Michael Palmer - The fifth vial

" 'Lo?"

"Hi, it's me."

"Yeah?"

"I was just calling to see how you guys were doing?"

"We're doin' fine. Jes fine."

That was already plenty of words for her to tell that Nick had a couple under his belt, although he wasn't in the bag. His speech was always the first to go. Asking for confirmation that he was drinking, though, was the same as asking him to hang up on her.

"Think I could just say good night to Teddy?"

"He's watching cartoons with Bern. I don't want to bother him unless you have somethin' important to say."

"No, not really. I…I just wanted to say good night."

"I'll tell him you called."

"Do that, Nick, okay?"

"See you tomorrow."

"Yeah…thanks."

Helpless, Sandy set her cell phone down. Almost instantly, it began ringing.

"Sandy, hi, it's Rudy."

Damn, she thought. First Nick won't let me talk to my boy, and now I'm about to get blown off.

"Well, hi, yourself," she said. "I just got out of work. Are we still on?"

"Been looking forward to seeing you all day."

At least something was going right.

"That's sweet of you to say. Well, I been lookin' forward to seein' you, too, Rudy Brooks."

"Just one little change. I'm still here at the mall site with one of the contractors — Greg Lumpert. I think you know him."

"I know who he is, but we're not really personally acquainted." "Well, me an Lumpert got some more business we need to finish. Any chance you could stop by here for a few minutes? We could actually use your opinion about some things. The site's right on the way to the Green Lantern, and just a couple a hunnert yards off the Brazelton Highway.

"I…guess so, sure," Sandy said, deciding that Greg Lumpert had no reason to start rumors about her, and grateful that her date with Rudy was still on.

Rudy described the turnoff in some detail, although he needn't have bothered. Sandy knew almost exactly where it was.

"I'll be there in less than ten minutes," she said.

"Terrific. See you soon by the light of the moon."

The turnoff to the mall site was not more than a mile from the Brazelton line in a wooded area that was still largely undeveloped, but had been the subject of much speculation over the past few years. Sandy found it exciting — even titillating — to be in on the ground floor of a project that was going to change the physical and economic landscape of the town she knew so well.

She turned off the highway onto a stony dirt road and slowed way down to keep from bottoming out or sending a stone up through the muffler. Her high beams jounced up and down off the forest ahead. Just as she began to think she was too far off the highway and might have actually taken the wrong turn, the woods fell away into a good-sized clearing that looked as if some sand and gravel operation might have done some excavating there. Parked off to one side was a Ford Bronco, with Rudy standing there alone, leaning against the hood. Just beyond the Bronco, close to the trees, stood a massive mobile home. Lights from inside the RV shone through the huge front windows.

Rudy waved her over. He was wearing tight-fitting jeans, tooled cow boy boots, and a colorful long-sleeved sport shirt. Just a fine looking man, Sandy thought.

"Hi," she said.

"You look great."

"Thanks, where's Greg Lumpert?"

"Oh, his wife called. Some sort of problem at home. We were just about done, anyhow, so I told him to go ahead."

"You sure it was his wife? I was pretty certain I heard she died a few years ago."

"I thought that's what he said," Rudy replied, "but I coulda misheard. I had other things on my mind."

He nudged Sandy's arm for emphasis, and gave her a gunslinger smile. From his two visits to the Big Bend, she knew he was well built, but tonight he seemed even bigger and stronger than she had pictured.

"So, what's with the bus?"

"Callin' that just a bus is a little like callin' Jessica Simpson just a girl."

Sandy decided against mentioning that she couldn't stand Jessica Simpson.

"Does it belong to your company?" she asked instead.

"It's like my home away from home when we're doin' site work. Wanna peek inside?"

Suddenly, inexplicably, Sandy felt uneasy.

"Some other time, maybe. It's like, I don't know, it's like that's your hotel room."

"I don't see it that way," Rudy said, "but suit yourself."

Sandy looked around at the absolute blackness of the forest. The traffic noises from the highway were barely audible.

"Maybe we should get going to the club," she said nervously. "I hear the band they have playing there is great."

"What's the rush?" Rudy asked, not moving from his spot by the truck.

"Rudy, please, let's go. This is starting to creep me out."

"Trust me, darlin', there's nothing to be creeped out about."

She stood just a few feet away and watched in confusion and mounting fear as he took a handkerchief from his pocket, folded it neatly on the hood of the Bronco, then doused it thoroughly with something poured from a metal flask.

Sandy gauged the distance to the Mustang. It wasn't a good bet that she could make it. Then the sickly sweet odor of chloroform reached her. At that exact moment, the door to the massive RV opened, and a young woman, thin, shapely, and blond, stepped out.

"Hey, Sandy," she called out cheerily, "come on over and let us give you a tour of this thing."

Reflexively, Sandy swung around toward the voice. In that single second, any chance she had to resist vanished. Rudy closed the distance between them with two quick steps and clamped the chloroform-soaked rag across her mouth and nose so tightly that she could not even struggle. In just moments, the scene around her began to swirl, then dim. Terror exploded through her mind, but was immediately replaced by a single image, a single word. Teddy. The vision of her boy was the last thing Sandy saw before darkness engulfed her.

Fifteen minutes later, the magnificent Winnebago Adventurer swung left onto the Brazelton Highway. It was followed not too closely by a bright red Mustang convertible. Eighteen miles down the highway, the RV pulled into a rest area while the Mustang bounced down a two-mile-long dirt road that ended at Redstone Quarry — a small lake that was reputed by the locals to be bottomless. The drop from the cliff's edge to the water was fifteen feet. The empty Mustang had vanished into the blackness before it hit the surface.

No one, except the man who had called himself Rudy Brooks, heard the splash.

Natalie, you're supposed to be starting back on your surgical rotation next week."

Dean Goldenberg held up the stack of paperwork that had been generated in order to get her back on track at school.

"I know."

"And you say that physically you think you can handle such a trip?"

"From the moment I finished making all those calls to Brazil, I've been spending three hours a day or more in rehab. My pulmonary function studies have improved nearly twenty-five percent since the first time they were measured after the fire. I'm even able to jog."

"But now you want to take more time off."

"I feel that I have to."

Goldenberg's office looked the same as when Natalie had been suspended from school, except that everything had changed. The people there this time, in addition to Natalie and the dean, were Doug Berenger and Terry Millwood. Veronica had offered to come along for moral support, but Natalie saw no reason for her to take time from her obstetrics rotation.

After her initial flurry of calls to various departments at Santa Teresa Hospital, Natalie had spoken to several police stations around the city of Rio. To the best that she could tell, there was a law requiring hospitals to report all gunshot wounds, and no such report had been filed on her, nor did the police themselves have a record of responding to her being shot.