“Yeah.”
“Why’d she go? If he was such a loser?”
Her radio squawked and Tab came on, wreck over on 201.
“Shit.” She rose with her drink. “Sorry, baby. I hate to leave cause this is the most you have
She leaned to kiss his head. “We gone finish this conversation,” she said and hurried out, the ambulance pulling to the curb, lights flashing.
Shaniqua came to the table. “Yall talking about Scary Larry?”
He looked up. “Yeah.”
She began collecting dishes. “My momma went to school with him. She say that boy used to always have snakes in his pocket.”
SILAS TOOK OFF his hat as he passed through the hospital’s electric doors and stopped at the information desk and asked where he could find Larry Ott. The red-vested volunteer, an old white man with eyebrows thick as mustaches, put on a pair of glasses and frowned at his computer screen.
“Are you family?” he asked, then gave a half smile to let Silas know he didn’t have to answer, it was a joke. “I’m Jon Davidson,” he said, offering Silas his hand. “Jon,” he said, “without an
“Nice to meet you.”
“You’re Constable Jones, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Read about you in the paper here.” He handed Silas a copy of the
“Ah, here we go,” Davidson said, scrolling down on his computer. “He’s still in the intensive care unit. Second floor, left out of the elevator. Visiting hours for there are three to five, but they’ll make an exception for you.” He winked. “Just tell the nurse on duty you’re famous.”
Silas thanked him and went past the gift shop to the elevator, then turned around and came back.
“Has anybody else been to see him?”
The volunteer took off his glasses and tapped his nose. “Let’s see. I’m on duty noon to six, five days a week. But no. Nobody else I know of. You want me to ask the other volunteers?”
“If you don’t mind,” he said. “And if anybody does come by, could you get their names? Let me know?”
“You got it.”
He scrawled his cell number on a business card and rode the elevator to the next floor. He pushed through a glass door that said INTENSIVE CARE. The nurses’ station was quiet, one black lady in green scrubs tapping at her computer. Behind her he heard, on a monitor, labored breathing. The walls were glass, and through them he could see several beds, most empty.
“Hello,” he said, approaching the desk.
She glanced up. “Good afternoon. Can I help you?”
He tapped his hat on his thigh. “I’m here to see about Larry Ott.”
She took off a pair of eyeglasses and appraised him.
“How is he?” he asked.
“Well, he made it through surgery last night but he’s still unconscious. The doctor should be back at four to check him, but he’s stable right now.”
“Can I see him?”
She rose. “Just for a minute.”
He followed her and saw she’d been playing solitaire on her computer.
Larry was alone in the unit, several other dark beds around, him in the center, connected to the heart monitor and ventilator and an IV rack. He was shirtless and pale, his chest bandaged with drainage tubes down both sides. He had more tubes going into his nose and mouth, taped over his skin.
“It’s amazing he’s still alive,” the nurse said. “When he came in, there hadn’t been time to get him over to Hattiesburg, where they’re better equipped to deal with gunshot wounds. The doctors did the best they could, but…” She didn’t finish the thought.
“You think he’ll pull through?”
“I couldn’t say,” she said. “But he was clinically dead twice during his operations.”
“Operations?”
“Yes. The surgeon removed the bullet, and we gave him six units of blood. The bullet missed his heart by the breadth of a hair, Dr. Milton said. But then, not long after we got him back here, he suffered a minor heart attack from the stress and went back into the O.R.”
This close, Silas saw lines of gray in Larry’s hair. The stubble on his chin around the tape was gray, too. There were wet tracks out of his eyes, down the dry skin of his face.
“Is he in a coma?”
“We can’t tell yet,” she said. “We’re sedating him with Diprivan.”
“When you think you might know more?”
“You’ll have to ask the doctor,” she said.
JURISDICTION, HE KNEW, meant more than geography. It meant responsibility. Somebody had to tell Mrs. Ott about Larry’s being shot, and, since French had pawned this case off on him, he got out of the Jeep and stood in the parking lot of River Acres, a nursing home he’d thus far only seen in passing, on his way somewhere else. Such places depressed him as they did, he supposed, everyone. He squared his hat on and took a breath. The building was a single-story brick structure with seedling pine trees growing out of the drainage gutters along the edge of the roof, which needed new shingles. There was a row of windows down the side of the home, many cracked and some opened and others with air conditioners hanging out, chugging, dripping to puddles beneath, propped with boards.
The front door was opened and a black man of Silas’s build sat inside smoking a cigarette and reading a NASCAR magazine. He wore a white uniform with yellow stains on the front. Silas recognized him-DUI arrest, a year ago-and nodded, wondering why the dude didn’t sit his chair outside, as it seemed hotter inside.
“Morning,” Silas said and removed his hat. “Where I go to see Mrs. Ott?”
Without looking up the man nodded down the hall and Silas thanked him and followed it to where he found a sliding glass window with nobody behind it. The odor of disinfectant didn’t cover the faint smell of urine. He leaned in the window, a desk with a crossword puzzle book and Oprah on a muted thirteen-inch television. He rang the buzzer and in a moment a heavy woman with big glasses came, in no hurry, from an adjacent door.
“Morning,” Silas said. “I’m Officer Jones from over at Chabot.”
The woman sat in the chair and looked up at him with amusement in her eyes. “I know who you are,” she said. Her nails were long and decorated with stars and he wondered how she punched the buttons on her phone. Her name tag said BRENDA. “You was up ahead of me in school,” she said. “I used to watch you play baseball.”
He smiled. “Long time ago.”
“You calling me old?”
His smiled widened. “I wouldn’t do that.”
“What you need up in here? Clyde done broke his probation again?”
“Not that I know of. I’m here to speak to a Mrs. Ott, if she’s able.”
The woman raised her eyebrows. “You can try if you want to. She had some strokes a few years ago, plus she got Alzheimer’s.”
“How bad?”
“Bad enough. Most times she ain’t know anybody. Can’t move her whole left half. Just be laying there. What you want to see her for? Her son in trouble?”
“Why you ask that?”
“Cause she tried to call him yesterday. She get her a good day once in a while. But he never came.”
“He come see her a lot?”
“Several times a week. Crazy man ax would I call him ever time she have a good day you know what I told him?”
“Told him no?”
