AFTER checking that Clyde's composite was indeed being circulated through internal mail, David rode up to the fifth floor and entered the ICU ward. It was busier than the last time he'd visited Nancy, two days ago. A frail woman called out to him from a bed, wanting more morphine, and he smiled at her as he passed. "I'm sorry, ma'am, I don't work in this department, but I'll get the nurse for you."
The curtains were drawn in a tight oval around Nancy's bed, like a coffin pall. The rattle of the rings woke her. She turned her face, and he did his best not to let his horror show despite the fact that she couldn't see him. If shock found its way into his face, it would find its way into his voice.
If anything, she looked worse, her burns resolving into wounds even more horrifying for their permanence. In the six days since the attack, her hair had fallen out along the front of her crown, leaving her with a coarse fringe of ringlets around the sides and back of her head. The large bolster on her right cheek had dried and turned gray, and the skin around the edges had yellowed. David didn't have a plastic surgeon's eye, but he doubted that the graft would take. Between her other bolsters, her patchwork flesh shone red, slick with residual Silvadene. In the midst of it all, her two eyeballs perched inside their sockets, shrunken and sightless.
"Who is it?" she said weakly, her voice a tiny rasp. "Who's there?"
"It's David Spier."
"Oh. I don't want to see you. I heard what you did… that you helped him… and now he got away." Her head drifted slightly on the pillow, a dying motion. "How could you?"
"I didn't help him," David said. "I treated him."
She drew breath raggedly. "I don't want to see you."
"Okay," David said.
"Ever again."
"Okay."
David backed up quietly and pulled the curtain shut.
Diane was back from surgery by the time David got downstairs. She'd already changed into fresh scrubs when David entered the doctors' lounge.
"This morning's incident with Jenkins gave me an idea," he said.
She gathered her bloody scrubs from the floor. "If it's the handcuffs you're interested in, you'll have to buy me dinner first."
"Sadly, nothing so titillating. That patient we helped out who the cops wanted-?"
"Hell's Angel guy?"
"No. The guy Jenkins was yelling about. The bullet in the ass. What was ostensibly his name again?"
"Ed Pinkerton."
"Right." David went to his locker and withdrew the odd bookmark that Ed had left behind in the ER. It read: AMOK BOOKSTORE. THE