Deadly Pedigree

26



Ronald died in surgery about two the next morning.



In an echoing tiled hallway of the hospital, an emergency room doctor almost young enough to be Nick’s son explained that Shelvin would probably live. He’d lost a lot of blood and his heart had stopped twice, but he seemed out of the woods now.

“Were they shot?” Nick asked. “Can I see him?”

“Knives,” the doctor said over his shoulder as he hurried to another scene of emergency-room carnage. “Or maybe chain saws. Five minutes.”

Ghoulish humor, but Nick understood. For someone who glimpses every day the horrible secret–that we’re just fragile bags of blood–it must keep the madness at bay.



Shelvin lay on a tall wheeled bed in Intensive Care, amid a forest of bags, tubes, and wires. Softly humming machines on carts generated green lines and red numerals of vital signs. Nurses ministered to maybe twenty other patients in the dimly lit room, talking to the semiconscious ones as though they were children, ignoring their pitiful pleas and odd requests. Odors of blood and antiseptic competed to nauseate Nick.

Shelvin stared at the low ceiling of acoustic panels, as if counting the holes. He breathed slowly, deeply, through his wide nostrils. His finely chiseled full lips quivered occasionally against each other. Thick gauze bandages covered his neck and arms and hands. His face and smooth scalp showed bruises and abrasions, but they had escaped the ravages of the knives. Except for his powerful, naked shoulders, an elevated sheet hid the rest of him.

His eyes, now unnaturally black, suddenly darted sideways, fixing Nick with a piercing gaze. “You don’t have to tell me. I know. He’s dead.”

Nick looked down. The floor shimmered behind a veil of sorrow and shame. He could say nothing.

“Give me your hand.”

Nick walked the remaining step to Shelvin’s bed and took the injured man’s bandaged right hand with his left. Shelvin was weak; his listless forearm was heavy in Nick’s grasp.

“I want you to go up to Natchitoches,” Shelvin said, in a low monotone. “See to it my brother gets buried proper. Do what you can for my mama and daddy.” He ordered Nick to spare no expense and told him where in New Orleans he could charge what he needed.

Sick people have a lot of time to obsess over details, Nick realized for the first time in his life.

Exhausted, Shelvin paused for a few breaths, before his muscular brows knitted together in concentration. He turned his coal-black eyes again to Nick. “If we’d never heard about Ivanhoe Balzar and how his own family turned on him, my brother would be alive, and I wouldn’t be here, all cut up…Hawty okay?” he asked, anesthesia-belated concern for her pushing aside the point he was struggling to make.

Nick nodded. Contrition welled up within him, threatening to break the dam of composure.

“But I don’t have no blame for you,” Shelvin said. “We weren’t who we thought we were, and that ain’t healthy for the soul. You had a duty to tell us, and you did it. Things needed setting right. Still do.”

Shelvin closed his eyes. His brows relaxed a bit. Must have been a load off his mind, Nick thought, knowing that his parents would be comforted by–dare he say–a friend.

Nick gently laid Shelvin’s hand on the sheet, and then started to go quietly. A nurse headed their way, tapping her wristwatch.

“You know who did this?” Shelvin asked, his eyes still closed.

Nick stopped and turned around. “I think so.”

“When I get better, you’re gonna tell me. Then I’m gonna kill ’em.”



“The material you gave me, Nick, remember? The night of the play?”

He’d picked up the phone on the fifteenth ring. Una had been talking for a few minutes, but he couldn’t get the gist of her words. Sleep’s gravity still tugged at his awareness.

“Wake up! It’s eleven o’clock in the morning,” she said. “The material you asked me to put in my safe-deposit box.”

“What, the night of the play? Uh, yeah. Just a second.”

Nick went into his bathroom and splashed water on his face. He’d stayed with Hawty until eight a.m., trying to assuage her grief for her dead friend and her worry over Shelvin.

“You’re going to be angry,” she said. “It’s gone.”

“Gone? What do you mean? How could it be gone? Did the bank blow up?”

“I screwed up. I temporarily stored the material in the departmental safe. But I forgot about it, until this morning. I’ve had so much on my mind, Nick. The new semester, our departmental fall symposium…I’m so sorry. When I went to retrieve it this morning, it had vanished. The secretaries swear they don’t know what I’m talking about. Something’s strange, here. But I take full responsibility for–”

“Tawpie,” Nick muttered, now thoroughly awake, slouching in his boxers on the side of his bed. Armiger’s goons probably knew Una was one of the few friends he saw the night of the play, after he’d returned from Natchitoches. It must have just occurred to her to track Una’s movements during the following days. Frederick Tawpie no doubt told Armiger that Una had deposited something in the safe. Armiger certainly did have her “sources,” everywhere, it seemed.

Now Nick was that much closer to being expendable. Armiger had everything she feared. Or so she thought.

“What?” Una asked. “I didn’t catch that.”

“It’s okay,” Nick said. “I know where the stuff is. It would be better if you didn’t mention this to anyone again, because I don’t want you…because there’s been more violence. Hawty’s in the hospital–but she’s going to be all right. Shelvin, one of the Balzar heirs from Natchitoches suing Artemis, is in pretty bad shape. And another man is dead.”

Una was flabbergasted. She’d read about the growing Artemis controversy, which was starting to make local waves, and now fired off a dozen frantic questions Nick wouldn’t answer. He did tell her which hospital Hawty was in, and asked her to go keep her company, when she got the chance.

“This is awful, Nick…” The shock of all the bad news had temporarily stunned her, and Nick could tell she was on the verge of tears. “Oh, I really hope Hawty isn’t hurt too badly. Do you think she’ll recover? Where are you going? Will you be all right? You’d better come stay with Dion or me. You could be next.”

“Una, just do what I ask,” he said. “I’ll be busy for the next few days.”





.