‘Go ahead, honey, turn me on.’ He waggled his eyebrows at her. Once the lechery might have been real (Kat thought Melissa might have information on that subject), but now it was just a pair of shaggy eyebrows working on muscle memory.
Kat plugged the cords into the control unit and flicked the switch. Properly attached, the TENS units would have sent a weak electrical current into Newsome’s muscles, a therapy that seemed to have some ameliorative effects … although no one could say exactly why, or if they were entirely of the placebo variety. Be that as it might, they would do nothing for Newsome tonight. Hooked up as loosely as they were, they had been reduced to expensive joy-buzzers.
‘Shall I—?’
‘Stay!’ he said. ‘Therapy!’
The lord wounded in battle commands, and I obey.
She bent over to pull her chest of goodies out from under the bed. It was filled with tools many of her past clients referred to as implements of torture. Jensen and Rideout paid no attention to her. They continued to look at Newsome, who might (or might not) have been granted revelations that had changed his priorities and outlook on life, but who still enjoyed holding court.
He told them about awakening in a cage of metal and mesh. There were steel gantries called external fixators on both legs and one arm to immobilize joints that had been repaired with ‘about a hundred’ steel pins (actually seventeen; Kat had seen the X-rays). The fixators were anchored in the outraged and splintered femurs, tibiae, fibulae, humerus, radius, ulna. His back was encased in a kind of chain-mail girdle that went from his hips to the nape of his neck. He talked about sleepless nights that seemed to go on not for hours but for years. He talked about the crushing headaches. He told them about how even wiggling his toes caused pain all the way up to his jaw, and the shrieking agony that bit into his legs when the doctors insisted that he move them, fixators and all, so he wouldn’t entirely lose their function. He told them about the bedsores and how he bit back howls of hurt and outrage when the nurses attempted to roll him on his side so the sores could be flushed out.
‘There have been another dozen operations in the last two years,’ he said with a kind of dark pride.
Actually, Kat knew, there had been five, two of those to remove the external fixators when the bones were sufficiently healed. Unless you included the minor procedure to reset his broken fingers, that was. Then you could say there were six, but she didn’t consider surgical stuff necessitating no more than local anesthetic to be ‘operations.’ If that were the case, she’d had a dozen herself, most of them while listening to Muzak in a dentist’s chair.
Now we get to the false promises, she thought as she placed a gel pad in the crook of Newsome’s right knee and laced her hands together on the hanging hot-water bottles of muscle beneath his right thigh. That comes next.
‘The doctors promised me the pain would abate,’ Newsome said. His eyes were fixed on Rideout. ‘That in six weeks I’d only need the narcotics before and after my physical therapy sessions with the Queen of Pain here. That I’d be walking again by the summer of two thousand ten. Last summer.’ He paused for effect. ‘Reverend Rideout, those were false promises. I have almost no flexion in my knees at all, and the pain in my hips and back is beyond description. The doctors – ah! Oh! Stop, Kat, stop!’
She had raised his right leg to a ten-degree angle, perhaps a little more. Not even enough to hold the cushioning pad in place.
‘Let it go down! Let it down, goddammit!’
Kat relaxed her hold on his knee, and the leg returned to the hospital bed. Ten degrees. Possibly twelve. Whoop-de-do. Sometimes she got it all the way to fifteen – and the left leg, which was a little better, to twenty degrees of flex – before he started hollering like a chickenshit kid who sees a hypodermic needle in the school nurse’s hand. The doctors guilty of false promises had not been guilty of false advertising; they had told him the pain was coming. Kat had been there as a silent onlooker during several of those consultations. They had told him he would swim in pain before those crucial tendons, shortened by the accident and frozen in place by the fixators, stretched out and once again became limber. He would have plenty of pain before he was able to get the bend in his knees back to ninety degrees. Which meant before he would be able to sit in a chair or behind the wheel of a car. The same was true of his back and his neck. The road to recovery led through the Land of Pain, that was all.
These were true promises Andrew Newsome had chosen not to hear. It was his belief – never stated baldly, in words of one syllable, but undoubtedly one of the stars he steered by – that the sixth-richest man in the world should not have to visit the Land of Pain under any circumstances, only the Costa del Sol of Full Recovery. Blaming the doctors followed as day follows night. And of course he blamed fate. Things like this were not supposed to happen to guys like him.
Melissa came back with cookies on a tray. Newsome waved a hand – twisted and scarred in the accident – at her irritably. ‘No one’s in the mood for baked goods, ’Lissa.’
Here was another thing Kat MacDonald had discovered about those golden dollar-babies who had amassed assets beyond ordinary comprehension: they felt very confident about speaking for everyone in the room.
Melissa gave her little Mona Lisa smile, then turned (almost pirouetted) and left the room. Glided from the room. She had to be at least forty-five, but looked younger. She wasn’t sexy; nothing so vulgar. Rather there was an ice-queen glamour about her that made Kat think of Ingrid Bergman. Icy or not, Kat supposed men would wonder how that chestnut hair would look freed from its clips and all mussed up. How her coral lipstick would look smeared on her teeth and up one cheek. Kat, who considered herself dumpy, told herself at least once a day that she wasn’t jealous of that smooth, cool face. Or that tight, heart-shaped bottom.
Kat returned to the other side of the bed and prepared to lift Newsome’s left leg until he yelled at her again to stop, goddammit, did she want to kill him? If you were another patient, I’d tell you the facts of life, she thought. I’d tell you to stop looking for shortcuts, because there are none. Not even for the sixth-richest man in the world. I’d help you if you’d let me, but as long as you keep looking for a way to buy your way out of that bed, you’re on your own.
She placed the pad under his knee. Grasped the hanging bags of flesh that should have been hardening up again by now. Began to bend the leg. Waited for him to scream at her to stop. And she would. Because five thousand dollars a week added up to a cool quarter mil a year. Did he know that part of what he was buying was her complicity in his failure to improve? How could he not?
Now tell them about the doctors. Geneva, London, Madrid, Mexico City.
‘I’ve been to doctors all over the world,’ he told Rideout. The reverend still hadn’t said a word, just sat there with the red wattles of his overshaved neck hanging over his buttoned-to-the-neck country preacher shirt. He was wearing big yellow workboots. The heel of one almost touched his black lunchbox. ‘Teleconferencing would be the easier way to go, given my condition, but of course that doesn’t cut it in cases like mine. So I’ve gone in person, in spite of the pain it causes me. We’ve been everywhere, haven’t we, Kat?’
‘Indeed we have,’ she said, very slowly continuing to bend the leg. On which he would have been walking by now, if he weren’t such a child about the pain. Such a spoiled baby. On crutches, yes, but walking. And in another year, he would have been able to throw the crutches away. Only in another year he would still be here, in this two-hundred-thousand-dollar state-of-the-art hospital bed. And she would still be with him. Still taking his hush money. How much would be enough? Two million? She told herself that now, but she’d told herself not so long ago half a million would be enough, and had since moved the goalposts. Money was wretched that way.