Chapter Eighteen
Around midnight, I finally fell asleep and that was after Penny came in and took my vitals again. She joked with me, spent time doing the Times crossword – the Sunday edition that was supposed to be super hard and we finished it in ten minutes. After that, she gave me a sleeping pill.
It was a different nurse that woke me up early in the morning. She bustled in with a tray that she set down on the bed near my legs. “Good morning, Lakan,” she said quietly. “I’m here to put in your IV.”
Quickly and efficiently, she tied off my elbow, wiped it with an alcohol wipe and inserted a butterfly into my vein. I stiffened as she made ready to inject me with something. She’d called me ‘Lakan’ when I was registered only as ‘Blake’.
“What are you giving me?” I demanded. My eyes searched for her ID card and she wore one around her neck but the picture didn’t look like her.
“Just a pre-op sedative to relax you,” she returned and stuck in the needle. I grabbed her hand and managed to knock the syringe away before she could press the plunger all the way. Even so, I felt drunk as I attempted to get out of bed. She reached down for the syringe and pushed me back.
I punched her; a wild swing that had no power yet it was enough to knock me out of bed into her. My weight caused her to woof as I knocked her air out. I felt soft breasts under my hands and the needle close by. I picked it up and pushed it into what flesh I could reach and slowly, she melted into me.
She had ridiculously long eyelashes over dark gray eyes, brunette hair and lightly freckled skin. She looked Midwestern or even English but not Native American. I struggled to get up, whatever she had forced on me was strong enough to make me feel as if I were drunk or stoned.
I pushed myself off her, my hands sinking into soft flesh that felt more like dead rubber than a human female. I could see the call button hanging off the side of the bed but getting to it was like running a 50 K marathon on my knees. When my fumbling fingers finally reached it, I laid my head on my arm and rested my face on the cool floor. Only then did I push the emergency button. When someone finally arrived, all hell broke loose. They wouldn’t let me get up until they checked me over and made sure I had no broken bones.
In halting, slurred speech I told them what had happened. In minutes, George arrived with the Head of Security who insisted on moving me to another room and posting an armed guard. One of them carried her off and I did not see her again.
The doctor gave me another shot and this one charged through my veins like bleach cleaning a spot. I was suddenly and instantly awake as the Narcan reversed the sedative she had given me. My first words were to George, “Who was that woman? She was sent here to snatch me back, wasn’t she? Where is she now?”
I was in a VIP room on a wing that was open only to keycards, guarded by armed men and security equal to high-powered movie stars. George was at my side and the doctor who had treated my drugging had been replaced by Dr. Rivers.
“Her name is Sarah Coventry, she is an RN at a local hospital who was contacted by an anonymous man on the Internet; he offered her $100,000 to kidnap you and bring you to an undisclosed location,” George answered. “She has a drug and gambling problem. $100,000 would pay off her losses, school loans and then some.”
“How did she know who I was?” I asked.
“From the AMBER alerts. She recognized your face in the casinos, saw the posters and looked you up on the Internet. As soon as she did that, her query triggered an alert which went straight to the NSA. It wasn’t but hours later they had a team alerted from Chicago and heading out here.”
“She’s from Chicago?” I asked in confusion.
“No. She works in the hospital, Denver General. The NSA keeps files on everyone in the U.S. that’s on the grid – Social Security, credit cards, student loans, cell phones. All they needed to do was pull up a query on an RN with credit problems and twist the knife. If it wasn’t Ms. Coventry, it would have been someone else. At least they didn’t want you dead - the drug in both of your systems was propofol. Just enough to knock you out and keep you under for 8 hours.”
“Eight hours? So, they were taking me out of the country?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Maybe. Or the East Coast somewhere they couldn’t fly directly and needed to transport you on the ground.”
“Is there a plane waiting at the Airport?” I asked.
He looked pensive. “I don’t know. Uncle Redline has the security part of this deal.”
I looked for him but he wasn’t one of those in my room. Dr. Rivers was and I asked him if he was still going ahead with the operation. “Are you sure, Lake?”
I nodded. “Even more so, now. Now, they know I’m here in this state, this city, and this building. I have to disappear. Or die to get them off me. You said they sent a team from Chicago. Are they here yet?”
“The plane lands in an hour,” George said.
“Can you do this anywhere else? Like a clinic?” I asked Rivers.
“No. No matter how I plan this, I need a sterile environment and micro instruments or I have to crack open your chest. That requires a lengthy hospital stay and a long convalescence. You won’t be able to run from anything if I go that route,” he argued.
“I may not have a choice. You need 75 minutes’ minimum to do this?” At his nod, I continued. “You’d better get started, then. I’m sure the agents have some idea why I’m hiding out in a hospital.”
“All right.” Once he decided to go ahead, he was a whirlwind of action. In 10 minutes, both of us were prepped and ready for the OR, a different one than previously scheduled. I was happy to see that Penny was one of the nurses and George, too. Rachel was there in the waiting room and she gave me a soft kiss on the cheek near that silly hat they put on over your hair for surgery. I was in a gown covered with blankets, doped and groggy.
“I will see you when you wake up, Lakan,” she said. “Promise me.”
I knew what she meant. “We will not meet in the Spirit Realm, Rachel Little Bear,” I told her in a slurred voice. George did something to my arm and told me to count. I made it to three before the darkness took over.
*****
My chest hurt. It felt as if I had the worst case of heartburn, nausea and sore ribs ever. Like I’d been pummeled by the entire scrimmage line at practice and then kicked by a mule. My eyes wandered over my surroundings. I didn’t recognize anything. I was in a small room with a curtain across it, a blue spotted one and in a hospital bed laid almost flat. The ceiling was tiled and a couple was painted with superheroes. Spiderman and Arrow, the Flash and Batman. There was a machine recording my vitals and a chair presently occupied by George who was dressed in scrubs. No window, no bathroom, no pretty girls to fawn over me.
“Did it work?” I asked in a voice that sounded as if it belonged to an 80-year-old frog.
“How do you feel?” He asked quietly.
“Sore. Like a mountain fell on me,” I rasped.
“We had to shock your heart twenty times to stop it,” he said soberly. “Finally, Dr. Rivers gave you a massive overdose of potassium chloride. Then, he was able to remove the tracer and the device. Starting it was a hell of a lot easier.” He hesitated. “Lakan, there was also a minute amount of an explosive in it, enough to blow your heart to hamburger along with half of your body and probably anyone within touching distance. These people don’t care who they would have killed besides you.”
“I thought as much,” I mumbled. “They would want to take me out if they suspected I might fall into the hands of terrorists or worse. Where am I?”
“Not the recovery suite,” he grinned. “This is one of those extra rooms we keep for the …less privileged of our patients.”
“The bum’s room?” I mumbled as I fell back into anesthesia-induced sleep. I didn’t hear his answer.
Fingers running across my forehead pushing sweat-dampened hair back woke me. Perfume and clean-smelling clothes. Coconut shampoo and makeup. “George?” I mumbled and a girl’s voice laughed.
“I hope not.”
I opened my eyes to Rachel’s smiling face. Her eyes were suspiciously bright, almost as if she had been crying. George was gone.
“Where’s your boyfriend?” I mumbled and she flushed.
“Darren isn’t my boyfriend. He’s working at the airport, driving some VIPs around looking for the casino. How are you?”
“Been better.” I raised the bed and winced as the change in angle made my chest ache. My breathing roughened and I was grateful for the 02 pumping through the nasal cannula. Next, I tried to push aside the covers and slide my feet onto the floor. She made sounds of protest but I ignored her. The floor was cold. It seemed so far away from my head as if I were on a mountaintop and my feet in the valley. I swayed, caught myself on the bed railing and waited until my blood pressure leveled off. By the time I felt almost capable of moving, Rachel had placed new clothes on the bed for me.
Without comments or fuss, she helped me dress in underwear, new jeans, polo in black and teal blue, socks, boots, and down vest before she ran a comb through my hair. I was passive and let her treat me as if I were a life-size doll. Or mannequin.
“Lakan, are you with it?” She asked me, snapping her fingers in my face. I stared at her cross-eyed.
“I feel kind of loopy,” I admitted. “For a supposed Superman, drugs sure have a potent effect on me.”
“You’re still human. Mostly.” She helped me walk over to the chair and sat me down in it while she pulled out her old cell phone. “Uncle Pete, he’s dressed and awake. We’re ready to go. Are you bringing a wheelchair? He’s a little shaky on his feet.”
I didn’t hear his reply but her face blanched and she hung up. She grabbed my arm and put it on her shoulder as she stood me up. “Those agents? They’re in the hospital with warrants and US Marshals, Lake. They’re not intimidated by our Tribal Laws or immunity.”
“I can walk,” I said and managed to place my feet in front of each other. Exiting the room, we stood in a small hallway on what was an unglamorous wing of the hospital. Small rooms just down from the laundry and the morgue, easy access to freight elevators to the basement and the subway system.
I didn’t put all my weight on her but she carried more of me than my own legs. The only good thing was that the more I walked, the clearer headed I felt. The freight elevators were bare boxes with half-doors, half-gates so that we could see the walls of the shaft slide by; the floors passing with quick glimpses of the less desirable parts of the Casino Tower Complex. If we saw any people, it was the Service Personnel and they would not say anything to anyone.
It creaked and clanked its way to the bottom, opening on the lowest floor of the tower – Sub-basement IV. Carts of dirty linen lined both sides of the broad hallway and steam marked the entrance to the cleaning facility which serviced the hotel rooms, bathrooms and hospital floor. Towels, linen, bedding were all piled on trolleys. Dirtied, cleaned and folded. Mountains of white and colored stuff, enough to supply a city.
Rachel hurried past heading for a cross hallway and another set of doors that led to the subway system. Once through those, we were in a warren of tunnels that were lit only by small 13W LED bulbs every 10 feet making it just barely bright enough to walk. She seemed to know where she was going and I had no choice but to follow her.