Lost - Michael Robotham [2]
“What day is it today?”
“October the third.”
“Did you give me drugs? What have you done to me?”
She stammers, “You’re on morphine for the pain.”
“What else? What else have you given me?”
“Nothing.” She glances again at the emergency button. “The doctor is coming. Try to stay calm or he’ll have to sedate you.”
She’s out of the door and won’t come back. As it swings closed I notice a uniformed policeman sitting on a chair outside the door, with his legs stretched out like he’s been there for a while.
I slump back in bed, smelling bandages and dried blood. Holding up my hand I look at the gauze bandage, trying to wiggle the missing finger. How can I not remember?
For me there has never been such a thing as forgetting, nothing is hazy or vague or frayed at the edges. I hoard memories like a miser counts his gold. Every scrap of a moment is kept as long as it has some value.
I don’t see things photographically. Instead I make connections, spinning them together like a spider weaving a web, threading one strand into the next. That’s why I can reach back and pluck details of criminal cases from five, ten, fifteen years ago and remember them as if they happened only yesterday. Names, dates, places, witnesses, perpetrators, victims—I can conjure them up and walk through the same streets, have the same conversations, hear the same lies.
Now for the first time I’ve forgotten something truly important. I can’t remember what happened and how I finished up here. There is a black hole in my mind like a dark shadow on a chest X-ray. I’ve seen those shadows. I lost my first wife to cancer. Black holes suck everything into them. Not even light can escape.
Twenty minutes go by and then Dr. Bennett sweeps through the curtains. He’s wearing jeans and a bow tie under his white coat.
“Detective Inspector Ruiz, welcome back to the land of the living and high taxation.” He sounds very public school and has one of those foppish Hugh Grant fringe haircuts that falls across his forehead like a dinner napkin on a thigh.
Shining a penlight in my eyes, he asks, “Can you wiggle your toes?”
“Yes.”
“Any pins and needles?”
“No.”
He pulls back the bedclothes and scrapes a key along the sole of my right foot. “Can you feel that?”
“Yes.”
“Excellent.”
Picking up a clipboard, he scrawls his initials with a flick of the wrist.
“I can’t remember anything.”
“About the accident.”
“It was an accident?”
“I have no idea. You were shot.”
“Who shot me?”
“You don’t remember?”
“No.”
This conversation is going around in circles.
Dr. Bennett taps the pen against his teeth, contemplating this answer. Then he pulls up a chair and sits on it backward, draping his arms over the backrest.
“You were shot. One bullet entered just above your gracilis muscle on your right leg leaving a quarter-inch hole. It went through the skin, then the fat layer, through the pectineus muscle, just medial to the femoral vessels and nerve, through the quadratus femoris muscle, through the head of the biceps femoris and through the gluteus maximus before exiting through the skin on the other side. The exit wound was far more impressive. It blew a hole four inches across. Gone. No flap. No pieces. Your skin just vaporized.”
He whistles impressively through his teeth. “You had a pulse but you were bleeding out when they found you. Then you stopped breathing. You were dead but we brought you back.”
He holds up his thumb and forefinger. “The bullet missed your femoral artery by this far.” I can barely see a gap between them. “Otherwise you would have bled to death in three minutes. Apart from the bullet we had to deal with infection. Your clothes were filthy. God knows what was in that water. We’ve been pumping you full of antibiotics. Bottom line, Inspector, you are one lucky puppy.”
Is he kidding? How much luck does it take to get shot?
I hold up my hand. “What about my finger?”
“Gone, I’m afraid, just above the first knuckle.”
A skinny looking intern with a crewcut pokes his head through the curtains. Dr. Bennett lets out a low-pitched growl that only underlings