I got out my cell again, called Vince’s. “Come on,” I said, feeling awash in anxiety. I couldn’t raise Cynthia, and now I was panicking that something had happened to a guy who only yesterday I would have viewed as a common thug.
“Is he there?” Clayton said, moving his legs over to the edge of the bed.
“No,” I said. After six rings, it went to voicemail. I didn’t bother to leave a message. “I need to get back over there.”
“Give me a minute,” he said, inching his butt closer to the edge.
I went over to the closet, found a pair of pants, a shirt, and a light jacket. “You need help?” I asked, laying the clothes out on the bed next to him.
“I’m okay,” he said. He seemed a bit winded, caught his breath, and said, “Did you see some socks and underwear in there?”
I took another look in the closet, found nothing, then checked the bottom cabinet of the bedside table. “In here,” I said, taking out the clothes and handing them over.
He was ready to stand up next to the bed, but if he was going to leave the room, he was going to have to disengage himself from the IV. He picked away at the tape, pulled the tube from his arm.
“You sure about this?” I said.
He nodded, gave me a weak smile. “If there’s a chance to see Cynthia, I’ll find the strength.”
“What’s going on in here?”
We both turned our heads to the door. A nurse was standing there, a slender black woman, mid-forties, a look of wonderment on her face.
“Mr. Sloan, what on earth do you think you’re doing?”
He had just dropped his pajama bottoms and was standing before her, bareass naked. His legs were white and spindly, his genitals shrunken away to almost nothing.
“Getting dressed,” he said. “What’s it look like?”
“Who are you?” she asked, turning on me.
“His son-in-law,” I said.
“I’ve never seen you here before,” she said. “Don’t you know that visiting hours are long over?”
“I just got into town,” I said. “I needed to see my father-in-law right away.”
“You’re going to have to leave right now,” she told me. “And you get back into bed, Mr. Sloan.” She was at the foot of the bed now, saw the disconnected IV. “For heaven’s sake,” she said. “What have you done?”
“I’m checking out,” Clayton said. Looking at him, in his condition, I couldn’t help but think the words held a double meaning. He steadied himself against me as he bent down to draw his white boxers up over his legs.
“That’s exactly what you’ll be doing if you don’t get hooked up to that again,” the nurse said. “This is absolutely out of the question. Am I going to have to call your doctor in the middle of the night?”
“Do what you have to do,” he said to her.
“My first call’s going to be to security,” she said, and turned on her rubber-soled shoes and sprinted from the room.
“I know this is a lot to ask,” I said, “but you’re going to have to hurry. I’m going to see if I can find a wheelchair.”
I went into the hall, spotted a vacant chair up by the nurses’ station. I ran up to get it, noticed our nurse on the phone. She finished her call, saw me heading back to Clayton’s room pushing the empty chair.
She ran over, grabbed hold of it with one hand and my arm with the other. “Sir,” she said, lowering her voice so as not to wake the other patients, but maintaining her authority, “you cannot take that man out of this hospital.”
“He wants to leave,” I said.
“Then he must not be thinking too clearly,” she said. “And if he can’t, then you have to do it for him.”
I shook her hand off. “This is something he has to do.”
“Says you?”
“Says him.” Now I lowered my voice and became very serious. “This may be the last chance he ever has to see his daughter. And his granddaughter.”
“If he wants to see them, he can have them visit him right here,” she countered. “We could even bend the rules some about visiting hours if that’s a problem.”
“It’s a little more complicated than that.”
“Ready,” said Clayton. He had made it to the door of his room. He’d slipped on his shoes without socks, and had not yet buttoned up his shirt, but his jacket was on, and he appeared to have run his fingers through his hair. He looked like an aged homeless person.
The nurse wasn’t giving up. She let go of the chair and went up to Clayton, got right in his face. “You cannot leave here, Mr. Sloan. You need to be discharged by your physician, Dr. Vestry, and I can assure you he would not be allowing this to happen. I have a call in to him right now.”
I brought the chair up so Clayton could drop himself into it. I spun him around and headed for the elevator.
The nurse ran back to her station, grabbed the phone, said, “Security! I said I needed you up here now!”
The elevator doors parted and I wheeled Clayton in, hit the button for the first floor, and watched the nurse glare at us until the doors slid shut.
“When the door opens,” I told Clayton calmly, “I’m going to be pushing you out of here like a bat out of hell.”
He said nothing but wrapped his fingers around the arms of the chair, squeezed. I wished it had a seat belt.
The doors opened, and there was about fifty feet of hall separating me from the emergency room doors and the parking lot just beyond them. “Hold on,” I whispered, and broke into a run.
The chair wasn’t built for speed, but I pushed it to the point where the front wheels began to wobble. I feared it would suddenly veer left or right, that Clayton would spill out and end up with a fractured skull before I could get him to Vince’s Dodge Ram. So I put some weight down on the handles and tipped the chair back, like it was doing a wheelie.
Clayton hung on.
The elderly couple who had been sitting in the waiting room earlier were shuffling across the hall. I shouted ahead, “Out of the way!” The woman’s head whipped around and she pulled her husband out of my path just in time as we went racing past.
The sensors on the sliding emergency room doors couldn’t react fast enough, and I had to put on the brakes so I wouldn’t send Clayton through the glass. I slowed down as fast as I could without pitching him forward and out of the wheelchair, and that was when someone I assumed had to be a security guard came up behind me and shouted, “Whoa! Hold it right there, pal!”
I was so pumped up on adrenaline I didn’t stop to think about what I was doing. I was working on instinct now. I spun around, using the momentum that seemed to be stored in me from moving so quickly down the hall, forming a fist in the process, and caught my pursuer square in the side of the head.
He wasn’t a very big guy, maybe 150 pounds, five-eight, black hair and a mustache, must have figured that the gray uniform and big black belt with the gun attached would get him by. Fortunately, he hadn’t yet pulled his weapon, assuming, I guess, that a guy pushing a dying patient in a wheelchair didn’t pose much of a threat.
He was wrong.
He dropped to the emergency room floor like someone had cut his strings. Somewhere, a woman screamed, but I didn’t take any time to see who it was, or whether anyone else was going to be coming after me. I whirled back around, got my hands on the wheelchair handles, and kept pushing Clayton, out into the parking lot, right up to the passenger door of the Dodge.
I got out the keys, unlocked it with the remote, opened the door. The truck sat up high, and I had to boost Clayton to get him into the passenger seat. I slammed the door shut, ran around to the other side, and caught the wheelchair with the right front tire as I backed out of the spot. I heard it scrape against the fender.
“Shit,” I said, thinking about how perfect Vince kept the vehicle.
The truck tires squealed as I tore out of the lot, heading back for the highway. I caught a glimpse of some people from the ER, running outside to watch as I sped off. Clayton, already looking exhausted, said, “We have to go back to my house.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m already heading there. I need to know why Vince isn’t answering, make sure everything’s okay, maybe even stop Jeremy if he shows up, if he hasn’t already.”
“And there’s something I have to get,” Clayton said. “Before we go see Cynthia.”
“What?”
He waved a weakened hand at me. “Later.”
“They’re going to call the police,” I said of the people we’d left behind at the hospital. “I’ve practically kidnapped a patient, and I’ve decked a security guard. They’ll be looking for this truck.”
Clayton didn’t say anything.
I pushed the truck past ninety on the way north to Youngstown, glancing constantly in my mirror for flashing red lights. I tried Vince again with my cell, still without success. I was nearing the end of my battery.
When the turnoff to Youngstown came, I was hugely relieved, figuring I was more vulnerable, more noticeable, on the expressway. But then, what if the police were waiting for us at the Sloan house? The hospital would be able to tell them where their runaway patient lived, and they’d probably stake the place out. What terminal patient doesn’t want to go home and die in his own bed?
I drove the truck down to Main, hung a left, went south a couple of miles and turned down the road to the Sloan house. It looked peaceful enough as we drove up to it, a couple of lights on inside, the Honda Accord still parked out front.
No police cars anywhere to be seen. Yet.
“I’m going to drive the truck around back where it can’t be seen from the street,” I said. Clayton nodded. I wheeled the truck onto the back lawn, killed the lights and engine.
“Just go on,” Clayton said. “See about your friend. I’ll try to catch up with you.”
I leapt out, went to a back door. When I found it locked, I banged on it. “Vince!” I shouted. I looked through the windows, didn’t see any movement. I ran around the house to the front, looking up and down the street for police cars, and tried the main door.
It was unlocked.
“Vince!” I said, stepping into the front hall. I didn’t immediately see Enid Sloan, or her chair, or Vince Fleming.
Not until I got to the kitchen.
Enid wasn’t there, and neither was her chair. But Vince lay on the floor, the back of his shirt red with blood.
“Vince,” I said, kneeling down next to him. “Jesus, Vince.” I thought he was dead, but he let out a soft moan. “Oh God, man, you’re still alive.”
“Terry,” he whispered, his right cheek pressed to the floor. “She had a…she had a fucking gun under the blanket.” His eyes were flirting with rolling up under his lids. There was blood coming out of his mouth. “Fucking embarrassing…”
“Don’t talk,” I said. “I’m going to call 911.”
I found the phone, snatched the receiver into my hand, and punched in the three numbers.
“A man’s been shot,” I said. I barked out the address, told the operator to hurry, ignored all her other questions, and hung up.
“He came home,” Vince whispered when I knelt down next to him again. “Jeremy…she met him at the door, didn’t even let him come in…said they had to go right then. She phoned him…after she shot me, said step on it.”
“Jeremy was here?”
“I heard them talking…” More blood spluttered out of his mouth. “Going back. She wouldn’t even let him come in and take a piss. Didn’t want him to see me…Didn’t tell him…”
What was Enid thinking? What was going on in her head?
At the front door, I could hear Clayton shuffling his way into the house.
“Fuck, it hurts…” Vince said. “Fucking little old lady.”
“You’re going to be okay,” I said.
“Terry,” he said, so softly I almost couldn’t hear. I put my ear closer to his mouth. “Look in…on Jane. Okay?”
“Hang in there, man. Just hang in.”