Bad Medicine (28 page)

"You're a pain in the ass, ya know it?" came the voice right by her left ear.

Molly whipped her head around, but he was too fast for her. Two hands clamped either side of her head and held it still. If she could have drawn breath, Molly probably could have smelled the cigarettes and beer on him.

"Relax," he said, his voice a sexual weapon. Laughing, controlling, taunting. Still Molly made no sound. Didn't move, even though she could feel the heat of his body through her scrubs.

Then the entire picture changed.

"This is just a warning, honey."

Molly instinctively blinked. "A what?"

Did rapists give out warnings, too?
You were caught in a lonely dark place without adequate protective measures. We're letting you off light this time, Ms. Burke. Next time you won't be so lucky.

"Maybe reminder is a better word," he said, his mouth even closer to her, his lips brushing against her ear and sending shivers down her back. "You're a nurse. Not a cop. Not a fuckin' detective. So be a nurse and leave everything else to the pros."

"Who are you guys?" she asked, even though her heart was pounding worse than her head. "The police union or something?"

"We're reminders. You got closed suicides in a summer with a lot of open homicides. Don't give anybody any more work."

For a second, Molly battled the insane urge to laugh. They had to be kidding. This was about Pearl? These guys were the local muscle telling her to stay on her own turf? Jesus, she wasn't doing an episode of "Magnum" here.

"You understand?"

She nodded and almost broke his nose. "Sure. I understand."

"You'll behave?"

"Oh, yeah. I'll behave."

She'd get out of here and find out where the hell the damn FBI was when they'd been tailing her for the last ten days. The one damn night she needed them and they were off watching reruns of "The Untouchables" or something.

And then she was going to pore through every one of those damn files until she found out just what it was that had these guys so worried.

"Good, because if you don't, we know where you live. We know what shifts you work and where you get your junk food fixes. So remember that after we let you go."

"Let me go..."

The van started with a jolt. Molly felt the quick slice of a knife at the backs of her hands, another by her ankles. Before she could so much as brace herself, she felt herself hefted by two sets of hands and tossed out the side door at thirty miles an hour like a stack of papers on a delivery route. Two sets of hands. Which meant...

Then she hit her head a second time that night and forgot what it was that was supposed to mean.

* * *

Molly still couldn't see. She could feel. She could feel the accumulated trauma of ether, two smacks on the head, and a tumble across a trash can-littered sidewalk into a brick wall. For what seemed like forever, Molly couldn't manage much more than breathing. She wanted to cry, but the tears backed up behind whatever was covering her eyes. She wanted to get to her feet, but they didn't seem to be working. Nothing did. She just lay like a lump of ectoplasm in a cushion of trash bags. She battled the urge to throw up and lost, damn near aspirating because she couldn't seem to turn her head around quickly enough for her stomach's convenience.

At least she wasn't on a deserted country road. She was downtown. Once she managed to coordinate herself enough to get the blindfold off, she realized she'd been tossed into the street a few blocks north of the convention center. From where she lay she could see past the jagged destruction of deserted buildings to where the pristine twin steeples of St. Joseph's Shrine on Biddle stabbed into the night. A beautiful church. Old and well loved and renovated in the seventies to protect the site of the only verified miracle in North America.

Actually, she wasn't far from where she'd started the evening in the first place. A few blocks south was the MAC, and a few blocks east were the caves.

That made her want to cry, too. So did the fact that she hurt everywhere. She must have slammed against the rim of a trash can, because the ribs on her left side were fighting every breath she took. She'd scraped arms and twisted legs and knew she was bleeding from something above her eyes, because it kept gumming up her eyelids.

She was alone, hurting, and without wheels or protection in north St. Louis at eleven o'clock at night. Things couldn't get much worse.

By now, she should have known better than to even court thoughts like that. The minute she did, those clouds she'd been noticing earlier opened up.

Molly had felt miserable in her life. She'd been scared and sore and tired and pitiful. She'd never felt quite like she did lying there drenched and aching and nauseous in stuff that smelled like rotting vegetables and diapers.

That was when she heard the rustle.

God, not more. As bad as she felt, Molly figured she was just fair game. Whatever was coming, was just going to have to get her. The rain spattered down on her, and down the street, the lights blinked yellow, the color splashing across the oil-slicked streets like paint. A plane flew overhead, but that wasn't going to help her. Unless there was a ball game, downtown was one of the emptiest places in the world at this time of night.

Scrape, rustle, sniff.

Sniff?

Molly got her head up and wished that she hadn't. The world tilted and righted itself and unsettled her stomach all over again. She saw the trash moving, though. It looked like a mole was tunneling through it. A mole, great.

Or a rat.

That got her up. At least to her butt, which hurt, too. She was gasping for air to calm her stomach down and trying to keep her eyes open when she kept seeing stars and fading colors. She was trying very hard to pull together enough sense to fight off an attack of rats.

"Get out of here," Molly commanded, sounding a lot like the homeless guys over by the bridge. "Go on!"

She shoved her feet and waved her hands, which produced results. Only not a rat. A puppy.

A bedraggled, mangy, starving, big-eyed puppy. Instead of being scared off, he walked right up and licked her on the nose.

That, after everything that had happened, was what made Molly cry.

* * *

"You have a concussion."

Molly managed to lift her face out of the barf bucket. "No shit."

The surgical resident grinned unabashedly at her. "Nurses make lousy patients. You know that?"

"Of course I do. Now, go away."

Alongside the resident, a razor-pressed, fresh-faced rookie uniform made another note in his pad. "You say two white men."

It took Molly a minute to answer. It was well after two, she was still as stable as a rowboat in a hurricane, and she wanted to go home to bed. Even so, she finally began to feel safe. She had since she'd seen that sincere young face of Officer Rowdy Parker peering down at her as she sat in the trash petting the puppy and crying.

"One tall and big," she told him again, just as she'd promised herself. "One medium and big."

She knew she was forgetting something, but she couldn't work up the energy to figure out what.

"With teeth marks on his arm. Uh-huh."

"You heard from the Feds?"

That had been her first demand. Find me the goddamn FBI agents who were supposed to have been following me around. Molly could well imagine just what poor young Officer Rowdy thought of that one. Even so, he'd been patient and kind and understanding, even when Molly had decorated his spit-shined shoes as they'd waited for the city ambulance to show up to cart her in to work.

Except she wasn't going to be working tonight. She had a headache. She had a broken rib and enough road rash to qualify her for membership in the Unlucky Motorcyclists Club. She had five new stitches just above her hairline and a new pet in the corner.

"How are you getting home?" the resident asked.

Molly glared at him again. It wasn't his fault really. He wasn't even a bad surgical resident. "My car is in the parking lot, Abrams."

He gave her another bright grin. "Oh, yeah. You can't drive it though. Not when you can't stop puking long enough to drive."

"I'm puking because of the ether. Not my head."

"Even so..."

"I'll drive you," Officer Rowdy offered.

Molly nodded, eyes closed to ward off another wave of trouble. "Thank you. That's the second time you've come to my rescue tonight."

"Just my job, ma'am."

Molly opened her eyes to see the other four people in the room all turn around, too, just to make sure they'd actually heard him say that. They had. Officer Rowdy was even blushing. Molly kept herself from giggling.

"Even so, if you hadn't seen me there..."

"I didn't have to," he said. "We got a call."

There was a five-second delay switch in Molly's brain from all the trauma. Once it was tripped, Molly's head snapped up so fast she almost decorated Officer Rowdy's shoes a second time.

"What do you mean you got a call?" she asked. "From whom?"

The very young policeman looked bemused. "He didn't leave his name. Just said he'd driven by and seen something on the sidewalk. Thought it might have been someone injured. I responded."

"And you got there right away?"

"Within a few minutes."

Molly tried hard to remember the chain of events. Her brain was still pretty mushy, which meant accuracy might suffer, but she was pretty damn sure she remembered one thing for certain.

"Nobody drove by," she said, looking back at her savior. "Nobody saw me."

He looked a little less bemused. A little more interested. "You think your kidnappers called?"

"Pretty considerate kidnappers," Abrams said as he finished making notations on Molly's chart.

"They did say they just wanted to warn you," Officer Rowdy said.

"And then they dumped me in the trash on North Ninth Street at night."

"Something to think about," Officer Rowdy decided with a nod and a scribble in his notebook. "After you get a good night's sleep."

Molly waited, but he didn't say
things'll look better in the morning.
She was glad. She was already past her cliché quota for the night.

Molly glared at no one in particular. "In that case, let's go."

She slid off the cart, bucket in hand, a new set of scrubs replacing the old. Nestled in a plastic instrument tub in the corner, her new friend, Magnum, lifted his head and whimpered. Molly knew just how he felt.

"You
are
taking him with you?" the resident asked.

"No, Abrams. I figured the ER should have a mascot. Of course I'm taking him with me." After all, he was the first life-form in almost ten years who had comforted her when she'd felt bad. Molly owed him something. Besides, there was just something about imagining a creature as ugly and scrawny as Magnum wandering around the pristine rooms of Chateau Burke, that pleased her immensely.

"I'll write you an excuse slip for the next four days," Abrams promised, scratching under his yarmulke with his pen.

Molly pulled out a new puke bucket from the nurse server and crouched down to pick up Magnum. Then she just dropped him in the bucket, where he promptly curled up and fell asleep.

"What breed do you think he is?" Abrams asked.

Molly considered the emaciated body, the lank, dirty fur, the big brown eyes. "Something... red. Or brown."

"With big feet," Officer Rowdy offered.

Molly hadn't considered that. A big, ugly dog in the house. Her smile grew. She couldn't imagine she'd never come up with that one before.

Officer Rowdy led the way out, with Molly and Abrams following. For a nanosecond, Molly felt bad. The hallway was in full riot, with a couple of auto accidents, the usual quota of barroom fights, and a homeless woman in full and vocal labor. Even so, more than one of the staff paused to pat Molly on the shoulder as she headed down the hall. A warrior in the fight. A victim of Mugger's Delight. The night supervisor even ran back to the lounge to get Molly's lab coat for extra cover, then held Magnum while Molly slipped it on. Considering that just that little bit of activity had her worn out and nauseous again, Molly decided that she really wasn't in shape to do the Night Shift Marathon anyway.

Her purse wasn't at her car, of course. Just her nursing hag—sans fifty-dollar stethoscope—and the litter from a few fast-food meals. Since nobody had had the bad sense to steal it before, Molly figured the car wasn't worth locking now. After grabbing her stun gun and pepper spray, she closed it and climbed into the front seat of Officer Rowdy's unit, where he was already calling for a locksmith to meet her at her house to change locks.

He was also nice enough to stop off for dog food and then carry it to the house for Molly.

She was so tired and sick by the time she got there that instinct pushed her hand right into her lab coat pocket for her house keys. All she came up with was five Band-aids, a tourniquet, and a handful of alcohol swabs.

"I don't suppose you can pick locks," she asked Officer Rowdy, stuffing everything away again.