Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [35]
The cards appeared to be earlier drafts of the list Marsha had given me. Most were labeled Seven Sacred Days, no doubt Stan’s idea of a joke, but he’d inadvertently transposed a couple of letters and wrote Seven Scared Days on one. In either case, I knew what he meant. The closer I got to the details of Stan’s final hours, the more I realized they might also be the details of my last hours.
If Stan was wrong about a syndrome, there were a hell of a lot of coincidences operating in North Bend. Chief Newcastle. Joel McCain. Jackie Feldbaum. Stan. My own symptoms. One might even include Holly in the list.
Poring over the various cards, I could see how he’d rearranged the order of the symptoms as his information base and his own condition altered. On two of the cards the list was six days instead of seven. The more I read, the more I became convinced the list I’d received from his wife was the final compendium. For starters, it was the only one that had the first two days precisely as I’d experienced them.
Ian Hjorth peered around my shoulder into the locker. “Don’t you think he was traveling a little light?”
“Look, Ian. I’m checking out for the day. Keep Jeb on for the rest of the shift.”
“He can only stay a couple of hours.”
“Then find somebody else. I’m outa here.”
“Sure. Of course. None of us feel much like working.”
Brushing past Ian on my way out of the station, I said, “Thanks for the Big Gulp. That was actually pretty funny.”
He was chasing me across the street to my car as I left. “Oh, Jesus. I forgot. I put it up there before our alarm. You don’t think I ran out there and put it on your roof after we came back from the freeway, do you? Oh, shit. You had to drive around like that? I’m sorry. I’ll take it off right now.”
I ignored him, was already turning the key in the ignition and buckling the seat belt.
“Come on, Lieut,” Ian said. “Let me get that off there. You don’t want to be driving around like that. At least let me take the straw out. It’s got juice in it. Ben thought it would be funnier with juice in it. Look, I’ll climb up—”
I shot gravel out from my rear tires peeling out of the parking area. It wasn’t often one of Ian’s gags backfired on him. Leaving the Big Gulp container on my roof and pretending to be pissed might be the last joke I ever played.
Alpine Estates Nursing Home was a white single-story concrete-block building three blocks from the fire station. I parked and went inside, found myself being chased down the hallway by a short Hispanic woman in white pants and one of those kiddie-print smocklike tops nurses wear these days that look more suited to a nursery school than a medical facility. This one was all teddy bears or lollipops or some such thing.
“Can we help you?” she asked for about the fourth time. “You want to visit a patient?” I must have been daydreaming.
“Jackie Feldbaum.”
She went back to her cubicle and picked up several sheets of paper stapled together. “Not here. Nope. No. Wait. Rolanda Feldbaum. Could that be her?” I nodded. “One-oh-seven. Down at the end of this hall. Turn left.”
The room was what you’d expect. Two patients, two beds, a curtain between them, photos and personal touches on the nightstand alongside each bed, and next to the sink a TV that looked as if it’d been underwater for about a year. Jackie’s roommate, a small humpbacked, masculine-looking woman with close-cropped hair and no teeth, looked to be about a hundred fifty and was absorbed in a Spanish-language game show I had the feeling she didn’t understand a word of.
Jackie was in bed on her back, her hair cut with straight Moe Howard bangs. Both hands were above the blankets, both covered in a waxy-looking patina.
“Jackie?”
“She don’t talk,” said the roommate.
“Ever?”
“Not since I been here.”
“What does she do?”
“She farts.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s about all. Yes sirree. They don’t smell so great, neither.”
Tuning out the racket from the television, I sat in the only free chair in the room and tried to ignore the stench of ammonia pervading the room. I opened the manila envelope I’d been