Sara Paretsky - Fire Sale

A walkie-talkie squawked, cell phones rang, men talked, engines clanged, soot-grimed faces carried a charred body. I shut my eyes and let the current pull me away.

I came to briefly when the ambulance arrived. I stumbled to the rear doors on my own, but the EMT crew had to lift me into the back. When they had me strapped in, awkwardly, on my side, the jolting of the ambulance drew me down to a tiny point of pain. If I shut my eyes I felt sick to my stomach, but the light stabbed through me when I opened them.

As we swooped in through the ambulance entrance, I vaguely noticed the hospital’s name, but it was all I could do to mutter answers to the questions the triage nurse was asking. I somehow got my insurance card out of my wallet, signed forms, put down Lotty Herschel as my doctor, told them to notify Mr. Contreras if anything happened to me. I tried to call Morrell, but they wouldn’t let me use my cell phone, and, anyway, they had me on a gurney. Someone stuck a needle into the back of my hand, other someones stood over me saying they’d have to cut away my clothes.

I tried to protest: I was wearing a good suit under my navy peacoat, but by then the drug was taking hold and my words came out in a senseless gabble. I was never completely anesthetized, but they must have given me an amnesia drug: I couldn’t remember them cutting off my clothes or taking out the piece of window frame from my back.

I was conscious by the time I was wheeled to a bed. The drugs and a throb in my shoulder both kept jerking me awake whenever I dozed off. When the resident came in at six, I was awake in that dull, grinding way that comes from a sleepless night and puts a layer of gauze between you and the world.

She’d been up all night herself, handling surgical emergencies like mine; even though her eyes were puffy from lack of sleep, she was young enough to perch on the chair by my bed and talk in a bright, almost perky voice.

“When the window blew apart, a fragment of the frame shot into your shoulder. You were lucky it was cold last night-your coat stopped the bolt from going deep enough to do real damage.” She held out an eight-inch piece of twisted metal-mine to keep, if I wanted it.

“We’re going to send you home now,” she added, after checking my heart and head and the reflexes in my left hand. “It’s the new medicine, you know. Out of the operating room, into a cab. Your wound is going to heal nicely. Just don’t let the dressing get wet for a week, so no showers. Come back next Friday to the outpatient clinic; we’ll change the dressing and see how you’re doing. What kind of work do you do?”

“I’m an investigator. Detective.”

“So can you stop investigating for a day or two, Detective? Get some rest, let the anesthesia work itself out of your system and you’ll be fine. Is there anyone you can call to drive you home, or should we get you into a cab?”

“I asked them to call a friend last night,” I said. “I don’t know if they did.” I also didn’t know if Morrell could manage the trip down here. He was recovering from bullet wounds that almost killed him in Afghanistan this past summer; I wasn’t sure he had the stamina to drive forty miles.

“I’ll take her.” Conrad Rawlings had materialized in the doorway.

I was too sluggish to feel surprised or pleased or even flustered at seeing him. “Sergeant-or, no, you’ve been promoted, haven’t you? Is it lieutenant now? You out checking on all the victims of last night’s accident?”

“Just the ones who raise a red flag when they’re within fifty miles of the crime scene.” I couldn’t see much emotion in his square copper face-not the concern of an old lover, not even the anger of an old lover who’d been angry when he left me. “And, yeah, I’ve been promoted: watch commander now down at 103rd and Oglesby. I’ll be outside the lobby when the doc here pronounces you fit to tear up the South Side again.”

The resident signed my discharge papers, wrote me prescriptions for Vicodin and Cipro, and turned me over to the nursing staff. A nurse’s aide handed me the remnants of my clothes. I could wear the trousers, although they smelled sooty and had bits of the hillside embedded in them, but my coat, jacket, and rose silk blouse had all been slit across the shoulders. Even my bra strap had been cut. It was the silk shirt that made me start to cry, that and the jacket. They were part of a cherished outfit; I’d worn them in the morning-yesterday morning-to make a presentation to a downtown client before heading to the South Side.

The nurse’s aide didn’t care about my grief one way or another, but she did agree I couldn’t go out in public without any clothes. She went to the charge nurse, who scrounged an old sweatshirt for me from someplace. By the time we’d done all that, and found an orderly to wheel me to the lobby, it was almost nine.

Conrad had used police privilege to park right in front of the entrance. He was asleep when the orderly wheeled me out, but he came to when I opened the passenger door.

“Woof. Long night, Ms. W., long night.” He knuckled sleep from his eyes and put the car into gear. “You still in the old crib up by Wrigley? I heard you mention a boyfriend to the doc.”

“Yes.” To my annoyance, my mouth was dry and the word came out as a squawk.

“Not that Ryerson guy, I trust.”

“Not the Ryerson guy. Morrell. A writer. He got shot to pieces last summer covering the Afghanistan war.”

Conrad grunted in a way that managed to heap contempt on mere writers who get shot to pieces: he himself had been hit by machine-gun fire in Vietnam.

“Anyway, your sister tells me you haven’t taken monastic vows, either.” Conrad’s sister Camilla sits on the board of the same women’s shelter I do.

“You always did have a way with a phrase, Ms. W. Monastic vows. Nope, none of them.”

Neither of us spoke again. Conrad turned his police-issue Buick into Jackson Park. We joined a heavy stream of cars, the tag end of the morning rush, filing through the Jackson Park construction zone onto Lake Shore Drive. A feeble autumn sun was trying to break through the cloud cover, and the air had a sickly light that hurt my eyes.

“You called it a crime scene,” I finally said, just to break the silence. “Was it arson? Was that Frank Zamar the firemen carried out?”

He grunted again. “No way of knowing till we hear from the medical examiner, but we’re assuming it was-talked to the foreman, who said Zamar was the only person left in the building when the shift ended. As far as arson goes-can’t tell that, either, not until the arson squad goes through there, but I don’t think the guy died from neglect.”

Conrad switched the conversation, asking me about my old friend Lotty Herschel-he’d been surprised not to see her down at the hospital with me, her being a doctor and my big protector and all.

I explained I hadn’t had time to make any calls. I kept wondering about Morrell, but I wasn’t going to share that with Conrad. Probably the hospital hadn’t bothered to call him-otherwise, surely, he would’ve phoned me, even if he couldn’t make the drive. I tried not to think of Marcena Love, sleeping in Morrell’s guest room. Anyway, she was frying other fish these days. These nights. I abruptly asked Conrad how he liked being so far from the center of action.

“ South Chicago is the center of action, if you’re a cop,” he said. “Homicide, gangs, drugs-we got it all. And arson, plenty of that, lots of old factories and what-do being sold to the insurance companies.”

He pulled up in front of my building. “The old guy, Contreras, he still living on the ground floor? We going to have to spend an hour with him before we go upstairs?”

“Probably. And there’s no ‘we’ about it, Conrad: I can manage the stairs on my own.”