Get ready to be welcomed, visitor, he said to himself, reaching the landing and weighing the heft of his weapon. He wanted it to be Chaz. Wanted to terrify the creep, confront him about the shooting, about Kelly, make him blurt out a confession or two.
He crossed the final few feet and, holding the bat in his right hand, slowly turned the brass knob with his left. He took a few slow breaths, preparing himself for battle.
“Freeze, you asshole!” he roared, flinging the door open and leaping into the room, the bat cocked over his shoulder.
A young woman with long black hair whom he’d never seen before clutched a bathrobe around her and let out a bloodcurdling yell the whole county would hear.
Before he could react, she pivoted on one leg and came at his head with a karate kick.
His skull hurt.
And his neck.
“I’m lucky I didn’t kill him,” a woman said.
“I’d say he’s the lucky one,” a man who sounded familiar replied. “Where’d you learn to kick like that?”
“At a karate school in Paris.”
He must have fallen asleep on his couch with no pillow – that would explain the pain – and left the TV on.
“Could you have fractured one of his vertebrae?” the man asked.
He knew that voice. Must be an actor he’d seen before.
“Not without breaking my foot. It feels fine.”
The woman’s voice he didn’t recognize at all.
“Well, I’m glad of that, for both of you.”
Wait a minute. That wasn’t an actor. It was Dan. What would he be doing on a television show?
Before he could open his eyes, someone pried his right lid up, beamed a white light directly into his pupil, and peered at him through the opposite side of an ophthalmoscope. “Stop it.” He moaned, and tried to move away from the glare, still feeling he had a hot coal buried in there. But a burning sheet of pain snapped up the back of his head and stopped him.
Then he remembered what had happened.
“Something has abraded your cornea, Dr. Roper,” the woman said from somewhere beyond the glare, “and I don’t think it was my toenails – wait a minute. Sheriff Evans, can you hand me my medical bag?” She removed the ophthalmoscope, leaving him momentarily blinded, but he could hear her rummaging around for something.
“What the hell’s going on?” he mumbled, unable to make his mouth move properly.
“Hold my light, please, Sheriff,” she ordered, and brought a tiny pair of forceps into view.
“Now wait a second-”
“Don’t move, Doctor.”
Before he could reply the white glare of the scope floodlit his eyeball again, and her fingers pulled the lids even farther apart.
He winced at a slight stinging sensation, then it was over.
“There,” she said, suddenly releasing her grip and allowing him to retreat back into darkness.
The hot coal sensation had vanished. He still felt a slight burning, but found it tolerable.
She studied the tip of the tiny forceps in her hand. “You had a piece of glass stuck superficially in the conjunctival membrane. Luckily it wasn’t embedded in the cornea and came out easy enough. Here, press gently with this,” and she placed a gauze pad over the eye.
“Who are you?”
“Lucy O’Connor. I’m so sorry, but when you leapt into the room like that, I acted on reflex.”
He tried to get up, but another spasm shot up from between his shoulders to the top of his scalp and changed his mind. As he flopped back down, the hard surface made him realize that he was still on the floor. “Lucy who?” he asked between gritted teeth as his neck muscles uncoiled.
“Lucy O’Connor, your family medicine resident for the next three months. I wrote you that I’d be arriving a day early.”
“Oh, my God. That’s this week?”
She ripped strips of tape off a roll and began to apply them across the gauze to hold it in place. “Of course I don’t know if you’ll still have me. I really am sorry, but you looked like a wild man, all dirty and wielding a baseball bat. Frankly, I thought you were going to kill me.”
Mark forced his good eye open and encountered the same tumbling black hair and white complexion he’d first seen on entering the room. “Weren’t you supposed to be someone named Paul?”
A frown overshadowed the deep brown eyes hovering inches from his own. “He and I switched at the last minute,” she said. “You didn’t know?”
He shook his head. Bad move. New spasms raced each other to the base of his skull. Wincing, he added, “And I thought he, I mean you, weren’t due until next Tuesday.”
“You’re sure you didn’t get a notice? The hospital moved everything up so I’d be back by mid-February to cover the floors when a lot of residents take a winter vacation.” As she talked, her hands continued to work with the tape. “The program director told me he wrote you about the changes weeks ago.”
His cluttered desktop leapt to mind. “Oh, God.” He groaned. “I haven’t opened my mail for the last-”
“You can let go now,” she interrupted, and deftly finished anchoring the improvised eye patch with a final strip of adhesive. Her fingers were firm as they worked, yet her touch was light. “There. That should hold until we find you a proper one.”
“I really am the one to blame, Dr. O’Connor-”
“Please, everyone calls me Lucy.”
“Of course. But how did you get in here?”
“I’m the guilty party on that one,” Dan said, hovering over her shoulder.
Returning her equipment to a worn black doctor’s bag, she smiled up at him.
It was a dazzler – what his father used to call a real string of pearls.
“Yes. Dan’s been most kind to me. When I couldn’t find anyone here, I asked around town where you might be and got sent to your office at the White House. Luckily, Dan had been working late, and after I told him who I was, he figured you wouldn’t want me waiting in the cold.”
Mark saw a flush of pink in the sheriff’s plump face.
“I dug up your spare keys and brought her back out here.” He gave a little shrug that seemed to say it was the least he could have done. “I knew you’d want me to.” Then he started to chuckle. “I sure didn’t expect this, though. Luckily I left her my cell number, and she called me after she coldcocked you. When I got here, she was standing over you with the bat.” He turned to Lucy, laughing even harder. “You should have seen your face when I told you who he was.”
She grinned back at him. “At first I thought you were kidding. Then when I realized you were serious, I felt I’d die.”
“Well, if he’d jumped out at me looking the way he did, I’d have shot him.”
They both had a good laugh over that prospect. Mark just held his head and gritted his teeth.
“But what happened to you?” Dan asked him. “You look as if you’ve been through hell.”
“You’re not going to believe this, but-”
“Before you two start chatting,” Lucy interrupted, “I need to examine Dr. Roper further.” Her fingers slipped behind his neck and applied gentle pressure to the tip of his seventh cervical vertebra. “Any tenderness there?”
“No. But I really have to apologize-”
“How about there?” she cut in, her fingers slipping up a notch.
“No. You see, someone broke in here last night, and I thought you were him-”
“And there?” Her touch found vertebra number five.
“Fine. I’m sure they’re all fine.”
“For the moment, I’m the doctor, Doctor.” She gave his fourth cervical vertebra the once-over. “Is there pain here?”
Pretty damn sure of herself for a resident, he thought. He found her exam uncommonly thorough. He also found himself wondering about her age. She looked older, leaner than the usual crop he got up here. Male or female, they all seemed barely out of their baby fat these days. She also had a hint of sadness in her eyes that the usual polished faces lacked.