He pointed to the side of the one-story brick building. We put our coffee cups in the holders by the dashboard, got out and closed the doors quietly. I didn’t lock them. We might want to or have to get out of here quickly.
I followed Ames into the darkness at the side of the building. The sky was clear but there wasn’t much of a moon, not enough light to keep me from tripping over a bush and pitching forward, losing my hat.
Ames helped me up.
“Lost my cap,” I whispered, squinting around my feet.
“Here,” whispered Ames, handing it to me.
A light came on in the window three feet from us. We pressed our backs against the wall and inched away. We stopped when we heard the window begin to open.
A tiny woman, white bushy hair, glasses on the end of her nose, leaned out, pulled her robe around her and said, “Jerry Lee?”
She didn’t look in our direction, just squinted toward the trees straight ahead of her.
“Is that you, Jerry Lee?”
Something shuffled in the grass by the trees. Whoever or whatever it was came slowly toward the window. When the light from the window hit the gator, which was a good or bad seven feet long, it turned its head up toward the woman, mouth open. Its eyes were a glassy white.
Ames moved slightly at my side. I turned my eyes but not my head and made out a gun in his hand. The gator grunted and turned its head toward us.
“Jerry Lee, be quiet,” the old woman whispered.
She threw something out the window into the gator’s open mouth. The gator made a gulping sound, took a few steps forward and opened its mouth even wider. The old woman threw something else out the window. Jerry Lee the gator snatched it from the air.
“Jerry Lee,” she whispered. “You’ve got to be quiet. You know I’m not supposed to… Someone’s in the hall.”
She closed the window and a few seconds later the light went out. I could only make out the vague shape of Jerry Lee and hoped his appetite had been satisfied.
There was a click from the gun in Ames’s hand as the gator turned its head in our direction and took a short step toward us.
Ames moved past me, took four steps and stood in front of the gator, gun in hand.
“Get out of here,” Ames whispered, aiming his gun directly down at Jerry Lee’s left eye.
The gator grunted. Ames brought his booted right foot down on Jerry Lee’s snout and took a step back, gun steady in his hand.
“Your move,” Ames said calmly to the gator.
The gator shook its head back and forth, trying to decide what to do. Then it turned right and scuttled across the long grass into the darkness between the trees. There was a splash in the darkness.
Ames walked back to me, tucking the gun into his belt under his denim jacket.
“Let’s go,” he said.
I followed him without tripping to the fourth window, where he stopped and reached up. He pushed the window up and whispered, “It’s empty. Least it was this afternoon, when I unlocked the window.”
Ames boosted himself up and went through the window headfirst. He made almost no noise. When he was in, he reached back to help me up. I was reasonably quiet.
Ames turned on his flashlight. There was nothing in the room but a bed with a rolled-up mattress, a wooden night table and a wooden chest of drawers with nothing on top of it. There were no pictures on the walls.
Ames motioned to me and turned off his flashlight. We went to the door. He listened, ear to the door, for a few seconds and then turned the knob. He opened the door slowly. The lights in the hall were night dim. He stepped out and motioned for me to follow him.
In the hall, Ames moved to his right with me behind him. There was a turn in front of us with a long hallway. From far down that long hallway came a man’s voice. I couldn’t make out the words, but could tell that the person was probably talking on the phone because of the silent pauses.
Ames went to the end of the corridor and peeked down the long hallway. Then he turned and motioned for me to follow him. He moved quickly across the hallway and into an alcove. I followed, glancing to my left, relieved to see nothing and no one.
I knew where we were now, right in front of Amos Trent’s office. Ames tried the door. It was locked. He pulled his jackknife from his pocket, found a thin blade that looked like a toothpick with a tiny forked tip. In no more than four seconds, the door opened. We went in. Ames’s flashlight came on as the door closed. I turned mine on too.
We both knew what we were looking for. I went to the desk. Ames went to the file cabinet. We worked fast. I found a few interesting things, including a clearly marked medicine bottle from Eckerd’s drugstore containing two Viagra pills, five low-carb chocolate bars, a tube of Thomas Valerian’s toupee paste, and a thin catalog of items guaranteed to “embarrass or gross out” your friends and enemies.
Ames was on the second drawer, thumbing through file folders.
“Wrong place,” came a voice from the door.
I froze. Ames turned his light toward the voice.
A figure in a blue robe pushed the door closed. I turned my light on him. He was ancient, pudgy, pink-faced, with sparse white hair carefully brushed to the right of his age-spotted scalp. He stood with both hands on a walker.
“Saw you here this afternoon,” he said to Ames. “Or maybe it was yesterday. It’s easy to lose track of days or time in here.”
Neither Ames nor I said anything.
The man flicked on the lights.
“No one’ll see the light,” he said conversationally. “Even if they look at the door, there’s nothing out there but trees, grass, the creek and Rose Teffler’s gator. Well?”
“You know what we’re looking for?” I asked.
“Dorothy told me,” he said. “My name’s Ham Gentry, by the way.”
“You knew we’d come here?” I asked.
“Hell no,” he said. “I’m a night wanderer like Dorothy and a few others, Sid Catorian, Lilly Carnovski. You can hear Sid’s wheelchair whining fifty feet away. I just happened to see you when I came out of the toilet at the end of the hall.”
“Where is it?” I asked.
He pointed past me to the wall. There was a corkboard a few feet above where I sat. It was covered with neatly posted memos and announcements skewered with colorful tacks. I had looked at the board when I came in. There had been nothing about patient discharges.
“Under the green brochure about Medicare and Medicaid,” he said.
I got up, lifted the brochure and saw a report marked, Discharges, Admissions. The date at the top was yesterday.
“I saw him put one of those up there a few months ago,” said Gentry. There were others beneath it dating back a week.
“Why’s he hide it?” Ames asked.
I put the report on the desk and began to copy the information I needed onto the back of an envelope I took out of the trash can under the desk.
“I think he juggles the numbers,” said Gentry. “My guess is he uses it to skim moola, dinero, a few bucks here and there. Not sure how, but I’m working on it and when I find out, there will be perks aplenty for Hamilton Gentry and his friends.”
“Got it,” I said, writing down the last of four names and the addresses.
I put the report and the brochure back on the corkboard as close to where they had been as I could remember. Ames and I headed toward the door but Gentry raised his hand to stop us.
“Just go out the window here,” he said. “I’ll lock it behind you.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“Dorothy says someone was murdered here, then someone was murdered here,” he said. “Nurses here are damned nice, considering what they have to put up with, but Amos Trent is… what the hell, get going.”
Ames opened the window, lifted his right leg over the sill, and then his left followed and he dropped into the darkness. I followed him. When my feet touched the ground, the window lock clicked. A few seconds later, the light went out.
I followed Ames along the brick wall and made it past Rose Teffler’s window without encountering Jerry Lee.