Day of the Dead - J. A. Jance [43]
He never knew—Gayle never told him and he never asked—just how she had managed to entice Roseanne Orozco away from the hospital that Wednesday afternoon. It was clear Gayle had done so without being seen and without arousing any suspicion. Their carefully concocted alibis for the night Roseanne Orozco died proved to be unnecessary. No one from Law and Order or the Pima County Sheriff’s Department ever bothered asking either one of them about where they’d been or what they’d done.
What never failed to amaze Larry was how everything that had happened—the way his entire life had evolved—had grown out of a single misstep, one that had seemed entirely inconsequential at the time. He and the other young doctors on the reservation had regarded it as little more than a boyish prank, a well-deserved bonus for working at a dinky reservation hospital in the middle of Arizona’s godforsaken desert. All of them had been in on it together, the same way they all drank beer and played poker together—card poker, that is. This had been “poker” of another kind.
Whenever one of the girls from the high school—especially one of the good-looking ones—showed up as a patient in the hospital, whoever was in charge of her care would let the others know that the game was on. During evening rounds, the girl’s attending physician would administer a high dosage of a sedative—enough to put her under. Later on, one by one, the doctors would drop by her room and have a crack at her. To them it seemed like good clean fun.
The girl would wake up the next morning or after her surgery or procedure and go home none the wiser and no harm done. At least that was the way it was supposed to work—the way it had worked—for years.
AIDS wasn’t even a blip on the radar back then (Gayle’s brother, Winston, hadn’t died of AIDS until sometime during the mid-eighties), but Larry and the others had all, by mutual agreement, used condoms. They did it as much to protect themselves from whatever STDs the girls might be carrying as they did to protect the girls. But then came the night when Larry’s condom broke as he was screwing one of his own patients, a girl named Roseanne Orozco, who was due to be released the next day after being hospitalized for a ruptured appendix.
Larry felt the condom break the moment it happened, but he told no one. At first he thought everything would be okay—that he’d get away with it. Several times in the next weeks and months, Emma Orozco brought Roseanne back to the clinic complaining that her daughter wasn’t getting any better.
Roseanne was a good-looking but strange fifteen-year-old, who, as far as anyone at the hospital knew, never spoke to anyone. Suspecting the worst, Larry finally admitted Roseanne to the hospital for a whole battery of tests. A pregnancy test was the only one that turned out positive.
He wondered sometimes what would have happened to him if he hadn’t told Gayle that very afternoon as soon as he knew Roseanne’s test results. What if Gayle hadn’t taken matters into her own hands? No doubt he would no longer have a license to practice medicine, and he certainly wouldn’t have spent the last twenty-five years as one of Tucson’s most well-respected citizens. The aftermath of Roseanne Orozco’s murder changed him forever—and it changed Gayle as well.
In the months that followed, Gayle evolved into an entirely different person. He had known she was smart and ambitious, but now it seemed some previously unknown toggle switch had been moved to the “on” position. She was at him all the time. Sex had never before been an issue between them. Now it was.
Gayle would be waiting for him in the evenings when he came home from rounds. “Did you fuck anybody tonight?” She’d ask the question pleasantly enough, the same way she once might have inquired after his day, but they both knew there was far more to it than that.
Larry always told her no. As it turned out, that was the truth. In actual fact, Roseanne Orozco had cured Larry Stryker of abusing patients, but Gayle wasn’t buying