who was hunting a promotion, was taking a college-level English Lit course online and Shugrue felt it was having a bad effect on him.
The door opened. A pretty woman was standing in the doorway, in a ratty powder blue terry-cloth bathrobe, obviously naked underneath, since the robe was not quite pulled in tight enough for modesty, her hair wrapped up in a big white towel and her face covered in some kind of lime-green cream. She smiled at them.
She had a great smile.
“Evening, miss,” said Deputy Shugrue, the senior deputy in this pair. “Can we talk to Mr. Willard Coleman?”
The woman made a pursed-lip expression, thinking about it, but then she brightened.
“Well, I think he’s asleep, but of course, come on in. Is this about the shooting thing earlier?”
“Yes it is, Miss...?”
“How terrible. I’ve been watching it on Fox. They have all sorts of video on it, I guess from people and their cell phone cameras and stuff. That poor lady police officer. The whole thing is on film. They’re playing it over and over. Is the lady officer okay?”
“She’s in the hospital,” said Shugrue, stepping inside and scuffing her boots on the doormat to clean off the mud. “But we think she’s going to be okay. Thank you for asking.”
“And the little girl who was shot? They’re not saying whether she was okay too?”
Shugrue exchanged a look with Cotton.
“She, ah, she died, I’m afraid, Miss...?”
“Oh, I’m so sorry. I’m Catherine Marcus. Call me Cathy. I’m with Helping Hands? We’re the assisted-living people?”
Marcus backed away from the door, inviting them into a neat little front room with a green leather sofa and two chairs, antique lamps, a fireplace with family pictures, a flat-screen TV with the sound off—Fox News—an oxygen tank in one corner.
“I’m the resident nurse for the night,” she was explaining. “Will... Mister Coleman...has some mobility issues, and he suffers from sleep apnea. So we try to have someone here through the night.”
“Can we talk to Mister Coleman?”
Marcus seemed worried, distracted, as she wiped some of the night cream off her face.
“He’s finally gotten to sleep... He has a terrible time...insomnia. But, of course, you need to check on him... Let me take you to him. His room is just down the hall here.”
She led the deputies down a narrow wooden-floored hall past a bright galley kitchen, dishes piled neatly in a rack, the counter gleaming in the glow of halogen downlights.
She reached a door, half-closed, tapped gently on it. “Will...are you awake?” she asked in a whisper. No answer, but the sound of some sort of breathing machine came from the darkened interior.
“Like I said, Will has sleep apnea,” Marcus explained. “That’s where your breathing just sort of stops, while you’re sleeping. It can be fatal. He has to wear a mask at night, to keep him breathing. Poor dear, he hates it. Says it’s too hot. But he needs it.”
“Can we just look in?” asked Cotton.
“Of course,” said Marcus, in a whisper.
Shugrue pushed the door open softly. The room had been stripped down to the basics, a dresser, a small flat-screen TV on top of it. Wooden floors. It was spare and neat. There was a single bed in the center of the room. In the dim light from a night table lamp they could see an elderly man lying on his back in the bed, covered by a fluffy pale blue comforter.
His eyes were closed and sunken but his bony chest was rising and falling in a steady rhythm. A rubber mask with a flexible tube attached to it covered his nose and mouth. The hose ran down to a machine that was puffing and venting in the same rhythm. The room smelled vaguely of antiseptic and some kind of lemon-scented air freshener, and under that just a teeny tiny hint of old-guy pee.
The cops stood in the doorway for a while, listening to Willard Coleman breathe. Then they backed out quietly.
“Okay with you if we do a walkabout?” asked Deputy Shugrue. “Make sure there’s nobody in the house who shouldn’t be here?”
Marcus gave her a broad smile.
“You go right ahead. It’s a pretty small house, just one floor. There’s no basement because of the water table around here being so high.”
Shugrue and Cotton went off down the hall, poked around in the bathroom, a tiny second bedroom, stepped out into the lanai-covered backyard, looked at the locks, flicked on the backyard lights for a moment and then they came back down the hall, where Marcus had stayed to wait for them.
“Everything looks good,” said Shugrue, and they all headed back down the hall, two large deputies carrying heavy gear, looming over a curvy barefoot woman in an increasingly scandalous bathrobe—in all the distraction, Marcus seemed to be unaware that her robe was not quite doing all it could to keep her decent.
They went out into the living room and across to the front door, where Shugrue stopped, as if she had just remembered it, and asked Catherine Marcus if she had some ID.
“Of course,” Marcus said. “Hold on, I think I left it in the kitchen.”
She fluttered off, leaving a soapy scent in the air, came back in a moment with a laminated ID card, the Helping Hands logo, and a photo with a security hologram over it and the name printed under the photo, which read Catherine Marcus, RN.
Shugrue studied the ID, made a note on her clipboard, tipped her Stetson to the nurse.
“Thank you, Miss Marcus. We’d like to advise you to keep everything locked up tight tonight. We’ve got a dangerous fugitive in the area, so don’t be answering any knocks on the door, okay?”
“Well, I had to answer yours, didn’t I?” she said, with a bright smile and a touch of tease.
“Yes, you did,” said Shugrue. “But no one else. Okay? Be careful. Have a good night.”
“You too, Officers,” said Marcus, holding the door open as they left. “And you both be sure to get home safe tonight, okay?”
“Thanks, miss,” said Shugrue, and they walked back down the wheelchair ramp and out to the street.
“Pretty lady,” said Cotton, who had enjoyed the half-open bathrobe more than was quite right for a happily married guy with two kids.
“Yeah she was,” said Shugrue, writing something on her clipboard. “Except for the acne. Her cheeks looked like she’d been bitten to death by ducks.”
“Didn’t notice her cheeks,” said Cotton.
“Yeah,” said Shugrue. “Because her cheeks were all up here and her boobs were all down there. I thought you were gonna trip over your tongue.”
“More likely my dick,” said Cotton.
“You wish,” said Shugrue.
* * *
Back in the bungalow Selena watched through the blinds as the two deputies walked away into the darkness between two streetlights. Then she slipped back down the hall and into the bedroom where Willard Coleman lay on his back in the hospital bed. She pulled off the sleep apnea mask and contemplated the old man for a while.
The mask was still breathing in and out for him, but Willard Coleman had drawn his last voluntary breath an hour and fifty minutes ago, when Selena had pinched his mouth and nostrils shut and then held them that way for six and a half minutes, because there was no point in doing something if you didn’t do it right, and it had been her experience that six and a half minutes did the trick for pretty much everyone.
She’d watched his eyes as he fought for life, his bony fingers scrabbling at her wrists.