Bill Hopkins - Judge Rosswell Carew 01 - Courting Murder by Bill Hopkins

ambulance is taking you to the hospital.”
    Then the real horror of the situation walloped into Rosswell’s gut. He wrenched his head around, looking left and right, up and down. “Where’s Tina?”
    Neal and Frizz glanced at each other for a millisecond, but Rosswell wasn’t so far gone that he didn’t catch it.
    His hands rubbed across the floor, finding a sticky puddle. His blood. And Tina’s blood. Mixed. It had to be. There was too much blood to come from one wound.
    Rosswell said. “Is she all right?”
    Rosswell smelled booze. Scotch, to be exact. Had he passed out at a party?
    “The EMTs are coming,” Neal said.
    “Are they going to pronounce me dead?” he said.
    The EMTs sprinted into the house and Rosswell passed out again.

    In his stupor, Rosswell heard a blonde woman tell him, “Do any- thing you want.” He lifted a hand. She said, “Don’t mess with the makeup.” She poured herself a large single malt Scotch.
    “Take your clothes off,” he heard himself say.
    The blonde said, “Take them off slow or fast?”
    Was it Tina talking to him? The woman’s face filled with fog. He tried to answer, but couldn’t speak.
    The blonde changed into a dark-complexioned child with black hair. A little girl. Rosswell screamed at her to run away, but she didn’t move.
    The blonde reappeared and slipped a dirty spoon to the little girl. The little girl turned around once and showed Rosswell the spoon, now clean. He spun the girl around and discovered that she clutched the spoon, dirty again, behind her back. The back of the girl’s head was bloody, blown away.
    Rosswell screamed again. “Get the hell out of here. Don’t you understand plain English?” He screamed and screamed.
    The child lost all color, transfiguring into a ghost. Then Rosswell’s father appeared, standing over him with a whip, ready to thrash him. Rosswell glimpsed his mother, hovering behind his father, crying. Rosswell reached around his father, laboring to touch his mother and convince her that everything was all right. He would make sure that nothing hurt her ever again.
    Everyone vanished. A curtain fell in his brain and everything faded to black.

    Rosswell awoke sweating from the nightmare. He found a tube stuck in his right arm and his left arm patched with a mile’s worth of bandages. The windows had the slatted blinds open. Sunlight poured through the clean glass onto his bed and made a striped pattern on his crisp white covers. A nurse, a gray-haired Sumo wrestler of a woman, as broad as she was tall, fussed with the inverted plastic bag hooked to a tube dripping liquid into his veins. He was certain it held a painkiller of some kind, although his arm still felt as if a thousand bees took turns stinging him. Nonetheless, he felt himself floating on a down comforter a mile thick. His mouth felt like it was stuffed with cotton balls. Everything hurt except the parts he couldn’t feel.
    He lay on death’s cold doorstep. The welcome mat invited him to leave the land of the living and enter the country of the dead.
    The nurse squinted. “You awake, honey?” she said in a soft angel’s voice that didn’t match her balloon of a body. If she spoke in an angel’s voice, maybe he’d already passed. “You must’ve been dreaming. You were groaning and making a lot of noise. Mumbling about something.”
    The exceptionally good dope dribbling into him made her voice sound heavenly. He spotted a crucifix hanging around her neck. When he turned on his side, a lightning bolt shot through his arm. Maybe the dope wasn’t as good as he’d first thought.
    He said, “Am I dead?”
    “No.” She rearranged his pillow. “Far from it. You’re in St. Luke’s Hospital.”
    “Then, yes, sweetie. I’m awake.”
    She giggled. The laughter and voice sounded familiar. “You’re going to be fine.” The nurse straightened the bed sheets while he tried to determine if he knew her. The sheets felt starched and smelled faintly of Clorox.