He jogged back to the van, opened its rear doors, and mounted the aluminum ramp he used to unload the motorcycle. With all the caution due the darkness, he rolled the Honda to the ground and set its kickstand, then unloaded a small Igloo ice chest and duffel bag from behind the passenger seat. Apart from these three things, the van was empty. He had driven all the way from Jackson with work gloves on his hands, a Ziploc bag over his beard, and a plastic shower cap over his scalp.
He kick-started the Honda to be sure he would not be stranded, then climbed into the van, put it into low gear, and drove slowly toward the cliff's edge. Fifteen feet from the precipice, he leaped from the open door and rolled paratrooper-style on the sandy ground. He heard a splash like a breaching whale crashing into the sea. Running to the cliff's edge, he stared down at the absurd spectacle of a Chevy van floating like a royal barge down the Mississippi River. The van's nose collided with a little spit of land, which started the vehicle spinning in slow circles as it sank, drifting southward toward Baton Rouge and New Orleans.
Had not the circumstances been so dire, Eldon would have laughed. But laughter would have to wait. A thousand troubling thoughts fought for supremacy in his mind. He would allow none free rein until he reached a place of sanctuary. Part of him wanted to remain in Natchez, to finish the work he'd started. But in that matter, time was on his side. He had more important problems to deal with. Andrew Rusk, for example.
Rusk had lied to him. Eldon couldn't be sure about the extent of Rusk's deception, but he was certain of the lie. This angered him more than almost anything Rusk could have done. Eldon shut out the images of revenge welling up inside and focused on survival. He had always known a day like this would come. Now that it had, he was ready. Sanctuary was less than forty miles away. There he could rest, regroup, and plan his response. He strapped the Igloo and the duffel bag to the Honda. All he needed to reach that sanctuary was a cool head and steady nerves. As he climbed onto the bike and kicked it into gear, a rush of confidence flooded through him.
He was already there.
CHAPTER 26
Chris pulled his pickup into the doctor's section of the St. Catherine's Hospital lot and parked. Before going inside, he ran a cable lock through the pitching machine and generator he carried for Ben's baseball practices. There had been a time in Natchez when he would not have had to take such measures, but that time was gone.
He made his rounds as conscientiously as he could, but the events of last night would not leave him. After saying good-bye to his last patient on the medicine floor, he took the stairs down to the first floor, heading for the ICU. There he met Michael Kaufman, Thora's obgyn, coming up. Two days ago, Chris had sent some of Thora's blood to Kaufman for analysis, to check for hormone imbalances that might be affecting her fertility.
'I'm glad I ran into you,' Mike said, pausing on the stairs. 'I found something strange in Thora's sample.'
'Really? What?'
'A high level of progesterone.'
Kaufman nodded. 'She's still trying to get pregnant, right?'
'Of course. What kind of level are we talking about? Contraceptive level?'
'More. Like morning-after pill.'
Chris felt blood rising into his cheeks. Mike Kaufman had probably just committed an ethical breach, and he seemed to be realizing it himself. More than this, they had both become aware that Chris's wife was not being honest with him about a very important matter. Kaufman gave him an embarrassed nod, then continued up the stairs.
Chris walked slowly down toward the intensive care unit, hardly aware of his surroundings. The implications of Kaufman's revelation did not bear thinking about. Was it possible that Thora's whole seduction of him in the studio-her talk about trying to get pregnant-had been a charade? A cold-blooded act designed to cover up an affair, and God knew what else? When Chris saw the big doors of the ICU before him, they seemed to offer escape from the burgeoning hell in his mind.
The cooler air, the hum and beeping of machinery, and the soft voices of nurses gave him a momentary respite from himself. Here he had no choice but to concentrate on work. He had a resistant bilateral pneumonia in the unit that had failed to respond to two powerful antibiotics: a teenager from St. Stephen's. Last night, during evening rounds, Chris had ordered a vancomycin drip. If the boy's condition had not improved, he intended to punt the case up to Jackson, to an infectious-disease specialist he knew at UMC. When he looked toward the glass- walled cubicles, the first thing he saw was Tom Cage coming out of one of the rooms.
'Tom! I didn't know you had anybody in the unit.'
'I don't,' Dr. Cage replied, writing on a chart. 'I was seeing the patient Don Allen consulted me about. I wanted to take a more detailed history than the one I found in his record.'
'You learn anything interesting?'
'I'm not sure. Something is telling me that this guy might have generalized scleroderma, even though the lab tests don't show it. You often see almost no external signs in men, and this guy's blood pressure is truly malignant. Nothing will hold it in check.'
'If it is internal scleroderma, what can you do about the hypertension?'
When the white-haired physician's eyes rose from the chart, Chris saw a look that Dr. Cage would never show a patient: helplessness mingled with frustration, rage, and resignation. Chris nodded sadly.
'Oh, I looked in on your pneumonia,' Tom said. 'His white count dropped significantly during the night.'
'I'll be damned!' Chris said excitedly. 'I was really starting to worry. The kid's only seventeen.'
Tom sighed in commiseration. 'I'm seeing more and more of these atypical pneumonias, particularly in young adults.'
'Are you done with your rounds?'
'Yeah, I'm headed over to the clinic.'
'I'm right behind you.'
Chris walked into his patient's cubicle, but he didn't need to see the chart to notice the change. There was a brightness in the boy's eyes that had not been there for at least a week, and his flesh had already lost its deathlike pallor. When Chris listened to his chest with a stethoscope, he heard marked improvement, especially in the left lung. Chris was laughing at a joke the boy had made about nurses and bedpans when he caught sight of Shane Lansing writing in a chart at the nurses' counter outside. Lansing was looking at the chart as he wrote, but Chris had a strong feeling that the surgeon had been staring at him until the instant he looked up.
Mike Kaufman's words replayed in his mind:
Was Lansing thinking about a patient? Or was he thinking about Thora? Chris felt some relief at finding the surgeon in Natchez this early in the morning. Greenwood was over four hours away, and it was damned unlikely that Lansing would commute eight hours every day to screw Thora at the Alluvian Hotel. He would have to have left her at 4 a.m. to be here now. Still, Chris felt an irrational urge to walk out to the nurses' station and punch the surgeon's lights out. He told his patient he'd be back to check his progress after lunch, then updated the chart and walked out to the counter.
'Morning, Chris,' said Lansing. 'You think any more about that golf game?'
'I can't do it this afternoon.' Chris searched Lansing's eyes for signs of fatigue. 'But maybe I can get away tomorrow.'
'Just give me a call. Or leave a message with my service.'
'You can get away in the afternoons?'
'Yeah, it's my mornings that suck.'
'That's why you make the big bucks.'
Lansing didn't reply.
Chris watched the handsome surgeon scan another chart, then turned on his heel and walked out of the
