I put my hands over my ears. I was losing my mind-this wasn’t an angel, it was a helicopter. Someone had taken my SOS seriously. I stumbled toward the machine as a stranger in a leather bomber jacket jumped down, ducking to get clear of the blades.
“What’s going on here?” he demanded when he’d run across the turf to me.
“They’re down there.” I pointed into the pit. “Get your stretcher crew out; I don’t know what kind of injuries the woman has.”
“I can’t hear you,” the man said irritably. “Where the hell is Billy?”
“Billy?” I croaked, putting my lips close to his ear. “You mean Billy the Kid? I haven’t seen him since church on Sunday. This is Marcena Love. And I think Romeo-Bron Czernin. They need to get to a hospital. Don’t you have a stretcher on that thing?”
The words came out agonizingly slowly. The man recoiled as my fetid breath hit him. He belonged to a different species than me: he was alert, he’d breakfasted, I could smell coffee on his breath, and a heavy dollop of after-shave on his skin. He’d had a shower, he’d shaved. I probably smelled like the landfill itself, since I’d spent most of the night walking through the garbage-laden swamp.
“I’m looking for Billy Bysen. I don’t know anything about these people. How come you answered his phone?”
“It was in the dead man’s pocket.”
I turned away from him and stumbled over to the helicopter, remembering only at the last second to stoop under the blade. The motion sent me sprawling, and the clean-shaven man dragged me to my feet, yelling at me to tell him where Billy was. He was getting really annoying, like the boys on the playground chanting “Iffy-genius” at me, and I wanted to take out my Smith & Wesson and shoot him, but that would really get my father mad. “You can’t go around telling your schoolmates I’m a cop and I’ll arrest them,” he’d said. “You can’t go trading on my badge. You solve your problems without using a club on people. That’s the only way good cops and honest men and women act, you hear me, Pepperpot?”
I twisted out of the shaved man’s grip and flung myself into the helicopter’s open door. The pilot looked at me without interest and turned back to his instruments. I didn’t think I could climb into the helicopter on my own, and I couldn’t make myself heard above the racket of the rotors. I clung desperately to the struts while the clean-shaven man grabbed my sore shoulder and tried to pry me loose.
Suddenly, the racket of the engines stopped. The pilot was taking off his headset and getting out of his seat. The world around me was filled with flashing reds and blues. I looked around and blinked at the array of cop cars and ambulances.
The man let go of my shoulder as a familiar voice spoke behind me. “That you, Ms. W.? I thought I told you to stay the hell out of South Chicago. What you been doing down here? Bathing in the landfill?”
29 On the DL-Once Again
It was only later, after the IVs were pulled out of my arms and County Hospital pronounced me rehydrated and fit to leave, that I was able to make sense of the confusing swarm of cops and stretchers that descended on us, and later still that I found out where the helicopter had come from.
At the moment, though, I didn’t try to understand anything-just gave a little squawk of relief at seeing Conrad. I tried to tell him what was happening, but no sound came from my swollen, parched throat. I waved a shaky arm toward the pit. While I collapsed against the chopper’s doorway, Conrad walked over to the rim and peered down. When he saw Marcena and Romeo, he sprinted back to the ambulances and summoned a couple of stretcher crews.
I dozed off, but Conrad shook me awake. “You have to get your dog. He won’t let the techs take the woman, and we don’t want to have to shoot him.”
Mitch had been protecting Marcena all night, and he was prepared to bite anyone who tried to move her. I stumbled back down to the bottom, sliding the final four feet on my ass. That was the journey that completely finished me. I did make it to Mitch’s side, and I did get a hand on his collar, but the rest of the morning disappeared into a few fragments-Conrad hoisting me over his shoulder and handing me to a couple of uniformed men to carry to the surface-the struggle to keep a grip on Mitch’s leash all the time I was dropping down the well of sleep-waking again to hear the clean-shaven man shouting at Conrad about the chopper.
“You can’t barge in here and take private property. This helicopter belongs to Scarface.”
That couldn’t be right, not to Al Capone. I couldn’t figure it out, though, and gave up trying, just watched Conrad signal to some uniformed men to hold the guy while the stretchers were loaded. What a good idea; I wished I’d thought of it. I drifted again and lost hold of Mitch, who clambered into the chopper after Marcena.
“Better take her, too,” Conrad said to the ambulance crew, pointing at me. “She can take care of the dog, and, besides, she needs a doctor.”
He patted my shoulder. “We’re going to talk, Ms. W., we’re going to talk about how you knew to come to this place, but it’ll keep a few hours.”
And then the rotors started up, and despite the racket and the lurching, which made Mitch tremble and burrow into my side, I fell asleep again. I woke only when the techs carried me out of the helicopter into the emergency room, but the hospital didn’t want Mitch inside. I couldn’t leave him. I couldn’t talk. I sat on the floor next to him with my arms around his blood-stiffened fur. A security guard was trying to reason with me, and then to shout at me, but I couldn’t respond, and then somehow Mr. Contreras was there with Morrell and I was on a gurney, and asleep for good.
When I finally woke up, it was late evening. I blinked sleepily at the hospital room, not remembering how I’d gotten here but feeling too lazy to worry about it. I had that sense of pleasure in my body that comes when a fever breaks. I wasn’t sore anymore, or thirsty, and while I slept someone had washed me. I was wearing a hospital gown, and I smelled of Jergens.
After a while, a nurse’s aide came in. “So you’re awake. How you doing?”
She took my blood pressure and temperature, and told me, when I asked, that I was at Cook County Hospital. “You been asleep twelve hours, girl: I don’t know what war you were fighting in, but you definitely were going down for the count. Now you drink some juice; the orders are, fluids, fluids, fluids.”
I obediently drank the glass of apple juice she held out to me, and then a glass of water. While she bustled about the room, I slowly remembered what had brought me here. I tried out my voice. I could speak again, albeit still rather hoarsely, so I asked after Marcena.
“I don’t know, honey, I don’t know about anyone you came in with. If she was hurt bad, like you’re saying, she’d be in a different unit, you see. You ask the doc when he comes along.”
I slept for the rest of the night, although not as soundly as before. Now that the hardest edge was off my exhaustion, I couldn’t block out the hospital noise-or the parade of people who came to check on me. Leading the band, naturally, was someone from admissions who wanted my insurance information. My wallet had been in my jeans pocket; when I asked for my clothes, someone dug a nasty bundle out of the locker. By an act of mercy, my wallet was still there, with my credit cards and my insurance card.
When they woke me again for rounds at six Wednesday morning, Morrell was sitting next to me. He gave me a crooked smile.
The team of doctors pronounced me combat ready, or at least fit enough to get up and go. They asked about the hole in my shoulder, which had leaked a little from my travails but was basically healing, wrote up my discharge papers, and, finally, left me alone with my lover.