Marcia Talley - Dead Man Dancing

‘It doesn’t matter, Ruth. It’s only money.’

While Hutch tried to calm Ruth down, I walked around to the other side of the car and dialed 9-1-1.

‘9-1-1. What is your emergency?’

‘There’s been a mugging,’ I told the operator. ‘We need police and an ambulance.’ I gave the woman our address, then went back to see about my sister.

‘Hand me her scarf,’ I told Hutch.

I was afraid to touch Ruth’s wound, but I used her scarf as a makeshift tourniquet, wrapped it as tightly as I dared around her thigh and twisted it tight, hoping to stop the flow of blood that continued to ooze from her calf and on to the pavement. ‘How did you break your leg,’ I asked as I worked. ‘Did you fall? Did he push you down?’

‘He whacked me with a baseball bat.’

‘Oh, love, why didn’t you just let him have the stupid purse?’ Hutch said desperately.

‘No way that motherfucker was going to get my purse,’ Ruth said.

‘I suppose you told him that.’

‘Uh huh.’

Hutch rolled his eyes. ‘Why didn’t you call me on your cell phone?’

‘He smashed that, too.’ Ruth raised an arm, then let it drop to the pavement. ‘It’s around here somewhere.’

‘I see it,’ I said. ‘It’s under the next car.’

And it was, if you could call a scattering of plastic shards, circuit boards, SIM cards and batteries a cell phone. ‘The good news is, I think you’ll be getting that iPhone you wanted for Christmas.’

In spite of everything, Ruth managed a weak smile. ‘I’m cold,’ she said after a few seconds.

‘Don’t worry. The ambulance is on the way,’ I said, willing it to hurry.

Hutch had already pulled the flaps of Ruth’s jacket together and buttoned them up to her neck, but he cradled her more closely to the warmth of his chest. She gazed into his face, and burst into tears. ‘Oh, Hutch, I’m so sorry. We won’t be able to audition for the TV show, will we?’

Hutch lowered his cheek to her cheek and stroked her wet and matted hair. ‘Shhhhh. It doesn’t matter, sweetheart. The only thing that matters to me is you.’

Ruth’s face was white as the fresh snow that covered the snow banks behind her, and she started to sob, gasping uncontrollably. ‘She’s hyperventilating, Hutch,’ I said as calmly as I could. ‘She may be going into shock. Lower her head, and we’ll need to keep her warm.’

‘Shit. Why did we leave our coats inside?’ Hutch raised up on one hip, eased a hand into his pocket and withdrew a fist full of car keys. ‘There’s a football blanket in the back seat of my Beemer.’

When I returned with the blanket, Hutch helped me wrap it tightly around my sister. She shuddered, air hissed raggedly in and out between her clenched teeth as we waited together for the welcoming wail of an approaching siren.

Feeling like fifth wheels, Hutch and I followed the ambulance in his car, running traffic lights willy-nilly until I expected the cop who was riding in the ambulance with Ruth to pop out the back doors, waving his ticket book.

Hutch made a right turn against the light on to West Street, then veered immediately left on Admiral Drive, following the old back road to the hospital. He took the left at Jennifer Road on two wheels, ran a red light at the firehouse, nearly knocked into a pedestrian in the cross-walk of the County Detention Center, then ran another red light before turning off on to Medical Drive.

‘Drive around to the ER,’ I ordered. ‘You get out there, and I’ll take the car into the parking garage.’

The ambulance was offloading Ruth on a stretcher when we pulled up under the ‘Emergency’ portico. An oxygen mask covered her nose and mouth, and an IV dripped clear fluid into a vein in her arm. Poor Ruth! I hurried around to the driver’s door and gave Hutch a reassuring pat on the cheek as he climbed out of the driver’s seat and hurried after the stretcher. ‘Stay with her,’ I called as I eased behind the wheel. ‘I’ll be back as soon as I can.’

It took forever, of course, to find a parking space. I scoured the garage, spiraling upward ever upward until I managed to squeeze Hutch’s BMW 750 sedan into a space on the roof clearly designed for a compact. Once I’d wormed my way out of the narrow space between the BMW and the SUV next door, I punched the lock button on the keyless fob, and made a mad dash for the elevator, which took me down eight floors and spit me out into the main lobby. I turned right, straight-armed the swinging door, rushed past the visitors’ desk – I knew my way around Anne Arundel Medical Center so well I could draw a map from memory – and hustled down the long hallway that led to the ER waiting room. When I got there, Hutch was standing at the reception desk, filling out a form.

‘They’ve taken her to X-ray,’ he told me. ‘The policeman is with her.’

When I next saw my sister, she was in a treatment cubicle, half-sitting/half-lying on a gurney, with a blue surgical dressing draped lightly over her leg. Someone had stuffed her clothing, including the torn and bloody tights, in a plastic bag and stuck it on a shelf underneath the gurney. There was no sign of the policeman.

‘It wasn’t bone,’ Hutch informed me, relief written all over his face. I knew he was referring to the object we’d seen sticking out of Ruth’s leg. ‘It was a fragment of wood from the bat. They’ve cleaned out the wound, and stitched it up.’

‘How many stitches?’ asked Ruth, sounding competitive and more like her usual self.

‘Only three,’ her fiancé teased, ‘so don’t expect any sympathy from me.’ Hutch turned to face me. ‘But her tibia is definitely broken, Hannah. A clean break, thank goodness. They’re going to start her on antibiotics, pump some fluids into her, and keep her overnight for observation. They’ll set the bone in the morning.’

‘Tibia,’ I said, scrambling to remember the litany of bones I’d had to memorize for some long-ago zoology class at Oberlin College. ‘That’s the shin, isn’t it?’

‘That’s correct.’ A nurse wearing white pants and a colorful surgical top decorated with teddy bears stuck her head into the room. ‘We’ll be admitting you shortly, Mrs Gannon, so don’t go anywhere, OK?’

Ruth smiled. ‘As if.’

‘The policeman told me to tell you he’ll be right back,’ the nurse said, and then she disappeared as mysteriously as she had arrived.

Thinking about the policeman, I asked, ‘What were you able to tell him, Ruth?’

Ruth rested her head against the pillow and sighed. ‘Not much. He seemed to think that the guy followed me from the store, that he knew I had the receipts with me. But, I don’t think so. The creep came out of the parking lot of the Rapture Church.’

‘Did you hear anything? A getaway car starting up, for example, or a motorcycle?’

As tired as she was, Ruth still managed to follow my train of thought: the Harley-Davidson motorcycle dealership was next door to J & K. ‘Harleys are popular with badass dudes in their 50s and 60s,’ she said. ‘This guy didn’t look the type. Black, maybe sixteen or seventeen. I doubt he could afford a Kawasaki, let alone a Harley.’

‘What’d he look like?’

My sister shrugged. ‘Like any other African-American teenager on America’s Most Wanted .’ She held up an index finger. ‘But when they find him, he’ll have an ugly scratch on his neck.’ She examined her fingernail carefully for a moment. ‘Wait a minute! Can’t they get some DNA from under this?’

‘Maybe they’ll take a scraping,’ I suggested, ‘but I doubt the police will place a high priority on DNA analysis for a simple robbery and assault. It’d be expensive, and even then it’d take months for the results to come back.’ I sidled up to the gurney and patted her good leg. ‘Not likely a petty crook will be in the CODIS database anyway.’