or what the game was.
It helped that he was unusually handsome, with a dark head of hair and large, white spades for teeth. His eyes radiated warmth and charm; he was as smooth with a line of bullshit as he was with a Glock, and he was pretty smooth with that. He’d done a few years’ hard time, where he’d basically networked, and he had three other identities going, two wives, seven children, girlfriends among the stripper and escort population in every southern state, and a thing for young girls, which he indulged at shopping malls, clubs, and fast food joints whenever he had a spare moment. He could con a twelve-year-old into a blowjob in the men’s room faster than most people could count to one hundred.
Ernie was less accomplished. He was essentially a Murphy man, a fraudulent pimp who conned college boys out of their dollars and delivered zero in the sex department, in some of the Razorback State’s seamier venues. Basically, in today’s operation, Ernie’s job was to support Vern and learn from him, which is how they found themselves, in medical scrubs under MD nametags, walking down the hallway of the Bristol General Hospital, headed toward their destination, the critical-care ward.
It was late; the place was nearly empty. It was big enough, however, so that the concept of “stranger” could apply. No nurse, for instance, could know all the medical personnel by name or face and could therefore be counted upon to yield before slickness, sureness of authority, and the steady guidance and charisma of an experienced confidence man.
It’ll be easy.
No one suspects a thing.
The girl is an accident victim, not a murder survivor.
No security, no suspicion, no fear.
Thus the two men ambled happily, making eye contact, issuing warm “Hellos” and “Say, there, how’s the boy?”s as they coursed through the fourth floor’s spotless hallways. They even stopped now and then for a cup of coffee, to assure a patient on a walker, and to examine bedside charts. They took pulses, looked into eyes, felt throats, just like on the television doctor shows.
When they reached Nikki, it would be a simple matter. Vern, a little brighter and that much more ambitious, was to calmly reach into his pocket and remove a number seven hypodermic filled with air. He had practiced on the skin of a grapefruit all afternoon. He was to look for a blue artery that led to and not from the heart, plump up the flesh just a bit, gently inject the needle, draw some blood to make certain he’d hit the mother lode, then cram the plunger forward. This would put a bubble the size of a small nuclear missile in her bloodstream and it would jet to her heart and explode it. Meanwhile, Ernie would race to the nurses’ station yelling “Get an arrest team STAT! She’s lost rhythm!”
Then they’d quietly turn and continue their rounds.
The trick, as Vern had patiently explained to Ernie, was to do nothing suddenly. If you moved fast, if your body had a shred of fear or hesitation, it would register with witnesses who were otherwise oblivious. It was the first key of the con, to sell the mark on your authenticity, which was always done with gentle insistence, assuming correct subtextual details. For example: If you were on a job like this, you made damned certain your hands were very clean, almost pink, along with your ears, your face, any visible patch of skin. Docs become docs because they hate filth, disease, laziness, clumsiness. It’s how they feel like God. So to pass as one you had to play by the rules of the game. Another issue Vern was very big on was shoes. What kind of shoes do doctors wear? People notice shoes even if they don’t realize they do. Thus they’d parked for a bit outside the hospital in the staff lot, and noted men of a certain age, whom they took to be docs and not orderlies of some sort (your younger fellas), and noted a lot of Rockport wingtips. So they drove to the mall-not to Mr. Sam’s where all the shoes would have been made by Wah Ming Chow when she wasn’t hand-cutting powder blue suits for the Reverend-found a Rockport store, and paid for a pair each, one cordovan wing-tips, the other less fashionable, beige walkers. They scuffed the shoes against the asphalt of the mall parking lot because the docs were parsimonious and wore each pair unto death.
Now, on those new-but-old Rockports, they slowly approached the girl’s room. It was so close; it was two rooms away, which they’d discovered after an earlier quick stride down the hallway, reading names on the doors while feigning to look for a drink of water.
Here was where your lesser cons would give up the ghost. They wouldn’t play it out straight. They’d see that the room was so damned close and that the nurses were sitting at their stations on the floor without paying any attention at all to them and they’d sort of go into git-’er-done panic. They’d go straight to the girl’s room, do the deed, and get out of Dodge. Yeah, but that’s where it goes wrong. An orderly is on the way to the john and he happens to look down the hall and he sees something he doesn’t hardly ever see, which is a doc moving fast. Docs don’t move fast, not unless it’s the emergency ward and some poor fool is bleeding out or going into advanced vapor lock. Docs have too much dignity to move fast. So he goes to investigate and walks in and sees the needle going into her arm and he says, Hey what? and Ernie has to pop him with his nickle-plated Python 2.5 inch, and the whole thing goes up in flames, and Vern and Ernie end up at the wrong end of another needle somewhere down the line.
No sir, the Reverend didn’t raise no fools for sons or cousins or whatever.
So they played it out by good con discipline, riding the gag hard. They dipped in on Mr. X and saw that he was fine, then had a nice visit with Mrs. Y and noted that her color had improved and got a nice smile out of her for the comment, even if she had no idea who in hell they were, until at last, after a quick check on Mr. Z, who was comatose as well, they reached the doorway of SWAGGER, NIKKI, ACCIDENT VICTIM, and were about to-
“Say-”
They looked up, puzzled but not riled.
“Say there, excuse me, gentlemen.”
The speaker was a man in a blue suit and a crewcut, followed by another gentleman in a black suit but the same crewcut. He wasn’t a doc, as he was moving too fast and looked a little out of place. And when he got there, he was out-of-breath.
“Whoa,” he said, “more running than I’m used to, plus a terrible drive over from Knoxville. Anyway, sorry, don’t mean to be a bother, we just got here.”
“You’re?”
“Sorry again, Ron Evers, Pinkerton Detective Agency, Knoxville office. We’re setting up security for this patient, here, let me show you this.”
He struggled goofily, unsure to be busting doctors, but better safe than sorry, and he pulled out a comic-book badge just like Deputy Dawg’s and some kind of photo ID with an official PINKERTON imprimatur.
“I’ll have to see some ID before I can allow entrance.”
“Son, I’m Dr. Torrence, I’m on my rounds,” said Vern smoothly.
“So sorry, doctor, really I am, but I’ll have to get an administrator here to verify you. Pain in the ass, I know, and it’s your hospital, and all that, but her father hired our firm and his instructions were very clear. No entrance without verification. I’ve already liaisoned with hospital security, if you’re wondering. I’ll call the hospital admin right now,” and he lifted a cell.
Something scalding went off inside Vern’s head. In his younger days, he would have hit the young security guy in the throat, then kicked the other in the balls. Then he would have kicked each in the head until he was sure they were dead. Then he would have killed the girl with the knife he carried. But Vern was mellower now. Even as he felt the frustration build and build like a steam engine about to blow, he kept it together.
“Well,” he said, “no need for that. I’ll go get the duty nurse and she’ll get this straightened out.”
“Yes sir, that’s fine.”
“Come on, Jack,” he said to his cousin or brother or whatever kin Ernie was to him, “we’ll get the nurse. I
And the two Grumleys walked ever so slowly down the hall in their Rockports to the elevator and waited ever so slowly for it to come, Vern thinking, I need to kill something or get laid, preferably by a kid, fast!
SEVEN
He called her from Knoxville the next afternoon.
