Page 7 of Undone
The room was one of those two-person rooms where there was a sliding curtain as a barrier between beds. The other patient seemed to have all the windows to himself, but I didn’t think it was unfair. Every now and then, the mystery patient groaned. He didn’t sound like he was in pain, just that he was in intense discomfort. As though sensing my thoughts, Daly gestured me close.
“That fella over there?” he said, with a mischievous grin. “Tried to eat a tin can. Chopped it all up with some machine and tried to eat the shavings. Got about halfway through before he developed a hell of a stomachache.”
“That’s…special,” I said.
Daly waved that off. “He’ll be fine. They pumped his stomach. Far as I know, they’re just waiting for the last of the lid to pass. Come, sit down.”
There were two seats facing the hospital bed. They looked sterile, like they’d been coated with some kind of antibacterial poison. I could practically smell it in the room.
“No, thanks,” I said. “I’ll stay standing.”
It had been easy to hate Daly all this time, when he wasn’t around. Now, seeing him in the hospital bed, it was a bit harder. He seemed to have aged by a decade over the last twelve hours, appearing even older and more decrepit than he had before. His movements seemed slower and more deliberate, and his body seemed almost skeletal—though, based on the empty plate and bowl on his tray, it wasn’t for a lack of food. His face was blotchy and bruised, with red streaks on his forehead and black bags under his eyes. Daly, ever the strong-but-silent type, seemed to wince as he moved, but made no effort to draw attention to his discomfort. Seeing him in this state made him hard to hate.
The patient in the next bed groaned.
“How are you feeling?” I ventured.
“Like a TV show squatted on my land and held up my development, then punched me in the face, that’s how I feel!” Daly said.
Okay, so maybe I could hate him a little without feeling guilty.
“Can we get to the point, Daly?” I said. “I’d like to get this out of the way…”
“All right, all right, no need to get all het up. God, you see an old man in a hospital bed and you take off like a jailbird who’s seen a police car.”
“Well, that, and what happened last night…”
“One thing at a time, honey,” he said, cutting me off. “About the site. You know, I was thinking. I got a wife. And she loves me. Just now, she’s down at the Chinese place up the street, picking me up some real food. None of this regurgitated cow shit they keep trying to feed me here. She’s a good woman. And my kids—they’re busy, they are, just like you. Ain’t got no time to see their old grandpa. Always out trying to save the world. Always somewhere to go, nowhere to be, spinning their wheels. But, fuck it. They’re mine. I love ’em. This here was a hard lesson from the man upstairs.”
At this, Daly laid his head back against the pillow and looked up at the ceiling. “Ah, as it’s always been. You see this in the shows on TV and in movies and whatnot. The old man reaching the end of his life and looking back and realizing that he’s spent his whole life working and missing the stuff that matters the most. Always struck me as cliché, but there’s some merit there.” Daly turned his head to look at us. “I got kids, and I got my woman, and I got my grandkids—I don’t need to be doing this kind of stuff anymore.” Daly chuckled to himself. “I ain’t as young as I used to be. Years ago, maybe I could have cleaned that guy’s clock, but not now. I don’t need this shit.”
I cleared my throat. “That guy,” I said. “So, you’re saying it was a guy?”
Daly nodded slowly, winced, and pressed the button for more morphine. “It was a guy.”
“Do you have a description?” Jasper asked from behind me.
Daly shook his head. “It’s all fuzzy. I know it was a guy, because I was ready to tear into him. I wouldn’t have reacted that way if it’d been a woman. Me and women—we don’t always get along, but I was brought up with the understanding that, while women have their place, it ain’t at the end of a man’s fist.” Daly thought it over for a moment. “At the end of a woman’s fist, maybe while they’re wrassling around in a bowl of Jell-O…now that’s all right.”
In the next bed, the patient groaned again. I barely held one back, myself.
“So it was a man,” I said, more to myself than to anyone else. “At least it’s something. We know it’s a man.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Daly said. “Said if he couldn’t have you, he was going to kill you. That was what got me so fired up. You might be a royal pain in the ass, Dunn, but a man who’ll lay a hand on a woman is no man at all.”
“What were you doing at Cari’s room, anyway?” Jasper asked. “I thought you couldn’t stand her.”
“I was there to show her the amount of money I was dumping into the project!” Daly exclaimed, before sputtering into a series of coughs. “Maybe talk some sense into her. I figured if you saw just how much money we were talking, you’d have a change of heart. It doesn’t matter anymore, though. Since this happened, with your ‘secret admirer’ or whatever you want to call him, it doesn’t matter. I’ve had enough of the business. I got a family.”
I rubbed my forehead. “So, that’s it, then? You know it was a man, but you don’t remember what he looks like? And he says if he can’t have me, he’s going to kill me?”
Daly nodded solemnly. I looked over my shoulder at Jasper, who met my gaze with his own stony, unreadable stare. “I guess it’s better than nothing,” I said, turning back to Daly.
“It’s more than you had,” Daly said.
“Well, thank you,” I said. “I guess we’ll have to work with it.”
“Sure, sure,” Daly said, scooping a cup from the tray and sipping at the contents through a straw. “Now get on out of here. My granddaughter’s going to be here soon, and I got to make myself pretty.”
Jasper and I turned around to leave. As I did so, Daly called after me: “That’s the stuff. Give me a wiggle of that ass on the way out!”
We stepped into the hallway and I rolled my eyes.
