The Death Factory: A Penn Cage Novella. Greg Iles
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Название: The Death Factory: A Penn Cage Novella
Автор: Greg Iles
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Зарубежные детективы
isbn: 9780007569601
isbn:
“Sarah’s parents came to stay with us, meaning to help. That didn’t work so well. Her dad couldn’t stand seeing his baby in that condition. Sarah was down to eighty-five pounds, and the pain was becoming unbearable. Bill had to move to a nearby motel. Eventually, the docs couldn’t keep her both lucid and comfortable. But that’s what she wanted. Sarah wanted to be home, and she wanted every second she could get with her daughter. Her goal was to reassure Annie until the very end. I never felt so helpless in all my life, Jack. I’d have given every dollar I had to have gone to medical school instead of law school.”
“Where was Tom in all this?”
“Natchez, mostly. But he’d been talking to the oncologists all along. He knew what was coming. He was waiting for his moment. And when it came, he rode in like the real Lone Ranger, if there ever was one. He loaded up his car with drugs, drove out to Houston with Mom, and informed the docs he was taking over the case. Mom politely asked the nurses to leave, and she and Sarah’s mother started caring for her around the clock. I don’t think Dad slept more than three hours out of twenty-four for a week. He lived at Sarah’s bedside, administering drugs like some kind of alchemist. I remember him calculating dosages of five different drugs on a legal pad, several times a day. But it worked. He kept her lucid and mostly pain-free until the absolute end.”
“That’s Tom, right down to the ground.”
I nod, thinking of my father lying helpless in his own hospital bed. “You know how people joke about doctors’ handwriting? Well, Dad’s prescriptions always looked like chicken-scratch, sure enough. But I still have a page of those drug calculations. And they look like they were written by a seventeenth-century mathematician, they’re so precise.”
“He loved Sarah like his own daughter,” Jack says. “He’s told me that.”
“Well . . . it was near the very end of that struggle that the other thing happened.”
“Which was?”
Even now, a shudder of dread goes through me at the memory. “A Hispanic guy knocked on our front door. He looked familiar, but I couldn’t place him. He was about thirty, tall, light-skinned, nerdy-looking. Turned out he was a serology technician from the Houston PD crime lab. Felix Vargas. I’d dealt with him on a few cases. Vargas was a chain-smoker, but I could smell alcohol on him the second I answered the door.”
“What did he want?”
We’ve reached the flat riverbank at the bottom of the mill road. Where the Magnolia Queen once floated in its movie-prop majesty, now only broken mooring cables trail into the river. The Mississippi is still wearing its summer colors, the muddy brown tide rolling through sandy banks thick with green willow oak and kudzu, and white fields of cotton stretching away over the flat Louisiana delta. I pull to the edge of the asphalt and park at the edge of the gray anti-erosion rocks that slope down to the water.
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