Free Broken Saint, The by Mike Markel Page A

like that?
She gonna bring him along to law school?”
    “One of my sisters went through a phase with a
knuckle-dragger like that.”
    “How’d that turn out?”
    “When she decided she’d punished my parents
enough, she moved on.”
    “So there’s hope for Amber after all.”
    “There’s hope for us all, Karen.”
    We got in the cruiser. “For most of us, maybe,” I
said. “Not for Maricel.”
    Ryan buckled his seatbelt. “No, not for Maricel.”
    I looked at my watch: 4:43. “Let’s call it a day,
huh?”

 
     
    Chapter 8
    “Wanna head over to the hospital to see if they’ve got a
record of Amber coming in with her shiner?” It was 8:01 am , and I’d had a bad night. That happens sometimes. Last
night, I’d felt shitty about missing my AA meeting and opened the emergency
bottle of JD I keep just in case. I don’t remember going to bed.
    “Can’t we phone them?” Ryan said.
    “No, they won’t talk to us unless they see our
shields. It’s policy.”
    We drove over to the hospital. I hate hospitals,
this one in particular. It’s where I lied to an old man that we were going to
get the two guys who killed his wife with a length of chain when the home
invasion went bad. Where I spent a few days last year after I’d been beaten up
and gang raped out at the neo-Nazi compound. Where I visited this little girl I
almost killed when I’d been drinking and T-boned a minivan.
    The big automatic doors opened for me and Ryan.
The unmistakable hospital smell hit me as we walked over to the reception desk
and I asked the ancient volunteer woman how to find Medical Records. She had a
nametag that said Betty and Volunteer on it. I had my shield around my neck.
She pointed down the main corridor and told us room 1170 was on the right. She
smiled sweetly at me. “Make it a great day,” she told me. I nodded.
    “What’s with her?” I said as we headed down the
hall.
    Ryan looked at me, confused.
    “I mean, we’re cops. We’re in a hospital. We need
to talk to someone in Medical Records. Is there any way, under any circumstances,
this could possibly turn out to be a great day?”
    We walked up to the counter at Medical Records.
Ryan said to me, “You want me to bite this woman’s head off, or you got it?”
    I gave him a look and turned to the middle-aged
dumpling on duty. “I’m Detective Seagate. This is Detective Miner.”
    Arlene from Medical Records nodded and said, “What
do you need?” Apparently we weren’t her first cops.
    “Have you got a patient, Amber Cunningham, in the
system? We’re thinking she came to the ER five or six days ago?”
    She hit some keys and watched the system churn. “I’ve
got two Amber Cunninghams. One’s about twenty, the other’s around twelve.”
    “Twenty. Could you print me a copy of that record?”
She hit a button and out it came. She handed it to me. “Thanks.”
    I looked at the form. Five days ago, at 2:15 am , Amber Cunningham came in to the ER.
She was seen at 3:47 by a Dr. David Tristan, who bandaged a laceration on her
cheek and performed a visual examination of her eye. She told him her vision
was a little blurry. He said that should clear up within a day. If it doesn’t,
she should go see an optometrist. She left at 3:52 am .
    “Can you tell me if she was here alone?”
    She shrugged. “No idea.”
    “Can you tell me if this ER doc, David Tristan, is
on duty now?”
    She hits a few keys. “Not yet. He does ten am to midnight today.”
    “Thanks.” I turned to Ryan. “Wanna wait till ten
or go to his house?”
    “I’d go to his house, so he can talk to us,” Ryan
said. “We wait till he gets here, he might have a case right away.”
    “Okay, but he might be cranky if we wake him up
before a shift.”
    “Don’t you hate having to deal with cranky people
on the job?”
    I looked at him. “Screw cranky people, I say.”
    “Exactly,” he said.
    “Go back and get his address from the woman, would
you?”
    I stood there, bleary-eyed,