A String of Beads (Jane Whitefield, #8)(78)

The image of the old man and the young woman in the studio returned. “Now we go live to Amy Norris at Buffalo General Hospital for more,” said Don as Kimberly looked serious beside him.

This time the scene was outside a rear entrance of the big brick hospital building. Amy Norris was a tall, thin black woman who looked like a fashion model. “I’m outside the hospital where the state police officer has been taken. Hospital spokesmen have stated he’s in stable condition. He sustained a bullet wound in his right thigh, but they predict he will make a full recovery. He has been identified as Sergeant Isaac Lloyd, age forty-one. The state police headquarters revealed today that he is an eighteen-year veteran with the force, with citations for outstanding merit and valor. The state police spokesman declined to comment on the incident, or on the case Sergeant Lloyd had been assigned to. Amy Norris, Western New York News.”

Jane watched the image change to Don and Kimberly in the studio again. Don said, “An illegal U-turn over a set of railroad tracks has ended in tragedy today.” Jane turned off the television set.

She left the hotel and drove to the store where Carey’s nurses often bought their work gear. She went inside, selected a package that contained two sets of light blue scrubs, a package of surgical masks, a box of thin latex gloves, and a cap like the ones surgeons wore. She found a bag with a shoulder strap, took all her selections to the counter, and paid for them in cash.

IKE LLOYD LAY IN HIS hospital bed, his right leg throbbing. All day there had been a little nurse who had been very gentle, very solicitous of his well-being and comfort. All she had really been able to do for him was come in every three hours or so and give him another shot of painkiller, but she had smiled and spoken softly. Each time she left he fell asleep again, a strange dreamy sleep, very colorful and vivid.

Whenever Lloyd awoke, he fought to bring his dreams back. Most of them started well—running the marathon in New York City last year, or walking through the woods around Salamanca, or sitting in an Adirondack guide boat fishing on Tupper Lake. In one dream he had actually been having sex with Molly. He had hated to let that one go, and had struggled to stay asleep until the pain in his leg had grown too sharp. That one had probably been triggered by her visit to his hospital room, and then missing her after she’d gone home. He had called her to tell her about it, and she had laughed and told him he was still too weak to have that kind of dream.

All the other dreams but that one seemed to shade off into a second part. It got dark. Men had shot him, but in the dream their pistols had thrown flames. Next he would feel the stab of pain as the fire tore through the muscle of his leg. He supposed that these sensations were triggered when his medicine wore off and the pain woke him.

The leg was worse than painful; it was damaged. He had always been a runner. He loved running, and had been a habitual runner for over thirty years. If last night had left him permanently crippled, it would turn that pleasure into agony and sorrow. When he’d been a kid he’d hated school until he discovered that his running didn’t have to be just a way to forget the fact that other kids had friends, money, and nice clothes. He got to run on the cross-country team in the fall and the track team in the spring. Running had given him an identity and acceptance.

Ike had been a farm boy whose family lived on somebody else’s farm and worked for next week’s groceries while they tried to make this week’s last. They were lucky if there was enough money left over to put gas in his father’s old Ford pickup. The Lloyds were backwoods people who had come up from Pennsylvania when Ike was about ten. Through his childhood he and his father had hunted. The Lloyds had been meat hunters, and they’d weighed the cost of each shot against the value it could bring the family.

One of the memories that reappeared in his sleep tonight was a day when his father had wounded a deer. His father walked with a limp because of something that had happened in the army, so Ike had been the one to run after the deer. His concern had been to keep the deer from running all day in pain and then coming to rest in a secluded copse somewhere deep in the woods to bleed out, so its death and suffering would be completely wasted. Ike had run through the forest tracking the buck until he caught up with it, shot it through the head, hung the carcass, dressed it, and brought it home. Ike’s father had cut the meat, then preserved it in the farm freezer. Ike remembered his mother defrosting pieces of the venison all the next winter, and each time they had it, his father would repeat the story of Ike running it down to prevent the sin of wasting a life.

Ike was beginning to feel fully awake again when the night nurse came in. This one was much taller—maybe five nine or ten, and thin, with olive skin but bright blue eyes. She wore a cap on her head that covered her hair and a white surgical mask over her nose and mouth.

At first he’d thought she must be one of the surgeons who had taken care of his bullet wound, but she was a nurse all right, because she fussed with things—moving the rolling stand so his call button was about seven feet from him and he couldn’t even reach the damned thing, opening a drawer on the other side and putting his stuff—wallet, watch, phone—into a plastic bag in the bottom drawer of the built-in dresser in his open closet. He didn’t exactly mind that part. He had thought Molly would take all that with her when she’d left tonight to go put the kids to sleep. And he didn’t really care where the nurses put things. They’d sort it all out another day when he was released.