John Gilstrap - At all costs

As she demonstrated, he thought he could hear a distant ding out in the nurses’ station. He tried it once, and it worked, but between the restraints and the IV crap dangling from his arm, it wasn’t easy.

As always, Jan interpreted his look correctly. “Maybe later this afternoon we’ll lose the restraints, okay? For right now, though, I think it’s the safest way to go.”

He nodded, but his face showed his disappointment.

She leaned in close and said in her most conspiratorial whisper, “Hospitals suck.”

That brought a smile, despite the intrusion of the tube. The buttons along the top of the controller were marked “Television,” and he tapped them with his finger.

Her expression darkened, and she broke eye contact. “Um, in your current condition, the doctor said you can’t have any television.”

Right away, he knew she was lying. Well, okay, fibbing. He liked her too much to think she’d lie.

“Tell you what, though,” she added quickly, clearly announcing the birth of a new idea. “I’m going off duty soon, but I’ll be back tonight at six. How about I bring in a VCR and a bunch of tapes so you don’t get too bored?”

He nodded again, but without much enthusiasm. Too late for that, he thought. It wasn’t possible for time to crawl by any more slowly. I just hope it’s not a lot of little-kid Disney stuff.

She patted his hand and left. That was an hour ago, probably, and nothing much had happened since.

The sound of sudden activity startled him. Normally a quiet, laid-back place, the nurses’ station exploded with activity. Through the window to his right, he saw everybody launching from their seats, tipping over chairs and coffee cups as they hurried off, out of his field of view. They looked scared, too, like maybe there was a fire or something. He tried to sit up to follow the action, but they were gone.

He lay back onto his sheets to begin the task of counting ceiling tiles when he saw a doctor peer in at him through the window. Yet another new face.

Gee, I wonder what he’s going to ask me?

The doctor moved on, and a few seconds later Travis could hear him talking to somebody outside his door. Finally, he entered and closed the door behind him. “Hello, Travis,” he said.

He wore the tie and the lab coat of several doctors he’d already seen, but this guy looked different somehow. He made Travis feel uneasy. Maybe it was the way he smiled. The lips pulled back the way they were supposed to, but there was something missing. Something important.

This guy also seemed like he had all the time in the world. Where everybody else in the hospital always seemed like they were trying to do a half hour’s work in ten minutes, this doctor moved like he was on his lunch break. And why on earth was he putting on surgical gloves? Travis watched as he twisted the miniblinds shut.

“Just want us to have a little privacy,” he said.

Now, that was really weird. So far as Travis could tell, nobody in the hospital gave a rat’s ass about privacy. So many people had seen him naked by now, it almost didn’t embarrass him anymore. So what was this guy up to? Whatever it was, it made him feel nervous as hell.

Who are you?

The doctor turned to him after darkening the room. “I talked to your mother last night…”

George Sparks went straight to St. Luke’s Hospital and was waiting in the emergency room when Carolyn’s ambulance arrived at the double doors. Little Rock was a violent town for its size, and nothing about this case caused anyone to get particularly excited. From all indications, in fact, as relayed via radio from the ambulance, this one was borderline inconsequential. An attempted suicide. Big deal.

Clearly, things had changed between the last radio transmission and the moment the gut bucket backed into its designated spot. The crew seemed agitated, hurried, as the doors flew open, and they struggled clumsily with the cot. The E.R. doc, a Generation Xer named Oscar LeGrand, saw the flurry of activity through the windows and left his current patient in midsuture to see what was going on. Sparks followed.

As the doors opened, the pulse of air brought a rush of profanities and cries for help from the patient, who obviously had found her way back to full consciousness.

“He tried to kill me!” she shouted. “And he’s going to kill my son, goddammit!”

The paramedics exchanged rolled eyes and knowing smirks. This was a live one, all right. “Okay, Carolyn,” one of them said. “We hear you, honey, but just relax, okay? I don’t see a single murderer out here.”

Dr. LeGrand met them halfway. “I thought she was unconscious.” He reached casually to Carolyn’s handcuffed wrist to take a pulse.

“Well, she was until about a minute ago,” the older of the two paramedics said. “Then she just came out of it. Bam.” He snapped his fingers. “Just like that. Screaming all sorts of paranoid shit about hit men and murder plots.”

LeGrand raised an eyebrow. “How about little green men? She say anything about those?”

Everyone laughed.

When a uniformed Little Rock cop showed up in his cruiser to assume custody of the prisoner, Sparks fell back a little. He hated this medical shit, anyway, and if someone else could do the fighting while they transferred her from the ambulance cot to the gurney, that would be just fine with him. This was Irene’s case, anyway. Once she arrived, he was history. Now, he just hoped that Carolyn wouldn’t say anything worthy of paperwork.

Watching the wrestling match, he noted the strength the woman showed, kicking and yelling. She even tried to bite the cop once, at which point Sparks gained a lot of respect for the man for not coldcocking her outright. Could be on drugs? he thought. He’d heard some caches of PCP had been discovered recently among the prisoners at the lockup.

All at once, Carolyn’s eyes cleared, and she settled down, zeroing in on the cop’s badge. “Oh, my God,” she said, her voice giddy with relief. “You’re a cop! Oh, thank God. You’ve got to listen to me! You’ve got to help me.”

The uniformed officer seemed uncomfortable with the sudden attention, and he smiled sheepishly to the others around him.

“Looks like love to me, Officer,” LeGrand joked.

Carolyn shot a hateful glare at the physician and focused in again on the cop. “Please listen to me!” she pleaded. “No one will listen to me!”

“I’m right here, ma’am,” the cop said, shrugging. “Say what you need to say.”

“Let’s try five milligrams of Valium,” LeGrand said to a nurse. “Before she strokes out on us.” The nurse went to work preparing the shot.

“God, no! Don’t!” Carolyn yelled at the doctor. Then she turned quickly back to the cop. “A man came to my jail cell last night. I know this sounds crazy, but it’s true, I swear to God. He said if I wasn’t dead by morning, he’d kill my little boy. He was dressed as an FBI agent, and he said he’d kill Travis.”

The cop scowled. “Isn’t your son upstairs here? We got a guy assigned to his room.”

LeGrand accepted the syringe from a nurse and inserted the needle into an injection port in the IV line. “Everything’s going to be fine, Carolyn,” he said.

She pleaded again, “No, don’t do that! He’ll… kill… Please…”

The medical personnel nodded approvingly as the patient lost consciousness. Meanwhile, the uniformed cop looked back to Sparks, who arched his eyebrows. “What do you think?”

“Well, the FBI part is bullshit,” Sparks said quickly. “So’s the rest of it, I’m sure. But she certainly seems convinced.”

The uniform looked over at Carolyn and then back to Sparks. “Shit, I can’t leave her,” he said. “I should get word to the man on the kid’s door. I mean, what the hell?”