She edged him toward the door, afraid of all the raging things she might say. “I don’t need an alibi. And you need to call the police, talk to them. I can’t even believe you were alone tonight, spying. What about Amy, that child physical therapist you were fucking.”
“Oh, I love to hear you talk dirty, Cheryl Beth. Gets me so horny.” He smirked. “But your mother would disapprove of that language.”
She knew he was pushing buttons. He was so good at that. But the words still lashed her. Why had she ever let him into her life, especially into the deeper parts that could wound?
“Please go.”
“Maybe I was with Amy tonight. You don’t know. And she’s hardly a child. She’s twenty-two.” He looked around the familiar room.
“I need you to go now.”
“I hope you close those curtains after I leave. Those big windows. You should really be more careful.”
“Gary, you’re really…” She didn’t finish the sentence. She just held out her hands defensively and he slipped out the door. When she had locked it, she spoke to the door. “Gary, you’re really creeping me out tonight.”
“You’re a hard man to find.”
Will Borders sat in the wheelchair, against the wall in a hallway behind a cart with red drawers, an EKG machine and menacing-looking defibrillator paddles, and there was Scaly Mueller walking toward him. Captain Steve Mueller was the commander of the Internal Investigations unit.
“But good men are hard to find.”
He talked that way, lapsing into motivational clichés. It was just another Scaly Mueller joke. All the cops made fun of him behind his back. Will said hello, but the unspoken answer to Mueller’s question was that Will’s only peace was anywhere but inside his room. After a week in the neuro-rehab unit, he had barely slept. Moving meant pain. Even raising his arm to dial his cell phone meant excruciating torture. Immobility meant pain to come. Once he was down for the night, he was strapped into what looked like vibrating socks-prevent blood clots, they said. They also killed his ability to sleep. But the biggest problem was three feet away from his bed.
His roommate was a quadriplegic from a car crash. He was trussed up in a contraption of wires and tubes. Every few minutes a nurse or technician would come in with a different, invariably noisy treatment. The commotion and stench made rest impossible. Hospitals were noisy places. When the poor man was conscious, he only wanted to watch back-to-back episodes of
