Orders filled the air. Crow bar, neck brace, stretcher. The twenty-five-foot rescue squad vehicle finally rolled from its parking bay and stopped at the end of the station’s driveway, setting a record for the fastest response time in regional rescue history. The head of rescue looked at the victim and scratched his head. The accident was a two on a ten scale. He had pulled far more endangered victims out of far more mangled pieces of metal.
Kate was on autopilot. After more than a hundred accident scenes, the car half-enclosed around the concrete pole at the end of the drive was nothing more than scenery. Irrelevant background information. Kate, her basic rescue kit in hand, headed around the rear of the car. She approached the driver’s side door, looked in and spewed words her mother didn’t know were in her daughter’s vernacular.
She didn’t bother with the latex gloves—she had exchanged more bodily fluid with the man behind the wheel than she cared to admit. The victim’s pupils were normal, his pulse was strong. The extraction team peeled the driver’s door back like the top on a tuna can. They removed the victim and placed him on the stretcher. Kate moved over Jake and checked for injuries. She unbuttoned his oxford shirt like she had so many times in the past months, passion now substituted with professionalism. She opened the shirt and cursed again. The head of rescue looked over at the victim.
“What the hell is that?”
“It’s a note.”
Across his Jake’s chest, in dark indelible ink, were the words “I am innocent. Let me explain.”
“Kate, you want to tell me what this is about?”
“Do I have to? It seems pretty obvious to me.”
Jake smiled.
“You’re an asshole,” Kate said quietly.
“Sometimes it takes an insane act by a sane person to prove a point.”
Kate tried not to laugh, but a smile formed on her face. Her words were being thrown back at her in the most ridiculous of circumstances.
“You can let me off the stretcher. I’m fine,” Jake said as he was rolled toward the ambulance.
“Sorry, Jake. You’re going to the hospital whether you like it or not. And I wouldn’t be surprised if they keep you for psychiatric observation.”
“How’s the car?”
“I take it that was your father’s?”
“Yes. My first time in a Porsche. The power got away from me.”
“Don’t bullshit me, Jake.”
“That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. Is it drivable?”
“No,” Kate answered looking at the wreck. “How pissed is he going to be?”
“He’ll get over it.” ***
Peter went straight from the bar in the clubhouse to the hospital. Jake was in the recovery room, the healthiest patient in the D.C. metro area. He had endured the cursory exam, a standard chest and neck x-ray, and a stern consultation from a young District-licensed psychiatrist who determined Jake to be as mentally sound as anyone he met in his line of work. In fact, his last patient of the day was in better mental health than most of his stressed-out medical colleagues.
Jake flipped through the outdated Sports Illustrated magazine for the fourth time, having already burned through three issues of Reader’s Digest. Peter met the nurse at the recovery room door, her station a single white table with a chair on wheels.
Dressed in his favorite golfing shorts and shirt, accentuated with a healthy tan, Peter performed his first fatherly duty in twenty years. “My name is Peter Winthrop. I am here to pick up my son, Jake Patrick.”
The nurse didn’t get out of her seat. “Last bed on the right, next to the window.”
Peter walked past the curtains that divided the eight-bed room and stuck his head around the corner.
“Jake?”
“Dad.”
“How are you, son?”
“I’m fine. Caught a little airbag in the face, but nothing’s hurt except my pride.”
“And the car?”
“It may need a little work,” Jake said, putting on his best look of shame.
“You know, I was on a six-month waiting list for that car,” Peter said, switching concerns.
Jake didn’t know if his father knew about the note on his chest, and he wasn’t about to volunteer that small detail. He kept up the charade as he got out of bed, and stood. “Dad, I’m sorry about the car. You were right. It was a little more power than I was ready for. I should have been more careful.”
“I’m disappointed, son.”
Peter was disappointed, and not just because he would be without his favorite toy for a while. He was disappointed for another reason. In the midst of the standard hospital formaldehyde scent, he smelled bullshit. The same bullshit he was famous for shoveling. This time it was coming from his son.
He hoped he was wrong.
Chapter 28
The old apartment was an orchestra of creaks and squeaks, groans and moans. The steps, the banister, the doors, the windows, all kept rhythm. The pipes to the sink, shower, and toilet hit all the high notes in various pitch. When the infamous D.C. summer thunderstorms blew in during the late afternoon and early evening, the whole building rattled and rolled. Jake had been there a month, and had yet to sleep uninterrupted until morning. Even when Kate wasn’t there and he didn’t have an excuse for being up half the night. There were hundreds of haunted jaunts in D.C., a winding trail of supernatural leftovers through the city, and Jake accepted that his building should have been an official tour stop.
Sex usually put him to sleep the moment his head hit the pillow, but between the thunderstorm raging outside and the noise from his apartment inside, he was wide awake. Post-sex dry mouth led him to the refrigerator where he quickly changed focus from thirst to hunger and choked down two pieces of cold pizza while standing barefoot in the kitchen in his underwear. He washed the pepperoni slice down with milk, straight from the carton, as usual. By the time Jake returned to the bedroom, Kate had taken the pole position on visiting Mr. Sandman. The remote control sat on his pillow, a considerate gesture from someone who was too busy studying how to save lives to watch TV.
Jake turned on the late news, the last edition of headlines for the day in a town with a neverending supply of new ones. Local news focused on the planned development of the Anacostia River front, a filthy stretch of land on the banks of water so polluted, one could do a Jesus impersonation on the cans and dead bodies floating on the surface. The second news story was even worse, and Jake cringed as he listened to the report on the re-entry of an infamous former D.C. mayor into the political fray—a man who once went to jail after being caught smoking crack on an FBI sting video. Framed by a hooker, the former mayor had won his second term, after serving his prison sentence, with the election slogan of “The Bitch Set Me Up.”
And D.C. wondered why it had problems.
The local news broadcast switched over to Rock Johnson, exposé reporter extraordinaire, on camera in front of the Senate Hart Building. He was flanked by a small but vocal crowd, screaming improvised chants and pumping homemade signs into the air. When Senator Day’s face flashed onto the corner of the screen, Jake inched up the volume. Kate, slipping toward sleep, moved closer to him, her head now resting on the edge of his thigh. Jake stroked her hair and turned the volume up one more notch.
The news clip started with glorious views of the surroundings—palm trees swaying in the breeze, seagulls floating in a cloudless sky. It wasn’t until ten seconds into the report that Jake sat up at attention and adjusted the volume yet higher. Standing against a wall, just off-center from Senator Day, was one Peter Winthrop—tall, broad, and smiling like the politician he was with. The camera moved around to another view of the building, followed by excerpts of video taken during a quick tour of the inside and the facilities. Jake was mesmerized. Lee Chang, the face from the file Jake had stolen from his father’s office, was shown shaking hands with Senator Day and good ol’ Dad. Next to Lee Chang, crystal clear, was another Asian man whom Jake immediately recognized. Jake’s pulse jumped and his mouth went dry again, this time from panic. The eyes, the ponytail, the sheer size of the man.