Page 15

“You were dizzy before you fell down the stairs?”

“Yeah,” she said and shut her eyes.

“Stay with me, Nana Mama,” Rich said, and she opened her eyes again. He shone the penlight in her left eye.

“BP’s one sixty over ninety,” Patrick announced. “Pulse ninety and irregular. Tell me about the cardiac history,” he said to me.

“Uh, atrial fibrillation more than a decade ago. Catheter ablation. Diagnosed with congestive heart failure. Has had two heart attacks. Received a left-ventricular assist device and hasn’t had any serious issues since.”

A tall, strikingly handsome Black woman in blue scrubs stepped through the curtain into the bay. She looked at me, put her hand on my arm, and nodded before going to my grandmother’s side.

“Regina, it’s Sydney,” Dr. Ames said. “Now, what have you gone and done to yourself this time?”

My grandmother made a humming, amused sound from her throat. Dr. Ames shone a light in her eyes, looked at the board under her.

“This is all plastic?” she asked.

“Far as I know,” I said. “Molded. Like a kayak.”

“No kayaks where I’m from,” Dr. Ames said.

She decided to have Nana Mama remain on the board for the time being and ordered X-rays of her arm and her cervical spine; they’d see if there were any vertebral fractures before they attempted to move her. She also ordered a CT scan of Nana Mama’s head and neck, but one of the two scanners was down, and there were more urgent cases ahead of her.

I was greatly heartened when Dr. Ames returned twenty minutes later pushing my grandmother’s gurney and smiling.

“No vertebral fractures that I can see,” the surgeon said. “She smacked the side of her head and probably has a concussion, but I think that right arm took the brunt of the fall. It’s broken in four places.”

“Ouch. But she’s going to be all right?”

“Let’s get her off that board and turned over so we can see the full extent of her injuries, then run a few tests before we make that call.”

Dr. Ames and the nurses were far more skilled at moving Nana Mama than John, Ali, and I had been. They told my grandmother what they were going to do and then did it, very fast, and within minutes she was lying in a hospital bed with an IV in her good arm and a nasal cannula delivering oxygen to address her low O2 saturation.

An ugly four-inch gash was visible on one side of her head, high on her temple, just forward of her hairline, courtesy of the edge of the brick she’d hit. That side of her face was swollen. You could barely see her right eye. They also confirmed that she’d bitten her tongue when she fell.

“How are you feeling now, Ms. Regina?” the doctor asked.

My grandmother seemed confused by the question. She looked at me and then said thickly, “’Etter.”

“Better, that’s good,” Dr. Ames said. “We’re going to get you stitched up and then run a few more tests, okay? We’ll keep you here for the night.”

Nana Mama sighed. “Old.”

I laughed. “You kind of are.”

She smiled a little, the swelling on one side of her face making her grin uneven, sagging on the right, rising on the left. Then she made a grumbling noise and shut her eyes.

15

BENEATH AN UNCOMMONLY WARM May sun, John Sampson walked down the old roadbed toward the Bridge to Nowhere. The muddy ground had been baking in the heat most of the day and was almost dry.

Several people stood high up the embankment where he and Alex had met Boog, right under the ghost ramp and farthest from the road. They were observing him. One woman dressed in wild, colorful clothes stood on a girder that jutted out from under the bridge at its highest point, holding on to a piece of rebar for balance. In the upper corner of the embankment opposite them, two men were also watching him. Were they all posted there to keep an eye on him?

He decided to assume they were and kept walking toward the encampment, ignoring the sentries, unable to get away from the scent of human feces that wafted from the underbrush.

The closer he got, the more people he saw silently studying him. It made him feel like an outsider, like he was walking into a closed and alien society. And maybe that was, in some ways, the point.

He realized Chief Kane’s instincts were spot-on. Maybe it wasn’t a stranger, someone nonlocal, who’d driven in the pouring rain to the Bridge to Nowhere, shot the victim, torched the car and the corpse, and left. Maybe the killer lived under the bridge. Maybe the killer was one of the trolls.