Sarah rushed to the desk. “Mr. DeVille! Are you sure you’re all right? Do you want me to call the paramedics?”
Louis sucked in a breath against the pain, held it for as long as he could, then let it out between his gritted teeth, long and slow, hissing steam from his internal boiler. He told her he didn’t need the goddamn paramedics. He needed a Kwel-Amity, a whole goddamn bottle of the stuff.
“I can’t hear you,” Sarah said. She was almost crying. “You’re slurring everything you say.”
He felt his chest, neck and left arm fizzing in the aftermath of the recent flare. Focusing on her cleavage seemed to help. “Kwel… Amity,” he said.
This time Sarah understood. She rushed to his side of the desk and opened the bottom drawer. From somewhere at the back behind the bottle of scotch she removed three drug bottles, then put them on top of the desk. “I thought you knew where I put the spare ones,” she said. Louis didn’t move, just stared at the bottles in disbelief. “Here, let me open one for you.”
He snatched the bottle from her hand and poured the entire contents into his burning gullet. Some of the little white pills spilled onto his desk and lap like popcorn, but most arrived at their intended destination and these he crunched greedily, ignoring the savage bitterness at the back of his mouth and the goggle-eyed surprise of his secretary. He didn’t care what he looked like. He had what he wanted. If only he could do something for his eyes. He could barely make out anything beyond the desk, just a swirl of darkness that was once his office. “Scotch!” he said to Sarah’s cleavage.
A pill shot out of his mouth across the table, gobbled by the black abyss. Sarah grabbed the liquor bottle, unscrewed the cap and handed it to him. When he took it he noticed that the yellow thing in her hand was a goddamn Post-It note. He poured the amber liquid into his mouth, crunching and grinding the pills into a sticky paste. Biting into a cake of soap-on-the-goddamn-rope would have tasted better. Worse, sticky foam began to dribble down his chin, but he kept crunching the pills in the hope they would start to do something pretty damn soon. The fire in his chest was starting to build again. The flares were coming in waves and the next one wasn’t too far away.
“I’m not sure this is the best time to tell you, Mr. DeVille,” Sarah said.
He could hardly hear anything she said now over the god-forsaken warbling. “Huh?” he said through a spray of foam.
“Your wife…”
“Whaddabout mar wife.” More dribble splattered onto the desk. At first he thought it was bird shit, then realized his mistake. He lifted his hand to wipe his chin, found that he didn’t have the energy, then let it fall to the side. The bottle of scotch dropped to the carpet. “Whadduz the ol cow wun now?”
“The hospital rang while you were on the other line.” Sarah was sobbing. She put the yellow Post-It note on the desk in front of him. “That’s their details,” she said. “You might want to ring them.”
He squinted at the memo, a yellow blur with illegible blue squiggles. Sarah hurried to the door that Louis could no longer see, disappearing into the darkness as if she had walked into shadow. He yelled after her, suddenly frightened at being alone. “You call them!” he said. “That’s what I pay you for.”
“Don’t you care about anyone? Not even the woman you’ve been married to for forty years?” She was yelling from somewhere in the darkness. “She’s dying! She’s taken an overdose. The doctors don’t think she’ll pull through.”
Suddenly, the warbling intensified into a deafening squeal and the greatest pain he had ever felt smashed through his chest in an explosion of heat and flesh and bones. Sarah was still berating him, but he couldn’t make out anything she was saying. He sunk forward, collapsing face down onto what used to be his desk, now a chasm of nothingness. For some reason the last voice he heard wasn’t Sarah’s. It wasn’t even his. It was his wife’s.
“I was right, wasn’t I Louis?” Lady Di said. “Told you you’d die at your desk.”
Then he heard no more.
CHAPTER FOUR
Louis’ Choice
LOUIS stirred to the sound of scuffling footsteps. He was lying on something comfortable, not what he expected a hospital bed to feel like, lumpy and hard and sheeted with plastic in case your sphincters opened before a nurse slid a bedpan beneath your smelly ass. More like a leather seat with the flip-out footrest, the kind in first-class you can just lay back and sink into with a pillow and blanket all the way to LA or London, or wherever the hell it was you were going.
He then heard scuffles again, though couldn’t pinpoint exactly where they were coming from. One second he could have sworn they were to his left. The next, they were to his right. Then in front. Then behind. Then, amazingly, on the ceiling.
When they faded completely, he kept looking around. He saw only whiteness. No door. No window. Just whitewashed walls and a ceiling. A modern building, he reckoned, or recently renovated. Probably St. Mary’s Hospital, one of the private rooms in the ITU, which didn’t quite make sense either. There was no medical equipment. No beeping cardiac monitors. No whispering artificial ventilators. No bags of blood or fluid over his head. Nothing. Absolutely nothing to suggest where he might be. There wasn’t even a call button.
“Nurse! Nurse!” he yelled. “Goddamn it! I need some help here!”
No one answered. Just good ol’ Louis DeVille and this goddamn white room, he mused. At least that horrid blackness had gone. His vision seemed pretty much back to normal, too. Better than normal, in fact. He could see everything without the need for bifocals. Close, far, in between, everything was as clear as daylight, as if the medics had fixed his eyesight while they were rerouting his clogged up coronaries. Goddamn paid a fortune for medical insurance; they damn well should have fixed his eyesight while he was under the knife.
Maybe that explained the bandages. He was covered like a goddamn mummy wrapped head to tail in cotton strips: his arms, legs, torso, just about every goddamn inch of his body. The medics had left holes for his mouth, nose and eyes, but not his ears. He didn’t feel uncomfortable, just stupid. What if he had to go to the bathroom in a hurry and there was no one around to help him unwrap? What about that, huh? Which brought him back to the room. He would have to ask the nurses to do something about it. A TV would do for starters. God knew what had been happening while he was infirmed. Another goddamn war in the Middle East could have started and he wouldn’t have had the foggiest. Worse, the stock market could have collapsed. How much money had he lost lying unconscious in this goddamn place?
Some things didn’t need to change, however. The leather bed, or layback thing, whatever it was, was comfy enough. A pillow and blanket would have been in order, but he was all right for the moment. The temperature was rather pleasant, actually, for a hospital. Damned frigid places, usually. Or worse, damned hot. They were always one way or the other. You either had to wear a coat and gloves like you were stepping into a goddamn refrigerator, or you had to strip everything off like a sauna. This hospital had it just right, though. Nice and cozy. Not too hot. Not too cold.
Still, the light was too damn bright. He would ask the nurse when she came to pull the drapes. But was there a window? He couldn’t exactly say. The light seemed to emanate from the walls and ceiling as if they were made of some kind of fluorescent putty, the kind of Glow In The Dark stuff his grandkids used to play with that radiated unnatural lime when the lights were switched off, like it had been bombarded with x-rays or gamma rays or whatever. Not that he thought this room was radioactive. The emanating light almost caressed him, you could say. Bright, but without heat, and it certainly didn’t glare his eyes like the low-lying winter sun. The emanation was – dare he say it? – almost cathartic.
It