Free The Do-Right by Lisa Sandlin Page B

You’re embarrassing yourself.”
    The teenager twisted around to him, the surprise on his face giving way to the death stare without any matching death moves.
    Phelan found Lloyd’s car at 8:09. The red brake lights of a black Seville. J5489, jackpot . The driver was alone, arm stretched over the seat back. Just sitting there, windows rolled up, AC deployed. The Seville was parked in front of room number 111. Phelan circled around, parked by the office with the Caddie in view.
    At 8:30, Lloyd put it in gear. So…they must have a plan in place. Didn’t get here by 8:30, she wasn’t coming. Lloyd didn’t seem devastated. His lips were moving. Practicing a speech?
    Phelan had his info—Holiday Inn for sure, approximate time. Jazzed, he watched as Lloyd drove past him. Guy was singing.
    Phelan turned the opposite direction, took a right, was passing St. Elizabeth Hospital’s bright ER entrance when he heard the whoop of a siren. Firing closer. He nudged over to the shoulder behind a pickup and monitored his rearview.
    A shrieking vehicle charged into sight, red lights flashing. Pontiac station wagon painted orange and white busted a sharp left into the horseshoe drive too fast to hold the curve leading to the ER doors. The ambulance took out a corner of a concrete bench, tight-spun in the opposite direction as the driver overcorrected, and plowed—bull’s-eye—into a pillar of the port cochére. There was a bang like a transformer had blown, a rush of steam, and the bent pillar slumped.
    Phelan slammed out of his car and ran the twenty yards. Pulled up when, like an afterthought, the port cochére gently shifted downward.
    He was wary of the structure collapsing but he circledround and peered through the driver’s open window. The man’s bald head had spidered the windshield, which had returned the favor probably a quarter-second before the steering wheel crushed in, hooked him under the chin and rammed upward. Slack as a sack, no gasp, no shudder, no blink.
    Phelan loped to the ambulance’s back door window. On the gurney lay an elderly man wearing a useless black oxygen mask—its hose was torn loose. The attendant, on knees and elbows, had snagged a shelf on the way down and was bleeding from temple to jaw. Shiny stripe of blood dividing off into separate rivulets.
    Phelan opened up the back door. “Y’all all right?”
    â€œScraped the side of my head off. Fucking Marshall. You hear me, you wino son of a bitch cocksucking bastard.”
    â€œYour driver’s wasted,” Phelan said, climbing in and bending over the old guy on the stretcher.
    â€œNo shit, Sherlock,” the attendant snarled. He crawled over to the window to the front seat. “You just got us both fired, Marshall. I told you—”
    Phelan said, “No, I mean he’s wasted.”
    The attendant jerked around.
    â€œLook, get the head, I’ll get the foot.” Phelan leapt lightly out of the ambulance. His fists closed on the gurney rail like they used to on stretcher handles dozens of times before, and he was sliding it out, unsurprised at the weight of the emaciated man, knowing bodies were heavier than they looked, specially the ones he was used to, the bony ones that belonged to boy soldiers. The only different element here was this gurney’s undercarriage, wheels and crossed metal legs like at the bottom of an ironing board—handy, these’d pop down and turn hefting into rolling. Could maybe manage this by himself, which was a good thing because the idiotattendant, apparently not believing Phelan’s call, was jabbing his index finger into the driver’s pulseless neck.
    A tiny nurse, long hair escaping from a bun on her neck, appeared at the back of the ambulance. She turned a scrunched-up face to Phelan. “Who are you?”
    Phelan’s chin jutted toward his car. “I was driving by.”
    Her face scrunched further,