, Florida.’
‘Florida.’ He whispered it like a word he didn’t know, and then his brow wrinkled and he said, ‘Why am I in Florida?’
‘On vacation, like everybody else,’ Farley told him. ‘Don’t you remember? You’re staying at the Breakers, up in Palm Beach.’
‘I live in San Antonio,’ Parmitt whispered. ‘I was
I was driving to my club. Was I in an accident?’
And this was something Farley had seen before, too. In bad accidents, or after bad scenes of violence, often the victims don’t remember any of the events leading up to the trauma. Later on it would come back to them, maybe, but not right away.
Unfortunate. Farley could see there was no point questioning the man now, he didn’t remember enough, and if he were told somebody out there was trying to kill him it just might put him into shock. So he said, ‘Yeah, you were in a kind of accident. You’re still getting over it, Mr Parmitt. We’ll talk again when you feel better.’
‘Was I driving?’
Farley had to lean close to understand the man. ‘What? No, sir, you weren’t driving.’
‘I have
