Boots and Bullets. B.J. Daniels

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СКАЧАТЬ are things you might never get back.”

       Like my sanity?

      When he’d reached town last night, he’d returned to the Whitehorse Hotel on the edge of town and taken the same room he had planned to stay in more than three months earlier.

      He hadn’t slept well and when his brother had called and he’d told him where he was, Cordell threatened to come to Montana. Cyrus had talked him out of it, assuring him he wasn’t losing it.

      Now, as Cyrus stepped into the new hospital’s reception area, he wasn’t so sure. Maybe he was wrong. Who saw a murder that never happened?

      It wasn’t just that no one believed him. They all made it sound as if it would have been impossible for anything he said to have actually happened. All of them couldn’t be wrong, could they?

      Of course, his first thought was conspiracy. But did he believe that even his cousin was in on it?

      The hospital was smaller than most, but then Whitehorse wasn’t exactly booming. Like a lot of small Montana towns, its population was dropping each year as young people moved away for college and better-paying jobs.

      “May I help you?” The receptionist was in her early twenties with straight blond hair and a recently applied sheen of lip gloss. He stared at her name tag, not registering her name as he suddenly had a flash of his so-called murder dream. The woman lying dead in the nursery hadn’t been wearing a name tag. So maybe he was right and she wasn’t a nurse. Or maybe she’d lost her name tag in the struggle.

      “Sir?”

      Cyrus stirred, blinking the receptionist back into focus. He removed his Stetson. “I need to speak with your hospital administrator.” He realized he should have made an appointment. Had he been afraid the person wouldn’t see him once he recognized the name and knew what this was about?

      “Your name?”

      “Cyrus Winchester.”

      The receptionist picked up the phone. “Let me see … oh, here she is now.”

      A woman in her sixties with short gray hair walked toward them. She was dressed in a suit and had an air of authority about her.

      “This man needs to see you,” the receptionist said.

      The hospital administrator gave him only a brief glance. “Why don’t you come back to my office.”

      Cyrus followed her into a small, brightly lit room. The light hurt his eyes. Another side effect of the coma, this sensitivity to light?

      “Would you like me to close the blinds?” She was already closing them, dimming the room a little.

      “I’m Cyrus Winchester.”

      “What can I do for you, Mr. Winchester?” She didn’t introduce herself but the plaque on her desk read Roberta Warren.

      “Were you also the administrator at the old hospital?” he asked.

      “Yes. I’ve been the administrator for the last thirty-four years.” She clasped her hands together on her desk and seemed to wait patiently, although her demeanor said she had a lot to do and little time.

      He kneaded the brim of his hat in his lap, surprised he was nervous. “You know who I am.”

      “Yes.”

      “Then you probably know why I’m here.” He realized he was nervous because he was sitting in front of a health care specialist who was looking at him as if he might be nuts.

      “Your brother called us about an incident you thought you’d seen while at the old hospital the night you were there.”

      “That incident was a woman murdered in the nursery.”

      She shook her head. “There was no murder at the hospital.”

      Another chunk of memory fell as if from the sky. “There were two babies in bassinets,” he said as he saw the nursery clearly in his memory. Why hadn’t he recalled that earlier? Because it hadn’t registered? Or because it hadn’t mattered when there was a dead woman lying just inside the nursery?

      Now, though, he thought the fact that the two babies were there did matter for some reason. He tried to remember, but that only made his head ache and the memory slip farther away from him.

      Roberta Warren was still shaking her head. “There were no babies in the nursery that last night the old hospital was still open. I’m afraid you’re mistaken about that, as well.”

      He tried another tactic. “Do you know a woman with long auburn hair, greenish-blue eyes, tall, slim, maybe in her late twenties or early thirties?”

      “As I told your brother, there is no one employed at the hospital who matches that description.”

      “Do you know anyone in town who matches that description?”

      She raised a brow. “I thought you said it was a nurse who you thought you saw murdered.”

      “She wasn’t wearing a name tag when I found her. Maybe she was only pretending to be a nurse.”

      The administrator looked at her watch pointedly. “I’m sure you’ve spoken with the sheriff. Had there been a murder—”

      “I’d like to speak to the two nurses on duty that night,” he said.

      “I won’t allow that.”

      “Why not?” he asked, thinking he might be on to something.

      “I’ve questioned both of them at length, Mr. Winchester. One was always at the desk that night. The sheriff also questioned them as well and looked at the monitor readings. You never left your bed that night. If you decide to pursue this, it will have to be with a subpoena and just cause.” Her tone said good luck getting either. “I won’t have you accusing my nurses of something that never happened.”

      He rose to his feet. He wasn’t going to get anything from this woman. “Thank you for your time.”

      She sighed and gave him a sympathetic look. “I’m sure your doctor explained to you that what you thought you experienced was a coma-induced hallucination of some kind, perhaps stemming from your line of work. There is no cover-up, no murder, no reason for you to waste your time or anyone else’s. I would think you would be glad to be alive and have better things to do with your time.”

      “I am glad to be alive. Unfortunately, the woman I saw lying in a pool of blood in the old hospital nursery isn’t and for some reason no one cares.”

      He saw that his words finally hit home because she had paled. But that gave him little satisfaction. He turned and walked out of her office and reception area into the bright October morning.

      He was shaking inside. Where had that come from about the babies? But now that he thought about it, he was certain there’d been two babies in the nursery.

      Just as he was certain there’d СКАЧАТЬ