Dirty Deeds(10)

I didn’t know what I was doing. That was a first.

When the bus finally let me off at the hospital, though, I didn’t waste any time. Even without a plan, I knew it was best to keep moving. I waited by the side doors to the building until a nurse went back inside from her smoke break and then followed her in. I got looks in the hall, but again I looked like someone just visiting their sister that got roofied at one of the downtown clubs or broke a leg in a parasailing accident.

One doctor ended up stopping me, asking me what I was doing and after I quickly explained, in English, that I was visiting family, he let me go. When an orderly on the second floor asked me the same, but in Spanish, I answered back in rapid fire English. That was enough for me to confuse him and he let me walk past. My size and strength probably had something to do with it as well.

Finally I found her floor. It was a big hospital and slightly chaotic. I used the disorder – the bustling staff, the patients wheeled to and fro, the opening and shutting of doors – to my advantage as I walked down the hall with purpose. Few stop a man with purpose.

I knew her room because there was a plain-clothed policeman standing outside of it. It wasn’t very subtle but I guess that was the point. To scare away people like myself, people who wanted to harm her.

I still couldn’t be certain what she was to me yet, what direction I would go.

I slowly went past and quickly glanced through her open door when the cop wasn’t looking. It was a fast look but I had been trained to look for the details. I saw her, lying down all bandaged up with a leg in a cast, a nurse talking over her at a doctor. Even though I could only see a bruised cheekbone, she looked to be asleep.

I kept walking.

Over the next week, I kept a close eye on her. Sometimes I was parked in a new rental car across the street, watching the people coming and going. Other times I walked down the hall, stealing glances when I could. Any time someone asked me where I was going, I explained the same story about my sister. To the hospital staff, I was harmless. Frequent, but harmless.

While I watched over her, I toyed with my options. What was I going to do with her? So far there had been no one else around her watching her and waiting. Not like I did. Every day it become more and more obvious that the hit and run was just that – no one else was coming by to finish the job.

Unless that meant that I was still the only one on the job.

Perhaps my clock was still ticking.

The buyer was still waiting.

There was a bit of comfort in that. If they thought I would still go through with it, I was buying her some time. Even though her time consisted of lying in a hospital bed, wondering what happened.

But after a few days, her spirits lifted. I could hear her laughter in the halls sometimes, so bright and infectious, as her friends visited her. It was always the same women. A pensive looking thing with long hair and tall one that was about as subtle as a battering ram.

That was it, though. There was no man – no husband, no boyfriend, no father, no brother. There was no mother. There were those two friends and that was it.

I don’t know why I found myself relating to her, this woman I was supposed to kill, but I was. Maybe I always had. Maybe that’s why I watched and waited, unsure of what to do but feeling like I eventually had to do something.

Then one night I saw her and her friends leave the hospital. I ducked down in the car but they weren’t even paying attention. I was in the dark, just a shadow, and they were giggling as they helped her to a Toyota, having fun. This was the first time I saw Alana fully dressed since the day I was supposed to kill her. Though she was limping and needed help, she looked beautiful.

That was something else that surprised me. The rush of blood to my heart and my dick. Feelings were rare, unwarranted and unwanted. I swallowed them down like acid.

When their car started, I waited until they left the parking lot and then followed. They didn’t get very far. A tacky-looking dive bar a few blocks away pulled them in like a siren.

So, Alana was escaping for a night of drinking. Part of me thought this wasn’t very wise and that her friends should know better, not just because of her injuries but because I was there, I was watching, and I was the man who had been hired to kill her. Didn’t they know just what kind of danger she was in? The fact that they had no clue made the whole thing even more puzzling.

But part of me was impressed. Car accident or no car accident, assassination attempt or no assassination attempt, she wasn’t going to let anything hold her back.

I waited in the car outside for an hour, listening to the rhythmic thumps of the music and the drunken laughter float through the humid air, before I decided I had enough. I wanted to watch her up close. I wanted to get to the bottom of everything and that included her.