John Lutz - Flame

Carver couldn’t argue with that one. The things and people money buys.

“You’re part of this team now,” Wesley said, “whether you like it or not. Best you don’t stray again. You truly realize that?”

“More or less.”

“Gonna be more,” Wesley said.

He abruptly stopped smiling and turned away. Walked back out the door. Carver had been dismissed from the minds of the self-important that way before. Wesley was finished talking to Carver; on to genuinely important matters.

Ogden was standing motionless with his head slightly cocked to the side, cupping right elbow in left palm, touching his chin lightly with two fingers. Made him look a little like Jack Benny. He was staring oddly at Carver.

That was when Carver detected an acrid medicinal scent. Something familiar, yet he was unable to place it.

Until Butcher, from behind, clamped a rough cloth over his mouth. Yanked back on his head so Carver gave an involuntary gasp. Carver recognized in that instant the stench of chloroform. Then Butcher’s other hand grasped the back of his neck and applied hard pressure so Carver’s head might as well have been locked in a vise.

Carver couldn’t breathe. Gasped the dizzying fumes but couldn’t exhale. He panicked and lashed back with his arms, but strength was draining from them and feeling was leaving his hands. Some of the chloroform dripped onto his chest, chilling him through his shirt. He heard Butcher laugh from a great distance. Felt his heart expand and pound against his rib cage. Saw pinpoints of light. Thrashed mindlessly with his arms and legs, thumping them against the floor and the sofa’s arm and back.

Saw red.

Saw black.

Regained consciousness and didn’t know where he was.

Slouched. Cramped. Leaning with his left shoulder against a hard surface.

He opened his eyes and saw gray vastness. Something dreamlike swaying in the corner of his vision. Recognized the something as a palm frond. He realized he was gazing out through a windshield.

What was the deal here?

He tried to move but his muscles were too stiff to respond. His bad leg was extended over to the passenger side of the car and he was half-sitting, half-leaning against the door. He blinked. Peered again through the windshield and saw that the sky was overcast and dim. Low gray ceiling of lead. It couldn’t be much past dawn.

Something, a car or truck, swished past on the nearby road. He swiveled his head slightly to look. Pain! Stiff neck. He was parked far enough off the road, and among some trees, so that the car must be barely visible to passing motorists. And if anyone did happen to notice a parked car with the driver slumped behind the wheel, they’d probably figure Carver was wisely taking a short nap before traveling on.

Another car flashed past, and the whining retreat of its tires on warming pavement pulled Carver closer to full consciousness. The entire left side of his head was throbbing with pain. Nothing a couple of dozen Tylenols wouldn’t help. More cars passed, and off in the distance a dog barked. The kind of frantic yipping a small dog makes, but it brought last night back to Carver in its entirety.

Rather, up to the time he’d been chloroformed.

He tried to scoot his body up straighter. Didn’t work. The pain in his head flared. It was an odd, numbing kind of pain; Butcher must have pressed a nerve at the side of his neck. He rested his palm on the edge of the vinyl seat to push himself back and up. The heel of his hand encountered something sticky and slipped off the vinyl.

And Carver became aware of the smell in the car. Familiar, atavistic. Frightening and sickening.

Blood.

He felt around on the seat. There was quite a bit of the sticky substance. With a bolt of terror, he wondered if Butcher had gone ahead and cut his throat.

What was this? Was he dead? What was this?

Unable to look, clenching his eyes shut, Carver felt slowly and found that his pants were wet and sticky. His shirt. Oh, God! He felt the same disgusting stickiness on his stomach and chest, gradually and tentatively working his hand upward.

He finally groped at his throat. Felt more coagulating blood. Slid his fingertips through blood.

His blood.

But beneath the slime of it his flesh felt smooth and unbroken. He almost shouted with relief.

Then he remembered his peculiar throbbing headache.

Darted his hand to his left ear. Felt a fierce burning and almost fainted with pain and rage as he yanked the hand away.

Was afraid to touch again where his earlobe had been.

The bleeding, profuse at first, wasn’t bad now as long as he kept a wad of Kleenex pressed to his ear.

In Pompano Beach he found a medical clinic and walked into the emergency room.

He didn’t attract undue attention there, alongside a twelve-year-old boy who’d had both legs broken when a car struck him on his bike, and a middle-aged man, balder than Carver, who’d suffered a heart attack. Carver heard somebody say the heart-attack victim was the driver of the car that had struck the kid. So what was an earlobe more or less?

Carver sat for a while in a red plastic chair and smelled Pine-Sol and watched white-coated professionals bustle in and out through wide swinging doors.

There were five other people in the waiting room, two men and three women. Relatives and friends of patients. They sat looking worried, or paced looking worried, or leafed through tattered old Newsweek s looking worried.

Finally a young redheaded woman he assumed was a nurse ushered him into a small green room where he was told to sit on top of a vinyl-padded table that had what looked like butcher paper spread over it. She said Emergency was busy but someone would get to him as soon as possible. As she was leaving she knocked his cane over from where he’d leaned it against the table. She scooped it up as it was still rattling on the tile floor, apologized, handed it to him, and hurried out. He sat quietly. Felt the white paper on the table and found that it was cool. The room was cool.

After a while an attractive young doctor who looked like an Indian woman who should have a jewel pasted on her forehead came into the room. She examined his ear and shook her head. Said, “That is a very bad cut. Almost the entire lobe of the ear is missing.”

“An accident,” Carver said.

“Accident?” She didn’t believe him.

He smiled at her. She smiled back. Then she shrugged elegantly. He had a feeling she did everything with a kind of understated elegance. “If you insist,” she said, “an accident and not a knife wound.” She was busy with patients hurt more seriously and didn’t have time to argue.

She dabbed something on the ear, then injected local anesthetic and stitched the lobe. There was some pain, but she had a very gentle and soothing touch. A talent beyond medicine.

“There was hardly enough left to suture,” she told him, standing back and staring at her handiwork.

He said, “When it heals, will I be able to play the piano?”

She merely looked at him somberly. Said, “Medicine is practiced here, not comedy.”

She quickly and skillfully covered the lobe, or what was left of it, with a pad of medicated gauze, laying on lots of white adhesive tape. “You need to be careful and not put strain on the stitches. Try to sleep on your back or right side.”

He said, “If I’m asleep, it’ll be difficult to decide which side to lie on.”

She said, “I see you have Blue Cross. There’ll be some forms for you to fill out. And the girl at the desk will give you a prescription for pain pills. Follow the directions on the label. Have a good day.”

Carver thought it was already too late for that.