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“A young lady who...” the officer trails off with a shake of the head. “We don’t normally get calls in until it’s too late to help, I’m sure you know that. And I’m sure you know what that means for her. She’s all over the report.”
She’s on the radar.The Portuguese mobs hates people who intervene.Too bad for her.“From what you tell me, I guess that’s dangerous.”
Officer Beyer bites down on her lip and nods her head. “You owe her your life.”
“Can I thank her?”Maybe she saw something, like who took my packages.
“Probably.” The officer looks at her watch. “She came in here for three days straight to check on you. By the way she cried, I’d think she was your girlfriend.”
“My girlfriend?”No I didn’t need one of those.
“But she thinks you’re dead.”
“What?” I curl my lip at the woman. “You told people I died?” I quickly reign myself in before she sees through my fake amnesia, the only person on my mind is my mother. She must be devastated.
“Relax, it’s just a minor mix up on my part since you didn’t have identification.” She all but winks at me. “Believe it or not, Mr. Morano, my goal is to keep you alive so we can work together. When you got placed into a coma, you flat lined beforehand. The doctor who was with you is my girlfriend, so I asked a favor.”
“What kind of favor?”
“One that put you in here under the name of Lloyd Caker, and Styx in the morgue.”
Lloyd.I grimace at the name. No one better fucking call me that. “When can I get out of here?”
Beyer sighs and crosses her arms over her chest. “You’ll have to discuss that with your doctor, Lloyd.”
Her girlfriend, right.I narrow my eyes at her and try to get up, but the pain shoots up to my neck. “Is she going to tell me what’s wrong with my head too?”
“What do you mean?”
“I can’t remember anything.”
“Are you being serious?” The officer looks back toward the nurses and lifts a hand up in the air. “Do you know where you are? How old you are? Who your mother is?”
I take a while, pretending to search my brain for answers. “I don’t know.” I hold my palms up and fist them. “I should know but I can’t remember anything. And now, I’m freaking out because you’re saying I’m in danger.”
“Damn it.” She rushes for the door before a slew of nurses rush in. If she believes me or not, I don’t know.
Yellow
STYX
The room I’m in has six people and two empty beds, and I swear to God the elderly man beside me just shat in his bed. The waft of stank emerging from my right is enough to make me want to puke.
In unison, our incessant calls, not in any cohesive chant, brings in one of the orderlies. The light purple scrubs differentiate him from the nurses who wear only white with a purple trim, as does the scowl on his grumpy face.
Before the orderly can edge in a word, one of the patients toward the front of the large room starts yelling in Portuguese, talking about how the poor man had been asking for help to go to the bathroom—for hours. The emphasis is on the plural form of the word. Honestly, if they had taken another minute, I would have helped the man myself.
Catching these workers between shifts is the worst time, not as worse as when they go on strike, but awful enough to make a human feel like an animal who needs to be taken out for a walk.
It’s shitty, literally. And I fear for my mother if she ever ends up alone in a place like this.
The purple dude shuffles across the room toward my neighbor and discreetly lifts the sheet. Half of me expects the employee to berate the older man or blame it on a mental illness, but to my surprise, the orderly bends down and apologizes for his coworkers mishap, guaranteeing he’d make sure it never happened again.
All it takes is a promise, a pair of gloves, and a few wipes to put a smile on the face of a man nearly in tears. The man is transferred to wheelchair and escorted toward the bathroom where a nurse takes over. The gentle orderly rolls out the hospital bed, taking the smell along with him.
It’s been two days since I’ve been moved from the coma unit on the first floor. Forty-eight hours since I invented my amnesia as a form of evading police questioning. Almost three thousand minutes since the police woman decided the best way to protect me from the person who shot me was to pull some strings and get me locked in the Psych Ward on a two-day hold with roommates.
Nice men, but none of them will protect me if it comes to it.
