At the ground floor the elevator lurched to a stop, making the spinning worse. I heard the doors slide open and tried to get back up, but my hands and feet weren’t following commands. Clay was hunched over behind me, but only I could see our assailant as the man turned and looked right at us.
“I’m thinking you guys are in the wrong business.” Even stunned, I could hear the word “business” come out as “beeznus”. I tried to reach out, but just stumbled forward into the panel of the elevator, everything spinning.
Big Ugly smiled and set off across the lobby while I slid to the floor.
“Jesus. Are you alright?”
I was flat on my ass, the head-spins still out of control. Somehow I’d stuck a leg out to stop the doors from closing, probably the only reason the security guard from the front desk even came over.
“Some guy mugged us. Check on my boss.” My double vision was brutal, and blood was dripping freely from a cut on my forehead. Clay was slumped over in the corner of the elevator car.
“Clay, are you okay?”
The guard knelt before Clay, and I could hear him whispering. Clay gasping out a response, and the guard’s face paled. He turned and mouthed to me: “I think he’s having a heart attack.”
CHAPTER 2
I wanted to call for an ambulance. Call the cops. But despite the pain, Clay was stubborn. He asked me to flag a cab, and minutes later we were in the Emergency Ward at Toronto General. After they heard his symptoms, Clay went to the front of the line.
The waiting area in Emergency was quiet by inner-city standards. Amongst the wailing kids and drunk university students, a kid wearing a crop top and low cut denim shorts was slumped in a chair, the tracks on the inside of her arm visible from across the hall. Opposite her sat a businessman, a guy in his fifties wearing a rumpled suit with his tie tugged loose. He was cradling his left hand, a large pair of scissors buried to the handles into his palm.
I thought about asking what had happened, but reconsidered. Not sure I wanted to know, quite frankly. Instead I rubbed the palm of my own hand and tried not to think about why someone would do that.
Besides, I was in no mood for talking. My head was throbbing, but the pain paled in comparison to the agonizing frustration I felt at not having done something.
I’d always wondered how I would react if faced with a gun. Bat it aside, or wrestle it from the gunman’s grasp. But when faced with the real thing, I’d just stood there. Like a coward.
My ruminations were interrupted by someone calling my name.
It was Harper Jarvis, Clay’s wife. Silver grey feathered hair, slim and straight-backed. Her light blue eyes, normally bright and lively, wore the stress of the evening. She’d been in with Clay and his doctor for the last half hour.
I joined her in the hallway.
“How’s he doing?”
“He’ll be all right. But he has to calm down. I’ve never seen him so angry.”
“Can’t say I blame him.”
“No. But he’s not a young man anymore.”
I smiled, but I suspect it came out more grimace than grin. The doctors had given me a couple of Tylenol 3s after cleaning the cut on my forehead and stitching it up, but the medication hadn’t made much of a dent in my headache. The bright lights of the ER weren’t helping, either.
Harper grabbed a chair from the waiting area and signaled for me to sit down. I snorted in disgust at myself, having an old lady offer me a chair.
Harper must have picked up on my mood, because she leaned over and spoke in a tone just above a whisper.
“Stop being so hard on yourself, Donnie Elder. Why, if something happened to you, I don’t know what I would say to your mother.”
Clay and Harper have known my mother for as long as I can remember — old friends of her and my long-departed father. My memories of them are like a slide show made up of annual glimpses into their life. The two of them dropping by for a barbeque one hot summer, Harper adding a pasta salad to the buffet table. Celebrating Thanksgiving at their old bungalow, with Clay delighted to have two young boys around to join him in watching football.
I didn’t know them well, but what I did know was that they were good people.
“What did the doctor say?”
“Well, they’re still doing tests. But it looks like a mild heart attack. They’re going to keep him for a few nights. Thank goodness you were there.”
“Has he had one before?”
“No.” Her voice cracked, and she pulled a stark white tissue from her purse to dab at the corner of her eye. “He’s had to watch his blood pressure, but nothing like this.”
I sat quietly next to Harper, thinking I might be in shock myself. A few hours ago I was starting a new job, getting to know my boss. Now I was sitting in a sterile hospital waiting room, wondering what the hell was going on in the world.
I still couldn’t believe it. The guy pulled a gun on us. My temper wrestled with its leash, desperate to go out for a run, so I took a long, deep breath and blew out slowly.
“Should we call the cops?” The security guard had seemed in no rush to do so, probably more worried about his job than anything else.
Harper sniffed, and straightened.
“No. Clay was always insistent that when things happened we not involve the police. He’s been robbed before, but never at gunpoint. Once or twice his van’s been broken into. And someone broke into the offices a few years ago. He insisted, said the police wouldn’t understand. That it wasn’t the right thing to do for the customers.”
No arguments from me. I’d never had any problems with the police, and I wanted to keep it that way.
“Is there anything I should be doing?”
She put on a valiant smile. “Well, Clay was asking to see you, so why don’t we go find out?”
Despite being on the downward slope to sixty, Clay had always struck me as a robust and healthy fellow.
Now, though, Clay’s skin had taken on a grayish pallor, and his eyes were watery. Mysterious wires and tubes ran from his nose and arms to machines that clicked, whirred, beeped and hummed. I already had a jaundiced view of hospitals, a result of watching cancer eat away at my aunt. This visit wasn’t going to change my views, though it helped that Clay was awake and lucid.
“Caused a bit of a stir, did I?”
“Oh,” Harper kissed his cheek and dabbed her eyes again. “You did that, you old fart.”
“Sorry about that.” Clay’s eyes dwelled on hers for a long moment, then he turned to me.
“How are you doing, kid?”
“I’m fine. Just pissed off.”
“I know how you feel. If I was twenty years younger-.”
“Calm down, honey.”
He did need to calm down. I could see from the monitors that Clay’s heart rate and blood pressure had both jumped in the few moments since I arrived. Mind you, I tended to do that to people.
“I’m real sorry, Clay.”
“Not your fault. I’m just angry at myself. Never had that happen before.”
“Just makes me wonder, did I do something wrong? I mean, it was my first day — maybe I should have-.”
“No, no. You did everything you could. This was planned. I just can’t understand why.”
“Me neither.” Interesting. It did seem planned. “Kinda begs the question as to who was behind it, though. That big idiot didn’t strike me as a criminal mastermind.”
“No, that’s for sure. But we need to call the folks at Sun, let them know. Maybe they’ll know why someone would want the package so bad.”
“Let me sort that out. You need your rest.”
“Thanks, I-,” Clay winced and his eyes took on a faraway look. It was something I had seen when I used to visit my aunt in the hospital, before she passed. When the pain kicked in, her eyes would wander, as though searching for some place of respite.
Harper and I watched quietly as he worked through the rough spot. After a minute or so, his eyes cleared.