He was ready to stand up next to the bed, but if he was going to leave the room, he was going to have to disengage himself from the IV. He picked away at the tape, pulled the tube from his arm.
“You sure about this?” I said.
He nodded, gave me a weak smile. “If there’s a chance to see Cynthia, I’ll find the strength.”
“What’s going on in here?”
We both turned our heads to the door. A nurse was standing there, a slender black woman, mid-forties, a look of wonderment on her face.
“Mr. Sloan, what on earth do you think you’re doing?”
He had just dropped his pajama bottoms and was standing before her, bareass naked. His legs were white and spindly, his genitals shrunken away to almost nothing.
“Getting dressed,” he said. “What’s it look like?”
“Who are you?” she asked, turning on me.
“His son-in-law,” I said.
“I’ve never seen you here before,” she said. “Don’t you know that visiting hours are long over?”
“I just got into town,” I said. “I needed to see my father-in-law right away.”
“You’re going to have to leave right now,” she told me. “And you get back into bed, Mr. Sloan.” She was at the foot of the bed now, saw the disconnected IV. “For heaven’s sake,” she said. “What have you done?”
“I’m checking out,” Clayton said. Looking at him, in his condition, I couldn’t help but think the words held a double meaning. He steadied himself against me as he bent down to draw his white boxers up over his legs.
“That’s exactly what you’ll be doing if you don’t get hooked up to that again,” the nurse said. “This is absolutely out of the question. Am I going to have to call your doctor in the middle of the night?”
“Do what you have to do,” he said to her.
“My first call’s going to be to security,” she said, and turned on her rubber-soled shoes and sprinted from the room.
“I know this is a lot to ask,” I said, “but you’re going to have to hurry. I’m going to see if I can find a wheelchair.”
I went into the hall, spotted a vacant chair up by the nurses’ station. I ran up to get it, noticed our nurse on the phone. She finished her call, saw me heading back to Clayton’s room pushing the empty chair.
She ran over, grabbed hold of it with one hand and my arm with the other. “Sir,” she said, lowering her voice so as not to wake the other patients, but maintaining her authority, “you cannot take that man out of this hospital.”
“He wants to leave,” I said.
“Then he must not be thinking too clearly,” she said. “And if he can’t, then you have to do it for him.”
I shook her hand off. “This is something he has to do.”
“Says you?”
“Says him.” Now I lowered my voice and became very serious. “This may be the last chance he ever has to see his daughter. And his granddaughter.”
“If he wants to see them, he can have them visit him right here,” she countered. “We could even bend the rules some about visiting hours if that’s a problem.”
“It’s a little more complicated than that.”
“Ready,” said Clayton. He had made it to the door of his room. He’d slipped on his shoes without socks, and had not yet buttoned up his shirt, but his jacket was on, and he appeared to have run his fingers through his hair. He looked like an aged homeless person.
The nurse wasn’t giving up. She let go of the chair and went up to Clayton, got right in his face. “You cannot leave here, Mr. Sloan. You need to be discharged by your physician, Dr. Vestry, and I can assure you he would not be allowing this to happen. I have a call in to him right now.”
I brought the chair up so Clayton could drop himself into it. I spun him around and headed for the elevator.
The nurse ran back to her station, grabbed the phone, said, “Security! I said I needed you up here now!”
The elevator doors parted and I wheeled Clayton in, hit the button for the first floor, and watched the nurse glare at us until the doors slid shut.
“When the door opens,” I told Clayton calmly, “I’m going to be pushing you out of here like a bat out of hell.”
He said nothing but wrapped his fingers around the arms of the chair, squeezed. I wished it had a seat belt.
The doors opened, and there was about fifty feet of hall separating me from the emergency room doors and the parking lot just beyond them. “Hold on,” I whispered, and broke into a run.
The chair wasn’t built for speed, but I pushed it to the point where the front wheels began to wobble. I feared it would suddenly veer left or right, that Clayton would spill out and end up with a fractured skull before I could get him to Vince’s Dodge Ram. So I put some weight down on the handles and tipped the chair back, like it was doing a wheelie.
Clayton hung on.
The elderly couple who had been sitting in the waiting room earlier were shuffling across the hall. I shouted ahead, “Out of the way!” The woman’s head whipped around and she pulled her husband out of my path just in time as we went racing past.
The sensors on the sliding emergency room doors couldn’t react fast enough, and I had to put on the brakes so I wouldn’t send Clayton through the glass. I slowed down as fast as I could without pitching him forward and out of the wheelchair, and that was when someone I assumed had to be a security guard came up behind me and shouted, “Whoa! Hold it right there, pal!”
I was so pumped up on adrenaline I didn’t stop to think about what I was doing. I was working on instinct now. I spun around, using the momentum that seemed to be stored in me from moving so quickly down the hall, forming a fist in the process, and caught my pursuer square in the side of the head.
He wasn’t a very big guy, maybe 150 pounds, five-eight, black hair and a mustache, must have figured that the gray uniform and big black belt with the gun attached would get him by. Fortunately, he hadn’t yet pulled his weapon, assuming, I guess, that a guy pushing a dying patient in a wheelchair didn’t pose much of a threat.
He was wrong.
He dropped to the emergency room floor like someone had cut his strings. Somewhere, a woman screamed, but I didn’t take any time to see who it was, or whether anyone else was going to be coming after me. I whirled back around, got my hands on the wheelchair handles, and kept pushing Clayton, out into the parking lot, right up to the passenger door of the Dodge.
I got out the keys, unlocked it with the remote, opened the door. The truck sat up high, and I had to boost Clayton to get him into the passenger seat. I slammed the door shut, ran around to the other side, and caught the wheelchair with the right front tire as I backed out of the spot. I heard it scrape against the fender.
“Shit,” I said, thinking about how perfect Vince kept the vehicle.
The truck tires squealed as I tore out of the lot, heading back for the highway. I caught a glimpse of some people from the ER, running outside to watch as I sped off. Clayton, already looking exhausted, said, “We have to go back to my house.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m already heading there. I need to know why Vince isn’t answering, make sure everything’s okay, maybe even stop Jeremy if he shows up, if he hasn’t already.”
“And there’s something I have to get,” Clayton said. “Before we go see Cynthia.”
“What?”
He waved a weakened hand at me. “Later.”
“They’re going to call the police,” I said of the people we’d left behind at the hospital. “I’ve practically kidnapped a patient, and I’ve decked a security guard. They’ll be looking for this truck.”
Clayton didn’t say anything.
I pushed the truck past ninety on the way north to Youngstown, glancing constantly in my mirror for flashing red lights. I tried Vince again with my cell, still without success. I was nearing the end of my battery.
When the turnoff to Youngstown came, I was hugely relieved, figuring I was more vulnerable, more noticeable, on the expressway. But then, what if the police were waiting for us at the Sloan house? The hospital would be able to tell them where their runaway patient lived, and they’d probably stake the place out. What terminal patient doesn’t want to go home and die in his own bed?