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Mystic Cowboy(89)

By:Sarah Anderson


Rebel shot Nobody the strictest look he had, which turned out to be enough.

“Thank you kindly,” Nobody said as he slipped out the door ahead of Jesse.

Two down, Rebel thought with a mental sigh. One to go.

As he crossed the room, the phone rang. The sound froze him in his tracks for a second, but when the phone rang again and Madeline made no movement to answer it, Rebel found his feet and ran to pick it up.

“Clinic, this is Jonathan,” he said, hoping and praying that this was the lab. If the lab called, he could take her home. Everything would be okay.

At the sound of his white name, he swore everyone in the clinic turned and stared—even Clarence. But if it was the lab, he didn’t want to scare anyone off with Rebel.

“Uh, yeah, this is Open Diagnostics,” a high-pitched male voice cut through the static. “I’m calling for a Madeline Mitchell.”

“Dr. Mitchell is with a patient,” he lied. He’d heard Tara say it enough. “She is expecting your call and told me to take a message. If she has any questions, she’ll call back.”

“Can’t you get her? You’re talking to Leon Flagg here. I head the lab.”

Oh, Leon! Madeline’s fake giggle floated back to him. His hand clenched in a fist as if it thought it could punch the asshole out over the telephone line. “I’m sorry,” he replied, amazed at how smooth and un-homicidal he managed to sound. “She’s performing a procedure...” Yeah, sure. If you called slack-jawed staring a procedure.

“Yeah, yeah. Well, you tell her that what she’s got there is a nasty little double infection there, campy and E. Coli. You tell her that I’ve never seen concentrations so high. Where the hell did she get that sample?” Suddenly the high-pitched voice dropped a notch or two. Leon was impressed. “Because levels like that of those two things together would kill a man inside a day, no question.”

“E. Coli? Campy?” He didn’t know what the hell it was, but he wrote it down anyway. At least he’d heard of E. coli. Then he looked at Madeline.

Instead of the zombie, she was staring at him, her bloodshot eyes wide with recognition. So he didn’t know what campy was. She did, and that was all that mattered.

“You know, campy. Campylobacter jejune?” Leon sighed. “Can I talk to someone who knows what they’re doing?”

He tried to phonetically spell campylobacter, just in case Madeline wouldn’t remember this conversation when she woke up. “I’m sorry, sir, but everyone is helping with the procedure.” Leon snorted as a new thought occurred to Rebel. Madeline had made him call Tim last night, and Tim was the law around here. She’d been treating the campy outbreak like it was a crime scene—but the hard proof was with Leon. “Will the lab be sending out a full report?”

“Yeah, yeah, don’t get your panties in a bunch. We’ll finish it up and have it in the mail by the end of the week.”

That was probably as good as it was going to get—unless someone started offering sexual favors. Rebel shuddered at the thought. “Is there anything else I should pass along to Dr. Mitchell?”

The pause was too long. “Well, I would love to meet the doctor herself. Do you know if she’ll be coming to Baltimore anytime soon? Maybe with her sister?”

If he thought he could punch a man through a telephone wire... “Like I said, the doctor will call if she has any more questions.” And he hung up the phone as fast as he could before he said something that would get their lab report lost in paperwork limbo.

“Campy. E. Coli. Campy.” Madeline was repeating to herself, so softly that it sounded like she was just breathing. “Campy.”

“Yeah. That.” He pulled out the chair she was sitting in and crouched down in front of her. “Is that good?”

“It’s...a...bacteria.” She was averaging one completed blink an hour, and each word seemed to take about half of what she had left.

“And you gave everyone antibiotics.” She’d done the right thing, as she’d put it. She’d made the right call.

“Yeah.” Her head moved, and he saw that her eyes—still wide—were all shiny.

She was about to start crying.

He had to get her out of here. She was done, toast, stick a fork in her, and anything else she said or did right now would only come back to embarrass her. “Clarence. The lab said it was campylo-something and E. coli.”

“Shit,” the big man whistled to himself. Some of the kids giggled—the sweetest sound he’d ever heard. “Campy. I’ll be...” Clarence shot a warning look at the kids, “…darned.” They all whined in disappointment.