She used the peroxide, then waited until he said, “Now begin.”
Jane forced her mind to stop thinking of his back as living flesh. She told herself it was the soft, buttery leather they used for couches and car seats. She sewed it as she would have repaired a piece of furniture, except that it bled. She had to catch the blood with cotton. When she had finished, she tied off the thread as he had told her to.
“Next, douse the whole area with peroxide again,” said Dahlman. His voice was hoarse, all air and no vibration. “Then Neosporin and a full dressing of gauze and adhesive tape.”
When Jane had finished she stepped back and waited. Dahlman lay still. Finally she detected from the sound of his breathing that he was asleep, so she covered him with the blanket and went to the table by the window. She opened a Styrofoam container, looked at the food she had bought, then closed it and sat down in the chair with her hands over her eyes.
Dahlman awoke an hour later, sat up, threw off the blanket, and walked to the bathroom, still as unaware of his nakedness as ever. He used the shaving mirror in front of him to look over his shoulder into the big mirror. He lifted the gauze and studied the wound. “I don’t like the look of that. It’s inflamed.”
“What do we do?”
“An antibiotic. I’m afraid I can’t just write a prescription, can I?”
Jane shook her head. “We’ll have to do it another way.”
“I’ve heard there’s a black market for medicines,” he said. “Is it true?”
“Of course it’s true. There’s a black market for everything. But they’re not people we want to deal with right now. They’re just like any other drug dealers. Antibiotics aren’t their usual merchandise, so they’d have to make a special trip. That makes them curious. We’ll just cut out the middle man and get it ourselves.”
“How?”
“The way they do. What’s the antibiotic?”
“I’d prefer Cipro. It’s effective against the widest spectrum of bacteria, and I have no idea what was in that water.”
“Spell it.”
“C-I-P-R-O. But if that isn’t available, any of the penicillins or cephalosporins would be worth having.”
She picked up her purse and walked toward the door. “Get some rest, and try to eat something. I won’t be back for a few hours.”
Jane selected a gynecologist by talking to a woman at the hotel desk, who had a list of doctors for sick guests. She called and made an appointment for that afternoon. When she reached the office she told the nurse that she was on vacation and had forgotten her birth-control pills. The doctor took her right away, checked her blood pressure and heart rate, and wrote her a prescription for Orthocept pills. As she left the office, she slipped his pen into her purse.
Jane drove up the street until she saw a mailbox-rental store that advertised “Self-Serve Copies, 10?,” went inside, made a copy of nothing, then used the blank sheet to cover the doctor’s handwriting and make a blank prescription form. Next she used the doctor’s pen to trace his signature and the genuine prescription, substituting the word “Cipro” for “Orthocept.”
It took Jane a little longer to find the right pharmacy. She looked for one on the other side of the city so the druggist would not be too familiar with her doctor’s handwriting. She wanted one that was not part of a larger building, so all sides would be visible, and one that wasn’t part of a chain, because there was no way to know what might come up on the computer of a chain store. After she handed in her prescription, she sat in a coffee shop in the strip mall across the street and waited. No police cars arrived, no stranger showed up to hang around the building. After an hour she went in, picked up her prescription, and paid for it in cash.
When Jane handed Dahlman the bottle of pills he looked at her with his eyebrows raised.
“Something wrong with it?”
“It’s exactly what I asked for.”
“That’s why I asked you to spell it.”
He took a dose immediately, then went back to the bed. “I’ve been thinking about you,” he said.
Jane said nothing. She opened her suitcase and brushed her hair.
“Don’t you want to hear what I was thinking?”
Jane stared at him over the lid of the suitcase. “Not if it’s about me.”
“Interesting,” said Dahlman. “What I was thinking about was why a man like Dr. McKinnon would know the telephone number of a woman like you.”
“A woman like me?”
Dahlman went on. “He had it in his head, you know—didn’t have to look it up. I was thinking it was something like this. He did you a favor—maybe operated on you or a friend of yours. You told him that if he ever needed anything in return, he should call. The number just stuck in his mind. He’s a brilliant man, with the sort of mind that things just stick to. And last night I came looking for you. The police shot me before I could make it to your house. I told Carey your name, and out came your number.”
“You think he once took a thorn out of my paw?” Her face wore a mirthless little smile.
“Well?” He looked at her triumphantly. “Am I right?”
Jane picked up a new set of clothes and walked toward the bathroom. “I’m going to shower and change. Then I’m going to sleep for a few hours. You can watch TV quietly, or read if the light’s not in my eyes. When I wake up it will be dark. And then we’re going to check out and drive on.”
“You won’t tell me how he knows you?”
“He knew my number because I’m his wife.” She closed the door, and in a moment Dahlman heard the shower running.
Dahlman eased himself onto the bed. He had done it again. He had met a person he liked, and had studied her for a time, and found her so intriguing that he had allowed his curiosity to explode into life and hungrily turn her into a specimen for study. His life seemed to him a long and distressing series of incidents like this—a sequence of offenses that made him want to hide his face. He found himself wishing he could be back in the clinic in Chicago with the door closed and human beings kept far away, where he wouldn’t be tempted to do something that would make him ashamed. He felt a sudden twinge in his shoulder and shifted his weight to his right side. “That’s another reason,” he thought. “If I were back there, I could make this thing go away.”
10
It was time for the morning flurry of activity around the airport, and Marshall waited for the deep roar of the latest airplane to fade before he spoke into the telephone again. Now and then he looked down at what he had written in the little leather notebook that he carried. “Here’s what I would like. The Buffalo police will be sending prints from the hospital, along with prints on file of the members of the staff who were supposed to be in the area. Anything out of the ordinary goes to me, and to them. Okay?”
On the other end of the line, Albert Grapelli spoke in a preoccupied way, as though he were writing. “Okay.”
Marshall looked down at his list again. “When Dahlman walked out of there, he didn’t take his medicine with him. He’s supposed to have painkillers and an antibiotic. The painkillers we can’t do much about because there are so many kinds on the market, and we can’t even be sure he’ll take one. But the antibiotic seems promising. The guy who operated on him was one of his old students, so let’s assume they both believe in the same antibiotic. Now that he’s on his own, he’ll prescribe the same stuff for himself. It’s called Cipro. If any pharmacist fills a prescription for it anywhere in the next few days, I’d like to have him interviewed.”
Grapelli was silent for a moment. Marshall waited, then heard Grapelli take in a breath, so he knew what was coming. “John,” said Grapelli. “Isn’t that a little …” He corrected himself. “No, scratch that. Let’s hear what else you want before I tell you what you can’t have.”
Marshall said, “Problem?”
“You know what I’d like? I’d like to know what you think is going on.”
