Killer Move

Then I could get on with trying to find out where the hell Steph was, making sure she was okay, and not ungovernably pissed at me.

Before I set off, I tried Deputy Hallam’s number yet again. Still no reply. I didn’t leave a message. Dismissing the idea gave me another, however, and I called our home number. No reply, but I entered the key combination that allowed me to remote-access messages on the machine. I listened again to my previous messages. In the cold light of day I realized they would serve no purpose, and the last few sounded very drunk. The undertone of increasing moral indignation would also not sit well with my own lack of return to base overnight. I deleted them one by one.

But then, right at the end, I found another message. It had been left early that morning, and this time it was for me—but it was not from Steph or Hallam or anyone else I knew.

It was from the hospital.

Sarasota Memorial is a big white modern building with a sweeping approach and nice trees. Without the flag and the signs it could easily be a major condominium development. I ran into the main entrance and established that the ICU was on the third floor. I found an elevator. Stood in it, blinking, twitching.

I burst out into a big waiting area, sparsely occupied and decorated in the colors and shapes of expedience and calm. I went to the desk, said who I was and who I was there to see. The instant recognition this gained me just made me even more scared. The nurse said that someone would be right out, and got on the internal phone.

I pushed back from the counter, breathing deeply, trying to keep it even. I noticed a nervous-looking midtwenties guy on one of the benches, hands clasped. I was suddenly sure that he was waiting to hear about his wife, a pregnancy, an oncoming child. Maybe he had some superbad reason for being here, but I thought not. Probably everything in his life was going okay.

I wanted to be him instead of me.

A man in a white coat appeared at the entrance to a side corridor, and the station nurse pointed me out. I hurried over before he’d started in my direction.

He led me down the corridor and into a further side area, without saying anything. Toward the bottom was a portion where sections of the walls were made of glass, to allow people to see what was happening inside. He led me to one of these. I looked through.

Lying in a bed, eyes closed, and with plastic tubing going into her, was Stephanie.

Her skin was pale and seemed to hang off the bones of her cheeks and wrists. Her eyelids were lilac. She did not look like my wife. She looked like Steph might look like to herself in cracked mirrors glimpsed in bad dreams.

“To be honest,” the doctor said, “we’re not one hundred percent sure what we’re dealing with. She arrived with vomiting, which was not a cinch to diagnose as she’d clearly drunk a lot. But then we discovered there’d been diarrhea, with blood, which switched us to looking at a bacterial infection. It seemed like this was heading into hemolytic uremic syndrome and kidney failure, which kind of made sense, though it’d be unusual given your wife’s age and state of health—and there’s no previous indicators of renal problems, correct? But then we started to see drops in organ function overall, to the point where we’re running a slew of new tests on everything from E. coli to a couple of rare seafood biotoxins.”

He finally left a gap, as if for me to speak. I couldn’t think of anything to say, and with my hand clamped over my mouth as it was, he wouldn’t have heard the words anyway.

“It could be E. coli,” he said, as if that was in some way reassuring. “We’re pumping antibiotics and fluids into her and we’re putting out the other fires as best we can. At the moment that’s all we can do.”

She looked so pale, so broken, and very far away.

“Is she conscious?”

“Intermittently. She was awake up until about forty minutes ago, now seems to be drifting in and out.”

“I have to go in there.”

“Not right now.”

“Well, when?”

“I don’t know. Maybe soon. It depends.”

“How long has she been here?”

“Since three A.M.”

“But . . . how come the first I hear of this is a message at eight thirty this morning? Why did nobody call me right away?”

The doctor glanced at his clipboard. “The notes say your wife requested you be contacted as soon as she was admitted. Her brother said he’d get hold of you.”

I turned to look at him. “Her brother?”

“Right,” he said, still reading. “He brought her in. I don’t want to be critical, you’ve got enough to process as it is, but she’d evidently been deteriorating for several hours before the guy thought, okay, there’s a situation here, let’s get to the hospital. You might . . . want to talk to him about that.”

“Oh, I will,” I said. “Though I’ll need to discuss a couple other things with him first.”

“Excuse me?”

“Like the fact that my wife doesn’t have a brother.”

The doctor looked up from his notes. I could see him making a decision that this wasn’t his problem.