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

took them to make the pain go away. Once I was hooked—I would try to go a day without using. That’s what they teach you. One day at a time. Only I would become physically ill. My body would feel as if I hadn’t eaten in three days. I went back to my doctor, partly to get off the drugs but also partly to stay on. His response was to hook me up with Jamal. I should have quit right then and there; book a room in a chemical dependency clinic. Only you can’t defeat your demons if you still enjoy their company. My family didn’t know anything about this, of course. People who are addicted to opioids can still hold down jobs; they can meet their responsibilities; maintain the appearance of stability at work and home. Until they can’t.”

Yet while Jenna talked up a storm, Bobby told me later that at no time did she incriminate herself; at no time did she utter a single word that could be used against her. It was always Jamal this or Jamal that.

“I was told that Jenna King is the smartest person in the room,” I said, “no matter what room she happens to be in.”

“I believe it,” Bobby said.

Detective Jean Shipman was feeling a little depressed when she finally left the crime scene. She had been there first, she reminded herself. Yes, Bobby and the others eventually turned up at Jenna King’s house, but she was the one who knocked on the front door; she’s the one who broke the case. It was her cuffs that were wound around Jamal Brown’s wrists.

She took pride in that. Only not a lot. Discovering who had shot me and why and then bringing him down hadn’t given her nearly the satisfaction that she had hoped for. She didn’t believe the case had tested her skills. It never gave her an aha moment.

While she was driving back to the Griffin Building, Shipman heard the sound of a bell coming from her cell phone. It told her that she had just received a text. She accessed it at the first stoplight.

The text had been sent by Officer Kyle Cordova of the Northfield Police Department.

“U up?” it read.

The question made Shipman shake her head. It was still early evening after all.

She replied when she was caught at the next stoplight.

“Your seduction skills are sorely lacking,” her text read. “But since you asked, yes, I’m up.”

IN CASE YOU’RE WONDERING

I wish I could say that when I finally opened my eyes for good I was gazing into the lovely face of my wife. Or Lilly Linder. Or Kate Beckinsale playing a nurse in Pearl Harbor. Instead, I got a male nurse who thought a three-day-old beard looked good on him. He shined a bright light into one eye and then the other, felt for a pulse even though a machine was counting my heartbeats for him, and said, “The doctor will be with you in a moment.”

This had been the fourth time I had come out of the coma by my count. The first time, I woke with complete clarity about where I was and what had happened to me. I sat up and looked around the room; even saw Nina sitting there, before falling against the bed and drifting back to sleep. The second time, I couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, my vision was blurred, and I had no idea where I was or why. The third time, I was convinced that all of the doctors and nurses were attempting to kill me; that even the room fixtures and machines that surrounded me were encouraging me to die. Then there was Dan—Dan being the name of the male nurse and with all due respect to him and his profession, goddammit!

This is not the way it would have happened in the movies, my inner voice told me.

Dan was correct about the doctor, though. Lilly Linder was by my side less than ninety seconds later, and Nina, too, who took my hand, kissed it, and pressed it against her cheek.

“I can’t leave you alone for a minute, can I?” she said.

Lilly was intent on conducting a bunch of examinations then and there to test my mental status, cranial nerves, individual senses, motor function, and reflexes. She wanted to know where I fit in something called the Glasgow Coma Scale. Apparently, I scored high.

I have to say, though, I didn’t care much for her bedside manner. She asked “What’s your name?”

“Is that a trick question?” I answered.

“Do you know who you are?”

“It depends. What have you heard?”

Lilly whacked me on the shoulder.

“And you wonder why somebody shot him,” she said.

“Wait. Somebody shot me?”

“It’s a long story,” Nina said.

Once Lilly deemed that I had recovered sufficiently enough to receive visitors, damn I received a lot of them—Bobby, Shelby and the girls, Erica after she completed her exams, Harry, Greg Schroeder, Riley and Mary Pat Brodin-Mulally, Mason Gafford, Emma King, Herzog, and to my great surprise, Chopper, who despised hospitals. I even received a call from Heavenly Petryk who was purposely vague about where she was at the time and what she was doing. They all helped filled in the blanks for me. Including Detective Jean Shipman, who was surprisingly forthcoming about her role in all of this—at least I was surprised. ’Course, she kept calling me “hotshot,” which was infuriating. “So, how are you doing, hotshot?” And I kept calling her “Jeannie,” which seemed to annoy her, too. “Pretty good, Jeannie, how are you?”

Despite what she had told Marshall Sohm about Gerald King’s disappearance not being her case or her jurisdiction, she felt compelled to take her supplementals to Lieutenant Rask at the Minneapolis Police Department and tell him what she had learned. She was a cop after all and her instructors were correct—you can’t choose the victim.

Rask hadn’t known that Jenna was pregnant when he conducted his first investigation or he might have done things differently, he told Shipman.