Final Disposition (5 page)

      “Farmington-U?”

      “The Farmington Cocktails were designed for patients with brain injuries or traumas,” the nurse explained.  “The ‘C’ series is predominately a mixture of anti-anxiety drugs, whereas the ‘U’ series is mostly a mix of very effective and fast-acting sedative-hypnotics,” the nurse explained.  “The ’C’ stands for ‘conscious’ and the ‘U’ for unconscious … something easy for us floor nurses to remember.”

      “I remember what I assume was the U-series hitting pretty fast,” he said.  “What’s in it, some kind of secobarbiturate?”

      “No, actually a combination of five benzo-diazepine derivatives — the latest in a series of fast-acting sedatives that are a lot safer to use, and offer much less danger of an overdose,” Marcini replied, and then cocked her head curiously.  “So, you know something about pharmacology too?”

      “I … seem to,” he said hesitantly, and then shrugged easily.  “But I’m probably just interested because it sounds like a pretty effective way of controlling us patients.”

      “Only the ones who start wandering off the reservation,” she said, her eyes flashing with amusement.  “But you haven’t been acting that way … yet.”

      “It’s still early; I’ve only been awake for a few minutes.   And besides, I’m still trying to understand something.”

      “Oh, what’s that?” she asked, cocking her head and causing several strands of long dark hair to sweep across and partially conceal her right eye.

      Cellars decided it was the most exotic look he’d ever seen … or, at least, the most exotic look he could remember ever seeing.  But he had to concede that the data set was pretty limited.

      
One?  Is she the only beautiful woman I’ve ever seen?  How can that be?

      Cellars hesitated, and then turned to stare at Vargas for a few seconds before answering.

      “Something else that I’m beginning to understand about myself, Dr. Vargas: I get the distinct feeling that, deep down inside, I really don’t like shrinks.”

      “Really?  Why is that?” the deep-voiced doctor responded with an easy smile.

      “I don’t know why,” Cellars said, firmly meeting the psychiatrist’s gaze as he switched the focus of his comments to Lisa Marcini, “presumably something from my past.  If it was something clinical, you’d think I’d be nervous or upset — or at the very least uneasy — in our good doctor’s presence, but I’m not.”

      “That’s an interesting bit of insight,” Vargas commented.

      “I thought so, too,” Cellars agreed as he turned to focus his full attention on the dark eyes of his sensuous black-haired caretaker.

      “So tell me, nurse Marcini,” he went on, “before I ask you for your phone number … and before I make a very determined effort to talk you into running off to some island locale with me … why would I be mostly indifferent to our good doctor’s mind-probing presence; but, at some subconscious level, scared every time you walk into this room?”

      “You’re afraid … of me?”  Lisa Marcini’s dark eyes blinked in disbelief.

      “I seem to be.”

      “But … why?  I haven’t done anything at all to threaten — much less harm — you,” Marcini protested.

      “I agree, everything you’ve done so far — or at least everything that I’m aware of —” he added meaningfully, “seems to have been directed toward my personal benefit, if not my libido.”

      “I’m a professional nurse.  It’s my job to take care of you.  And besides,” she added skeptically, “you don’t look like a man who would be afraid of any woman, much less someone like myself.”

      Cellars didn’t think the visibly-toned and -muscular nurse looked all that fragile or helpless, but he didn’t say anything.  Instead, he held out this right arm.

      “Check my pulse if you don’t believe me.”

      Marcini stepped forward, took his wrist with practiced ease, and paused for ten seconds.

      “All right, you do have an accelerated pulse rate, and your skin is moist,” she acknowledged after a few seconds, “but that could be caused by … a number of other things, in my experience.”

      Her lips formed another one of her dimpled smiles.

      “I’m not in heat; not yet, anyway,” Cellars said firmly.  “Look at my eyes — check my pupils.”

      She did so, and then stepped back quickly.

      “Okay, you are showing some physical symptoms of being concerned about something … and you think it’s me?” she asked softly.

      Cellars nodded slowly.

      “So I guess this means you really don’t want my phone number after all?”  Her eyes flashed mischievously.

      Then, apparently concerned that she’d pushed the probing humor too far, Marcini glanced quickly over at the doctor, who made a slight motion with his head for her to continue.

      Neither gesture escaped Cellar’s alert eyes.

      “No, not at all,” he responded, shaking his head, “I really do want your phone number; or, at the very least, I’d like to keep seeing and talking with you — because I love listening to your voice — either here, or in whatever environment you’d feel safe doing so,” he added.

      “You’re concerned about my safety, even though, as you said, I scare you?”  She cocked her head dubiously.

      “I don’t think it’s you, personally, that I’m afraid of,” Cellars said.  “But there’s clearly something about your presence that unnerves me, at least at some subconscious level.  I want to know what that is … and why.”

      Cellars then turned to Vargas.  “Are we getting somewhere — making progress, doc?”

      “Yes,” the clinical psychiatrist said, nodding slowly.  “I definitely think we are.”

      “Good, then can I get dressed?”

      “Well —” Vargas hesitated.

      “I’m starting to feel pretty good right now,” Cellars said with a shrug.  “Not so lightheaded.  Mostly, my stomach feels cramped and empty.  So I was thinking,” he went on, gesturing with his head at Marcini, “if my nurse has the time, perhaps she and I could walk over to the cafeteria — I assume there is one around here — and get something a little more solid to eat. That would give me a chance to stretch my legs, work on my memory a bit, and maybe even try to talk her out of that phone number, while she makes sure I stick to easily-digested foods.”

      Vargas looked over at Marcini.

      “I haven’t had my dinner break yet,” she said, shrugging agreeably.

      “All right, then,” Vargas said as he walked over to the nearby wood closet and used a ring of keys that he drew out of his lab coat packet to unlock the doors.  “I believe you’ll find a clean set of clothes in here.”

      Cellars blinked, started to say something, and then hesitated.

      “Yes?”  Vargas right eyebrow rose expectantly.

      “I’ve noticed that I’m not hooked up to a catheter.”

      Vargas looked over at Marcini quizzically.

      “We had to remove any and all objects containing even small amounts of metal from your person — which included the catheter and the I.V. systems — before taking you into the MRI room,” she explained.  “Given your new state of awareness and presumed mobility, I thought you’d prefer not to have the catheter put back in.  They’re not very comfortable when you’re awake, and the bathroom isn’t very far away.”

      “Thus my ‘walking around’ attire?”  He glanced down at his green shorts.

      Lisa Marcini started to say something, and then caught herself.

      “Yes?”

      “I was going to say that the floor nurses get a little tired of seeing guys wandering around the halls with their bare butts hanging out of their gowns,” she replied, her dark eyes flashing again, “but —”

      Cellars cocked his head?  “But —?”

      “We’ll leave it at that,” Marcini said firmly.

      “Okay,” Cellars nodded agreeably and then turned his head to stare at Vargas.

      “So, Doctor, given my apparent history over the past few days as nurse Marcini’s patient, I’m thinking that it’s probably an odd — and maybe even inappropriate — time for me to start worrying about being undressed in front of her,” he said, briefly shifting his gaze and enjoying yet another dimpled smile.  “But, at the same time, I imagine you all expect me to start acting a little more civilized if I’m going to be walking around in public?”

      “Yes, indeed, we do … and you might as well start right now,” Vargas agreed as he reattached the clipboard to the end of Cellar’s bed and then motioned for Marcini to proceed him out the door.  “Unless you feel you’ll be needing assistance, we’ll leave you alone to get dressed.”

CHAPTER 4

      Cellars waited until the door closed with a loud click.  Then he got off the bed, walked over to the door, and discovered – to his frustration — there was no internal lock.

      
Okay, makes sense, they probably don’t want their nutso patients locking themselves in, and creating a fuss
, he thought as he walked back over to the foot of his bed and unsnapped the clipboard from the bed frame.

      The chart folder bearing the name CELLARS, COLIN on the outside tab in large capital letters was thick with log notes, EKG graphs and MRI photos … mostly black-and-white gibberish that was barely readable and meant absolutely nothing to Cellars.

      But he was intrigued by the fMRI scans that showed cross-sections of a brain in gradient shades of white-to-dark gray with what seemed like random spot patterns in bright yellow-to-orange colors … especially the most recent one — a reverse-color-printed scan still loose in the chart folder that showed small flashes of yellow-to-light-orange within a black shadowy area that had been circled with a ballpoint pen.

      For reasons that made absolutely no sense to Cellars, the black shadowy area in the middle of the brain scan looked vaguely sinister … as if he were looking at a cartoon characterization of some monstrous disease growing within his brain.

      
No, can’t be
, he reminded himself. 
That’s got to be the lesion they were talking about.  An area of my brain that mostly isn’t — or wasn’t — processing signals.  Not some kind of tumor.

      He started to put the clipboard back, hesitated, and then removed the fMRI scan with the black shadowy image from the chart folder and tossed it onto the bed before closing the folder and reattaching the clipboard to the bed frame.

      As he did so, he noticed what appeared to be a small flat rectangular electronic device — consisting mostly of a dark glass screen — and set of earphones attached to the bed frame with a Velcro™ strap.  He examined the unfamiliar electronic device briefly and then tossed it next to the fMRI scan.

      Then he walked over to the far side of the room, pulled open the drapes covering the waist-high-to-ceiling window frame, and stared out into the streetlight-illuminated darkness.

      There wasn’t much to see from his third-story perspective.  An expanse of neatly-trimmed lawn bisected by a meandering gravel pathway that was softly illuminated by a series of stubby metal bollards every twenty feet or so, and led over to an adjacent single-story building maybe a hundred yards away.  No vehicles.  No people.  Just —

      A flicker of movement caught his attention.  Someone — or something — had crossed the gravel pathway between two of the light bollards and approximately halfway between his window and the distant second building.  He’d seen the shadow distinctly at the corner of his vision — a flash of indeterminate darkness moving quickly away from the clinic building — but whoever or whatever had created that shadow was no longer visible on the faintly illuminated lawn.

      No longer visible anywhere, in fact.

      The alarm bells — deep and resonate — began to roar in the back of his mind, causing him to jerk back away from the window and pull the drapes shut.

      
What the hell?

      He could feel his heart racing, a part of the familiar adrenaline-fueled fight-or-flight impulses surging through his brain.  But there was a difference now.  He wasn’t trying to wrench himself loose from the restraints, or dreaming about trying to escape some fearsome creature.

      In point of fact, his hands were pulling open the stainless steel drawers in the mobile cart next to his bed … searching for some kind of weapon … ideally something offensive in nature.

      
A crowbar would be nice
, he thought,
and a loaded pistol or sharp knife even better.

      He didn’t find anything in the drawers sufficiently lethal for his intended purposes, and he was considering the possibilities — and significant limitations — of the Farmington Cocktail vials and the pair of syringes that nurse Marcini had left on the tray when it occurred to him that if she’d forgotten to put the drugs away before walking outside the room, she might have forgotten to do something else.

       And, in fact, she had.

      The lid to the solidly-built — but still unlocked — metal case that she’d left lying next to the syringe tray on the mobile cart opened smoothly.  In the foam-core filled case, he observed six more vials of varying drugs, the empty slots for the seventh and eighth vials, an assortment of syringes, a supply of cotton pads and surgical tape, and one additional item in two-by-two-by-twelve-inch box mysteriously labeled ‘MSB’ that — when he examined the box contents carefully — really didn’t seem to belong with any of the other items.

      
You’re an interesting lady, nurse Marcini, and certainly not one to be messed with
, he thought as he gently closed the lid of the briefcase and then thumbed all five combination dials so that they displayed a new set of numbers. 
But let’s see if your memory is any better than mine.

      Finally satisfied that he had made a quick but thorough search of the room for lethal appliances, he used a blunt pair of surgical scissors he found in the bottom drawer to cut the ID band off his wrist.  And, in doing so, he was vaguely aware of some deep portion of his brain humming contentedly now.