Death's Savage Passion by Jane Haddam

at Bogie’s, Sarah in my apartment, Sarah kissing the taxi driver on the nose.
    Sarah who had finally, finally won.
    I tried to tell myself I could be wrong. I was sick. I was tired. I could be overreacting. I knew I wasn’t. I knew because I could feel the hard scrape on my stomach lining that told me the same thing that had Sarah was about to get me.
    I turned to Marilou Saunders, tried to focus, failed.
    “Oh, hell,” I said. “She’s dead.”
    Then I passed out.

NINE
    S OUND AND LIGHT: CEMENT-BLOCK echoes in a wind tunnel; flashbulbs and strobe lights and metallic fluorescent glare.
    Give me a clamp give me a clamp give me a tube give me a clamp.
    Squeak in one of the wheels. No sense of direction. Get it out of her hand. Somebody dropped the knife on the tiles.
    It’ll be all right if we hurry.
    Get it out of her hand.
    I need a wash I need a wash give me a clamp I need a wash blew the tube.
    She’s going to cut herself.
    Give me a tube give me a clean tube.
    Free fall roll. Tear in the throat.
    It’s home it’s home give me a clamp.
    I can’t get it out of her hand.
    You can’t pump a goddamned empty stomach.
    Red on white. Landscape of the earth after the explosion of the sun.
    It’s gonna work. It’s gonna work anyway. Give me a clamp.
    Nearly cut her goddamned finger off.
    We’re home we’re home you can’t pump a goddamned empty stomach but we’re home give me a screwing clamp.
    Tony Marsh said, “My face. That’s the problem, my face. They take one look at me and think I’m a goddamned choirboy, not the Joseph Wambaugh type choirboy, the kind sings ten o’clock at St. Bernie’s and then—”
    There were no cigarettes on my bedside table. I felt the slick white metal, probing. Water glass (plastic), water pitcher (plastic), tissue box. No cigarettes. I opened my eyes to look at the tissue box. Kleenex.
    On the other side of the room, Tony Marsh was saying, “That was the problem. I’d be on the street in uniform and this face and they’d pick fights. I mean, it infuriated them. The contrast, you know. And then I got the promotion and went into plainclothes and—”
    I tried to sit up. There was a tube through my nose and down my throat and an IV in my arm. I felt feverish and achy and oddly disembodied. Except for the tube. There was nothing disembodied about the tube. I tried to say “Tony” and nearly strangled.
    I must have made some kind of noise. Tony stopped mid-sentence. There was shuffling on his side of the room.
    “Even if she is awake,” a female voice said, “you can’t talk to her.”
    “Not with that thing in her throat,” Tony Marsh said.
    “If she’s awake, I can remove the tube,” the female voice said. “But you still can’t talk to her.”
    I gave it my best effort. I said, “I’m awake.” It came out “Icomrska.”
    There was more shuffling on that side of the room, then footsteps, then two hulking figures coming through the light. The nurse was a nun with trigeminal neuralgia and a corrected harelip, dressed in something white and stretchy and a short veil. Tony Marsh was Tony Marsh. He looked as much like a homicide detective as Elmer Fudd looks like a brain surgeon.
    “Maybe we ought to call Miss Damereaux in,” Tony Marsh said.
    The nurse did something to the tubes trailing up the side of my head, hooked her fingers at the plastic junction under my nose, and pulled. I felt like I was being eviscerated.
    “There,” she said. “If you pass out on us again, I’m going to be very angry.”
    “I want a cigarette,” I said.
    “No smoking allowed in the rooms,” the nurse said.
    “To hell with that,” I said.
    Tony Marsh coughed. “Maybe we ought to get Miss Damereaux and Mr. Carras,” he said. “They’ve been waiting three days.”
    “Three days?” I said.
    They ignored me. I lay very still. Since the nurse didn’t seem like an ally, I waited until she had marched out of the room, leaving me alone with Tony. Three days? Did she say