She sat down on Diane’s sofa and said, “What do you want me to do? If I get a page from the hospital, though, I’m out of here. Just so you know. Today I’m the catheter queen. Who knew? If the nurses can’t thread the needle, they call me. Sometimes I don’t do a single emergency Foley in six months of call. Today I’ve inserted three Foleys in five hours. Must be a turkey thing. Whatever it is, one more and I’m calling Guinness.”
I didn’t want to hear about any dubious urological records. Foley catheters made me squirm.
“You’re going to play a doctor,” I said.
“It’s a bit of a stretch, but I can do that. What kind of doctor am I?”
“A shitty doctor who just screwed up a procedure.”
“Hardly,” she said. “Who’s my patient?”
“You’ll see.”
Her face lit up. She’d started playing along with me in earnest. That was when I knew I had her cooperation. “Am I a urologist? Precisely what did this mystery patient come to me to have examined?”
“You’re a Denver urologist, but you live here in Boulder.”
“Which means I’m a Denver urologist with taste.”
“You screwed up a vasectomy. You cut a nerve or something, made a guy impotent.”
She shook her head at my ignorance. “Sorry, hon, but that’s not exactly how the anatomy works. To make a guy impotent during a vasectomy, I’d have to use a tomahawk instead of a scalpel.” She proceeded to explain the complex physiology of erections and the precise surgical maneuvers involved in completing a vasectomy in much more detail than I ever wanted to know. Erotic it wasn’t.
“Once we get started in there, could you simplify it a bit, Adrienne? This is for a lay audience.”
“Don’t worry, even though your way is pure science fiction, I’ll play along. But you’d better hope there are no doctors in the front row of the theater.”
We rehearsed for a few minutes. I checked my watch. It was fifteen minutes after four o’clock.
I’d told Jim Zebid that I would be handling an emergency prior to our Thanksgiving evening appointment. If he was planning to eavesdrop on the emergency session, he’d be in place outside already. I imagined him sitting in a darkened car on Walnut Street with his receiving unit finely tuned and a pair of good headphones over his ears.
“You feel ready?” I asked Adrienne.
“Just show me the stage.”
“This way, madame. Break a leg.”
Adrienne whispered, “You know this would never happen in real life? Me screwing up a procedure like this?”
“I know. Goes without saying.”
SIXTY-TWO
The rules of nitroglycerin are simple. If one tiny tab under your tongue doesn’t make your chest pain go away in a few minutes, you throw another little white pebble into your mouth. The instructions don’t tell you to pray, but if you’re still caressing that minuscule brown bottle after those first few minutes of center-of-your-world, center-of-your-chest agony, then it’s likely you’ve already made contact with whatever version of God that you consider might be the most influential.
I was sitting, leaning up against Holly’s garage, when I popped the second nitro. As a general rule, standing and nitroglycerin go together about like beer and chocolate. Not too well. That’s why I was sitting.
I started thinking about Simon. That freaked me out.
As a way of distracting myself while I waited for the second nitro to kick in and the pain under my ribs to ease, I refocused on Holly’s house. Artie was at the kitchen sink. I didn’t take him for a roll-up-his-sleeves, get-his-hands-dirty kind of guy.
But no Holly. Still no Holly.
My head was pounding. After the flush and the disorientation, the next side effect of nitro is the headache. An ice-cream brain freeze and a big bass drum. It’s that kind of thing, and it comes on instantly.
Artie walked away from the window. One of Holly’s sisters took his place at the sink.
Holly?
I phoned Carmen.
“Any sign of her yet?”
“Sam, where the hell are you?”
“Behind the house.”
“You don’t sound too good.”
“A little indigestion.”
“How can you have indigestion? You haven’t eaten anything.”
“It was probably that energy bar thing you gave me. My body’s not accustomed to healthy crap like that. Any sign of Holly?”
I heard a car door open, then slam shut. I turned my head and spied the Cherokee, but I could only see the front end from where I was sitting.
“No,” she said. “Nobody’s gone in or out of that house.” Her tone announced that she was pissed off.
I could hear her walking. First the sounds came through the earpiece of the phone, then gradually I could hear her footfalls through my other ear, the one that was uncovered. The steps grew louder, more determined. Finally, Carmen emerged above me. God, she was tall.
“I’m calling an ambulance,” she said.
“No, no. It’s getting better. I swear. The nitro’s working. It is.”
Was it? I couldn’t tell. The pain wasn’t gone. But I could almost breathe without gasping. That had to be a good sign.
I didn’t want to get into another ambulance. Not on Thanksgiving. Not in South Bend.
She squatted beside me, adopting a posture that I knew I couldn’t have managed after a year of dieting and daily yoga sessions.
She touched my face. “You’re clammy.”
“No, I’m Sammy.”
She slapped me. A true little love pat.
“If you die out here after you talk me out of calling an ambulance, I swear I’ll come to your funeral and piss on your grave.”
“I’d love to see the surveillance tape on that.”
She slapped me again.
The pain was easing. It was. The knife was out from below my ribs.
“I’m good,” I said. “Just a little angina. Doc said I might have some angina every once in a while. That’s what the nitro’s for.” The doc hadn’t said that, but it sounded like something a doc might say.
She stared at me as though she didn’t believe a word out of my mouth.
“I have a feeling Holly’s not alone,” I said.
“Don’t change the subject.”
“I’m serious. I think he might be in there. Sterling.”
“Why?” Her solitary word was a simple question, but given its inflection, it was also a statement. The statement was“Don’t be an asshole. Not with me.”
Not now.
I explained about watching the kitchen window and about my phone call to the house.
“Okay, how would he have gotten in?” she asked. Her inflection? I recognized it. It was the one I used to employ with Simon when he was younger and he blamed mishaps around the house on his imaginary friend, Tank.
“Maybe he went in when everybody arrived, you know? He snuck in the back door when the family was at the front. Isn’t that possible?”
“Anything’s possible.”
Carmen was staring at me, not at the house. She thought my sneaking-in-the-back-door scenario was about as likely as Gibbs going to Wal-Mart to buy her winter wardrobe.
“Or Holly might have let him in,” I added.
“What?” she said. The tenor had changed. It was more like: Now you’re saying something interesting. Tell me.
“She likes danger-risk might be a better word. We know that, right? Sexually speaking, Holly Malone likes risk. That was the whole thing with Sterling in the first place.”
Carmen nodded. She completed my thought as though we’d been partnering for years, not hours. “And doing it with an accused murderer while her family is gathering for Thanksgiving…”