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?”
George agreed. What the hell, exactly. He checked his watch and sighed. “Okay, tell you what. You stay here and watch Sleeping Beauty, and I’ll go upstairs and tell your buddy.”
“If you wouldn’t mind, I’d sure appreciate it.”
“No problem.”
Travis heard his heart skip a beat on the monitor as the doctor mentioned his mother’s name. Something was terribly wrong. He could tell, just from the way the man spoke.
“She was really sad, kid. Worried as all get-out about you. She’s in jail, you know.”
No, he didn’t know! The heart monitor was beeping like crazy now, and Travis knew instinctively that this guy was trouble, with a capital T. He wished Jan were here with him. Or even another doctor. Any adult would do, just to keep him from being alone with this guy. The way he talked, the dead look in his eyes. In an instant, Travis knew that this was one of those guys whose cars he was never supposed to get into when he was a little kid.
His fingers touched the call button. If you need anything…
Wiggins caught the movement and quickly pulled the controller out of the boy’s reach. “Whoa, buddy! You’re not gonna go tattling on me, are you?” He laughed.
Travis’s eyes were wide, wild. They darted to the window for help, but all he saw was a wall of beige plastic.
“No, that’s right, Travis,” the doctor said, reading his thoughts. “It’s just you and me. Everybody else is too busy to help you.” He dropped his voice to a whisper. “Seems a little kid’s heart stopped down the hall a ways. Terrible, terrible thing. Somebody pumped a whole shitload of potassium chloride into her IV line and stopped her heart dead like a slab of hamburger.” To make his point, Wiggins pulled a capped syringe out of his lab coat pocket and dropped it in the trash can at the foot of the bed. “They tell me this shit stops a heart forever.”
Travis tried to yell, tried to struggle against the restraints, but nothing would work. This guy was crazy! This guy was a murderer!
“You just keep floppin’, boy. You look like a fish in a boat.” He chuckled one more time, then struck out with a hand to squeeze the sides of Travis’s face. The force of his grip sent darts of pain through the boy’s jaw as his teeth battled with the hard plastic of the ET tube. “You just settle down now,” Wiggins commanded. “Or I’ll give you more of the same.” A second syringe appeared.
Oh, shit! Oh, God! Travis froze, his eyes darting from the needle to his attacker’s face and back again. He pleaded silently for mercy but got only an icy glare in return. The blood in his mouth tasted hot against the chalky dryness of his tongue.
Wiggins watched the terror build in the boy’s face and smiled contentedly. “Yeah, that’s right, kid. You show some respect.” After holding his grip for a few seconds more, he turned his attention to Travis’s respirator. Dropping the full syringe back into the pocket of his lab coat, Wiggins traced the connections with his finger, petting the tubes lightly as he followed them from the spot where they left the bellows, all the way up to the connection at the boy’s mouth.
He paused, and his voice softened. “Before we go on, I just wanted you to know that none of this had to happen. I told your mother specifically what she had to do to keep me from hurting you, but she just wouldn’t listen.” He made a clicking sound with his tongue as he shook his head sadly. “Does it hurt when you breathe, boy?”