Sara Paretsky - Hardball

The doctor examined me closely. “You are very lucky, Ms. Warshawski. The burns on the lids were not severe and are already healing. For the next few weeks, you’ll need to wear dark glasses with photochromic lenses whenever you are outside, whether the sun is shining or not, and anytime you’re in a brightly lit room. If you wear glasses, you need to get prescription sunglasses to use in front of a computer for the next month or two. And stay away from TV and computers altogether for two more days. That’s a serious order, okay?”

He gave me an antibiotic salve to put on and under the lids twice a day, and told me it was safe to wash my hair.

When they brought me back to my room, with a pair of those outsize plastic sunglasses they give people after cataract surgery, the resident came around to inspect the rest of my body. My arms were rough and red. I’d been wearing a linen jacket, since I’d dressed professionally for my meeting, and while the fabric had charred it had spared my skin from more severe burns.

My hands had suffered the worst damage. When the dressings came off next week, I’d need to wear cotton gloves anytime I went outside.

When I finally crept into the bathroom and looked in the mirror, I looked sunburned, but my face only had a few blisters along the hairline. I’d apparently buried my face in the throw while I tumbled Sister Frances out of her room, which also had saved me from serious burns. What made me look bizarre wasn’t my shiny red cheeks but the clumps of hair missing from my head. I looked like a dog with mange.

Even so, I had been staggeringly lucky to escape the full force of the fire. If only I’d pulled Sister Frankie down instead of screaming at her… I could see the bottle hitting her head over and over again every time I closed my eyes.

The resident had said they would discharge me tomorrow if I continued to hold my own. In the meantime, they were removing my IVs. I could switch to oral antibiotics and actual food.

“You know you’ve created a kind of media circus at the hospital?” The resident was a young man, and a media circus was clearly a welcome change of pace for him.

Apparently, the hospital security staff had found one reporter trying to get into my room while I was asleep that morning. They had gotten the city to arrest another man they’d discovered at one of the nursing-station computers calling up Sister Frankie’s and my charts.

“We put a block on incoming calls to your room. The switchboard says they’ve clocked a hundred seventeen calls.”

I hadn’t thought there could be a plus to a hospital stay, but missing a hundred seventeen media calls proved me wrong.

When the doctor finally remembered he had other beds to visit, I put on plastic mitts to protect my hands and took a shower in the little bathroom. I felt better physically, but exhaustion, medication, and depression made me go back to the bed in a sort of numb lethargy.

I put on my heavy glasses and lay half dozing. Someone brought a species of lunch. I begged for coffee, thinking caffeine might lift some of the fog in my brain. The attendant said it wasn’t on my diet, and I lay back down, nauseated by the wobbly red Jell-O on the tray.

By and by, I thought of my clothes. My wallet had been in my handbag and that was probably melted into the remains of Sister Frances’s home, but I often stuff loose bills into my pockets. I found eleven dollars and thirteen cents in my smoky clothes. My cellphone was there, too, but the battery was dead.

I pulled my Lario boots onto my bare feet and put on my torn and charred linen jacket. I looked in the little mirror in the bathroom. Between the costume, my clumpy hair, and the outsize glasses, I looked like I belonged on the Uptown streets outside the hospital, collecting cigarette butts. I made it down the hall on wobbly legs; two days in bed, with no food and a lot of shock, had atrophied my muscles. A hospital security guard at the nursing station looked at me curiously but didn’t try to stop me. I rode down to the first-floor lobby.

Hospitals have realized that the cash register chings louder if they install an espresso machine. They don’t study how to make it good, figuring a clientele under stress will drink anything. I wasn’t in a position to be picky, either. I ordered a triple espresso from an attendant who, taking in my costume and my mangy head, asked to be paid first.

While he pulled my shots, I looked across the lobby to the front of the building. The media circus had shut down most of its rings, with only one camera truck still there. As I squinted through my glasses, I could just make out a couple of people with picket signs-the immigrant rights activists, perhaps, or maybe a striking local or even abortion protestors. The lenses were too opaque for me to be able to read the signs themselves.

My hands were so thickly wrapped that I had to hold the cup with my fingertips, and I had trouble opening the sugar packets. I finally tore them with my teeth, spraying sugar over myself and the floor before managing to get some in my coffee. I was heading for the elevators when I spotted my old pal Murray Ryerson from the Herald-Star at the reception desk. He was collecting a visitor’s pass and grinning with satisfaction at the clerk. So much for the lockdown on reporters.

I felt vulnerable and exposed, with no underwear under a shabby hospital gown, only my smoky jacket keeping my breasts and buttocks from public view. I retreated into a chair behind a potted plant and watched until Murray was inside an elevator.

As I waited, Beth Blacksin from Global Entertainment went up to the reception desk and started gesticulating in indignation, pointing at the elevator. So Murray had scammed his way in. A hospital security guard joined Beth.

Hospitals have a million exits and stairwells. I left the coffee shop by the far end and went into the first stairwell I came to. One flight, and I felt as though I’d been sandbagged, my legs wobbling, my head dizzy. I leaned against the wall and drank some of my coffee. It was bitter-they hadn’t cleaned the machine heads anytime recently-but the caffeine steadied me.

A doctor came running down the stairs but paused when he saw me. “Do you belong here?”

I held out my wrist with my plastic patient tag looped above my gauze hands. “I got turned around when I went downstairs for coffee.”

He read my tag. “Your room is on the fifth floor. You’d better take an elevator. I’m not sure you should be up and about at all… Definitely not climbing five flights of stairs.”

He opened the door to the first floor and held it while I walked past him. “I can call for a wheelchair.”

“No, the nurses told me I needed to start walking. I’ll be okay.”

He was in a hurry and didn’t stay to argue with me. I looked at my tag. Sure enough, it had my room number on it. That was a mercy: I hadn’t bothered to check it when I left.

I found a secondary elevator bank and saw a sign for the hospital library. Carrying my coffee in my fingertips, I walked past the Orthopedic Outpatient Clinic and Respiratory Diseases and came to the library. To my relief, this was merely a room filled with donated books, mostly unread review copies with publicists’ letters still inside the front covers. No staff were present to question whether a person in heavy dark glasses and no underwear ought to be there.

I turned out the overhead lights and curled up in an armchair. Time to stop feeling sorry for myself and guilty about Sister Frankie. Time to think, to work.

The feds had been watching Sister Frances’s apartment and hadn’t intervened in the attack on her. Did that mean they wanted her dead or had they been out getting pizza and not noticed whoever threw the Molotov cocktails?