Cripple Creek Read Free Page A

you, is it?"
    "Not really. But I know how these things usually go."
    Perfunctory rap at the door, around the sill of which a face then leant. Young woman with something very close to a Marine
     buzz cut and a diamond stud in her nose.
    "That time already?" Ion said. "Be right with you, C.C. Just give me a minute.
    "Shift change," he told me, looking back down at the chart. "Here we go. . . . Bullet passed cleanly through your upper thigh,
     no major vessels involved. There'd have been a lot of blood, I imagine. A couple of major muscle groups got more or less dissected.
     All put back right, but muscles take an amazing time to forgive you."
    "That why I can't move?"
    "That would be the restraints. Sorry." Ion unlashed trailing nylon ties from sidebars of the bed, slipped padded cuffs off
     wrists and ankles. "Seems you reacted poorly to one of the sedatives, hardly uncommon. But all that lot should be well out
     of your system by now."
    The stud-nosed face appeared again in the doorway.
    "C.C. What is it, you've a bloody bus to catch? You're here for twelve hours. Go take some vitals, pretend you're a nurse.
     I'll be along straightaway, just as I said."
    I thanked him.
    Standing, he pulled up a trouser leg and rapped knuckles at the pinkish leg thereunder, which gave off a hollow sound. "I've
     been where you are, Officer, right enough. Compliments of Miss Thatcher."
    He never showed up beside my bed again. When I asked, I was told that he'd been assigned to another unit, that all the nurses
     rotated through the various intensive cares.
    "How many ICUs are there?"
    "Seeks." Six.
    "That's a lot of care."
    "Is hard world."
    Angie was, what, twenty-four? On the other hand, she was Korean—so maybe she did know, from direct experience, how hard the
     world could be.
    I thought I knew, of course. Weeks of physical therapy, weeks of furiously sending messages down the spinal column to a leg that first
     ignored the signals then barely acknowledged them, weeks of watching those around me—MS patients, people with birth defects,
     victims of severe trauma or strokes—taught me different. My world was easy.
    Four months later, back at work though still on desk duty, I had personally thanked everyone else involved in my medical care,
     but in trying to track down Ion found that he'd not merely been assigned to another ICU, as I'd been told, but had left the
     hospital's employ.
    Two or three purportedly official calls from Officer Turner at MPD, and I was pulling into the parking lot of an apartment
     complex in south Memphis. No sign of air conditioning and the mercury pushing ninety degrees, so most of the apartments had
     doors and windows open, inviting in a nonexistent breeze. Parking lot filled with pickups drooling oil and boxy sedans well
     past expiration date. The one-time swimming pool had been filled in with cement, the cement painted blue.
    I knocked at the door of 1-C. Had in hand a sack of goodies with a gift bow threaded through the paper handles—candy, cookies,
     cheese and water biscuits, thumb-sized salamis, and summer sausage.
    "Whot?" he said as the door opened. Puffy face, sclera gone red. Wearing shorts and T-shirt. The foot on his good leg was
     bare; a shoe remained on the other. Van Morrison playing back in the depths. "Tupelo Honey."
    "Whot?" he said again.
    "You don't remember me, do you?"
    "And I should?"
    "Officer Turner. Came in with a GSW long about August. You took care of me."
    "Sorry, mate. All a blur to me."
    Motion behind him became a body moving towards us. Buzz-cut blond hair, diamond stud, not much else by way of disguise. Or
     of clothes, for that matter.
    "I just wanted to thank you," I said, passing across the bag. "Forgive me for intruding."
    He took the bag and pulled the handles apart to look in. The bow tore away, dropping to the floor.
    "Hey! Thanks, man." He stared for a moment at the bow on the floor by my foot. "You take care, okay?"
    None of us, I thought later at home,