Deep Freeze (Virgil Flowers #10)(90)
“You really turned into a Debbie Downer,” Cain said. He laughed. “That goddamn Birkmann. He broke my arm. I gotta give it to him, I didn’t see that coming. Not at all. Didn’t think Bug Boy had it in him.”
TWENTY-SEVEN Virgil waited until Cain’s arm was x-rayed and the duty doctor confirmed that it was broken. “Simple fracture, not terrible. We’ll put a cast on it. Probably be on for three or four months, depending on how fast you heal.”
Cain, who was rapidly sobering up, said, “I got to quit this shit.”
The doc agreed and asked, “Aren’t you the guy who got beat up by Ryan Harney’s wife?”
“Yeah, I guess. Been a bad week,” Cain said.
The doc said that because Cain had been drinking, and because he was going to need some painkillers, he wanted to keep him overnight until the alcohol had worn off. “I’m going to supervise the analgesics myself. I don’t want you overdosing and dying, which would get me sued.”
“That’s nice, worried about getting sued while I’m dying,” Cain said.
The doc said, “People die all the time. I can live with that. It’s the lawsuits that are a pain in the ass.”
A nurse came in and said to the doctor, “We got more business coming in. Some out-of-town woman got in a fight up at Tony’s Chicago Style. She’s burned. Some other woman got a broken arm.”
Virgil had an instant bad feeling. “What out-of-town woman?” he asked.
“Don’t know. Guy on the phone said there was a brawl . . . The out-of-towner broke the other woman’s arm with some kinda pipe or something . . .”
“Ah, shit . . .”
—
Sure enough.
Margaret Griffin was the first through the door, helped out of a pizza delivery truck by a worried man wearing a white paper chef’s hat. Griffin was holding a wet white towel over her face, saw Virgil, and said, “I been burned, bad. Woman threw a slice of red-hot pizza at me.”
The doctor left Cain in an examination room and took Griffin to another. Virgil said, “I need to talk to her,” and the doc said, “You can come in, if she says it’s okay.”
Griffin said, “It’s okay.”
The doctor peeled away the towel. The pizza had stuck to the bridge of Griffin’s nose, to her forehead above her eyes, and to a quarter-sized patch of her cheekbone. The doc said, “Yeah, you’re burned.”
“How bad?” Griffin asked.
“Second-degree, superficial. You’ve got some blistering. I need to clean you up. I’ll give you some ointment for the pain because it will hurt.”
“Will it scar?” Griffin asked.
“No, it shouldn’t. You’re lucky it didn’t get in your eyes. That would have been a much larger problem.”
“No thanks to her,” Griffin said.
The nurse came back. “We’ve got the other one. Where do you want me to put her?”
Griffin said, “Bring her in here—give me a shot at her other arm.”
“Ah . . . maybe not. Stick her in the first room,” the doc said. “Both the breaks will probably be overnight.”
“How did this happen?” Virgil asked Griffin.
“I went into the pizza parlor. I was standing in line, and this woman was sitting at a table. She’d gotten her pizza, and she looked at me and asked if I was the private detective looking for the Barbie dolls. I said I was. And she picked up a slice of pizza and threw it at me. Boiling hot cheese. Stuck to my face. I pulled it off fast as I could . . .”
“You hit her with your baton?” Virgil asked.
“Yeah. She was going to throw more pizza at me, but I got to her first.”
“Jeez, Margaret, I’m sorry. We need to get done with this Barbie thing . . .”
“You get me Jesse McGovern and I’m gone,” she said.
“I’m trying to get in touch with her now,” Virgil said.
—
Virgil went out to the lobby and called the sheriff’s office, told them what had happened, and a deputy said that she’d come down and interview Griffin. “After she’s made her statement, I’ll check with Lanny up at Tony’s and if he backs her up we’ll charge the other woman with assault.”
“Thanks,” Virgil said. He went back and told Griffin what he’d done.
Griffin said, “I’ll give them a statement, but I’ll be damned if I’m coming back here for a court date. Maybe if she’d scarred me . . . But if I heal up okay, I’ll take the busted arm and call it even.”
The doc said, “You’ll be back to normal in a couple weeks. If you broke her humerus, it could take her a year to get back to normal.”
“Good. She can spend the year thinking about why she’s fucked up. Could have blinded me.”
“I gotta stop this shit,” Virgil said. “Margaret, time for you to go home.”
“Tell me about it.”
—
Virgil didn’t care either about Cain or the woman who’d gotten her arm broken but stayed with Griffin until she was cleaned up. The doc put a dressing on her face, gave her some pain ointment that included an antiseptic, told her that her biggest potential problem was infection, and told her where to go to pay for the treatment.