The Devil's Right Hand - J. D. Rhoades [52]
It was on one of these morning constitutionals that he noticed a familiar figure sitting in one of the visitor’s lounges. The lounges were glass-windowed enclosures to which family members and friends of patients were banished whenever it came time for the nurses to perform some uncomfortable and humiliating ritual on the patient. This morning, the lounge was empty except for a big man in a flannel checked shirt sitting in one of the chairs. The man held a magazine up before him, but the ice-blue eyes that could be seen between the top of the magazine and the baseball cap pulled down low on the man’s forehead were fixed on the hall. As Raymond passed by, the magazine lowered to reveal Billy Ray’s face. Raymond gave no sign other than a slight nod. The nod was returned, barely. The cop, who was busy talking about movies with a chubby blonde nurse, never noticed. Raymond turned around and started the slow trek back to his room. The cop followed, looking disgruntled at his interrupted conversation. When Raymond reached the door of his room, he stopped and leaned on the doorjamb as if to catch his breath. He saw Billy Ray pass. His eyes flicked to the number beside the door, then swung back to look straight ahead down the hall. He walked around the corner, out of Raymond’s sight.
Raymond shuffled slowly back to the bed and got in slowly, grunting with the pain as the motion flexed his ripped and torn muscles. The cop stood by, waiting with the cuffs to secure him back to the bed.
“I don’t know why you got to use those,” Raymond complained. “I’m so busted up I ain’t going nowhere.”
“Yeah, right,” the cop said. “You got these doctors fooled, Raymond, but not us.” Raymond sighed with theatrical resignation, then lay back on the bed and lifted his arm. The cop snapped one cuff on Raymond’s right wrist and locked the other to the bed rail. Then he walked out to take up his position in the chair outside Raymond’s door. Raymond turned his head and looked out the window, waiting.
Keller entered the hospital through the front entrance. He walked to the front desk, where a middle-aged woman in a blue and white striped uniform was talking on the phone. She had dark hair shot with streaks of white, cemented in place with enough hair spray to give it a shellacked appearance. Keller started to speak, but she silenced him with an upraised hand. “Fayetteville General,” she said in a singsong voice. “I’ll connect you..” He waited while she answered and routed several calls. Eventually, there was a lull in the traffic and she looked up at him. “May I help you?” she chirped.
“I’m trying to locate a Crystal Lee Puryear?” he said.
The woman turned and began tapping the keys of a computer terminal in front of her. “Are you a family member?” She asked. “It says here she’s to receive no visitors except...”
“I’m her brother,” he lied. “Leonard.”
“Room 433,” she said after a moment. “Follow the green line on the floor to the elevators, go up to the fourth floor, and follow the yellow lines to the patient rooms.”
“Thanks,” he said, but she was already on another call.
He found the room with only slight trouble. The door stood slightly ajar. He pushed it open gently.
It was a double room. Crystal Puryear lay in the bed closest to the door, her face nearly as pale as the sheets. She was asleep or unconscious, and there was a thin clear oxygen tube crossing her face under her nose. There was a girl seated in the chair next to the bed, her hand resting lightly on Crystal’s. The girl stood up quickly as Keller entered.
The girl was tall and painfully thin. Her narrow face was pale and nearly green in the glare of the harsh fluorescent light over the bed. Her light-brown hair was plaited in cornrows that hung in braids to beneath her shoulders. The braids were woven in with colored beads that rattled and clacked when she moved. She was dressed in a ragged midriff