The Last Hot Time (2 page)

He looked up. Cloudhunter Who Keeps His Sisters' Counsel was sitting absolutely still, the shotgun across his knees. Only his silvery eyes moved, shifting like mercury. Danny couldn't see a thing through the tinted windows, not even into the front seat; he had heard that elves had night vision, or some kind of special vision.

"Mr. Cloudhunter—"

"No titles," the elf said. "Cloudhunter is fine. Cloud if we get to be friends."

"Cloudhunter, could you put that thing away?"

"The Ruthins might try again." The elf's voice was softer now, more like human. "Not much use put away."

"Yeah, I guess."

The eyes shifted again. "The Urthas like to plot," he said, still more softly. "Urthagwaed's clever and likes to be seen so. Long Lankin, or Iceberg Jack, Glassisle, Rhiannon—any could find a nice human lad, good with the kingsfoil. . . have him finish whatever needed finishing."

Danny didn't say anything. Assuming he understood what the elf was saying, there was no point in arguing with it.

Norma Jean groaned, stirred. She gurgled out a half scream. "Easy, now, easy, Norma Jean," Danny said, and put a hand on her shoulder, pressed just slightly. She sighed as the pain defocused. The blue dress had covered her breasts maybe halfway, before Danny had started cutting.

"Is she in pain?" It was Patrise's voice through an intercom grille.

"I don't think she's really conscious. But—is there a blanket back here?"

"Drawer under the seat."

As Danny got Norma Jean covered, Patrise said, "Can you give her something?"

"You mean for pain? I've got aspirin and benzocaine cream. No good here."

There was a pause. The woman's head trembled.

Mr. Patrise said, "I'd like to see your license now." A little drawer slid out of the dividing panel. "I'm not questioning your ability."

Danny got out his wallet. "You want my driver's license, too?"

"That would be all right."

He put the cards through. "Ah," Patrise said. "Do you see this birthdate, Lincoln?"

"Okay!" Danny said. "Okay, so I'm still nineteen, all right? The stuff's all real and the car's really mine. It's only a few weeks to my birthday—"

"It certainly is," Patrise said. "October thirty-first. All Hallow's Eve."

Cloudhunter's head turned.

Mr. Patrise said, "Hallowseve. Holman, Hallownight. That's a fine alias. Doc Hallownight, I think." He laughed. It was a pleasant sound. "There are already several Docs on the Levee, there always are. Oddly enough, few of them ever have MDs." He laughed again, and Danny found himself wanting to laugh too.

After about fifteen minutes, Danny could see the glow of the burning sky through the dark windows. They were apparently traveling at high speed, seventy at least, but the car seemed barely to be moving. Danny looked at his watch. The liquid-crystal display read FEAR. Danny blinked, angled his wrist to catch the light. 2:28 AM. No wonder he was seeing things. He'd been driving for nearly nine hours straight before all this.

He said, "How long till we get to the hospital?"

McCain's voice said, "Ten minutes."

"Can I have my IDs back now?"

"Mr. Patrise is rather tired."

Danny's watch said 2:30, and then RAGE, and then 2:31.

At 2:40 they drove into a brightly lighted garage. An ambulance was parked nearby. Cloudhunter opened the door. A moment later. Norma Jean was on a gurney and Danny was giving the ED team the lowdown: "We have a woman, early twenties, two gunshot

wounds to the left flank and upper left arm, punctured left lung . . ."

Somebody, probably a resident, nodded to Danny by way of acknowledgment and the team closed him out. Nothing new about that. He looked around for Mr. Patrise and the other men, but they had disappeared. He wandered out into the waiting room.

It had the usual litter of old magazines, empty cardboard cups, and smokers' debris, and an unmanned counter of ancient varnished wood. The room smelled both musty and of disinfectant. As he started to feed change to the drinks dispenser, a woman's voice said, "Don't do that. Even if you are near a hospital."

A muscular, dark-haired woman in surgical scrubs, stethoscope draped around her neck, was standing in a doorway. "You're Doc Hallownight?"

"Daniel—uh, yeah."

"Lucy Estevez. I'm the lucky bozo in charge of the Knife and Gun Club tonight. It was pretty quiet until you got here." She held out a hand and Danny shook it. "Come on back and have some actual coffee. It's probably just as toxic as the machine stuff, but at least it's free."

They went back to a nurses' station, facing a row of a dozen curtained cubicles, about half of them with signs of occupancy. Dr. Estevez poured coffee from a heavily stained pot into two mugs bearing the names of drug companies; one was advertising an antihypertensive, the other a stool softener.

It was real coffee, as strong as he'd ever tasted it. It made Danny's chest burn and his head stand up and cheer. "Thanks."

"McCain said you were a paramedic."

"Yeah."

"Hey, relax." She told him a story about a motorcycle decapitation, down to the last splintered vertebra and drop of O-negative. He told her one about a disk-harrow accident. He'd had the conversation before, at Adair County. He relaxed. He knew this place.

Dr. Estevez got a bottle of peroxide and a towel to take the blood off Danny's denim jacket. She fingered his blue chambray shirt. "I think this one's had it. Mind accepting a loaner?"

'Sure." He was given a blue scrub shirt, found a bathroom to

change in. In the mirror, there was more blood on him than he'd realized. He rinsed his chest and slipped the shirt over his head. It was Stamped STOLEN FROM MICHAEL REESE HOSPITAL.

When he came out, Dr. Estevez was emerging from a cubicle. "The young lady ought to make it," she said. "You do good work."

Danny nodded.

"I mean that. You did it all dark?"

"There was light in the back seat."

"I mean, you didn't use any magic."

"Huh?"

"Never mind. You're from the country?"

"Duz it show s'much?" he drawled.

"When you came in, you said, 'We've got a woman.' One of the local people would have said, 'white female.' "

Danny thought hard about that. Things were going to be different here. People were going to be different, in more ways than one.

Dr. Estevez said, "I don't suppose you're looking for a job. W 7 e can always use another van jockey."

"Well, actually, I just got here, and ... I guess a job sounds pretty good."

"The pay's fair, but I guarantee the hours stink worse than anything you're used to. And you know the New Paradigm?"

"No."

"There are never enough of us, so if you bring somebody in and don't have another call right away, you can get drafted as an ED assistant. OR too, sometimes. And you do know which end of the baby to grab?"

"Did it for real once."

"Good enough. Anyway, it's all the fun of being a first-year trauma resident, without ever getting to be a doctor."

"We did all that at home. We didn't have a name for it."

McCain appeared from somewhere in the back of the ward. "Mr. Patrise wants to see you, Doc."

"Offer's open," Dr. Estevez said, and went into one of the cubicles.

McCain led Danny to another cubicle. ( 'loudhuntcr u as waiting

outside, holding a hand inside his coat. Danny had no doubt there was a weapon tucked away there. The elf opened the curtain and Danny went in.

Patrise was sitting up on a bed, his shirt off. His chest and arms were very thin, and his dark brown skin had the blue-gray cast of heart disease. EKG wires ran to a monitor; Danny saw a slightly abnormal rhythm, probably valvular trouble.

On Patrise's right chest was a black bruise the size of Danny's palm.

"You didn't tell me you'd been hurt."

"A ricochet. My coat stopped it." Patrise tilted his head back. His face was delicate, even-featured, thin-lipped. His hair was black and combed straight back from his forehead, caught in a silver clip at the back of his neck. "Some first night in the big city, eh, Hallow? What's the time?"

Danny looked cautiously at his watch. It showed just numbers. "Three-ten."

"Little late to show you the bright lights, then. But you're still going strong. That's good. Night people are at an advantage on the Levee. Lincoln."

McCain looked in. He had a broad, rocklike face, all planes and crevices. His eyes were sharp blue. When he looked at Danny they seemed friendly enough; Danny didn't want to see unfriendly on McCain.

Patrise said, "We'll go by the club; Doc can shake some hands."

McCain nodded and left. Patrise said, "They always treat your clothes like something dangerous. Find my shirt."

It was on a hanger nearby. The label said TURNBULL & ASSER. As he helped Patrise put it on, he realized that it was silk. He had never in his life seen a man's silk shirt.

Patrise fingered the rip in the shirt above the bruise on his chest, touched one of the EKG wires glued to his skin. "Shut that gadget off. I don't want them thinking I've died. Too many people have ideas already."

Danny switched off the monitor. Patrise peeled the electrodes off, buttoned his shirt.

"Mr. Patrise, the doctor on duty offered me a job here."

"I'm not surprised. Lucy can see competence a mile off. I'm

sorry to disappoint her. Don't worry 7 , Lincoln will make the excuses." He paused. "Perhaps it wasn't clear: you have a job. With me. Personally. There's no room for moonlighting." He pulled on an elastic-sided shoe. "You'll have plenty of your own time, but you work for me. Understand that and you'll have no cause to complain."

"Mr. Patrise, this is—I mean, I just drove into the city. You don't know me, it was just an accident—"

"There aren't any accidents." Patrise examined his slim hands, rubbed away a bit of electrode paste. "You have options, of course. You could work here. It's a nice place, if you don't mind the pay and the hours, the homicidals and the positive Wassermanns, all that. And, too, Norma Jean's family is Gold Coast, and they'll probably want to express their gratitude in a concrete way. But you'd regret it." He looked up, smiling. "That isn't a threat: I won't make you regret it. You just will." He stood up, wavered a little; Danny caught his arm.

Patrise looked up at him, eye to eye. "As for not knowing you . . . ask me again in a month if I know you. Cloud."

Cloudhunter pulled the curtains open, held Patrise's coat. At the nurse's station, McCain was signing some papers. Dr. Estevez waved as they passed. "Have fun, Doc," she said. "If you ever get tired of the good life, give me a call."

They got into the car, Patrise and Cloudhunter in back, McCain driving. Through the clear glass in front, Danny could finally see the city. A long building with lit strips of stairwell would be the hospital; beyond it was the hollow concrete shell of a structure just as large. McCain turned into a broad street lined with burnt wood, broken bricks, empty windows, lit only by the car's headlights and the orange sky hovering low above everything.

"People live out there?"

"Not so you'd call it that," McCain said. "This is the Boneyard. The Penumbra if you're in a fancy mood. Went in the big shakedown. You saw the first big wreck back there? They blew that as a firebreak, to save the hospital. Now it's too far out of the World and the Shade both for either to care."

There was more red in the airglou now. "It burns like this all night? Every night?"

"Nothing's really burning. The light's something from the

change. Witch stuff, not my department. We'll lose it once we're really inside. We're almost to the river now. Watch."

The car climbed a bridge approach. Danny could see red light turning water to blood. Suddenly the sky was black, with the fingernail moon descending. Stars came out as Danny's vision adjusted. He looked back. The river still had a pink tinge.

The little moon, without competition, washed down dark walls to wet pavements. Here and there a streetlamp glowed, and a bit of brilliantly colored neon flared. Motorcycles were parked in clusters, and a few of the boxy old-style cars.

Danny saw a multiple, hunched movement, as of something huge and dark and formless slithering down an alley—or else just a group of people, keeping their backs to the wind.

"Was that—"

"Probably. Where're you from, Doc?"

"Nowhere."

"Been there many a time. Little dull, but no cooking like it. Where?"

"Okay, Iowa. Adair, Iowa. Know anything you didn't know before?"

"Adair, Iowa. The James brothers pulled their first big robbery around there, didn't they?"

"Yeah. Yeah, they tried—but they robbed the wrong train."

"Ah, well, everybody has to start somewhere, eh?" McCain laughed, and Danny felt himself relax.

Then McCain said in a dead cold tone, "Where you start is knowing that all the attitude in your little farmboy body don't come up to the top of my shoes. Got that?"