Deadly Beloved

I shifted in the recliner. “I wasn’t there for all of it, Doc, so I’ll give it to you as best I came to understand it....”

A dark-haired, trimly mustached uniformed cop of about thirty, Officer Anthony Clemens was sitting outside Roger Freemont’s room, playing a Nintendo DS handheld. On the other side of the door, Fremont remained unconscious in his hospital bed, IV tube inserted, heart monitor blipping, privacy curtain drawn, the room now being shared.

As Clemens played New Super Mario Bros., a tall, slender, severely attractive Hispanic nurse approached, a clipboard in hand. Her nametag said Garcia, and she wore latex gloves.

Outside Freemont’s room, about to go in, she paused and asked, “Are you Officer Clemens?”

Clemens looked up from his screen, grudgingly. “Yeah.”

She nodded back down the hall. “Call for you at the nurse’s station. A Lt. Valer?”

“Thanks,” Clemens said, and he began juggling the gaming system with the cell phone he was getting out of his pocket. “But I gotta stay at my post. I’ll call him—”

She gripped his arm. “Officer!”

He blinked up at her. “What?”

The woman’s tone was scolding. “Don’t you know you can’t use a cell phone in a hospital? Electronic interference.”

A little confused, Clemens put the cell away—slowly, but away. “What, like on an airplane?”

“That’s right...sorry. Didn’t mean to jump on you.” She smiled at the officer. “Go on and take your call, at the nurse’s station. I’ll stay with the patient till you return.”

He smiled back at her, said thanks, and as Clemens headed down the corridor, tucking away the evidence— his Nintendo DS—into a pants pocket, Nurse Garcia slipped into Freemont’s room.

On entering, the nurse’s pleasant expression hardened into a blank mask as she studied, in a clinical fashion, her patient, unconscious in his bed, the heart monitor’s blipping providing a percussive undercurrent.

The nurse tossed her clipboard on the foot of the bed and removed from her pocket a hypodermic syringe already filled with a black liquid. She pointed the hypo needle up to check it, giving it a test squirt.

Then she moved in on the unconscious Freemont, needle poised....

“Excuse me for interrupting, Ms. Tree,” Dr. Cassel said, and he was on the edge of his chair. “But how can you know this? Where were you when this was going on?”

I grinned over at him. “Didn’t I mention it, Doc? I was who Roger was sharing the room with....”

I whipped the privacy curtain open.

The empty bed where I’d been sitting and waiting—in slacks and blouse, not a hospital gown (I wasn’t sharing the room to that extent)—was to my back, and I was on my feet, with my nine millimeter in hand...

...and aimed right at the “nurse.”

I gave her a smile at least as nasty as the black remedy in that hypo.

“Maybe,” I said, “it’s time for your shot....”

But she was fast, and didn’t fluster, I’ll give her that: she hurled the hypo at me like a knife, and the damn thing hit me in the arm, hard, hard enough to pierce the blouse and stick in my arm and quiver there and for that matter bump me back against the bed, jarring me so that the gun went flying, clattering to the floor somewhere.

This put me out of commission long enough for Nurse Garcia to book it out of the room, moving quickly, not quite running.

I yanked the damn hypo from my arm—“Fuck!”—and wasted a second or two trying to spot my fumbled nine mil, slipping the hypo in my slacks pocket.

Gun was out of sight, so I said, “Shit,” and took pursuit, anyway.

I could see Garcia up there, nearing where she’d have to turn either left or right, but there were several real nurses in the hall as well; calling out was too risky, because it would encourage Garcia to take a hostage or otherwise misbehave....

Down at the end of the corridor, beyond the fleeing Garcia, came Uniformed Officer Clemens, trundling around the corner, gesturing in confusion. And right on his heels was another nurse, a genuine nurse, pushing a steel cart of meds.

“Hey,” Clemens said to Garcia, “I held on for like forever, and Valer didn’t—”

What happened next I saw but couldn’t do a damn thing about....

Nurse Garcia casually removed a small automatic from her right-hand dress pocket and shot Clemens in the head, just above and between the eyes.

He went down in a cloud of blood spray and landed on his gaming system, which made a pathetic little dying bleep bleep, and the poor dead bastard wound up sitting against the corridor wall, slumped there, game over.

As this was happening, that real nurse shrieked, abandoned her cart and ran back the way she came. And Nurse Garcia shoved the cart out of her path, upending it, spilling pills and other medical supplies, so that when I reached that point, the overturned cart was between me and Garcia and the route she’d taken, though I could see her, on the run now, full throttle, shoving aside people in white, nurses and aides and doctors, like human bowling pins.

And then, without slowing her pace, Garcia glanced back and her arm came up and straightened and she threw a shot at me, that little automatic making a loud little firecracker report in the hallway.

I anticipated the shot enough to duck into the nearest hospital room.

But that slowed me down, and Nurse Garcia was still on the move.

I bolted back out and ran to the cart and uprighted the thing and, with every ounce of strength in me, propelled it down the corridor....

...where it clipped Nurse Garcia, in the right side and leg, just as she was about to round another corner, knocking her off balance.

In her awkward on-the-run fall, Garcia hit her head on the wall, hard, and slid to the floor, leaving a snail’s trail of red blood smear.

She seemed to be out cold, but I made my approach cautiously—after all, my gun was God knows where, back in Roger’s room.

I knelt over her.

Checked the woman’s throat pulse.

But then her hand was on my throat, and she sure as hell wasn’t checking for a pulse....

I winced in pain as she twisted around and brought her other hand to bear, ten fingers choking me now as we squirmed on the floor, me wriggling like a fish on a boat deck and her squeezing the damn life out of me....

Somehow my hand found the hypo in my pocket—the thing was still loaded with that foul black shit.

And as the lights flickered in my head, wanting to go out, I managed to will myself into one final act: jamming the needle into Garcia’s leg.

Her hands loosened on my throat, her eyes goggled and I was free of her grip. She was on top of me but did not really have the advantage any longer, as a look she sneaked confirmed: that needle was deep in her outer thigh and my thumb was poised to dispense medicine.

Her eyes locked with mine. Hard eyes, dark and mean and cold and, best of all, scared shitless.

“Gee,” I said. “I wonder what that drug is, honey? In this helpful hypo of yours?”

Her eyes saucered. “Don’t! Jesus sake, don’t!”

Then we did this shifting of positions that got her off of me, slowly, carefully, until she was on the floor and I was just above her, in control of my unhappy prisoner.

My hand patted her pockets until I found her gun in one. I got it out and held the little .22 in my left hand, gripping it as tight as she had my throat, and jammed its snout in her neck, ready to cure her permanently, if she fucking blinked.

These last minutes had gone down in a sort of claustrophobic close-up world that included only the two of us,