Meyer stopped by a little while after I'd finished the reels. He said he had slept fourteen hours and still felt tired. I told him about the trouble out at Bonnie Brae, and he agreed with me that Ladwigg had probably pushed himself beyond his ability. A fall onto asphalt paving from a ten-speed bike going twenty miles an hour can easily be fatal, especially without a helmet. I doubted Ladwigg would wear a crash helmet while cruising his own development in the early hours.
Gretel phoned again at half-past noon to say she had located the son in Alaska and told him the news, and he expected to be able to get to Lauderdale late this same night.
'~You sound a little beat," I said.
"Do I? The phone has been driving me crazy. But I do feel sort of blah. As if I'm coming down with a bug."
"Can you get somebody to take over?"
'Y'm trying."
"I think I'll come on out."
'4I... I'll be glad to see you."
Meyer left. I locked up the Flush, went over to the parking area, and cranked up my ancient Rolls pickup, the electric-blue Miss Agnes. The replaced power plant yanked her along too fast for her tall antique dignity, like a dowager blown into an unwilling trot by a gale-force wind. I made a stop on Spangler and picked up a pair of quarter-pounders with cheese, on the assumption that Gretel wouldn't have had time for lunch either.
I went all the way over to the University Drive intersection and turned north past the new plazas and shopping centers, the caramel-colored condommiums, the undeveloped flatlands where the pal
The Green Ripper motto still grew, the clusters of wooden town houses with roofs cut into steep new architectural cliches to shed some unimaginable snow load. Bonnie Brae had marled their entrance with squat fat brick pil- lars on either side of their divided-lane driveway. It curved off to the right to the big parking area near the renovated Cattrell place now used as clubhouse, fat farm, and administration building. When the gusty wind slowed, there was heat in the sun. I could see people bobbing and trotting about over on the tennis courts.
I went into the foyer of the building, hoping to find somebody who would direct me to Ladwigg's new house. A man came out of a room at my right and walked up to me, hand out.
"Mr. McGee?" He was a boyish thirty-something, with apple cheeks, a bushy blond mustache, thinning blond hair carefully adjusted to hide the thinning, bow tie, gray tweed jacket with leather elbows. When I nodded he shook my hand heartily and said, 'Tm Morse Slater. Maybe Gretel has mentioned me."
"The manager, yes." He had a bumbling kind of effusiveness about him, a shoe-clerk willingness to please, which was given the lie by the ice-blue eyes, intent, aware, measuring I said, "What I want to know is how I find the ~
"Gretel told me to look out for you. I just took her up the Drive to the hospital. Got back minutes ago."
"What happened?"
"Some sort of bug, I thinlr.She seemed to be in a half faint, and she felt so hot to the touch it frightened me. So I took her right to Emergency and signed her in. They took her temperature and checked her into the hospital and began tests. A Dr. Tower seemed to be the one giving the orders. We accepted financial responsibility, of course. All our people have insurance which... but you're not interested in that. Room one thirty-three."
I think he tried to say something else, but I was already on my way. The hospital was on the same side of University Drive, and a little more than a half mile away.
I managed to talk my way to the nurses' station and then down the corridor to the room where Gretel was. It was a two-bed room with an old woman asleep and snoring by the windows, with a curtain drawn between the two beds. I pulled a straight chair close beside Gretel and took her hand. It felt dry and hot.
"What's going on?" I asked her.
Her lips were swollen and cracked, and her brown hair was damp and matted. She moistened her lips and gave me a small wry smile. Yt's one of those days," she said. "Oh, boy. I got up and busted my favorite coffee mug that you gave me. Herm Ladwigg died in the street. A bug gave me a hell of a sting in the back of the neck. Later on, when I
The Green Ripper began to feel dizzy, I fainted and fell and brolce one of the big lamps in the Ladwigg house. And here I am. It's one of those days."
"What do they say is wrong?"
'.They don't say. Fever of unknown origin. My ears are ringing so loud you should be able to hear them. I really feel weird."
"They're running tests, aren't they? They'll find out what you've got."
A little bit of a sallow blond nurse came hur~ying in. She had a fifty-year-old face and a twenty- five-year-old body. She gave me a disapproving glance, took a temperature reading with an elect Ironic gadget, then took blood pressure on the left arm, pursed her lips, came around and displaced me, and took the pressure on the other arm. She trotted out. I moved close. Gretel found my wrist with her hot dry hand and held tight. array, I feel so hot. [m burning up. I feel terrible, Trav. Terrible."
When I spoke to her again, she didn't answer. She seemed to be asleep, her eyes about one third open, breathing so rapidly and shallowly through her mouth, it scared me.
I went plunging out to find somebody and ran into a couple of orderlies pushing a stretcher. I asked them what was going on, and they said they were taking a patient named Gretel Howard to Intensive Care. Other than that, they knew nothing.
I followed along, after they had raised the bed and pulled her across onto the stretcher. They tried to keep me from getting into the elevator with her, but it didn't work. But they did stop me at the door to the Intensive Care area. I told a very large white-haired nurse that if somebody didn't come and tell me within ten minutes what was going on, I was coming through that door.
The doctor who came out said his name was Tower. Vance Tower. He led me over to some rattan chairs near a window and we sat down and he said, '] need some background here."
"What's the matter with her?"
He had taken a little Pearlcorder out of his At and put it into dictation mode. 'name, address, and occupation, please," he said, and held it up between us. They make you play their game their way, and if you want a lot of delays, just re- fuse to go along. Travis McGee. Slip F-18, Bahia Mar Marina Salvage Consultant.
"Relationship to patient?"
I hesitated, then said, "Common-law husband." After ale she had lived aboard the houseboat tenth me for a lot of weeks.
He was a dumpy-looking man, soft and pale and too heavy, going bald, short of breath, looking out of tired little brown eyes at me, showing no react lion at all to my answers.
"How can we contact her close relatives?"
The Green Ripper
"There aren't any. Parents and only brother are dead. She is divorced from her first husband. No children. I think there may be some distant kin, second cousins and so on, but I would have no idea how to reach them."
"Where has she been lately? Geographically, that is."
"Lately? Up until May she was living in Timber Bay over on the west coast. Then we came around to Lauderdale aboard my houseboat. We took our time. Got here in early August. She dived aboard and then moved to one of the model houses at Bonnie Brae to be closer to her work. A temporary arrangement."
"Did she go out of the country at any time since last May?"
"No."
"Has she been in swamp country?"
"No. Why?"
'Jo you know if any of the people she has been associated with have been taken seriously ill, quite suddenly?"
"I don't know if this is what you mean, but one of the owners of Bonnie Brae fell old his bicycle this morning and "
"I know about that. I mean an illness like hers, characterized by extremely high temperatures, spo- radic delirium, cardiac arrhythmia, and fading blood pressure."
'I can't think of anyone we know who's been sick lately. What's wrong with her?"
"I've ordered every lab test I can think of. I don't approve of the shotgun approach to antibiotics, but I'm giving her a wide range of those. If we can't knock that fever down any other way, I'm going to try packing her in ice." He sighed heavily. "The big problem with treating something when you don't l~now what it is, you can male diagnosis all that more difficult."
"Can I see her?"
He thought it over, then nodded. 'They'll be busy in there. You can see her five minutes out of every hour. I'll approve that It won't be pleasant for you, and I doubt if she'll know you're there."
A nurse came out and motioned to him, and he got up and plodded in, through the double doors. Man at work. A very tired man. But he was an empathetic man because, about ten minutes later, he beckoned to me and took me to her bedside. The rapid shallow breathing had eased. There was an LV. rigged, dripping into the vein in her arm. Her cheeks seemed hollower than they had looked an hour before, in her room, her eyes more sunken.
He said in a low voice, '~e knocked the fever down almost one degree. First sign of progress."
We walked out together and he said, "I'm making a full report of all our findings to Disease Control in Atlanta. Do you know anything about the red welt on the back of her neck?"
The Green Ripper
"She told me she was bitten by a bug this morning. She said it stung her."
"Symptoms bear no relation to anaphylactic shock. We've taken some tissue from the area It's being packed in dry ice and flown to Atlanta along with blood samples and so forth. Got more sophisticated analysis systems available up there. Paper chromatography. Thin-layer chromatology techniques."
The hours blurred. I went in as often as I could. Night and day inside hospitals are too much alike. Saturday night. Sunday. Sunday night. She kept changing, little by little, going further away from me. They did a tracheotomy, and from then on a machine was doing her breathing for her, pumping her chest up and down. When I bent close to her to touch my lips to her dank forehead, I could detect the faint sour smell of mortal illness. At one point, early in the vigil, I went out to the car and made the mistake of trying to eat one of the clammy hamburgers and was siclc on the asphalt.
Meyer came out, bringing a change of clothes and my toilet kit. A nurse found me a towel and took me to a place where I could shower and scrape the pale stubble off my tired brown jaws.
Somebody forgot to stop me and tell me. I went in a little after eleven on Monday night, and she was gone. The bed was empty. The equipment had been moved away.
"Where is she?" I roared, and they came running toward me, hushing me, ushering me toward the door.
A big black nurse, big as a tight end, had been answering questions for me during other visits during that shift. She took hold of my shoulders and gave me a shake. "Easy now! Easy now!" she said in a husky whisper. "It's better we lost her."
"Better than what?"
"Hush now. You hush down. A temperature like that, for so long, it cooked her brain. She would have been a vegetable. Ternble thing, a strong young woman like that." She had led me out into the corridor. "Who you got to come get you?"
"I'll manage." I tried to smile. The tears were mnumg down my face. No sobs. No shudders. Just eyes naming. "Where is she now?"
'They're doing an autopsy."
"Who said they could!"
"It's a law, Mr. McGee. When the cause of death is unknown, they have to. There's no way anybody can stop them, and that's a good law. Whatever is killing people, we have to find it out."
"What finally happened? There was that machine..."
She shrugged. "Total kidney failure, and then the heart gave out right about the same time." She shook her head. Her eyes were shining with unshed tears. "I don't know. We get so many old ones here.
The Green Ripper
Not young strong women like her. Whatever it was, it came and wore her right down to nothing. It took the life right out of her. It ate her up, like it was some hungry thing." She caught herself. "sorry. talk too much. Listen, if you're the only one she had, what you've got to do now, you've got to make the arrangements. She's got to have a burial"
I wallced on out of their hospital, snuffling from time to time, marveling that I could walk with so little thought and effort. Long strides, heels thudding against the tile door, hand lifting without conscious command to flatten against the push plate on the big glass door, push and let me out into the chill night, spangled with stars that were faint above the security lights of the parking area. I walked to the tall dark shape of Miss Agnes, my ancient Rolls, and leaned against one of her high front fenders, my arms folded, ankles crossed, eyes running again.
Cessation.. Ending. A stopping of her. I heard the night sounds of country and city. Yawk of a night bird nearby. Faraway eerie pulsing of siren. Whim poring drone of light traffic on University Drive, lights in moving patterns. Grinding whine of trucks moving fast, a mile or so away. Random night wind clattering palm fronds. This was the world, bustling its way on through its allotted four billion more years of ffme, carrying its four ~billicn souls gracelessly onward. A lot of them had stopped tonight, some in blood and terror. I tried to comprehend the enormity the obscenity of the fact that Gretel Howard had been one of them, just as dead as the teenagers who impacted a tree at a hundred and ten miles an hour near Tulsa, the llying dentist who didn't see the power lines, the Muslim children dead by fire in Bangladesh, the three hundred elderly in Florida who would not make it through the night in their nursing-home beds.
