Free J.L. Doty - Dead Among Us 01 - When Dead Ain’t Dead Enough by J.L. Doty

receptionist greeted her with a friendly smile. “Dr. McGowan, you’re up rather early. Or is it late for you?”
    “Early,” Katherine said. She didn’t recognize the woman, couldn’t remember her name. To locate Conklin she needed a teensy lie. “One of my patients was brought into the ER a little earlier, was checked in for the night, name of Paul Conklin.”
    The receptionist consulted her computer and said, “He’s on the fourth floor. You’ll have to ask the floor supervisor exactly where.”
    One of the nurses on the fourth floor recognized Katherine and she repeated the lie that he was one of her patients. Without asking, the nurse handed her his chart and led her to a ward with twelve beds. It was a long, rectangular room, with six beds lined up along the left wall and six along the right. Ten of the beds were unoccupied, while privacy curtains hid the remaining two, “He’s in the last bed on the right,” the nurse said, then marched back to her station.
    The night receptionist looked up from her book as the three men stepped into the lobby, an older fellow flanked by two younger, larger men, all wearing cheap, dark suits. The older fellow wore an outdated hat that would’ve been stylish in the fifties. The younger fellow on his left was an ugly blond with pock-marked cheeks, while the big fellow on his right had a bushy mustache that almost hid his square face. The younger men radiated a badass attitude like the thugs that hung out with her junkie nephew, and she took an immediate dislike to them.
    The older fellow in the middle spoke in a thick accent of some kind. “We’re looking for Paul Conklin. I believe he was brought into emergency earlier this evening.”
    She wasn’t going to give these fellows anything. “Sorry. We don’t release information to anyone but relatives. And you’ll have to wait for visiting hours.”
    “But I am a relative,” the old fellow said. “Here, my card.”
    He held out a business card. She reached out and took it, and as it touched her fingers they tingled slightly. She didn’t really need to look at it, because of course he was a relative. Since she’d looked up Conklin’s records for Dr. McGowan only ten minutes earlier, she didn’t need to do so again. “Mr. Conklin’s on the fourth floor. But you’ll have to wait for visiting hours. Only medical staff allowed this time of night.”
    “But I am medical staff,” the fellow said in his thick accent. “Look again at my card.”
    She didn’t need to look at his card, which still tingled in her fingers. Of course he was medical staff. She pointed down the hall. “The elevator’s that way, doctor.”
    “Thank you,” he said kindly, reaching out and retrieving his card.
    As they walked away he said to the two younger men, “See what you can do with a little finesse.”
    Some minutes later she wondered why she was just sitting there staring at her hands as if she was holding something. She must’ve zoned out, one of those senior moments they told her would happen as she got older.

Chapter 4: In It Together
    Katherine found Paul resting in a light, uneasy sleep. She’d assumed he was younger, but realized now that, like her, he was in his thirties. His light brown hair was a tousled mess at the moment, and beneath the bandages on his left cheek she thought he might be quite attractive. And there was something familiar about him, some memory that pulled at her so strongly she couldn’t brush it off as some vague recollection. She stared at him for quite a while, trying to resurrect the memory, and then it hit her: the shoe store! The Pradas! The ghost! A ghost that had clearly meant something to him and led him to her. And now she suspected it had done so quite purposefully.
    Out of curiosity she decided to check out his aura. Like most practitioners of the arcane she normally suppressed such vision, much like selective hearing at a loud cocktail party: the background voices might be louder than