Samaritan (3 page)

Chapter 3

Hospital—February 10

Contrecoup contrecoup contrecoup—the word leaden and tasteless, a gray mantra that braided its way through Ray’s open-eyed dreams, the dreams themselves going on and on, stretching like putty and always involving his daughter, Ruby—Ruby in a crowded elevator, someone lecturing her, “They don’t give out trophies for trying, and they don’t give out trophies for crying”—Ruby building a house out of ice bricks for herself, cheerily rejecting Ray’s entreaties to put on a hat and make some friends—Ruby and her dead grandmother in bed, Ray setting up TVs for them to watch; a dozen in a tight horseshoe around the mattress.

Ray clawed his way back into the world with a tooth-grinding hypnagogic lurch; then lay there in the hospital bed, balloon-brained, trying to remember what had happened to him. He slipped back into dreams, then fought his way out again and again and again, each time resurfacing with another detail, another crummy piece of the puzzle.

All the beds in the monitored-care ward were separated from each other by Plexiglas partitions and open at the foot facing the nurses’ station, so that the only way he could get any privacy was to keep his eyes shut; the problem with that was the brilliant juddering sparks that went off against the darkness every time he lowered his lids.

Catching his reflection in a stainless-steel pitcher on the night table, he discovered that the whites of his eyes had turned cherry red, the surrounding skin from forehead to cheekbone now slick and purple as a braised onion. And then, with a sleepwalker’s detachment, he took in the shaved patch, the circumference of a wineglass, on the left slope of his skull, bristling with blood-blackened stitches.

A nurse entered and adjusted his IV drip.

“Your wife and daughter’s out there, do you want them to come in?”

He could tell from the set of her mouth that it was taking him too long to process the question.

“
No,
” he finally, drunkenly blurted, his head paper-thin and pulsing. “No,” saying it more calmly, trying to seize control of himself, but no way would Ruby get to see him like this.

“No problem,” she shrugged.

He noticed that the pinky on his left hand was thickly taped, the dressing extending down across his palm and terminating in a mooring bind around his wrist.

“Contrecoup,” he said.

“Come again?”

“Contrecoup. What’s contrecoup.”

“That’s the fourth time you asked me that today.”

Ray waited.

“It’s a shift in the brain mass,” she said easily. “You take a good enough whack up here?” She suspended the heel of her palm between his eyes, the mere thought of contact nauseating him. “The brain gets bounced to the opposite side of the cranial cavity, then rebounds back to the center. It’s like whiplash of the gray matter. Contrecoup. Maybe I should write it down for you.”

There was no way he could judge if this last comment of hers was sarcastic, and he couldn’t marshal his wits to ask if that was what had happened to him, although why else would that be the new word for today. Or yesterday. Or the day before that . . .

Sighting from the open foot of his bed straight through the glass exterior wall that separated the monitored-care ward from the main hallway, he caught a slice of his ex-wife and their daughter seated on a couch out by the elevator bank, Ruby’s eyes wet, mouth pursed, his ex with an arm around her shoulder, looking self-contained yet braced: a crisis goalie.

But before he could organize a coherent reaction to the sight of them, a short heavyset black woman wearing a stocking cap and a North Face coat, a grocery bag in either hand, came barreling into his stall with the proprietary air of a nurse coming on duty.

“Hey, Ray! How you doing?” near-shouting as if to be heard over loud music, the hip-length puffy coat making her as round as a ball.

She put down the bags, which were brimming with videos; Ray now thinking that she was some kind of civilian candy striper, a recreation aide.

“Do you know who I am?” She briskly rubbed her hands as if she were still outside, then unzipped her coat to reveal the detective’s shield clipped to the breast pocket of a lumberjack shirt.

“A cop?” he said distractedly, desperately trying to put together a response to Ruby and her mother out in the lobby.

“But who
am
I,” going all playful on him like it was a game.

She brought herself to the edge of the bed, Ray reading “N. Ammons” off her shield.

“I don’t believe this,” she said with theatrical exasperation.

“N. Ammons,” he said, a little frightened of her now; all this bizarre familiarity. “N. Ammons, N. Ammons . . .”

“Ray,” she cut him off. “Up here.”

She touched the remains of her left eyebrow, more than half of it a whitish plug of scar tissue, all the more livid for being set against the deep brown of her skin.

“Tweetie,” he said flatly.

“Tweetie . . .” She laughed deep and gravelly like a man, took off her coat and dropped heavily into the visitors’ chair next to his bed. “Nobody’s called me that since the Flood.”

“Tweetie Ammons,” he said, his eyes flitting back and forth between the elevator banks and this woman who might or might not actually be here. “And you’re a cop.”

“Going on twenty years. So you remember this, huh?”

“The stickbat. With Dub.”

“With Dub. He’s a cop too now, a sergeant over in Jersey City.”

“Your brothers are Antoine and Butchie and your mother is Olive.”

“That’s right,” she said in a more sober tone, sizing him up now.

“So how are they?” Ray trying so hard but sounding to himself like a cordial robot.

“Nah nah nah,” she growled. “Don’t get me goin’ there. How’s yours? How’s your folks?”

“My mother’s dead, my father’s down in Mississippi.”

“Aw, I liked your moms, Ray. She was like a movie star.”

“Yeah,” he said. “She thought so, too.”

“Man, I hate this hospital . . .” Nerese hunkered in, her voice dropping to a confidential drawl. “Can I tell you what happened to me here one time?”

Ray’s ex-wife finally got up from the couch and pushed the elevator button, refueling his struggle over how to greet them.

“Ray, you got to hear this . . . 
Ray.
” Nerese touched his hand to bring him around. “Last December, right before Christmas? Me and my partner, Willy Soto, we caught a job up in the Heights, some old Irish lady, her live-at-home son had broke her nose, right? So we bring her here, but we can’t find the son. Turns out the guy was an ex-cop about forty years old, a juicer, OK? So, all right, we get an order of protection for her, a warrant for him. Now, I went back to the building and interviewed this woman’s neighbors, found out that the guy, when he got his load on? He used his mother like a regular punching bag but she never once complained, called 911, asked him to move out, nothing. And, you know, when I heard that, I knew she was gonna protect her little baby no matter what, right? So, back in the hospital I go to the lady in the next bed, give her my card, tell her if your roommate’s red-nosed Sonny Boy shows up, you page me.”

“Huh,” Ray declared, trying to fall into the story, but at the same time becoming aware of a vague sense of shame starting to creep up on him, curling in wisps around his heart.

“Anyways, the next day, I get the page, the eagle has landed. Me and Willy, bang, we race down here, catch him in the room hanging over his mother’s hospital bed, yelling in her face, something about money. So we drag him out to the hallway, you know, trying to cuff him up?

“All of a sudden the nurses, the doctors, the visitors, everybody starts yellin’ at us, ‘Hey! Hey! What are you doing to him! We’re calling Security! Somebody call Security!’ You know, because Willy’s black too, so all they saw was two thugs pounding on a white man, read us as some kind of middle-aged gangbangers, crackheads, or whatever. Then Sonny Boy starts screaming, ‘Get this fat black bitch off me!’ At which point I’m like, Fuck the handcuffs, and I just start whaling on him because Ray, I am not that fat. But in any event, here comes Security, me and Willy, we got our hands full with this guy, neither one of us can get to our shields, next thing we know we’re fighting with Security too! It took fif-teen minutes for them to get it through their thick racist-ass skulls that we were cops. And that sonofabitch almost got away from us again, can you believe that?”

“Yes.”

“Sure you can. And after that? I came here every day to visit that nice old lady to try and drill it into her head that her son was a mortal danger to her. But don’t you know soon as she went home she had him move right back in with her?

“And six months later, guess what happened . . .”

“He killed her,” Ray said.

“Nah. She’s fine.” Nerese waved him off. “Him, on the other hand, he got good and oiled one night, wound up run over by a PATH train. Toot-toot. Peanut butter.” Nerese laughed. “God is good, huh?”

“Tweetie,” Ray said. “You’re a cop.”

“Yeah, but what’s even better”—she leaned in closer, rubbing her hands—“right now I’m
your
cop. So what happened?”

And just like that, she lost him, his bloodred eyes sliding away from her in a sullen glaze.

The catching detective had told her that Ray wouldn’t cooperate, which, in the always hopping city of Dempsy, New Jersey, automatically dropped the case into the Fuckit file.

“What happened, Ray,” waiting out both his willful reticence and the typically slow reaction time of a concussed victim. “Can you remember what happened?”

Having interviewed countless blunt force trauma vics over the last two decades, Nerese had a reasonably good idea of what she was dealing with here, the lacerated scalp resting atop either a so far bloodless brain contusion or a small intracranial bleed; anything more dire, and the skull would have been burr-holed to clip the bleed and evacuate the overflow.

And although the monitor showed his BP at 110 over 70 and his heart rate holding steady at 75, the IV was pumping Decadron, a powerful steroid given to control swelling of the brain, which probably meant the poor bastard hadn’t really slept since he’d been admitted and most likely immediately hooked up—no one slept on Decadron—which further meant that in addition to whatever disorientation he was experiencing, he was also probably on his way to a nice bout of sleep disorder psychosis, steroid psychosis, critical care unit psychosis, take your pick. He could also develop a subdural hematoma, the gap between the skull lining and the brain filling with expelled blood from the healing tissue, the doctors in that case, too, needing to go in drilling to relieve the pressure. Any and all of this meant she had to work fast, before he became either too estranged from reality or straight-out unconscious; any and all of this liable to happen in a blink, the emotional and medical status of brain-whack patients as treacherously unstable as the weather conditions around Mount Everest.

The problem with Nerese working fast, though, was that she was world famous for her tortoiselike pace—getting where she was going more often than not, but, as Willy Soto had once said, “Fast ain’t your speed.”

“Ray.” She took his hand in hers. “You need to tell me what happened.”

“Doorbell rings,” he finally said. “I open the door, next thing I know some paramedic’s asking me my date of birth.”

“Doorbell rings,” she nodded, reaching into one of the shopping bags and pulling out a notepad. “You got a doorman?”

“An intercom,” he said grudgingly, Nerese taking his willful surliness as a good sign, at least biology-wise.

“An intercom. So, you’ve got to buzz people up, right?”

“He must’ve rung someone else’s buzzer, got in the building that way.”

“He?”

“I’m assuming.”

“OK.” She shrugged. “‘He’ rings your doorbell. You ask who’s there? Or did you just open up the door?”

He took a long time answering, Nerese not sure if it was the head injury or Ray just trying to buy some time here.

“I don’t remember. I must’ve asked who’s there, I guess. I don’t remember.”

“Look through the peephole?”

“If I did, I don’t remember.”

“Don’t remember. OK, so you open the door. Next thing you’re in a rig heading for the hospital. So whoever did this, it’s not like you invited them inside because you’d most definitely remember that, right?”

“Right.”

“Ray . . . When you came to the door, were you carrying a big vase with you?”

“A what?” he said, then, “No.”

“You got one in the house?”

“I guess.”

“Where in the house?”

“Living room.”

“Where in the living room?”

“In a corner, between the couches.”

“See, Ray, I’m asking, because the medics told me, they come up to get you, you’re laying there, someone had smashed a big vase over your head. Blood and plaster everywhere.”

“Shit.”

“They said you were seizing up, flopping around like a fish on a dock, had a sharp chunk of plaster in your fist?” She pointed with her pen to his bandaged pinkie, Ray staring at it as if he had never realized that there was a hand at the end of that particular arm. “Almost severed your own finger there.”

He closed his eyes, winced as if pricked, opened them.

“So let me ask you this . . . When you opened the door, was this guy by any chance
carrying
a big vase? You know, like waiting for you, like, ‘Surprise!’”

He didn’t answer.

“OK . . . So you must’ve gotten clocked with that vase that was sitting in the corner between the two couches, huh?”

He started to turn away from her, reaching weakly behind him to close his open-backed smock, then gave up.

“So this guy had to have entered your apartment, looked around, spotted the vase, walked over to the corner between the two couches, picked up the vase, come back up to you and . . .” Nerese mimed raising that vase over his head, slowly bringing it down in front of his face.

“Why are you making me feel like I’m the criminal,” he said without heat.

“Ray. Are you afraid of this guy?”

“What guy . . .”

“Ray.” She sighed. “You invited the guy in, or he pushed his way in, or something, but there’s no way you can tell me you have no memory of it.”