Healing Wolves
Part Eleven - The Night
By Scott J. Welles
scottjwelles@yahoo.com

ER and all related characters are the property of Warner Bros., Amblin Entertainment, and ConstantC productions, used here without permission. This story has been written entirely for entertainment value. No copyright infringement is intended, and no form of profit is being made on this work. Any errors in continuity, characterization, or common sense may be blamed entirely on me. Sorry. If this hasn't given you eyestrain already, read on.



I shoved Gary into the office, and the first thing that I saw was a body, covered from head to toe by a bloodstained tarpaulin. It was lying on what was either a long desk or a small worktable. There was a stethoscope and a hypodermic and some used bandages and vials and other medical supplies on the table with the body. I saw a few empty bottles of what looked like scotch or brandy on a nearby bench. The light came from a portable work bulb, plugged into a wall socket and hung from an overhead cabinet.

The body on the table was too large to be Kerry Weaver.

I pushed Gary down on the floor, which was covered by a ratty, moth-eaten carpet, and told him that I'd shoot him if he moved. Stepping over him, I looked behind the worktable. Then, I said, "Jesus Christ, you scared the hell out of me."

Kerry Weaver was sitting on the floor with her back against the table. Her knees were drawn up to her chin, and she had her arms wrapped around herself. She wore a pair of castoff mechanic's coveralls over an ill-fitting sweatshirt. Her hair was matted and looked like it hadn't seen a shower in days. Her face was smudged and streaked by blood, sweat, and tears. Literally. There were dried bloodstains all over her clothes and hands. She looked a million miles away from the woman I had had lunch with at Ed Debevic's in Los Angeles. She looked up at me, her eyes empty and hollow. "She's dead," she repeated.

I said, "It's Daniel Fox. From Los Angeles."

"I know who you are," she said, without inflection.

"Are you hurt?"

She shook her head, like it didn't matter.

I held my left hand out, to help Kerry to her feet. "Come on," I said, "We have to get out of here."

Kerry took my hand, but leaned her forehead against it. "I couldn't save her, Daniel," she said, "Oh, God, I tried everything I could, but I just couldn't..."

I lifted the corner of the tarpaulin with the revolver's barrel, and looked at the body underneath. Glorianna Rossili. Gloria Russell. Glory. Deceased, by any name. Yup, I had guessed right. I let the tarp drop over her face again, and said, "They approached you as you were leaving the ER, didn't they?"

She nodded, eyes shut, still holding my hand against her face. "I knew immediately who they were. It was on the news. I knew I shouldn't have gotten in, but it was Glory. She was..."

"Yeah, I know."

Gary, still face-down on the floor, said, "We were just gonna drop her off, I swear, but then Lonnie shut the door of the van and just drove. I didn't know he was gonna do that."

"He threw my crutch and my purse out the window," Kerry said, "then he brought us here. I've been trying to keep her alive ever since, but I didn't have anything to work with." She looked at Gary. "I told you she needed a hospital. I begged you to let me take her. Damn you, why didn't you listen?"

I thought that Gary was asking himself the same question. I said, "You told Lonnie how to get into your apartment, right?"

"And where to find the medical kit, and the painkillers from my medicine cabinet." I'd missed that. Kerry looked at me again. "He didn't hurt Carter, did he?"

"Carter's fine," I told her. Damn lucky he kept the same work hours, but fine.

"Thank God. I was so afraid he'd be home, but I didn't think of it until it was too late."

"When the stuff from your place wasn't enough, you told Lonnie how to get supplies from the hospital, right?"

She nodded again. "But it was too late. Glory bled to death a few hours ago. There was nothing I could do. Not here, like this." Her voice was small and childlike.

I knelt beside her. "Did Lonnie hurt you at all?"

"No. I think he wanted to... Gary wouldn't let him. When Lonnie came back, they were arguing about what to do with me, now that Glory..."

I was thinking that Gary wouldn't have been able to keep Lonnie in check much longer. Particularly not if Lonnie had too much of Kerry's liquor to drink. If I had gotten here any later, she might have been dead as well. "Where's Lonnie off to?" I said.

Gary said, "He's out, practicing night maneuvers. That's what he calls it when he's sulking. He still thinks he's a soldier. Lonnie's crazy."

"Just figured that out, did you, Garr?"

He didn't reply.

I said, "Kerry, we've got to get out of here, before he comes back. Jeannie Boulet is outside with a car."

She looked at me, and for the first time I saw a spark of life in her eyes. "Jeannie's here?"

"Yeah. Can you walk unaided?"

"I think so."

She let me pull her to her feet, and when she was standing, I pulled Gary upright as well. I was thinking about Lonnie, out practicing 'night maneuvers,' fancying himself the lone warrior of the wasteland, and about Jeannie Boulet, sitting all alone in the car. I was starting to wish I'd told her to drive away without me and call the cops.

I told Gary that we were going outside, around the body shop, and back to the car. I figured I'd lock him in the trunk until the cops could take him. If I had to put a bullet hole in the trunk for air, so be it. Avis would give me flack about it, but that's their problem.

I pushed him ahead of us, and Kerry limped behind me, her right hand on my left shoulder for support. As we stepped out of the garage, into the night air, I told Gary to turn left. I paused as Kerry stepped out beside me, and out of the corner of my eye I saw something unusual on her face, high up by her right ear. My first thought, irrationally, was that it was some sort of luminous earring, reflecting the moonlight.

I said her name, and she turned her head to look at me, but the little red dot stayed in place, sliding forward along her cheekbone until it came to rest alongside the bridge of her nose, and my blood suddenly went cold, as I realized what you've probably already figured out, and I tackled Kerry, throwing us both the ground, and she thrashed and screamed at me to get the hell off her, and she was interrupted by the sharp CRACK-CRACK-CRACK of the rifle fire and the WHACK-WHACK-WHACK of the bullets impacting the garage wall exactly where her head had been a split second earlier and she instantly went silent.

Lonnie Bledsoe's 'night maneuvers' hadn't taken him very far away.

I scrambled back through the doorway, grabbed a handful of Kerry's coveralls, and hauled her inside like a sack of meal. Gary was on his own.

Maybe Lonnie had spotted us tailing him on the road after all. Maybe he had come back from his maneuvers early and saw us coming out. Maybe he was just fed up with his pathetic brother and his brother's bimbo girlfriend and their nagging hostage, and he had just decided to off the lot of them and go it alone. I wouldn't put anything past Lonnie at this point.

When we were safely inside the garage, out of the line of fire, I told Kerry Weaver to hunker down and stay put while I searched frantically for another way out of the garage. The only ones I had seen were the big roll-up doors for cars, on the same side of the building as the doorway. Even if they could be opened, they'd just put us right back in Lonnie's laser-guided rifle sights. Butch and Sundance in the '90's.

I found a metal fire door half-hidden behind some rusting shelves at the back of the garage. Shoving the shelves out of the way, I tried the door. It wouldn't budge. Locked.   Telling Kerry to cover her ears, I leveled the Smith & Wesson and fired two shots into the lock, then kicked at it. Nothing. Still immovable and unyielding. Damn. Arnold Schwarzenegger could pound on it once, and it'd fall right off its hinges.

"Daniel," Kerry called to me, "there's a window in the office!"

Half-carrying her back into the office, I saw the window she was referring to. It was a small transom window, for ventilation, about six feet off the floor. Maybe 18" by 30". It was covered with enough dust and grime to make it virtually opaque, and I hadn't noticed it earlier in the poor light. When the crank handle broke off in my hand, I said to hell with it and smashed out the glass with a short section of two-by-four that was lying in the corner. I knocked out the largest shards, then I took off my jacket, draped it over the windowsill, boosted myself up, and squeezed out through the window.

Landing on the pavement outside, I was about to reach back and pull Kerry Weaver through, when Gary Bledsoe came around the corner of the garage, swinging a foot-long section of iron pipe at me. The blow landed on my right forearm, sending a bolt of fire along the bone, and making me drop the gun. He swung at me again, and I caught the pipe with my left hand and drove a knee into Gary's gut to take his air out, then hit him hard in the neck. He made a sharp hacking noise, but didn't go down. He charged me like a football linebacker, slamming me bodily against the garage wall. I twisted to ram an elbow into his ear, but there was another CRACK-CRACK-CRACK and I felt something wet and warm spatter against my ribs. Gary convulsed once, sharply, as the bullet went through his side, and then fell.

I joined him on the ground, scrambling for cover. Either I had misjudged Lonnie's firing position badly, or he had moved very quickly to a new one while I was finding a way out of the garage. Of course, he was familiar with this area. He'd have known where I'd be coming out. I should have thought of that.

I rolled behind a metal trash barrel, the only cover I could reach. Another CRACK-CRACK-CRACK, and the bullets passed completely through the barrel with a SPANG-SPANG-SPANG, leaving little rosettes of jagged metal just inches above my head. I felt the rain beginning again, falling in a gentle mist.

A flat voice said, "You lose, son." If the thousand-yard stare had a matching voice, this was it.

Looking up, I saw a dark silhouette standing on the top of a corrugated metal machine shack, maybe twenty feet away. Lean and mean, holding a rifle. Lonnie Bledsoe. He was only dimly visible in the dark and the mist, but the beam from his rifle's laser sight stood out in sharp relief, illuminating the moisture in the air. The solid red line seemed to form a bridge between us, one end anchored squarely on my chest. The next bullet had my name on it, and I had nowhere else to go. Looks like I had used up my lifetime supply of luck after all. I couldn't even think of anything cool to say. I closed my eyes and waited for it.

I heard a sustained volley of loud gunshots, maybe a dozen of them, rapid fire, then silence. Then a choking noise, followed almost immediately by the unmistakable wet-sack-on-cement sound of a body falling. I found it strange that I was still breathing.

Opening my eyes, I saw that Lonnie had disappeared.

Hearing a ragged breathing - other than my own - I looked around, and spotted Kerry Weaver, her forearms braced on the transom window sill, aiming the Sig Sauer automatic I had taken from Gary Bledsoe earlier. I had forgotten about it. Damn careless of me. She must have been standing on a chair or something to reach the window.

Her eyes were shining and her teeth were bared, and with her face grimy and streaked, she looked dark and feral, almost like Mel Gibson during the war scene in "Braveheart." She held the gun in an almost perfect combat grip, though she was starting to tremble violently. That's okay, so was I.

I picked up my .38 and moved over to the machine shack, finding Lonnie Bledsoe crumpled in a lifeless heap at the base of the shack. His rifle lay nearby. One bullet had caught Lonnie in the throat, and his head was twisted at an angle that can't be faked. He was as dead as you get. Only a few of Kerry's shots had hit him, and in an irregular pattern. On a pistol range, it would have been called lousy shooting. Under these circumstances, I considered it absolutely incredible.

There was a soft thump, then I heard Kerry's voice. "Daniel, I need your help!" Turning, I saw that she had already squirmed out through the transom window and dropped to the pavement, landing awkwardly on her good leg. She knelt beside Gary Bledsoe and pressed her hands, hard, against the entry and exit wounds in his side. He stifled a scream as she did so. You could see Kerry Weaver devoting her entire being to saving the life of a man she had every reason to loathe and despise. If you had never seen her before that moment, you'd know instantly that she was an ER doc, and a damned good one.

I pulled my jacket off the window sill, shook out the glass fragments, then bundled it as best I could and held it against Gary's wounds while Kerry tied the sleeves around his rib cage. "Clean entry and exit, fractured rib, no organ damage," she recited, automatically.

I said, "Where the hell did you learn to shoot like that?"

She shook her head. "Africa," she said, distractedly, "I'd rather not talk about it."

"No, I mean, think you could teach me sometime?"

She was too wiped out to smile, but she leaned against me in silent appreciation. Then, satisfied with our first aid attempts, said, "That'll have to do until he gets to the ER."

Gary grimaced, but looked at her and said, "Kerry, thank you..."

"You shut your mouth!" she growled at him, getting right in his face, "I'm helping you because I'm a doctor, and because my best friend in the world loved you, for reasons I can't fathom, but don't you dare thank me for it!"

"No, I meant..." he looked at the garage wall. For trying to help Glory, he was saying.

She looked at the wall, taking his meaning, then looked away. "Just shut up," she said.

I held the pressure on the makeshift bandage while she stood up, tiredly. She didn't lean against the wall. Determined to stand on her own, crutch or no crutch. She reminded me of some photographs I had seen of the Holocaust Survivors. Imprisoned, starved, dehumanized, but clinging resolutely to some unshakable reserves of spirit. Astonishing.

There was a gasp, a sharp intake of breath, and we turned to see Jeannie Boulet standing nearby, both hands pressed against her mouth, staring wide-eyed at Kerry Weaver. You see? Nobody ever Waits Here. Jeannie reached out to touch her, as if she were a mirage that might vanish in the blink of an eye. "Sweet Lord, Kerry, are you all right?"

Kerry dropped her eyes, suddenly embarrassed to be seen this way. "Yes, Jeannie, I'm fine," she said, raising a bloody palm in a little leave-me-alone gesture. Jeannie ignored it, taking her by the shoulders and pulling her into a tight embrace. Kerry shifted, awkwardly, saying, "No, Jeannie, I said I'm all right. Really, I'm..."

Then she crumbled, throwing her arms around Jeannie and sagging against her. Jeannie staggered a little, but held her upright. Kerry's hands left streaks of Gary Bledsoe's blood on the back of Jeannie's coat. I think one of them was crying. Maybe both. If I wasn't such a tough guy, I'd be crying, too.

"How about that, Garr?" I said to Gary, "The Fox has done it again."

He wasn't paying attention. Too busy hurting. I looked back at Kerry and Jeannie, clinging to each other for dear life. Every so often, I think that all the unbelievable amount of crap we have to put up with in this world is very nearly worth it, just for moments like this.