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He shrugged. “I don’t know.” He looked at his left hand again. “Somehow, I don’t think I am.” He held it up. “Despite the evidence to the contrary.”
The doctor spent a few more minutes asking questions and checking his head wound. Then stepped back from the bed. “I don’t want you to panic just yet. With how hard you were hit, this could be a temporary situation. I’m going to confer with a colleague and take a closer look at your scans. I’ll be back in a while.”
The doctor left, and the nurse smiled again. She had a great smile, and it was the only thing keeping him sane at this point. “In the meantime, we need to call you something. Hey you doesn’t seem quite proper.”
“John Doe?”
“Oh, we can be more original than that.” She thought for a moment. “The John is fine. How about John Sherlock? Because your life is a mystery.”
“Wow.”
“You don’t like it?”
He sighed and held out his hand. “John Sherlock.”
She shook his hand. “Ember Madison.”
“Thank you, Ember.”
“For what?”
“For being here. I’m pretty sure I’d be in super panic mode right now if you weren’t.”
“Well, John. My shift is over, and I’ve got nowhere to go. So, I’m happy to stay here as long as you need me to.”
John looked at his left hand again and rubbed where the missing ring was. “I would know, right?”
“If you were married?”
“Yeah. I mean, it just seems like that’s something I’d feel. That there was someone out there wondering where the hell I was.”
She nodded. “Yes. I think you’d know.”
He dropped his hand to the bed. “Where’d they find me?”
“Behind a bar. I don’t know the name of it. But I could find out.”
John thought about that for a moment. “So someone beat me up behind a bar in Santa Fe.” He looked at her. “Was I drunk? My head hurts so much, I can’t tell if I’m hung over or not.”
“I saw your chart. No alcohol in your system. Or drugs.”
“How was I dressed?”
She reached into a drawer in the cabinet next to the bed and pulled out a plastic bag with his belongings in it. She held it up. “Jeans. A plaid shirt. T-shirt. That’s it.”
“No keys? A knife? Anything?”
She dug into the bottom of the bag and heldup a watch. “There was this. But nothing else. Whatever else you had on you, they took.”
“Well, shit. That’s not a lot to go on.” He took the watch from her and looked at it. “This is an expensive watch. Why would they take my ring and not this watch?”
“Maybe they didn’t take your ring.”
“Maybe.” He handed the watch back to her.
She put the bag away. “Oh, and these.” She showed him a pair of cowboy boots.
John looked at them. “Ostrich.”
