The Victims Game
Part Thirteen - the Bird
By Scott J. Welles
scottjwelles@yahoo.com

DISCLAIMERS:  Hi. We've got some legal stuff to wade through before we can jump into things. Mostly the usual prerequisite jazz: ER and all related characters are the property of Warner Bros., ConstantC Productions, and Amblin Entertainment Television, a bunch of really swell, understanding guys who won't sue me if I mention that the aforementioned characters and institutions are being used without their permission, but only for entertainment purposes, and that no form of profit is being made on this work. For the benefit of the content-conscious amongst you, I'll assure you that there's nothing here that you couldn't see on the show, anyway. Except maybe some language, I'm not sure yet. Depends what kind of day I'm having as I write. Beyond that, I make no promises about what's in store. Could be silly, could be scary, could be sexy, could be sad. I'm not telling. Come on, live dangerously...

The coming of daylight also seemed to bring a kind of awareness to us, signaling the return of equilibrium in our relationship. The strange sort of self-abandon we had experienced last night, that crazy, delirious feeling of stepping outside ourselves, simultaneously unsettling and intoxicating, was on its way out again, and wouldn't be back.

We were both silently relieved and reassured by the return of normalcy, yet also undeniably a little sad. If a wild, uncontrollable bird - say, an eagle - flies into your home and fixes you with its gaze, you won't know what it will do, and you won't feel safe until it flies out again. But once it does, you'll become aware of how quiet and empty your home is without it, and you'll fondly remember the time when it was there.

Upon waking, we lay there for a while, our eyes silently exchanging these thoughts, and then she kissed me once and got out of bed. I watched her dress in last night's clothes, reassembling her familiar persona, reasserting control. She told me that she was going to take a shower and then go get some breakfast, and I inferred that she meant she wanted to do these things alone. I offered her some cash from my wallet for breakfast, and she took it and left.

And that was that.

After a little while I got up, did half an hour of tai chi practice - I hadn't done any in a while, and it seemed like a good idea to get back in the habit - and then showered myself. I stood under the spray for a long time, trying to wash away my confusion, my failures, my guilt. But there's only so much you can do with motel plumbing.

An hour later, I was walking around, looking at some of the small shops near the motel. One of them, a local crafts and souvenirs shop, featured a beautiful display of hand-carved figurines. Each was small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, and the motif was wild creatures in various combinations. Bears with owls, raccoons with hawks, cats with ravens... each had a land creature paired with a bird, now that I thought about it. The workmanship on the figurines was remarkable, each capturing the essence of its subject, and there was a strange, unexpected relationship in each pair. Two creatures that wouldn't normally appear together, in a peculiar harmony.

I was considering buying one to put in my office. Maybe the turtle with the pelican. At least, I was considering it until I saw the price tags...

Kerry Weaver had entered the shop while I was thinking about it, and I noticed her as she appeared at my side. "Morning, Daniel," she said, as if we hadn't spent the night together. Then again, that was how we'd agreed to play it.

"Hey," I greeted her. "How was breakfast?"

"Wonderful," she said, "The place around the corner has pumpkin pancakes with real syrup, home fries, and apple spice sausages. It was just what I needed after a day like yesterday."

"Mmm, sounds good. Maybe I should eat something."

"I thought the same thing," Kerry added, handing me a small paper sack. "Here."

"What is it?" I asked, unenthusiastically.

"Decaf with skim milk and a fat-free muffin. You've put on weight, remember?"

I scowled at her. "You are a mean, mean lady, you know that?"

She smiled, smugly.

"Here, I bought you a tee shirt," I added, handing her a sack of my own. "I figured you'd appreciate a change of clothes."

She took it out and looked at it. I'M WITH STUPID, the front declared. "Oh, I appreciate this, all right," she declared.

We went back to the motel, where she changed into the shirt while I dropped off the room keys at the front desk. We met back in the parking lot, just as Kerry's Plymouth pulled up, driven by John Carter. "Now how's that for timing?" I said to him.

"It's a gift," he said, then greeted Kerry. They exchanged little more than a smile and nod, but there was an unspoken moment of glad-to-see-you warmth between them. I wondered, again, how such an oddly matched pair of personalities could be so comfortable with each other. Yeah, this from the Tinsel Town comic-book addict who hangs out with Richard Wintergreen, the original British Bulldog. Family is where you find it.

I climbed into the back seat, letting Kerry ride shotgun. She asked Carter to stop by the same crafts shop before we hit the road, and we waited while she went inside, carrying the purse that had been sitting in her car for a couple of days.

Carter turned in his seat to look at me. "Danny, I tried to get hold of Walter and my grandmother," he said, "but no luck. It's like they've vanished off the face of the earth."

"I'm not surprised about Montgomery," I said, "but is that usual, for her to disappear like that?"

"Gamma travels a lot, both for business and personal reasons, but we can usually get in touch with her if we need to. It's almost like she's avoiding my calls for some reason." You could tell Carter was troubled by it.

I expected that Walter Montgomery would have disappeared, as soon as he and the others got hold of the clinic's twenty million. But why was Millicent Carter - the real one - suddenly incommunicado? Did it have any bearing on the whole situation? I didn't know; I was so burned out on the whole shadow dance that I couldn't think about it anymore...

Kerry came back, saying, "Sorry, I just wanted to take another look at those animal figurines," and we hit the highway. I let my attention drift around the landscape.

"I'm really glad to see you two are all right," Carter was saying, "Kerry, when you didn't come home last night, I started to worry..."

"Carter, you remember I told you, I am not your mother?" she informed him snidely, "Well, it works both ways. You're not mine, either."

"I know, but I've never known you to stay out all night..."

"Hey, don't go commenting on a lady's social life, or even her lack of one!"

"All right! I was just worried, is all. You know, what with you losing your job and all, I thought maybe..." He trailed off, plaintively.

"I'm sorry, John, I'm just not happy about any of it, either."

"Plus, and no offense, Danny, but this is the second time you two have nearly been killed together. You've either got to stop seeing each other, or start being more careful."

"Don't worry, Carter, we were pretty careful last night," I said, allowing a little innuendo to creep into my voice.

"Daniel," Kerry muttered, warningly, but the double meaning went right by Carter.

"I'm serious. I'm beginning to think you guys need a bodyguard or something," he went on. "You've gotta start protecting yourselves better."

I couldn't resist. "Oh, we had plenty of protection last night."

"DANIEL...!!"

"I mean, the Sheriff's Department was keeping an eye on us all night," I said. "I saw a car in the lot this morning, with one of the deputies in it. He was in plainclothes, but I recognized him anyway."

"Oh," she said, subdued.

"He was tailing us until he traded off with another car five minutes ago," I added, glancing back at the blue pickup two cars back in the next lane. Yup, still there.

"I thought you meant...never mind."

"Am I missing something?" Carter asked.

"No, she's just a little jumpy, after everything that's happened," I assured him.

Carter smiled and said, "Yeah, I can't blame you." Then he glanced at her, surprised. "Kerry? Are you blushing?"

"No," she said in a yes-but-if-you-know-what's-good-for-you-you'll-forget-you-saw-it voice.

"Didn't think so," he said in a message-received-loud-and-clear voice.

I said nothing, in a too-zonked-to-make-further-conversation voice.

A gray Ford replaced the pickup as we neared the city. I figured that Robinson had instructed his people to watch us until we got into Chicago PD's jurisdiction. That was probably CPD in the Ford.

Everyone was hungry by the time we reached Chicago, but no one felt up to cooking again, so we got lazy and hit a McDonald's drive-thru. Kerry didn't say anything when I got the extra-size McNuggets. Sometimes a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do.

I didn't see anyone tailing us by the time we reached Kerry's place, which might have meant that they had let us go, or simply that they were better at surveillance than I was at spotting them. Not that it mattered at this point. I had already decided to leave the whole affair alone before I got us all killed somehow.

Once inside her home, Kerry immediately disappeared into the bathroom and took an extra long bath, while Carter and I had a couple of beers and I told him everything that had happened since I came to town. I figured he deserved the full story, barring only what Kerry and I had agreed not to talk about.

I told him about the woman who had impersonated his grandmother, with Walter Montgomery's help. I told him about the clinic patients I had tracked down and interviewed, and how their signatures had, I guessed, been transposed onto the phony statement that the Medicinal Standards and Practices guys had brought to County. I told him about my talk with Steve Wasserstein, and how he had been murdered shortly afterwards, and how Kerry and I had been tasered with a stun gun by Buzz Cut and Broken Nose. I told him about my one-sided conversation with the mysterious 'Joan' and how we had barely escaped from the car with our lives before being picked up by the cops.

Carter listened attentively, interrupting only for the occasional question to clarify. He was particularly intrigued by 'Joan' and her 'Millicent Carter' act. Apparently, she wasn't anything like the real Millicent. When he asked me what I was going to do next, I told him that there was nothing for me to do but go back home.

"People like Joan contact you if they want to, otherwise they're nothing but a whisper in the wind," I said. I was thinking of a man Richard Wintergreen once introduced me to, in passing. He was a truly unremarkable little man who seemed to be almost entirely lacking in personality. I only shared a few minutes bland conversation with him, and afterward I could barely remember his name. Richard later told me that the man worked for the National Security Agency, and was the most fearsomely intelligent individual that Richard had ever met. If Joan was anything like that, I'd be lucky if I never saw her again.

"So, effectively, she might as well have beamed up to the Starship Enterprise, for all the chance you have of finding her, right?" Carter was saying.

"Voyager, more likely, but yeah."

"What do you mean?"

"Huh? Oh, nothing. Just that she reminded me a little of the lead actress on that show." The thought had come to me somewhere on the drive back to Chicago.

Carter stared at me.

"What?" Did I have something hanging out of my nose?

He turned away and sifted through some magazines until he found one. Flipping through it, he held up an article on the actress Kate Mulgrew, profiling her new made-for-cable film about the Suffrage Movement. "This is what she looked like?"

"Yeah, a little. Not as slim, and with a different hairstyle, but..."

"I was reading this article, the other day, and the picture reminded me of - hey, Kerry!" Carter got up and met her as she was coming out of the bathroom, bundled in an oversized robe, her hair still damp and her glasses slightly fogged. He held up the magazine for her inspection. "Who does this picture remind you of?"

She did a double take at him, caught off-guard. "Uhh, Katherine Hepburn? I don't know..."

"No, I mean, who does it look like that you and I used...to...know?" He put extra emphasis on the last few words.

"Why?"

I said, "The mystery woman looks kind of like her. You know, 'Joan', I told you about her?"

Kerry looked at the Mulgrew picture again, a little more focused. Then, wide-eyed, she looked sharply at Carter, who gave her a see-what-I-mean? look.

"No..." she said to him, like 'say-it-ain't-so-Joe'.

"Yeah," he nodded, strangely amused.

"What?" I said, not following.

She turned away, leaning heavily on her crutch, her head in her free hand. "Oh no, oh God, I don't be-LIEVE it!!" she exclaimed.

"You think it's her?"

"It could be," she groaned.

"What is it?" I said.

"She would have the audacity to pull something like this," Kerry said.

"Yeah, and the intelligence to get away with it."

I waved my arms. "Hello?! Third person in the room, wondering what he's missing...?"

Kerry looked at me. "Daniel, if she's who we think she is, I'm really going to be furious. This is a woman for whom the phrase 'good news, bad news' was coined."

"Uh-huh...?" I prompted.

"The good news is that she turned out to be - and it utterly galls me to admit this - the best Emergency Chief I've ever worked with. A terrific leader, an exceptional administrator, and an eminently likable person." She shook her head. "The bad news? She's not even a doctor! Turns out she's a pathological liar, a delusional psychotic, a..." She waved her hands, looking for words.

"Total goonball nutcake?"

"Thank you, Carter."

"Vegetarian Hannibal Lecter?"

"Thank you again, Carter."

"Founding member of the wackaterium academy?"

"Shut up, Carter!" She stormed into the kitchen.

He cooled it, but whispered to me, "Think 'Single White Female' in a stethoscope..."

We heard Kerry banging around in the cupboards, getting out a coffee mug. Her voice carried back to us, clearly. "I don't know what was worse, that she fooled the entire hospital administration so completely, or that the only one who suspected her was..." She let out a strangled grunt. "I can't even say it!"

"Jerry Markov-"

"CARTER! I'm warning you!"

I said, "Who the hell are we talking about, here?"

"Amanda Lee," Kerry said grumpily, coming out of the kitchen with a steaming mug of tea. "The much-lamented, UTTERLY demented, Amanda 'don't-call-me-'Sybil'-or-I'll-boil-your-rabbit' Lee."

"Don't hold back, Kerry, tell us what you really think of her," I quipped. Then, my memory caught up with me, and I flashed on my lunch with Randi Fronczak, when she told me about... "Wait, wasn't she one of the flakes the hospital hired to run the Emergency department?"

"Flake number two, to be exact," she snarled, sinking into the sofa. "The flake it took a nationwide search to dredge up, in fact. Oh yeah, why appoint someone who's proved herself organized and professional, when you can hire Keyser Soze's sister...?"

Carter said, "Kerry, don't feel bad, you know you would've gotten the job, if they weren't mad about the Synergix thing..." He seemed to be getting a kick out of the latest turn of events.

"Yes, and thank you for reminding me that THAT was my own doing..." she snapped.

"Yo, whoa!" I said, holding up my hands in the traditional Time Out signal. They looked at me, and I pointed at each one in turn. "Bitter Girl, silencio, por favor! Laughing Boy, speak! Familiarize me with this Lee person, si vous plait?"

Carter took the floor, and told me what he knew about Amanda Lee, who had been hired as County's Chief of Emergency Services after a guy named Dan Litvak blew them off. He told me how she had impressed everyone - even, reluctantly, Kerry herself - with her charisma and organizational abilities, even beginning a tentative courtship with Mark Greene (more like stalking him, actually). He told me how she had tripped herself up with one too many outrageous lies, and how she had vanished mysteriously when her cover was blown and she was revealed to be a complete fraud with a history of such scams under a variety of names.

I listened carefully, my incredulity growing by the second. When he had finished, I said, "My God. I know professional soap writers who couldn't make this stuff up if they tried."

Kerry was shaking her head, saying, "I don't believe it, we've been conned. Again," she added, pointedly. "She pulled the wool over our eyes again, and walked away with twenty million dollars."

"Wait, Danny, are you sure that was really Amanda Lee you saw?" Carter asked me.

"Well, I never met Amanda Lee, so obviously I can't say for certain, but it sounds like the sort of thing she might pull," I said, slowly, "And if it was her, and the whole government conspiracy story was just another scam... ohh, man, you know what this means?"

"What?" they asked, together.

I felt something strange happening on my face, something that hadn't happened in a while, and I realized I was smiling. Not just any old smile, but the full-out, no-holds-barred, Dennis-Quaid-with-the-devil-in-his-eye smile. "It means," I said, "that I can take the bitch down."



"I don't know how to thank you guys!"
--- Fozzie Bear, 'The Muppet Movie'
"I don't know WHY to thank you guys..."
--- Kermit the Frog, Ibid