Ashley Bell. Dean Koontz
there beside her, his head in her lap, while she stroked his face, scratched his chest, and rubbed his tummy. The porch roof blocked her view of the apartment windows, but she could just still see the lower part of the balcony railing and the dog with his snout between two balusters. He was watching her, all right.
Bibi brought one of the carob treats to her nose, smelled it, and decided that it would not be offensive to the human tongue. She bit the cookie in half and chewed. It didn’t taste bad, but it didn’t taste fabulous, either. Carob was supposed to have a flavor much like that of chocolate, which dogs couldn’t eat, but it would never put Hershey out of business.
From his perch on the apartment balcony, Olaf had seen half of his treat brazenly consumed. His chin no longer rested on the bottom rail of the balustrade. His snout poked between two balusters a foot below the top rail, which meant that he’d gotten to his feet.
Bibi waved the remaining half of the cookie back and forth in front of her nose, back and forth, raising her voice to express her unqualified approval of that delicacy. “Mmmmm, mmmmm, mmmmm.”
Olaf bolted down the stairs from the balcony, across the brick courtyard, and onto the porch. He bounded onto the sofa, landing with such force that the wicker crackled and creaked in protest.
“Good boy,” said Bibi.
With his soft mouth, he took the half cookie from between her thumb and forefinger. She fed him the second cookie whole, and while he chewed it with noisy pleasure, she said, “Don’t go up there again. Stay away from the apartment. It’s a bad place. It’s terrible. It’s evil.”
After he finished licking his chops, the dog regarded her with what she took to be solemn consideration, his pupils wide there in the shadows of the porch, his golden irises seeming to glow with an inner light.
NANCY TOLD HERSELF TO CHILL OUT, GEL, TO sideslip through the moment, ride out the chop, to just sit in one of the visitor chairs and wait for Bibi to be brought back from the CT scan. But even when she had been an adolescent surf mongrel learning the water, she had never been a Barbie with the placidity of a doll. When on a board, she had always wanted to shred the waves, tear them up, and when the waves were mushing and the land had more appeal than the ocean, she had always nonetheless pumped through the day with her usual energy.
And so when Murph turned the corner from the first ER hallway into the second, Nancy was pacing back and forth outside the cubicle from which Bibi had been wheeled away on a gurney. She didn’t see him immediately, but intuited his arrival by the way a couple of nurses did double takes and smiled invitingly and whispered to each other. Even at fifty, Murphy looked like Don Johnson in the actor’s Miami Vice days, and if he had wanted other women, they would have been hanging off him like remora, those fish that, with powerful suckers, attached themselves to sharks.
Murph still wore a black T-shirt, a Pendleton with the sleeves rolled up, and boardshorts, but in respect for the hospital, he had stepped out of sandals and into a pair of black Surf Siders with blue laces, worn without socks. Newport Beach was one of the few places in the country where a guy dressed like Murph would not seem out of place in a hospital or, for that matter, in a church.
He put his arms around Nancy, and she returned his hug, and for a moment neither of them spoke. Didn’t need to speak. Needed only to cling to each other.
When they pulled back from the embrace and were just holding hands, Murph said, “Where is she?”
“They took her for a CAT scan. I thought they would have brought her back by now. I don’t know why they haven’t. It shouldn’t take so long—should it?”
“Are you okay?”
“I feel like I’ve been hammered, fully prosecuted,” she said, both terms surfer lingo for wiping out and getting brutally thrashed by a killer wave.
“How’s Bibi doing?” he asked.
“You know her. She copes. Whatever’s happening to her, she’s already thinking what she’ll do once she’s gotten through it, if maybe it’s good material for a story.”
Rolling his mobile computer station before him, Dr. Barsamian, the chief ER physician during the current shift, approached them with the news that Bibi had been admitted to the hospital following her CT scan. “She’s in Room 456.”
The doctor’s eyes were as black as kalamata olives. If in fact he knew something horrific about Bibi’s condition, Nancy could read nothing in his gaze.
“The CT scan seems to have been inconclusive,” Barsamian said. “They’ll want to do more testing.”
In the elevator, on the way from the first floor to the fourth, Nancy suffered a disturbing moment of sensory confusion. Although the position-indicator light on the directory above the doors went from 1 to 2, then to 3, she could have sworn that the cab was not ascending, that it was descending into whatever might occupy the building’s two subterranean levels, that they were being cabled and counterweighted down into some enduring darkness from which there would be no return.
When the light moved to the 4 on the directory and the doors of the cab slid open, her anxiety did not abate. Room 456 was to the right. When she and Murph got there, the door stood open. The room contained two unoccupied beds, the sheets fresh and taut and tucked.
Bibi’s drawstring bag stood on the nightstand beside the bed that was nearer to the window. When Nancy peered into it, she saw a toothbrush, toothpaste, and other items, but no pajamas.
Each bed came with a narrow closet. One of them proved empty. In the other hung Bibi’s jeans and long-sleeved T-shirt. Her shoes stood side by side on the closet floor, her socks stuffed in them.
With the squeak of rubber-soled shoes and the scent of soap, a young blond woman in blue scrubs entered the room. The nurse looked too young to be credentialed, as if she might be just fifteen and playing hospital.
“They told us our daughter would be here,” Murph said.
“You must be Mr. and Mrs. Blair. They’ve taken Bibi for tests.”
“What tests?” Nancy asked.
“An MRI, blood work, the usual.”
“None of this is usual to us,” Nancy said, trying for a light tone of voice and failing.
“She’ll be all right. It’s nothing intrusive. She’s doing fine.”
The much-too-young nurse’s reassurances sounded as hollow as a politician’s promises.
“She’ll be a while. You might want to go down to the cafeteria for lunch. You’ll have the time.”
After the nurse left, Nancy and Murph stood for a moment in bewilderment, looking around the room as though they had just now been teleported into it by an act of sorcery.
“Cafeteria?” he asked.
Nancy shook her head. “I’m not hungry.”
“I was thinking coffee.”
“Hospitals ought to have bars.”
“You never drink before five-thirty.”
“I feel like starting.”
She turned toward the window and then, with a sudden thought, turned away from it. “We need to tell Paxton.”
Murph shook his head. “We can’t. Not now. Don’t you remember? His team is on a blackout mission. No way to reach them.”
“There’s got to be a way!” Nancy protested.
“If