The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [190]
Clark gave his old friend a kiss. “So, Sam, maybe we should get married. What do you say?”
Sam’s eyes fluttered closed. “Forget it. Few gay years left in me.”
He held open the doors. “Come on, Sam, old Jill will be a distant memory.”
“Old Jill is a distant memory. Everything distant memory.” Sam bit her lips from the jolt as they pushed the gurney through the OR doors.
Sarah Yoelson leaned down to Sam’s face. “Caddyshack, right?”
Sam was fading. “Mister Roberts. Watch out for Clark if you’re a radiologist.”
Clark said, “Sam, would you please just go to sleep?”
The surgeon gestured for Clark to leave the OR. “Seems like a nice guy,” she told Sam, “but I’m an orthopedic surgeon and a Lesbian.”
“‘Nobody’s perfect,’” Sam mumbled.
Outside the ER entrance, Georgette Nickerson left a message for Annie, still not knowing that her friend’s cell phone was sunk in the surf of the Atlantic Ocean. “Sam doesn’t want you to worry but she’s in the hospital. She’ll be fine. Call me back.”
Her cell phone rang as she walked back toward the doors. She assumed the caller was Annie but instead it was Brad Hopper, phoning her from Atlanta. Learning that Sam was in surgery, he urged Georgette to take her to a better hospital. After all, Emerald wasn’t Atlanta. Georgette assured him that Sam was in perfectly competent hands, even beyond the Atlanta city limits.
Brad thought it was a shame Annie was going through so much right now and mostly because of her dad. That detective Hart had sounded dead serious about her going to jail. He’d practically frog-marched her in handcuffs out of the hotel. She’d be dishonorably discharged. Her whole career, down the tubes. Should he get her a lawyer?
Privately Georgette considered the chances of Dan Hart’s actually arresting Annie miniscule to nil, even if he actually still had the power to make an arrest after being fired. But she didn’t say that. She said that finding Annie a lawyer was not Brad’s responsibility. Moreover, as Brad’s friend, she felt she should advise him that as soon as Annie wasn’t legally his wife, she would not be his legal liability either—whereas now, technically, until Brad signed those divorce papers, he might be implicated in who knows what crimes (Georgette left this vague) that the unprincipled detective Hart might devise against Annie, and against anyone connected to Annie. Georgette further suggested that there could be huge financial liability for Brad as well, civil suits from the victims of all the frauds and swindles in which Jack Peregrine had been engaged.
“I hadn’t thought of that,” Brad admitted. “That’s something to worry about.”
Brad should worry about it, Georgette urged. He should just sign those divorce papers immediately. Remember: his first responsibility was to his company Hopper Jets and to his mother Mama Spring and to his sister Brandy, whose husband had left her. Brad had to take care of his nephews. Annie could take care of herself.
Brad felt very calmed by Georgette’s tone. He found himself wondering what she was looking like these days. He told Georgette that tomorrow he was going to fly up to Emerald to visit Sam in the hospital. He had always—and he choked up even thinking about it—loved Sam. Maybe Georgette could meet him at the hospital and go out to dinner with him.
Georgette didn’t think so.
Chapter 49
The Sign of the Cross
Annie had flown in and out of Boca Chica Key any number of times; she routinely clocked fifty flight hours a month as a jet instructor and often did so off Key West waters. So she’d been more accustomed than Dan to procedures at the security checkpoint, where MPs checked them in at 07.53 hours, 07, 07, 2001, and instructed them to put their personal belongings out for inspection, including their cell phones, which were not permitted inside the facility. Such things, she advised Dan, had to be tolerated at a high-security military facility.
But Dan didn’t see why he should have to pass through a scanner as if he were a grocery item. He didn’t like handing