Bad Medicine (27 page)

Suddenly, he was just there, a disembodied face behind the leaves of his personal privacy fence.

"I need to talk to you, Joey," Molly said, deliberately pulling her hands free in a show of passivity. "I'm alone."

Joe did his own looking around, his eyes much more suspicious than hers. "How did you know where I was?"

"I knew where the caves were," she said. "Harmon told me. I haven't told anybody else."

He gave the area another look, his eyes squinted so tight, Molly almost couldn't see his irises. "Okay."

Then he disappeared again, which Molly figured meant she was supposed to follow. She took a breath and did just that.

Actually, she figured it could have been worse. Once she'd negotiated the waist-high entrance and the sloping floor that led to the main room, she could stand up fairly easily.

The cave itself was a small one, soot-stained and fetid and littered in cast-offs. Kind of like the nurses' lounge in the ER. Just about as clean. Darker, though, in ways that had nothing to do with electricity. The cave smelled of waste and loss and futility, and Molly didn't think she wanted to spend much time there.

By the back lay a black-and-white Australian shepherd-mix mutt with a red bandanna around his neck. Regulation homeless vet dog. He got to his feet when she walked in, stretched, wagged his tail, and settled silently at his master's feet. Joe motioned for Molly to take the red, white, and blue lawn chair with the trailing nylon strips, and he settled on an old dinette version covered in ripped, livid yellow Naugahyde. Beside it was a table stacked with cans and packages and half-empty bottles. In the corner was a pile of moldy paperbacks, and closer, a pile of trash can saves. Light was provided by a lone bulb that seemed to have been strung off a pole at the corner of the lot, and cooking was done on a Bunsen burner. All the comforts of home with none of the tax base.

Even so, Molly didn't like it here. She shouldn't have come. She'd been so caught up in playing detective, she'd forgotten the underscoring to this particular tune, and it was crawling up her neck like fingers on a silent piano.

Molly gingerly cased herself onto the listing chair. "It's about Peg," she said quietly.

Joe's attention was caught. His head came up and he smiled. Just a flicker, as if the real thing were too heavy. Wrapped together in his lap, his fingers scratched at each other as if they were separate entities entirely. "I miss her."

"I know. I wanted to tell you that you might have been right, Joe. There may be more to Peg's death than suicide."

Again he struggled to focus on her. He smelled sour, and his eyes were red and watery. Molly wondered if she was doing any good. In the morning, he probably wouldn't even remember she had been down here. She should just go home. Leave him to his burrow. She should get back into the air.

"I know. I told..."

"Me. You told me. And Frankie."

A nod. "I warned her about it, but she wouldn't listen."

Molly had been focusing on breathing, on getting out of the cave before she embarrassed herself. All of a sudden, she heard what it was Joe said.

"You warned her?" Molly asked, trying so hard to keep her voice level and nonthreatening. "About what?"

Joe wouldn't look at her now. He watched his hands, as if they were communicating with him. "You remember how you were at that... at that age, Cap. Fearless. Immortal. She was immortal. She told me."

Molly held her breath. Held her silence waiting for him to work through his thoughts.

"None of them was, though," he said and stopped.

"None of whom, Joe?"

His attention flickered a little, lit on her again like a frantic insect. "Her friends. She told me. She told me because she knew I wouldn't tell anybody. Because I'm her brother."

"What did they do, Joe? What was wrong? You didn't tell me before."

"I know." That smile again, dark enough to drain the light. "I wasn't... allowed."

"What did they do?"

"They dabbled, Cap. In this, in that. Where they shouldn't have. Got bitten, ya know?"

Bitten.
Molly's skin was crawling again. That's what Pearl's note had said.
I slept with the snakes and I got bitten.
This was all getting beyond her, and she couldn't sort it out in the dark. In Joey's dark.

"Did Peg tell you what, Joe?" she asked, her voice taut with the effort to keep herself in place.

Joe's attention skipped away. His head came up even before his dog's, both of them looking uncannily alike as they listened for outside noises.

Then Molly heard it, too.

"You okay in there, Sarge?" Low and strained and hesitant. The kind of voice that goes with sweats and shakes.

The dog let his head rest. Joe nodded to himself. "Number one, Baker. Night."

"Night, Sarge. Safe home." There was a faint rustling, and then nothing. Molly looked down to see that her own hands were twisted together and pulled them apart.

"Joe?" Molly tried again. "Did Peg tell you what they dabbled in?"

"Inside information. Now you have to go, Cap. This firebase isn't secured. VC everywhere."

It was the first time Molly had heard him really wander. She wanted to wait. Wanted to take him with her somewhere where it was safe and warm and always dry. It wasn't what Joey wanted, though. It wasn't what he could handle. She'd been hearing about the guys in the caves for a while. The folks at the various Vietnam vet counseling centers had been trying to get them to a halfway house or homeless shelter for as long as there had been counseling centers. The guys always found their way back to the caves.

Molly climbed to her feet, suddenly feeling tired. "Thanks, Joe. Come by the office any time, okay?"

He got up with her, as did his dog. Both followed her to the door. "I'll accompany the officer, ma'am," Joe said, his head and eyes always on the move out into the darkness. "Bad fuckers out there."

Molly popped out of the cave entrance right behind Joe like an air-starved second twin. She took a second to suck some in. It smelled great. Clean.

Then Joe crept away toward Molly's car and she realized she could hardly see him. It had grown dark out here.

To the south the lights of the city sapped the black out of the sky, but the shadows beneath that viaduct were about as dark as they got. And either the wind or something that breathed was rustling through the grass. It was nighttime, and it was true. Bad fuckers were out there.

Molly put her hand back in her pocket. Joe went into a half crouch, the long-remembered position of defense from another war a lifetime ago. The dog prowled ahead, sniffing for trouble. Sensing eyes out in that darkness, Molly followed along, wondering what could have possibly possessed her to wander down to the edge of the river at sunset.

The funny thing was, she was perfectly safe. Joe saw her to her car and waited there with his dog while she unlocked her door and got in. By the time she started the engine and pulled away, he, too, had retreated into the shadows.

Still shaking as if she'd just escaped within an inch of her life, Molly locked the doors and reached into her pocket to put the safety back on her stun gun. Which was where it was two hours later when she was attacked in the parking lot at work.

Chapter 14

Molly's first thought was "Damn it, when is the hospital going to do something about this?"

The Grace Hospital parking garage was also locally known as Rapist's Row and Mugger's Delight. Squeezed between about four other buildings, the five-story affair had lights that were forever shorting out and stairs that reeked of urine and semen. Just as she'd been doing for the last three or four weeks, Molly bypassed all the open slots and headed straight for the roof, where she could see the sky until the minute she walked into work.

Tonight, she swung her car in between a van and a Jeep and flipped off the lights. Clouds had settled in over the city, glowing a soft orange in reflected light, and whatever breeze they'd had had died. It was hot and sticky and empty up there. Molly took a minute to just watch the sky so she could carry it into work with her. Then she grabbed her nursing bag and purse and pushed open the door.

That quickly, a hand reached in and clamped around her arm. Which was when she realized that she'd left her stun gun in the camouflage jacket out of reach in the backseat.

Molly drew breath to scream. Another hand slammed her head against the side of the door, igniting a shower of sparks in her vision and effectively shutting out cognitive thought. Molly could feel herself being pulled from the car, bag and all. She couldn't seem to stop it.

Damn it, damn it, damn it, was all she could seem to think. Her vision was shifting like a fun house mirror and the side of her head was on fire. Her shoes were scraping against metal and concrete as she fought against the pull of that pair of big hands.

Ski masks. How original. Two of them, black knit on white faces. Molly wasn't sure why she was so certain. Her attackers were covered head to toe. They were silent and strong and deadly, and she was suddenly terrified she was going off this roof via air express.

This time she did scream. A good one, all the way from her toes. She twisted her wrists in the man's grip, trying desperately to pull against his thumbs. She slammed her foot down on his instep and wished for the first time in her life she wore heels to work. Six-inch spike heels. Nursing shoes just didn't make the same impact.

Molly opened her mouth again, but assailant number two stepped in and simply dropped a bag over her head. A sweet-smelling bag. A sickly sweet...

Oh, goddamn it. Ether. When she woke up again, she was gonna puke.

If she woke up again.

If she didn't wake up raped and dismembered.

It was the last thing she remembered, except that even with a hood soaked in ether over her head, she managed to bite one guy until he howled.

* * *

He was still swearing about it when she heard him again. At least, Molly figured it was him she heard.

She was still blind, even though the ether smell was mostly gone. She was horizontal and cramped and unable to move anywhere. Whatever she was laying in, however, was moving. Fast.

"What's going on?" Molly demanded in a voice that didn't sound nearly terrified enough for what was going on inside her chest.

"Shut up."

Even though she was blindfolded, she shut her eyes. It didn't help. She was sick to death, sweating like a pig, and fighting the headache of the century. And she was being hauled somewhere in the back of a van. All she could seem to remember were all those safety videos they'd shown at the hospital instead of hiring more security to walk the nurses out to their cars that warned against ever getting into a van with a strange man. Women who get into vans never got out alive.

"This look good to you?" a voice in front of her asked.

Molly figured she wasn't the one he was asking.

"Yeah. I think so," another higher voice answered. Still a man, but somebody who didn't sound quite so masculine. Molly thought maybe it was the taller of the two men.

Two white guys, she'd say when the police asked for a description. One tall and big and the other medium and big. One of them has my teeth impressions on his forearm. Right through the black cotton of his turtleneck.

And one of them... she could swear she smelled something. Something familiar, even past the ether that still lingered.

The van slowed to a stop and Molly began to sweat even worse. She didn't hear any traffic. She didn't hear anything. Not only that, she had no idea how long she'd been in the damn van. A while, if the fact that she was now hog-tied and tape-wrapped was any indication. Probably out on the kind of lonely road where UFOs and decomposed bodies were always being sighted.

Except she didn't hear crickets, either.

Where the hell was she?

Why was she there?

A door opened and shut. The side door slid open and Molly felt the van list with the weight of somebody climbing in the side. Her entire body spasmed in self-defense. She fought hard not to make any noise. She would not degrade herself by pleading or whimpering.