BARE HUNTER

SORRY- CHAPTER 23

The morning charge nurse entered the room to unplug the monitors and release me from the maze of wires and tubes. She handed me a post-operative instruction sheet with Dr. Carpenter’s phone number and address, reminding me I had a follow-up appointment with him in a week. She told me I could shower before leaving if I kept my catheter arm dry.

“Is there any way I can visit a friend who was brought in yesterday? She was injured in an assault and I need to make sure she’s going to be okay.”

“What’s her name? I’ll find out where she is and if she can receive visitors.”

“Sharon Decker,” I said.

“I’ll let you know before you leave.” She reached into a linen closet and handed me a towel before leaving the room.

Hard to believe it had only been 24 hours since my last shower. I felt as though it had been weeks. Remembering to keep my arm dry, I stood under the hot stream for the longest time, working the kinks out of my neck from the hospital bed.

By the time I was dry and dressed, the nurse came back with a slip of paper and handed it to me. “Your friend is in the surgical wing. Take the yellow corridors to the elevator. It’s on the third floor. You’ll need to sign in at the desk and show your ID. We had an unfortunate incident last night and now visitors and non-resident physicians must sign in.”

“Thank you so much,” I responded, not mentioning that I knew all about that unfortunate incident. I grabbed the plastic baggie of leftover toiletries and those nifty, slip-proof socks and followed the yellow corridors to the elevator. I approached the nurse’s station on the 3rd floor and offered my license to the nurse behind the desk. She barely noticed it and asked who I was there for.

“Sharon Decker.”

“Oh, Mrs. Decker is in 348. Take a left. It’s at the end of the corridor.”

I felt unprepared without flowers or balloons. My steps were a little unsteady, after my own health scare. I tapped quietly on her door. “Sharon? It’s Ted. Can I come in?”

Hearing no answer, I gently opened the door a crack. Her closed eyes were surrounded with black and blue marks. A large white bandage was wrapped around her lower face, which was held together by a metal contraption. Her left arm was in a cast, lifted about a foot off the bed with a pulley attached to the ceiling. The rest of her body was covered with a blanket, so I couldn’t see any other injuries. That bastard. Seeing her lying there, beaten and helpless, infuriated me. The police had better catch that son of a bitch, or I would. There’d be no trial for him if I found him first.

I tiptoed into the room, pulling a chair to her bedside, and watched over her as she slept. I fell asleep in the chair and a nurse nudged me awake at noon. “Sharon is on soft foods now, so if you’d like me to order a regular meal, I’m sure the hospital won’t have a problem with it. You look like you plan on camping out.”

Rubbing the sleep out of my eyes, I looked at my phone and realized I’d been there for almost 3 hours. “Oh, yeah. That would be great. Is there a limit on how long I can stay with her?”

“Visiting hours are from 10 AM to 8 PM. Have at it,” she shrugged at me as she adjusted Sharon’s IV and checked the monitors.

When the meals came, Sharon wasn’t awake. The nurse said she was better off resting and left the applesauce and juice for me to help her with, if and when she woke up. She also explained how to swab Sharon’s lips with a little sponge on a stick, to keep her lips from drying out. There was an uncomfortable plastic sofa near the window that I crawled onto after lunch. I wasn’t leaving until visiting hours were over. Without her husband in custody, I didn’t think she was safe, especially, after my scare yesterday.

At dinner time, a new nurse came into the room and asked if I wanted to visit the hospital cafeteria so she could clean Sharon up and try to feed her. I left to give her privacy and found the cafeteria on the ground level. Choosing a dried-out chicken sandwich and a fruit salad, I paid the cashier and found a table in the noisy, crowded room. My head began pounding, and I realized my meds were home. Shit. I would have to give up guard duty, or else I’d be more of a hindrance than help to Sharon’s care.

I’d go home, grab my medicine, and come back in the evening to sit with Sharon. After finishing the crappy meal, which was far worse than what the patients got, I left the hospital and drove home. When I arrived, I tried to think of how the Thorazine had gotten into my system. Was Greg spiking my coffee at work? When my place was broken into the other night, did they change pills? No. I would have noticed a differently shaped pill. I couldn’t figure it out—until I opened the fridge and pulled out the new carton of OJ.

It had been opened while I was in the hospital. I always screwed the tops on bottles and jars harder than they had to be. This top was just barely tightened. Someone had been spiking my OJ with Thorazine. Why? If they were after me and in my apartment, why not just poison me and get it over with? Maybe they were trying to kill me, but my system had built up a tolerance, due to all the other drugs I’d been taking.

Greg. It had to be him. No one else knew about Afghanistan, except for him and Cap Howard. What did Greg have to gain by offing me? Or, by making me seem crazy. Was this something to do with his investigation of the IT department? Or something far more sinister? I rummaged through the nightstand drawers for Cap Howard’s burner phone and pulled up his number. Maybe it was time to call in his goons. I couldn't deal with Greg by myself if he were this dangerous. Especially now.

“You’ve reached Bill Howard, you know what to do.”

“Hey, Cap, er, General, it’s Ted Bronsky again. We’ve got trouble.”

In about a minute, he returned my call, “Bronsky, what’s going on? I tried getting in touch with you, and you were AWOL. Where the hell were you, and why aren’t you answering your phone?”

“General Howard, I had a heart attack and was in the hospital for the past two days.”

“No shit. Son, I’m so sorry. How are you out so soon after a heart attack?”

“Modern medicine. They put two stents in and said I’ll feel better than ever. Not right now, though, I feel like shit.”

“I’ve been trying to reach you to tell you that Greg Atkinson contacted me and threatened to expose you to the feds for Wardu. Amnesty International is making a push to investigate civilian casualties in Afghanistan with a UN team,” he warned.

“Wait. What? He said you told him about Wardu,” I argued.

“Oh, no. That’s top-secret information and I would never tell that scum bag anything,” the General insisted. “That is our secret. Not even the clean-up crew knew who pulled the trigger. That is strictly between you and me.”

“I don’t understand. How did Greg find out?”

“Who knows how the CIA gets their information?