Page 2 of The Undead

Funny, so was I …

“You already asked me that,” I whispered. She twisted around enough to brush her wet warm lips against mine.

“So?” she asked. Her hands, so clever, found what they were looking for. It was easy enough to find, considering the circumstances. “You want brilliant conversation at a time like this?”

“Hell, no—”

“Shh,” she interrupted, and stiffened against me. I lifted my head from her shoulder and listened.

Sure enough, the sharp annoying whine of a beeper filtered in.

“Oh, shit,” she snapped, and twisted to look at me. Her dark blue eyes were wide and more than a little wicked. “We can pretend we can’t hear it.”

“Hah,” I told her sourly. “Yours or mine?”

“It’s a B-flat,” she said after a moment of thought, and a faint, very regretful smile flickered across her lips. “Yours, I guess. Mine’s a—”

“G-sharp. Yes, I remember.” I had the tonal accuracy of a deaf donkey, but Maggie’s life before becoming a cop included two years of graduate-level music study and an artist’s certificate in performance. “Great. Listen, hold this thought, okay? Five minutes, I promise.”

“Sure,” she said, unconvinced. I slid the shower door aside and grabbed a towel on the way to the bedroom where I’d dropped the damned beeper.

The LCD read off a number I knew all too well. I squished over to the bedroom phone and dialed, mopping at my hair with one hand and trying not to drip too much into the mouthpiece. There were five rings before somebody picked up— again, something I was more than familiar with.

“City Square Hospital.” If it hadn’t been for the telltale Virginia drawl, I wouldn’t have known Katy’s voice. She was usually slow and friendly—but not tonight.

“Hi, Irish, whatcha got for me?”

“About time you got your ass on the phone, buddy. Dr. Voorhees wanted to talk to you as the attending on the Julio Ramos thing. Hang on, he’s right here—no, Carl, it’s Mike Bowman—”

As soon as she said the magic word—Voorhees—I yanked the receiver an extra two inches from my ear. As usual, I underestimated; when Carl took the phone he was still loud enough to rattle my teeth. He really didn’t yell, everyone assured me, it was just that he had such a strangely pitched voice—but you couldn’t prove it by the speaker in the ear-piece. It jittered like water on a hot plate.

“MIKEY!” he roared. There was a flutter of noise at the other end, probably Katy Shaughnessy trying to tone him down. Whatever it was, his voice went from a sonic boom down to a nearly normal bullhorn level. “Mikey, I hope I didn’t interrupt anything—”

“Yeah, well, it’s my anniversary, so make it fast. I’ve got—ah—dinner on the stove.”

“Yeah, I’ve seen the dish,” Carl said solemnly. “Tasty, very tasty. I wouldn’t let some old fart like me get in the way if I were you—”

“I don’t intend to.”

“Ah, yes.” Carl cleared his throat. I could just see him, a great brown-haired bear of a man who looked more like a lumberjack than a physician. He was probably the best doctor I’d ever known, in spite of his notoriously simple social graces. “It’s about Julio Ramos. I thought you’d want to know he ended up back in here tonight.”

“What? I discharged the kid yesterday.” I had a bad feeling growing in the pit of my stomach, a sickness that had the density of lead. Carl’s voice had gotten softer, more apologetic, and that wasn’t like him. “Cops bring him in?”

“Yeah. Look, Mikey, I know you liked the kid, so I’ll just be blunt and brutal: he’s dead. We lost his girlfriend before the wagon pulled in, but we thought Julio might pull through-then all kinds of shit started going wrong. I worked on him in OR for an hour; I didn’t want you to think I didn’t go goal-to-goal on this one.” Carl paused, and I could feel the wheels turning on the other end. “You got him on stab wounds originally, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, yeah, it’s in the chart.” I sat down on the edge of the bed, never mind the drips. The eager length of my erection was already dwindling. “He told the cops he was stabbed in a gang fight.”

“That wasn’t what he told you.”

“No.” My free hand grabbed hold of the smooth flowered surface of the Laura Ashley bedspread under me and made a fist. I needed an anchor. “He told me his father stabbed him in a fight over the girlfriend. Julio wanted to marry her. Dad apparently had a problem with interracial dating.”

“Goddamn.” Carl’s expletive was soft and contemplative. “You know what happened, then. Julio and the girl were shotgunned in his car. Looks like they had everything they owned packed in there.”

“Did the cops pick the bastard up?”

“Yep. He’s in jail, where I hope to God he’ll rot, but your wife can tell you the chances of that. Anyway, the bodies will be transferred to County tomorrow for the autopsies—as if having a pound of buckshot in the bloodstream isn’t a valid cause of death.”

“Jesus, I fucked this up,” I whispered, and rubbed at my aching eyes. “I told the cops what he said, but Julio wouldn’t back me up —I should have tried harder, Carl. I should have made sure his bastard father got picked up, and this wouldn’t have happened.”

---