I napped and woke up what seemed like seconds later, refreshed. “Nurse?” I said quietly.
She looked up from her charts, smiling. “You’re awake, sir? Let me go get the—”
“No! No, wait. Before I talk to any officers… could you tell me where I am and what I’m doing here?”
She put a cool hand on my forehead. “You’ve been in this bed several days. Your chart says you’re under observation pursuant to a drug reaction. What drug did you take?”
“Didn’t take. It was a dart.”
She touched the gauze in the center of my chest. “It was your heart?”
“No, not ‘heart.’ A dart. Look. Where am I?”
“It’s a military hospital, Keesler Air Force Base. You got a dart in your heart?” She smiled. “Like Cupid?”
“No, not Cupid!” Better not say a beautiful mystery woman shot me with a mysterious dart gun for mysterious reasons. “I guess it was kind of an accident?”
“That was clumsy,” she said, her pleasant expression unreadable. “You shot yourself in the chest with a riot control gun?”
“Is that what it was?”
“Well, they don’t say you did it yourself.” She reached down and rattled the handcuff that attached my ankle to the bed frame. “They seem to think you were resisting arrest.”
“Holy shit. That’s not it, not at all.” I sat up in bed, shaking off dizziness, and looked at the handcuff, ankle restraint, whatever. It looked pretty serious. “Nobody arrested me.”
She looked out down the hall. “Yeah, the guys who dumped you here weren’t MPs, despite their uniforms. I work with MPs all the time. What did you really do?”
“Truth is, I’m not really sure. But I didn’t break any law.”
“For what it’s worth, I believe you. Those guys are creeps. They don’t work here.”
“So let me out of here.”
“Oh, yeah, and get them on my ass.” She shook her head. “Even if I could”—she rattled the handcuffs—“I don’t have the key. Oh yeah, and I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in federal prison.”
“They’re not real officers. And I’m not a criminal. I think my life’s in danger.”
She canted her head and smiled again. “Spy stuff, eh?”
“Kind of. More like criminal stuff. On their part.”
She stepped to the door and looked out again. “Them? I think they’re too dumb to be criminals.”
“Why’s that?”
“Don’t know shit. They didn’t treat me like a nurse, just another dumb black bitch—and those scrubs they’re wearing, they don’t think I know whose monograms they are? Like I’ve worked here so long they oughta name a disease after me.” She turned to rummage through a drawer. “Not even clean. They stole them scrubs from a laundry basket.”
“You’ve got to help me.”
“No, I don’t got to. I don’t have to do nothing not in my orders.”
She looked out the door again, and shook her head, then picked up a big towel. “Don’t you go noplace.” She hustled out and was back in about two minutes.
“Got my boyfriend’s pickup.” She unwrapped the towel, exposing a big greasy pair of bolt cutters.
Rather than cut the chain, she snipped through the cuff itself, and then cut it off at my ankle, too. “You take that and get rid of it somewhere. Outside.”
She pulled open a drawer and lifted out my clothes and shoes, wrapped in tissue paper. “Move fast. I’m not here.” She put the bolt cutters into a low cabinet, stepped into the hall, looked up and down, and walked away unhurriedly.
There was a heat-sealed plastic sack with my bag in it. No cash in the wallet, though; just a receipt for $4,109. A brown envelope had the stuff from my pockets, about thirty bucks in small bills and change, and keys to the car that was parked back at Mom’s Home Away from Home, and the room key. Not too useful. Credit cards that I might be able to use in off-the-grid places. A dime store cell phone.
I dressed quickly and stuffed the blue hospital pajamas into a HAZARDOUS BIOWASTE trash can and stepped out briskly, trying to look as if I knew what I was doing.
No way I was going to get that $4,109 out of the hospital safe. But I wasn’t going anywhere without money.
The fifty grand inside the book, that was just gone. If the guy with the white moustache showed up, I’d just have to tell him that the other bad guys, Boris and Natasha, had beat him to it. Take it up with your god-damned supervisor.
I had to assume that they searched through the motel room after they darted me. But if they didn’t know about the money… I’d closed the hollowed-out book and left it on the floor by the bed. Maybe some maid got a tip big enough to retire on.
I sure was worth a lot of money for a guy who barely had cab fare. Even in mundane reality. I had plenty of credit cards in my wallet; that was a couple of grand that I could tap at usurious rates, if I were standing in a bank in Iowa City. But between me and MidWestOne were plenty of search engines where my name would ring a bell. Or start up a siren.
I sat down in the hospital lobby for a minute, trying to come up with a plan. Went through everything in my wallet.
At the bottom of the stack of credit cards was a Visa I’d never used. It was from a dumb promotion thing where I’d get $10 of free merchandise at a Hy-Vee in Coralville—but that store was just a hole in the ground now; they’d closed it last year.
I’d never used the card because it had the wrong middle initiaclass="underline" “John B.” All my other cards were for “C. Jack.” When it came, I hung onto it with a vague idea of doing an experiment; see what happened if I tried it in a cash machine when I was broke.
Might as well be hung for a sheep as a goat, though I wasn’t really sure what that meant. Might as well be hung for a John as a Jack.
I used the pen at the sign-in desk and scrawled “John B. Daley” on the card’s signature block. Then I went outside and got in the next cab. “Bus station, please.” The driver was a girl who looked about twelve.
“You want the one at the Amtrak station?”
“Yeah, sure.” The cab had a beat-up card reading machine. I handed her the new one. She slid it through without bells or sirens.
“You got ID?” I showed her my driver’s license and she scrutinized the picture and then studied my face. “You look better with the beard,” she said, and handed it back. I guess Visa-Jack would pass for Visa-John if there were no computers involved, or sufficiently old ones.
She dropped me at the bus station annex. I watched her pick up a fare and drive away, then made a snap decision and crossed over to the train station.
I used the same Visa in a ticket machine, ready to run if it started beeping, but it obediently booked me to Washington. From there I could book to New York, and then up to Maine. The last Maine bit on the bus. How to get from Bangor to Swan’s Island without any money was a problem I’d have to deal with when I got there.
It wouldn’t be smart to push my luck charging a restaurant meal. With cash, I got a handful of power bars and a hot dog. Still a few hours before the train. I picked up a discarded Times-Picayune and sat on a bench outside, reading with one eye and watching with the other.
I didn’t suppose a police car would pull up with lights flashing. If a cop car did come up, I could slip off in a cab to nowhere and start over.
The breeze died and I realized I smelled too strong to sit next to anyone who didn’t have a real bad cold. What performers call “flop sweat,” I supposed. A difficult role, pretending to be an innocent writer from Iowa City who had no connection with murderous assholes or people with good plain haircuts from three-initialed agencies.