SIXTY-ONE
Tayisha was finished in five minutes.
She joined me where I was waiting for her in Diane’s office.
“Don’t be looking like your hemorrhoids are acting up,” she said. “I won’t charge you the whole thing. Tell you what, we’ll make it… we’ll make it two-fifty. How’s that?”
For five minutes?I should have been grateful. Tayisha had cut her original price in half. It still seemed like a lot of money for five minutes of anything.
I started unpeeling bills. “I only have twenties. You know, the cash machine.”
“We’ll make it two-sixty, then. That’ll work.”
I finished counting to thirteen and held out a thick stack of bills. She snapped them from my hand, folded them once, and stuffed the wad into the back pocket of her jeans.
“The thing is going to work? You’re sure?” Any enterprise that required me to turn over a large quantity of cash in total secrecy tended to leave me feeling a little bit anxious.
“I tested it; it’s all good.” She eyed me the way people eye a friend after he insists he can drive just fine after a night out drinking. “You know what you’re doing, right? You’re not planning something stupid?”
I shrugged.
“Figures. I’ll be back next week to sweep the rest of your building. Just save the equipment for me. Don’t rough it up; it’s fine stuff.”
“Sure,” I said. “Thanks. I appreciate your doing this on Thanksgiving.”
She patted the back pocket on her jeans. “That’s a car payment. It’s a pleasure doing business with you.”
Diane’s office, like mine, has a solitary French door leading out to the backyard. That’s the way Tayisha left the building.
Five minutes later it was also the way that Adrienne arrived.
Adrienne was my neighbor, she was Sam’s urologist, and she was, most important, my friend. I’d chosen her to assist me that night for two reasons. One, she was a conspirator by character. Her life as a respectable, and respected, physician was a cover for her true calling as an anarchist. Second, she was on call for Thanksgiving anyway and had spent a good chunk of the day at Community Hospital, which was only ten or so blocks away. Since I’d already fed her son, I knew I wouldn’t be pulling her away from a holiday dinner with him.
She was dressed as though she’d awakened in Boulder that morning and discovered the whole town had been moved to the Arctic. Scarf, hat, gloves. A down parka that made her look like the Michelin Man’s little sister.
“This sort of thing doesn’t happen to normal people, you know.”
That was Adrienne’s version of hello.
“I never claimed to be normal people.”
“A bug? Somebody planted a bug in your office?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Do you know who?”
“I do. A lawyer.”
She perked right up. “A lawyer? We’re trapping a lawyer? Hell, I’ll get naked with you for that.”
“That won’t be necessary, Adrienne.” She would have. I had no doubt. I was more curious about the associative stream that led her to make the offer than I was about the prospect of seeing herau naturel.
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.