He got up and started toward the door. I said, Wait a minute, and he paused and turned around.
“Well?”
“Well, I’d kind of like to have the reddish-haired girl. She wants the job, and I’m sure she’d be just fine.”
“Fine for what?” Claggett said. “No, don’t tell me. You just take care of golden-haired Miss Aloe, and forget about your pretty little redhead.”
I said I didn’t have anything like that in mind at all. Whatever it was he thought I had in mind. My God, with Connie and Manny to contend with, I’d be crazy to start anything up with another girl.
“So?” said Claggett, then cut me off with a knifing gesture of his hand as I began another protest. “I don’t care if you did promise her the job. You had no right to make such a promise, and she knows it as well as you do.”
He turned, and stalked out of the room.
I expected him to be back almost immediately, bringing the ex-police matron with him. But he was gone for almost a half an hour, and he came back looking wearily resigned.
“You win,” he said, dropping heavily into a chair. “You get your red-haired nurse.”
“I do?” I said. “I mean, why?”
“Because she spread it all around that she had the job. She was so positive about it that even the nurse I had in mind was convinced and she got sore and quit.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I really didn’t mean to upset your plans, Jeff.”
“I know.” He shrugged. “I just wish I could feel better about the redhead.”
“I’m sure she’ll work out fine,” I said. “She got off to a bad start today by letting Manny lock the door and pull the bed trick. But—”
“What?” said Claggett. “Oh, well, that didn’t bother me. That could have happened, regardless of who was on duty. The thing that bothers me about Miss Redhead Scrubbed-Clean is that I can’t check her out.”
I said, Oh—not knowing quite why I said it. Or why the hair on the back of my neck had gone through the motions of attempting to rise.
“…raised on a farm,” Jeff Claggett was saying. “No neighbors for miles around. No friends. Her parents were ex-teachers, and they gave her her schooling. They did a first-class job of it, too, judging by her entrance exams at nursing school. She scored an academic rating of high-school graduate plus two years of college. She was an honors graduate in nursing, and I can’t turn up anything but good about her since she made RN. Still”—he shook his head troubledly. “I don’t actually know anything about her for the first eighteen years of her life. There’s nothing I can check on, not even a birth certificate, from the time she was born until she entered nurses’ training.”
A linen cart creaked noisily down the hallway. From somewhere came the crash of a dinner tray. (Probably the redhead pounding on a patient.)
“Look, Jeff,” I said. “In view of what you’ve told me, and after much deliberation, I think I’d better have a different nurse.”
“Not possible.” Jeff shook his head firmly. “You promised her the job. I went along with your decision, when I found that my matron friend wasn’t and wouldn’t be available. Try to back down on the deal now, and we’d have the union on us.”
“I’ll tell you something,” I said. “I find that I’ve undergone a very dramatic recovery. My condition has improved at least a thousand percent, and I’m not going to need a nurse at all.”
Claggett complained that I hadn’t been listening to him. I’d already engaged a nurse, the redhead, and the doctors said I did need one.
“I’ve probably got the wind up over nothing, anyway, Britt. After all, the fact that I can’t check on her doesn’t mean that she’s hiding anything, now does it?”
“Yes,” I said. “I think it’s proof positive that she was up to no good during those lost years of her nonage, and that she is planning more of the same for me.”
Claggett chuckled that I was kidding, that I was always kidding. I said, Not so, that I only kidded when I was nervous or in mortal fear for my life, as in the present instance.
“It’s kind of a defense mechanism,” I explained. “I reason that I can’t be murdered or maimed while would-be evildoers are laughing.”
Claggett said brusquely to knock off the nonsense. He was confident that the nurse would work out fine. If he’d had any serious doubts about her, he’d’ve acted upon them.
“I’ll have to go now, Britt. Have a good night, and I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
“Wait!” I said. “What if I’m murdered in my sleep?”
“Then I won’t talk to you,” he said, irritably.
And he left the room before I could say anything else.
I got up and went to the bathroom. The constant dryness of my mouth had caused me to drink an overabundance of water.
I came out of the bathroom, and climbed back into bed.
The hall door opened silently, and the reddish-haired nurse came in.
17
She was wheeling a medicine cart in front of her, a cart covered with a chaos of bottles and vials and hypodermic needles. Having gotten the job as my regular full-time nurse seemed to have given her self-confidence. And she smiled at me brilliantly, and introduced herself.
“I’m Miss Nolton, Mr. Rainstar. Full name, Kate Nolton, but I prefer to be called Kay.”
“Well, all right, Kay,” I said, smiling stiffly (and doubtless foolishly). “It seems like a logical preference.”
“What?” she frowned curiously. “I don’t understand.”
“I mean, it’s reasonable to call you Kay since your name is Kate. But it wouldn’t seem right to call you Kate if your name was Kay. I mean—Oh, forget it,” I groaned. “My God! Do you play tennis, Kay?”
“I love tennis! How about you?”
“Yeah, how about me?” I said.
“Well?”
“Not very,” I said.
“I mean, do you play tennis?”
“No,” I said.
She sort of smile-frowned at me. She picked up my wrist, and tested my pulse. “Very fast. I thought so,” she said. “Turn over on your side, please.”
She took a hypodermic needle from the sterilizer, and began to draw liquid into it from a vial. Then she glanced at me, and gestured with light impatience.
“I said to turn on your side, Mr. Rainstar.”
“I am on my side.”
“I mean, the other side! Turn your back to me.”
“But that wouldn’t be polite.”
“Mr. Rainstar!” She almost stamped her foot. “If you don’t turn your back to me, right this minute—!”
I turned, as requested. She jerked the string on my pajamas, and started to lower them.
“Wait a minute!” I said. “What are you doing, anyway?”
She told me what she was doing, adding that I was the silliest man she had ever seen in her life. I told her I couldn’t allow it. It was the complete reversal of the normal order of things.
“A girl doesn’t take a man’s pants down,” I said. “Everyone knows that. The correct procedure is for the man to take the girl’s—Ooowtch! WHAT THE GODDAM HELL ARE YOU TRYING TO DO, WOMAN?”
“Shh, hush! The very idea making all that fuss over a teensy little hypo! Sergeant Claggett told me you were just a big old baby.”
“That’s why he’s only a sergeant,” I said. “An upper echelon officer would have instructed you in the proper treatment of wounds, namely to kiss them and make them well.”
That got her. Her face turned as red as her hair. “Why, you—you—! Are you suggesting that I kiss your a double s?”
I yawned prodigiously. “That’s exactly what I’m suggesting,” I said, and yawned again. “I might add that it’s probably the best o double f offer you’ll ever get in your career as an assassin.”
“All right,” she said. “I think I’ll just take you up on it. Just push it up here where I can get at it good, and—”
“Get away from me, goddammit!” I said
. “Go scrub out a bedpan or something.”
“Let’s see now. Ahh, there it is! Kitchy-coo!”
“Get! Go away, you crazy broad!”
“Kitchy-kitchy-coo…”
“Dammit, if you don’t get away from me, I’m going to…going to…going—”
My eyes snapped shut. I drifted into sleep. Or, rather, half-sleep.
I was asleep, but aware that she had dropped into a chair. That she was shaking silently, hugging herself; then rocking back and forth helplessly and shrieking with laughter. I was aware when other people came into the room to investigate. Other nurses, and some orderlies and a couple of doctors.
The silly bastards were practically packed into my room. A couple of them even sat down on my bed, jouncing me up and down on it as they laughed.
I thought, Now dammit—
My thought ended there.
I lost all awareness.
And I fell into deep unknowing sleep.
I slept so soundly that I felt hung over and somewhat grouchy the next morning when Kay Nolton awakened me. She looked positively aseptic, all bright-eyed and clean-scrubbed. It depressed me to see anyone look that good in the early morning, and it was particularly depressing in view of the way I looked, which, I’m sure, was ghastly. Or shitty, to use the polite term.
Kay secured the usual matchbook size bar of hospital soap—one wholly inadequate for lathering the ass of a sick gnat. She secured a tiny wedge of threadbare washcloth, suitable for scrubbing the aforementioned. She dumped soap and washcloth into one of those shiny hospital basins—which, I suspect, are used for puking in as well as sponge-bathing—and she carried it into the bathroom to fill with water.
I jumped out of bed, and flattened myself against the wall at one side of the bathroom door. When she came out, eyes fixed on the basin, I slipped into the bathroom and into the shower.
I heard her say, “Mr. Rainstar, Mr. Rainstar! Where in the world—”
Then, I turned on the shower full, and I heard no more.
I came back into my room with a towel wrapped around me. Kay popped a thermometer into my mouth.
“Now why did you do that anyway? I had everything all ready to—Don’t talk! You’ll drop the thermometer!—give you a sponge bath! You knew I did! So why in the world did you—I said, Don’t talk, Mr. Rainstar! I know you probably don’t feel well, and I appreciate your giving me a job. But is that any reason to—Mr. Rainstar!”
She relieved me of the thermometer at last. Frowned slightly as she examined it, then shrugged, apparently finding its verdict acceptable. She checked my pulse, and ditto, ditto. She asked if I needed any help in dressing, and I said I didn’t. She said I should just go ahead then, and she would bring in my breakfast. And I said I would and I did and she did.
Since she was now officially my employee, rather than the hospital’s, she brought coffee for herself on the breakfast tray. Sat sipping it, chatting companionably, as I ate.
“You know what I’m going to do for you today, Mr. Rainstar? I mean, I will if you want me to.”
“All I want you to do,” I said, “is shoot me with a silver bullet. Only thus will my tortured heart be at rest.”
“Oh?” she said blankly. “I was going to say that I’d wash and tint your hair for you. If you wanted me to, that is.”
I grinned, then laughed out loud. Not at her, but myself. Because how could anyone have behaved as idiotically as I had? And with no real reason whatsoever. I had stepped on Jeff Claggett’s toes, making a commitment without first consulting him. He hadn’t liked that naturally enough; I had already stretched his patience to the breaking point. So he had punished me—warned me against any further intrusions upon his authority—by expressing serious doubts about Kay Nolton. When I overreacted to this he had hastily back-watered, pointing out that he would not be leaving me in her care, if he had had any reservations about her. But I was off and running by then. Popping off every which way, carrying on like a damned nut, and getting wilder and wilder by the minute.
Kay was looking at me uncertainly, a lovely blush spreading over her face and neck and down into her cleavage. So I stopped laughing and said she must pay no attention to me, since I, sad to say, was a complete jackass.
“I’m sorry as hell about last night. I don’t know why I get that way, but if I do it again, give me an enema in the ear or something. Okay?”
“Now, you were perfectly all right, Mr. Rainstar,” she said stoutly. “I was pretty far out of line myself. I knew you were a highly nervous type, but I teased you and made jokes when I should have—”
“—when you should have given me that enema,” I said. “How are you at ear enemas, anyway? The technique is practically the same as if you were doing it you-know where. Just remember to start at the top instead of the bottom, and you’ll have it made.”
She had started giggling; rosy face glowing, eyes bright with mirth. I said I was giving her life tenure at the task of futzing with my hair. I said I would also give her a beating with a wet rope if she didn’t start calling me Britt instead of Mr. Rainstar.
“Now that we have that settled,” I said, “I want you to get up, back up and bend over.”
“B-bend over—oh, ha, ha—W-why, Britt?”
“So that I can climb on your shoulders, of course. I assume you are carrying me out of this joint piggyback?”
She said, “Ooops!” and jumped up. “Be back in just a minute, Britt!”
She hurried out of the room, promptly hurrying back with a wheelchair. It was a rule, it seemed, that all patients, ambulatory or not, had to be wheeled out of the hospital. So I climbed into the conveyance, and Kay fastened the crossbar across my lap, locking me into it. The she wheeled me down to and into the elevator, and, subsequently, out of the elevator and into the lobby.
She parked me there at a point near the admitting desk, Admitting also being the place where departing patients were checked out. While she crossed to the desk and conferred with the registrar—or un-registrar—I sat gazing out through the building’s main entrance, musing that the hospital’s bills could be reduced to a level the average patient could pay if so much money had not been spent on inexcusable nonsense.
A particularly execrable example of such nonsense was this so-called main entrance of the hospital, which was not so much an entrance—main or otherwise—as it was a purely decorative and downright silly integrant of the structure’s facade.
Interiorly, it consisted of four double doors, electronically activated. The exterior approach was via some thirty steep steps, each some forty feet in length, mounting to a gin-mill Gothic quadruple archway. (It looked like a series of half-horseshoes doing a daisy chain.)
Hardly anyone used this multimillion-dollar monstrosity for entrance or egress. How the hell could they? People came and went by the completely plain, but absolutely utilitarian, side entrance, which was flush with the abutting pavement, and required neither stepping down from nor up to.
It was actually the only one the hospital needed. The other was not only extravagantly impractical, it also had a kind of vertigo-ish, acrophobic quality.
Staring out on its stupidly expensive expanse, one became a little dizzy, struck with the notion that he was being swept forward at a smoothly imperceptible but swiftly increasing speed. Even I, a level-headed unflappable guy like me, was beginning to feel that way.
I rubbed my eyes, looked away from the entrance toward Kay. But neither she nor the admitting desk were where I had left them. The desk was far, far behind me and so was Kay. She was sprinting toward me as fast as her lovely, long legs could carry her, and yet she was receding, like a character in one of those old-timey silent movies.
I waved at her, exaggeratedly mouthing the words, “What gives?”
She responded with a wild waving and flapping of both her arms, simultaneously jumping up and down as though taken by a fit of hysterics.
Ah-ha! I thought shrewdly. Something exceedingly strange is going on here!
/>
There was a loud SWOOSH as one of the double doors launched open.
There was a loud “YIKE!” as I shot through it.
There were mingled moans and groans, yells and screams (also from me), as I sped across the terrazzo esplanade to the dizzying brink of those steep, seemingly endless stone steps.
I had the feeling that those steps were much harder than they looked, and that they were even harder than they looked.
I had the feeling that I had no feeling.
Then, I shot over the brink, and went down the steps with the sound of a stuttering, off-key cannon—or a very large frog with laryngitis: BONK-BLONK-BRONK. And I rode the chair and the chair rode me, by turns.
About halfway down, one of the steps reared up, turned its sharp edge up and whacked me unconscious. So only God knows whether I or the chair did the riding from then on.
18
I was back in my hospital room.
Except for being dead, I felt quite well. Oh, I was riddled with aches and twinges and bruises, but it is scientific fact that the dead cannot become so without having some pain. All things are relative, you know. And I knew I was dead, since no man could live—or want to live—with a nose the size of an eggplant.
I could barely see around it, but I got a glimpse of Kay sitting at the side of the door. Her attention was focused on the doctor and Claggett, who stood in the doorway talking quietly. So I focused on them also, relatively speaking, that is.
“…a hell of a kickback on the sedatives, Sergeant. A kind of cumulative kickback, I’d say, reoccurring over the last several days. You may have noticed a rambling, seriocomic speech pattern, a tendency to express alarm and worry through preposterous philosophizing?”
“Hmmmm. He normally does a lot of that, Doctor.”
“Yes. An inability to cope, I suspect. But the sedatives seem to have carried the thing full circle. Defense became offense, possibly in response to this morning’s crisis. It could have kept him from being killed by the accident.”
My head suddenly cleared. The gauzy fogginess which had hung over everyone and everything was ripped away. And despite the enormous burden of my nose, I sat up.