The Thunder Keeper(14)

She dropped to her knees and curled her hand over the crown of his head to keep the spirit from departing, the way she remembered the medicine man treating her grandfather when she was a child.

“Send an ambulance!” someone shouted into a cell phone.

“Let me through. I’m a doctor.” A man’s voice came from behind. Vicky felt someone shove against her. Reluctantly she removed her hand and got to her feet. “Please don’t leave,” she said out loud so that the spirit would hear.

A large man brushed past and dropped to one knee. He began probing the unconscious man’s wrist, then the carotid artery. Seconds passed. Finally he removed his own raincoat and laid it over the prone man. A siren sounded in the distance.

Vicky stepped back through the crowd flowing around her like water, until she could no longer see the body sprawled on the pavement. A mixture of dread and nausea welled inside her. Stuck in her mind, like a still from a movie, was the image of the movie-star-handsome man in the black raincoat suspended over the hood of the sedan.

The siren grew louder, piercing the sounds of the rain on the sidewalk. A red-and-white ambulance drew alongside the curb ahead of the black squad car pulling in. Two officers in dark blue uniforms emerged from the car and shouldered their way through the crowd, shouting orders to stand back. Slowly a path opened, and the ambulance attendants hurried across the sidewalk.

“Anybody see what happened?” one of the officers shouted.

Several people raised their hands.

The officer produced a small pad from inside his jacket and began moving around the periphery of the crowd, asking questions, jotting notes in the rain.

“I saw it happen,” Vicky said when he approached.

“Your name?” His tone was calm, matter-of-fact, the narrow, reddish face unreadable.

She gave him her name, address, telephone numbers, and told him about the black Camry speeding up, jumping the curb, running down the man. The words spilling out, as if the horrible image in her mind might be washed away by the torrent. She drew in a breath and told him the last three license-plate numbers.

“It was deliberate,” she said, watching the stretcher being wheeled across the sidewalk toward the ambulance. “The driver wanted to kill him.”

“We’ll need a complete statement from you tomorrow.” His eyes held hers a moment before he turned toward another woman who had raised her hand.

“Officer,” Vicky said. He glanced back. “I was on my way to meet someone named Vince Lewis. It may have been him.”

“Wait here.” He began shouldering his way through the cluster of silent people toward his partner. After a moment, he was back. “Driver’s license says Vincent R. Lewis. You know him?”

“He was a potential client. It was an initial meeting.” She heard herself parroting what Wes Nelson had said earlier, struggling to make it sound convincing. “Where are they taking him?”

“Denver Health.” The officer was writing again, flipping over a page, starting another. “Like I said.” He raised his eyes to hers, “We’re gonna want a complete statement tomorrow.”

Vicky nodded and turned toward the entrance of the Brown Palace. The ambulance was sliding away from the curb, its siren bouncing off the hotel’s brown stone walls.

“Taxi, please,” Vicky told the doorman standing limp-armed under the awning, eyes on the ambulance receding down the street.

He seemed to snap to attention. Stepping off the curb, he jammed the whistle between his lips and sent out a long, shrill noise that blended into the wail of the siren.

Vicky held the lapels of her raincoat closed against the chill passing through her and waited until a Yellow Cab pulled into the curb. Then she tipped the doorman and got into the rear seat. “Denver Health,” she said.

Ten minutes later she was hurrying along the covered walkway that connected the redbrick hospital buildings on the outskirts of downtown Denver. The rain beat on the roof, and the cold wind swirled through the walkway, bending the stalks of tulips that poked out of the pots on both sides. Inside the glass entrance, a middle-aged black woman was leafing through a stack of papers at the information desk. Vicky asked for the emergency room, and the woman nodded toward the escalator in the building’s atrium.

Vicky gripped the arm hold as the escalator rose to the second-story balcony. Nurses and doctors in green scrubs hurried past the groups of people standing along the railing, staring down into the atrium, dejection and hope etched in their expressions. She followed the signs down a corridor to another desk, where another middle-aged receptionist sat hunched over an opened newspaper. Beyond the desk was a double-steel door with an intercom panel on the adjacent wall.