Читать книгу Ashley Bell - Dean Koontz, Dean Koontz - Страница 15

NANCY TOLD HERSELF TO CHILL OUT, GEL, TO sideslip through the moment, ride out the chop, to just sit in one of the visitor chairs and wait for Bibi to be brought back from the CT scan. But even when she had been an adolescent surf mongrel learning the water, she had never been a Barbie with the placidity of a doll. When on a board, she had always wanted to shred the waves, tear them up, and when the waves were mushing and the land had more appeal than the ocean, she had always nonetheless pumped through the day with her usual energy.

And so when Murph turned the corner from the first ER hallway into the second, Nancy was pacing back and forth outside the cubicle from which Bibi had been wheeled away on a gurney. She didn’t see him immediately, but intuited his arrival by the way a couple of nurses did double takes and smiled invitingly and whispered to each other. Even at fifty, Murphy looked like Don Johnson in the actor’s Miami Vice days, and if he had wanted other women, they would have been hanging off him like remora, those fish that, with powerful suckers, attached themselves to sharks.

Murph still wore a black T-shirt, a Pendleton with the sleeves rolled up, and boardshorts, but in respect for the hospital, he had stepped out of sandals and into a pair of black Surf Siders with blue laces, worn without socks. Newport Beach was one of the few places in the country where a guy dressed like Murph would not seem out of place in a hospital or, for that matter, in a church.

He put his arms around Nancy, and she returned his hug, and for a moment neither of them spoke. Didn’t need to speak. Needed only to cling to each other.

When they pulled back from the embrace and were just holding hands, Murph said, “Where is she?”

“They took her for a CAT scan. I thought they would have brought her back by now. I don’t know why they haven’t. It shouldn’t take so long—should it?”

“Are you okay?”

“I feel like I’ve been hammered, fully prosecuted,” she said, both terms surfer lingo for wiping out and getting brutally thrashed by a killer wave.

“How’s Bibi doing?” he asked.

“You know her. She copes. Whatever’s happening to her, she’s already thinking what she’ll do once she’s gotten through it, if maybe it’s good material for a story.”

Rolling his mobile computer station before him, Dr. Barsamian, the chief ER physician during the current shift, approached them with the news that Bibi had been admitted to the hospital following her CT scan. “She’s in Room 456.”

The doctor’s eyes were as black as kalamata olives. If in fact he knew something horrific about Bibi’s condition, Nancy could read nothing in his gaze.

“The CT scan seems to have been inconclusive,” Barsamian said. “They’ll want to do more testing.”

In the elevator, on the way from the first floor to the fourth, Nancy suffered a disturbing moment of sensory confusion. Although the position-indicator light on the directory above the doors went from 1 to 2, then to 3, she could have sworn that the cab was not ascending, that it was descending into whatever might occupy the building’s two subterranean levels, that they were being cabled and counterweighted down into some enduring darkness from which there would be no return.

When the light moved to the 4 on the directory and the doors of the cab slid open, her anxiety did not abate. Room 456 was to the right. When she and Murph got there, the door stood open. The room contained two unoccupied beds, the sheets fresh and taut and tucked.

Bibi’s drawstring bag stood on the nightstand beside the bed that was nearer to the window. When Nancy peered into it, she saw a toothbrush, toothpaste, and other items, but no pajamas.

Each bed came with a narrow closet. One of them proved empty. In the other hung Bibi’s jeans and long-sleeved T-shirt. Her shoes stood side by side on the closet floor, her socks stuffed in them.

With the squeak of rubber-soled shoes and the scent of soap, a young blond woman in blue scrubs entered the room. The nurse looked too young to be credentialed, as if she might be just fifteen and playing hospital.

“They told us our daughter would be here,” Murph said.

“You must be Mr. and Mrs. Blair. They’ve taken Bibi for tests.”

“What tests?” Nancy asked.

“An MRI, blood work, the usual.”

“None of this is usual to us,” Nancy said, trying for a light tone of voice and failing.

“She’ll be all right. It’s nothing intrusive. She’s doing fine.”

The much-too-young nurse’s reassurances sounded as hollow as a politician’s promises.

“She’ll be a while. You might want to go down to the cafeteria for lunch. You’ll have the time.”

After the nurse left, Nancy and Murph stood for a moment in bewilderment, looking around the room as though they had just now been teleported into it by an act of sorcery.

“Cafeteria?” he asked.

Nancy shook her head. “I’m not hungry.”

“I was thinking coffee.”

“Hospitals ought to have bars.”

“You never drink before five-thirty.”

“I feel like starting.”

She turned toward the window and then, with a sudden thought, turned away from it. “We need to tell Paxton.”

Murph shook his head. “We can’t. Not now. Don’t you remember? His team is on a blackout mission. No way to reach them.”

“There’s got to be a way!” Nancy protested.

“If we tried and Bibi found out, she’d want our scalps. Even though they’re not married yet, she’s getting more like him each day, tough-minded and committed to the way things are in that life.”

Nancy knew he was right. “Who would have thought it would be her we’d have to worry about instead of him?”

She switched on the TV. None of the programs was entertaining. All of them seemed intolerably frivolous. The news inspired despair.

They went down to the cafeteria for coffee.