The Naked Detective(10)

Why the hell had I come to the hospital?

I swallowed back nausea and said hello to Lefty.

He turned his papery yellow face, looked at me, and promptly went to sleep.

He slept about ten seconds, long enough to snore just once, then blinked himself awake. He raised a finger a few inches off the sheet. Wagging it at me, his voice a slurring rasp, he said, "You fuck my daughter I cut your balls off."

Pleasantly, I said, "Okay, Lefty. Since you feel that strongly about it."

"She got a problem. Don't you take advantage."

"Take advantage? Me?"

He struggled for a breath. His wigged-out yellow eyes did pinwheels. He dropped his voice a notch.

"You find it yet, Bubba?"

I didn't answer right away. I told myself be cagey. "Not yet," I said. "Still looking."

He fell asleep for another snore or two, then woke and gestured weakly toward a corner of the room. "Fuckin' palmetto bugs. Cocksuckers sing to me, ya know. Stand up on their hind legs, put their arms around each other, sing. Antennas waving, won't shut up."

I looked toward the vacant corner. "What do they sing, Lefty?"

He closed his eyes and murmured tunelessly through deeply fissured lips: "When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that's amore ..."

"Would kill anybody."

"No shit, Bubba." He laughed, I think. There was some wheezing and his enormous liver shook like half-set Jell-O. Then, to my horror; he reached out and touched my arm. His fingers felt waxy, already dead. He said, "I can't rest, you don't find it. Promise me you'll find it."

Stalling for time, I glanced up at the monitor. Bunch of numbers. When they zeroed out, that was that. I told myself be smart. "I'm working on it, Lefty."

There was a silence. The sick man seemed to settle into it, practicing for the quiet to come.

After a bit I nonchalantly said, "What is it again I'm looking for?"

Lefty's mouth opened. I saw stumps of teeth and a scaly tongue before it closed again. His forehead crawled, his jaundiced eyes narrowed with a fresh confusion that now took on a tinge of panic. "You ain't Bubba. Fuck are you?"

"Sure, I'm Bubba," I said, though even as I said it I felt some echo of the uselessness that Kenny Lukens had felt in lying to this guy.

"Fuck are you?" he said again. "That fuck Mickey send you?"

"What fuck Mickey?"

He didn't answer. His eyes slid off me and strained upward toward a nurse call button on the wall behind him. His arm slowly lifted, dragging tubes and needles. I blocked it with my body and leaned down low. Rumor has it that cancer isn't catching; still, it was creepy bringing my face close to the foul breath of this dying stranger. "Okay. I'm a friend of Kenny Lukens, Lefty. Remember Kenny Lukens?"

Ortega's hand dangled in midair. Pulse showed through the thin skin of his temples. "Cock- sucker," he whispered.

"He's dead, Lefty. Went to dig up what he stole from you, got killed."

The dying owe no homage to the dead, and Ortega wasted no sympathy on Kenny's passing. He just gurgled and scrambled till he was almost sitting up. IV bottles swung like bells and clunked together. "The pouch? You have it? I pay you."

"Whoever killed him has the fucking pouch."

Ortega just panted through the harness on his nose, his eyes as wild as the eyes of a cornered horse.

I suddenly realized I was not only frightened and appalled, but angry; I still don't know exactly why. Maybe because any death drags you back to thoughts of every other, all the helplessness and lack of resignation. I grabbed him by the arms. "What the fuck is so important with that pouch that Kenny Lukens died for it?"

Ortega didn't answer.

I think I shook him. "Who's Mickey?"

Nothing.

"Who put the pouch in the safe? Kenny said it was a woman. What woman, Lefty?"

His mouth twitched, his cracked lips quivered and split deeper. Disgusted to find his bony shoulders in my hands, I let them go. He fell back against his pillows. Oxygen was squeaking in his nose; or maybe it was my own breath, coming hard. The graph of his heartbeat was tracing out a jagged range of hills.

His eyes stayed on my face as he reached slowly once again toward the call button. I did nothing to stop him. I was paralyzed. I watched him watching me, and I digested the horror of having touched him. Wheezing, straining, he used up the slack of the tubes in his arms. The button was farther than the tubes would stretch. He kept reaching for it anyway. The tape that held the needles in his veins started pulling back from his purplish-yellow skin; it made a sound like ripping silk and left behind a residue of gummy dots. The needles appeared to be bending in his flesh like spoons in unripe melon. A syringe pulled free with a muffled pop and a small spout of brownish blood gushed out of Lefty's forearm.