What Doesn't Kill Us--A McKenzie Novel by David Housewright (most read books txt) 📗

SOB. I’d like to wait until at least tomorrow morning before making a decision.”

“Tomorrow morning? Why?”

“McKenzie’s brain is healing,” Lilly said. “The swelling is down. Just not down as much as we’d like to see.”

“You said he was going to be all right.”

“He will be, but we need to give him time. The man was shot. The bullet lodged very near his heart; there was a lot of damage. Nina, it seems like a long time to us, but he’s been here for less than twelve hours.”

“You said…”

“I simply want to give it another day or two, give McKenzie’s heart and his brain more time to reboot, more time to rest. My greatest fear is another SCA.”

“Sudden cardiac arrest,” Nina said.

“If it happens again—even if we’re able to bring him back, it won’t do his heart or his brain any good.”

“I understand.”

Lilly patted Nina’s hand some more.

“He’s going to be fine,” she said.

“Do you promise?”

“Go home. Get some sleep. If there’s any change, I’ll call you.”

Nina gathered her belongings and stood. So did Lilly. Nina pulled the strap of her bag over her shoulder.

“I trust you, Dr. Linder,” she said.

Except what Lilly heard was, “I’m holding you responsible.”

“Thank you,” she said just the same.

“Can I see him before I go?” Nina asked.

“Of course.”

A few moments later, the two women were standing outside my room, the sliding glass wall between us.

“He looks so pale,” Nina said.

Lilly gestured at the monitor above my head.

“Pulse, respiration, all within acceptable parameters,” she said.

“Acceptable,” Nina repeated.

“The EEG, electroencephalography, that’s the blue lines on the monitor. It records electrical patterns in the brain. The waves you see, that’s good. That’s a good sign.”

“When McKenzie’s in a coma like this, can he dream?”

“Oh, yeah.”

Okay, I’m going to tell you about my dreams now. Is there anything more boring? It’s like a guy coming up to you and saying, “I’m going to tell you a fantastic story about something that never happened and doesn’t have a point.” Why would you listen to that if you weren’t being paid? In any case, I promise that this has nothing to do with the narrative. It’s what Elmore Leonard called “Hooptedoodle.” Feel free to skip ahead.

What happened is that after I was shot, I slipped into a kind of netherworld where I couldn’t differentiate between what was real and what was not. There was plenty that was real, too; plenty of times when I was aware of what was happening around me—the bright lights, noises from machines and people, nurses speaking in hushed tones like they were afraid of waking me, Dr. Lillian Linder. I knew her going back to when I was with the SPPD. She was very smart and I liked very smart women. ’Course, I had always been ambitious. I remembered calling to her, only she didn’t hear me. Instead, Lilly boarded the Green Line, the train that ran between downtown St. Paul and downtown Minneapolis, and I never saw her again.

She was replaced by a man in a white coat who looked a lot like Gert Fröbe, the actor who played Goldfinger in the James Bond movie. He was keeping me prisoner; chained to a metal table. There was a laser above the table and Gert would turn it on so he could slice me in half and I’d say, “Do you expect me to talk?” and Gert would say, “No, Mr. McKenzie. I expect you to die.” Over and over and over and over and over again. And I’d scream at him—“Fuck you, Gert!”—over and over and over and over and over again. Which is a sign of insanity, isn’t it? Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Except, in my case, I didn’t die. Which was the outcome I was hoping for, so …

I was told later that the brain is always grasping for narrative, for understanding, even in a mostly unconscious state. In my long, rambling dream the narrative was my many attempts to escape, to get off that damn table. Sometimes I’d free myself and walk into Target Field and watch the Twins play baseball and never lose or find myself in a jazz club—never Rickie’s; it was always a huge club and I was always alone and Ella would be singing to me, or Louis, or Coltrane playing sax, or Hampton on vibes, or sometimes it was Nina sitting at her Steinway, the piano I bought her, playing soft and low and singing, “Summertime and the living is easy…” Sometimes I’d free myself and turn the laser on Gert and his henchmen, but that was never particularly satisfying and I’d see myself standing in the corner watching me attacking Gert and muttering, “C’mon, man. You can do better.” Mostly, though, I’d be lying on the metal table staring up at the laser and thinking, “Nah, uh-uh, not this time, bitch.”

I just thought you ought to know.

FIVE

Bobby paced in front of the conference-room table where Jean Shipman and Mason Gafford were sitting. Both of the detectives thought he looked tired yet neither was foolish enough to mention it.

Bobby carefully set a flash drive in front of Shipman.

“What’s this?” she asked.

“Video of McKenzie being shot taken from the security cameras at RT’s Basement.”

Bobby didn’t ask Shipman why she didn’t get the video herself, yet she heard the question just the same.

“The club owner said he didn’t have security cameras,” Shipman said.

“A witness lying to the police, imagine that.”

“I should have been more—”

“Thorough?” Bobby asked.

“Yes. Sorry.”

“The suspect could be a woman but it’s hard to be sure; the video is very poor quality. After we’re done here, take the drive to FSU. See if the image can be enhanced. If not, we’ll go back to the source material, see if that’ll make a difference.”

“What about the thing at the Haven last night? I was going to—”

“I passed it off to Eddie Hilger and Sarah Frisco.”

“But I caught it.”

“You also caught the shooting of McKenzie, didn’t you?”

Shipman couldn’t believe this