John Saul - Black Lightning

The fear that had begun to abate when he’d decided that he hadn’t had a heart attack suddenly came flooding back. Going to the dresser, he found his wallet where he’d left it last night, and pulled out the card with Gordon Farber’s phone number on it. Sitting on the edge of the bed, he punched the number into the phone, his fingers now trembling so badly he didn’t get the number right until the third try. “This is Glen Jeffers,” he said when someone finally answered in the heart specialist’s office. “I know I’m not due until tomorrow, but I need to come in today. In fact, I need to come in right now.”

“Well, whatever happened, you’re all right now.”

It was almost an hour later, and Glen wasn’t certain whether or not the words Gordy Farber had just uttered were good news or bad. His pulse had been taken, his blood pressure measured, and an electrocardiogram had been administered. And as each test showed normal results, his fear had eased a little more. Except that he still didn’t know what had caused him to wind up unconscious on the bathroom floor. “Then what happened?” he asked. “Did I faint, or did someone knock me out?”

“Were there any signs of someone being in the house?” Farber countered.

Glen felt himself flush. “I didn’t really look. It seemed more important to get down here.”

“Well, you didn’t get hit over the head,” the doctor assured him. “If you had, there’d be swelling, contusions, probably even concussion.”

“So I just passed out?”

“I didn’t say that. Someone who knows what he’s doing can knock you out in a matter of a second or two, just by pressing the right nerves. But you said you didn’t see anyone.”

“Everything was so steamed over, I could barely see myself.”

“Did you hear the door open?”

Glen shook his head. “But it wasn’t even all the way closed.”

Farber shrugged. “Well, if you want my opinion, I’d say you just passed out. Which, frankly, doesn’t really surprise me all that much. You’ve been in bed for two weeks, you’re still recovering from a major heart incident, and you were in a very hot shower. Add it all together, and what happened isn’t all that surprising.”

“But five hours?” Glen pressed.

Farber cocked his head. “You want me to readmit you to the hospital?” he asked. “If you’re really that worried, I can order up some more tests.”

“But you just said I was okay, didn’t you?”

“An opinion you seem disinclined to accept,” Farber observed. “I think you just fainted from overheating yourself in the shower, had a good nap, and woke up on the floor. You were right to call, and right to come in, and I’m now satisfied that whatever happened, it wasn’t serious. All I’m saying now is that if you’re really worried, I can put you back in the hospital for a few more days.”

Glen remembered the room filled with equipment, the tasteless food, and the nurses who had come and gone at all hours, taking his temperature and giving him pills. Suddenly, sleeping on the bathroom floor for a few hours didn’t seem all that bad. “Forget it,” he said. “If you say I’m okay, that’s good enough for me.” A few minutes later though, as he was leaving the doctor’s office, he had another thought. “Do me a favor, Gordy,” he said. “Let’s just keep this between us, okay? I mean, this is just the kind of thing that would scare the hell out of Anne, and if nothing’s wrong, what’s the sense, right?”

“No problem,” Gordy Farber replied. “Now get out of here and stop worrying. Go do something totally useless.”

“Like what?” Glen asked, wondering just what a heart specialist’s idea of “something useless” might be.

Farber thought a second, then: “Go over to Broadway Market, get a magazine at the kiosk and a decaf latte at one of the stands. Then sit, read, and watch the passing parade. I’ll see you in a couple of days.”

Dismissed from the doctor’s office, Glen left the Group Health complex, got into his car, and was about to start back up Sixteenth toward home when he changed his mind.

Why not just follow his doctor’s orders? Abandoning the idea of going right home, he turned left on Thomas and headed toward Broadway and the big brick building that housed the market.

For years the structure had contained only an enormous Fred Meyer’s store, with food at one end and a cavernous variety and pharmacy section at the other. It had squatted quietly on its block of Broadway for decades, serving the equally quiet middle-class citizens who had lived on Capitol Hill in the middle of the century. But through the second half of the century, a change came over Capitol Hill. Its middle-class neighborhoods slid into a downward spiral, and as families moved across the lake to Bellevue, the big old houses began to get chopped up into smaller and smaller apartments. And as the neighborhood slid downhill, so also did the shopping district along Broadway, until, by the early seventies, most of it was fairly well decimated. But then, inevitably, change came. First the gay population discovered the cheap rents and bargain houses to be found on Capitol Hill, and the process of gentrification began. Then, as the suburbs east of Lake Washington became more crowded and less appealing, the children of the families who had fled eastward twenty years earlier began migrating back toward the city. As the neighborhood came back to life, so did Broadway, evolving from a strip of dying shops whose customers consisted primarily of elderly women pulling shopping carts, into an eclectic collection of small restaurants and boutiques, each of them catering to one or another of the new groups who now strolled the street. And Fred Meyer, seeing the graffiti on the wall, changed, too. Moving the pharmacy into a trailer in the parking lot, they gutted their building, kept the old facade, and rebuilt the interior into a vaguely European-feeling shopping structure, complete with a multiplex theater upstairs, a huge subterranean garage, and a few apartments for those who could never live quite close enough to the action. Resigning the food business, Fred Meyer concentrated on the variety store and drug operations, and the rest of the space was rented out to all the entrepreneurial types who had a business dream and enough cash to rent one of the carts with which the main floor of the new building was lined.

Some grew.

Some failed.

Some simply stagnated, their owners scratching out a living selling everything from crystals to condoms. Inevitably, the Broadway Market became the center of the suddenly bustling neighborhood.

And that afternoon, as Glen wandered from shop to shop and finally settled down to watch the wildly diverse crowd that swirled and eddied around him, he found himself far more fascinated by it all than he would have thought possible.

So fascinated, indeed, that when he finally got home and turned on the television, the local news was just beginning.

Could he really have sat at the market for almost two hours?

It hadn’t seemed like more than an hour.

In fact, it had seemed like even less.

Switching the television off, Glen started up the stairs. Though he’d already slept five extra hours that day, he suddenly felt the need for a nap.

Or at least an escape from the confusion in his mind.

Odds and ends.

It had been an afternoon of odds and ends, just the sort of afternoon Anne Jeffers hated. First, she realized that the most important question she’d intended to ask Mark Blakemoor at lunch had completely slipped her mind when she realized that the detective’s emotions toward her were no longer based purely on business. Then, she wasted twenty minutes vacillating over what message he might get if she called him so soon after their meeting. Finally, she decided to put it off for a while, and went on to other things.