?Don?t screw with me,? Hokenberry said, hulking over Corky and [355] glowering as if he?d come down a beanstalk, angry and looking for whoever had stolen his hen?s eggs.
?You?ll get your money,? Corky assured him. ?I?d just like to hear how you acquired your third eye.?
Hokenberry had-only two eyes of his own, but around his neck, on a pendant, hung the eye of a stranger.
?I already told you twice how I got it.?
?I just like to hear it,? Corky said. ?You tell it so well. It tickles me.?
Scrunching his face until he resembled a Shar-Pei, Hokenberry considered the concept of himself as a raconteur, and he seemed to like it. ?Twenty-five years ago, I started doin? road security for rock groups, tour security. I don?t mean I planned it or managed it. That?s not my zone.?
?You?ve always been just beef,? Corky said, anticipating him.
?Yeah, I?ve always been just beef, been out front to intimidate the crazier fans, the totally wired meth freaks and PCP spongebrains. Been beef for Rollin? Stones tours, Megadeth, Metallica, Van Halen, Alice Cooper, Meat Loaf, Pink Floyd-?
?Queen, Kiss,? Corky added, ?even for Michael Jackson when he still was Michael Jackson.?
?-Michael Jackson back when he still was Michael Jackson if he ever really was,? Hokenberry agreed. ?Anyway I had this three-week gig with My memory?s fuzzy about this. I think it was either the Eagles or could?ve been Peaches and Herb.?
?Or it could?ve been the Captain and Tennille.?
?Yeah, it could?ve been. One of them three acts. This crowd gets all jammed up, gonads gone nuclear, too much of some bad juice bein? toked and poked that night.?
?You could feel they might rush the stage.?
?I could feel they might rush the stage. All you need is one idiot punk with spunk for brains, he decides to bolt for the band, and he starts a riot.?
?You?ve got to anticipate him,? Corky encouraged.
[356] ?Anticipate him, put him down like the instant he makes his move, or another two hundred headcases will follow him.?
?So this punk with blue hair-?
?Who?s tellin? this story?? Hokenberry grumbled. ?Me or you??
?You are. It?s your story. I love this story.?
To express his disgust with these interruptions, Hokenberry spat on the carpet. ?So this punk with blue hair tenses to make his move, gonna climb the stage, try to get to Peaches and Herb-?
?Or the Captain.?
?Or Tennille. So I call him out, move in on him fast, and the little butthead flips me the finger, which gives me absolute license to pop him.? Hokenberry raised one fist the size of a ham. ?I planted Bullwinkle as deep in his face as it would go.?
?You call your right fist Bullwinkle.?
?Yeah, and my left is Rocky. Didn?t even need Rocky. Bullwinkled him so hard one of his eyes popped out. Startled me, but I caught it in midair. Glass eye. The punk went down cold, and I kept the eye, had it made into this pendant.?
?It?s a terrific pendant.?
?Glass eyes aren?t really glass, you know. They?re thin plastic shells, and the iris is hand-painted on the inside. Way cool.?
?Way, ?Corky agreed.
?Had an artist friend make this little glass sphere to hold the eye, stop it deteriorating. That?s the story, gimme my twenty grand.?
Corky passed to him the plastic-wrapped packet of cash.
As he had done with his initial twenty thousand on the first of their three previous meetings, Hokenberry turned away from Corky and took the bundle to the table in the adjacent dinette area to count every crisp hundred-dollar bill.
Corky shot him three times in the back.
When Hokenberry hit the floor, the bungalow shook.
The big man?s fall was much louder than the shots because the pistol was fitted with a sound suppressor that Corky had purchased [357] from an anarchic survivalist with deep ties to an aggressive group of anti-veal activists who manufactured the suppressors both for their own use and as a fund-raising activity. Each of the shots made a quiet sound like someone pronouncing the word supper with a lisp.
This was the weapon with which he had shot Rolf Reynerd?s mother in the foot.
Considering Hokenberry?s intimidating size, Corky hadn?t trusted the ice pick to do the job.
He moved closer to the beef and shot him three more times, just to be certain no punch remained in Rocky and Bullwinkle.
CHAPTER 52
TWO WINDOWS PRESENTED A SOLVENT SKY and a city dissolving in drips, drizzles, and vapors.
Most of the large records room at Our Lady of Angels was divided into aisles by tall banks of filing cabinets. Near the windows lay a more open area with four work stations, and people were busy at two.
Dr. O?Brien settled at one of the unused stations and switched on the computer. Ethan pulled up a chair beside him.
Inserting a DVD into the computer, the physician said, ?Mr. Whistler began to experience difficulty breathing three days ago. He needed to be put on a ventilator, and he was moved into the intensive care unit.?
When the DVD was accessed, WHISTLER, DUNCAN EUGENE appeared on the screen with Dunny?s patient number and other vital information that had been collected by the admissions office.
?While he was in the ICU,? O?Brien continued, ?his respiration, heartbeat, and brain function were continuously monitored and sent by telemetry to the unit nurses? station. That?s always been standard procedure.? He used the mouse to click on a series of icons and numbered choices. ?The rest is relatively new. The system digitally records data collected by the electronic monitoring devices during the patient?s entire stay in the ICU. For later review.?
[359] Ethan figured they kept a digital record as evidence to defend against frivolous lawsuits.
?Here?s Whistler?s EEG when first admitted to the ICU at four-twenty P.M. last Friday.?
An unseen stylus drew a continuous line left to right across an endlessly scrolling graph.
?These are the brain?s electrical impulses as measured in microvolts,? O?Brien continued.
A monotonous series of peaks and valleys depicted Dunny?s brain activity. The peaks were low and wide; the valleys were comparatively steep and narrow.
?Delta waves are the typical pattern of normal sleep,? O?Brien explained. ?These are delta waves but not those associated with an ordinary night?s rest. These peaks are broader and much lower than common delta waves, with a smoother oscillation into and out of the troughs. The electrical impulses are few in number, attenuated, weak. This is Whistler in a deep coma. Okay. Now let?s fast-forward to the evening of the day before his death.?
?Sunday night.?
?Yes.?
On the screen, as hours of monitoring flew past in a minute, the uncommon delta waves blurred and jumped slightly, but only slightly because the variation from wave to wave was minuscule. An hour of compressed data, viewed in seconds, closely resembled any minute of the same data studied in real time.
Indeed, the sameness of the patterns was so remarkable that Ethan would not have realized how many hours-days-of data were streaming by if there hadn?t been a time display on the screen.
?The event occurred at one minute before midnight, Sunday,? O?Brien said.
He clicked back to real-time display, and the fast-forwarding stopped at 11:23:22, Sunday night. He speeded the data again in two quick spurts, until he reached 11:58:09.
[360] ?Less than a minute now.?
Ethan found himself leaning forward in his chair.
Shatters of rain clattered against the windowpanes, as though the wind, in wounded anger, had spat out broken teeth.
One of the people at the other work stations had left the room.
The remaining woman murmured into her phone. Her voice was soft, singsong, slightly spooky, as might be the voices that left messages on the answering machine that served Line 24.
?Here,? said Dr. O?Brien.
At 11:59, the lazy, variant delta waves began to spike violently into something different: sharp, irregular peaks and valleys.
?These are beta waves, quite extreme beta waves. The low, very fast oscillation indicates that the patient is concentrating on an external stimulus.?
?What stimulus?? Ethan asked.
?Something he sees, hears, feels.?
?External? What can he see, hear, or feel in a coma??
?This isn?t the wave pattern of a man in a coma. This is a fully conscious, alert, and disturbed individual.?
?And it?s a machine malfunction??
?A couple people here think it has to be machine error. But ?
?You disagree.?
O?Brien hesitated, staring at the screen. ?Well, I shouldn?t get ahead of the story. First when the ICU nurse saw this coming in by telemetry, she went directly to the patient, thinking he?d come out of his coma. But he remained slack, unresponsive.?
?Could he have been dreaming?? Ethan asked.
O?Brien shook his head emphatically. ?The wave patterns of dreamers are distinctive and easily recognizable. Researchers have identified four stages of sleep, and a different signature wave for each stage. None of them is like this.?
The beta waves began to spike higher and lower than before. The [361] peaks and valleys were mere needle points instead of the former rugged plateaus, with precipitous slopes between them.
?The nurse summoned a doctor,? O?Brien said. ?That doctor called in another. No one observed any physical evidence that Whistler had ascended by any degree from deep coma. The ventilator still handled respiration. Heart was slow, slightly irregular. Yet according to the EEG, his brain produced the beta waves of a conscious, alert person.?
?And you said ?disturbed.? ?
The beta tracery on the screen jittered wildly up and down, valleys growing narrower, the distance between the apex and nadir of each pattern increasing radically, until it was reminiscent of the patterns produced on a seismograph during a major earthquake.
?At some points you might accurately say he appears ?disturbed,? at others ?excited,? and in this passage you?re watching now, I?d say without any concern about being melodramatic, that these are the brain waves of a terrified individual.?
?Terrified??
?Thoroughly.?
?Nightmare?? Ethan suggested.
?A nightmare is just a dream of a darker variety. It can produce radical wave patterns, but they?re nevertheless recognizable as those of a dream. Nothing like this.?
O?Brien speeded the flow of data again, forwarding through eight minutes? worth in a few seconds.
When the screen returned to real-time display, Ethan said, ?This looks the same yet different.?
?These are still the beta waves of a conscious person, and I would say this guy is still frightened, although the terror may have declined here to high anxiety.?
The serpent-voiced wind, singing in a language of hiss-shriek-moan, and the claw-tap of rain on window glass seemed to be the perfect music to accompany the jagged images on the screen.
[362] ?Although the overall pattern remains one of conscious anxiety,? Dr. O?Brien continued, ?within it are these irregular subsets of higher spikes, each followed by a subset of lower spikes.?
He pointed at the screen, calling examples to Ethan?s attention.
?I see them,? Ethan said. ?What do they mean??
?They?re indicative of conversation.?
?Conversation? He?s talking to himself??
?First of all, he isn?t talking aloud to anyone, not even to himself, so we shouldn?t be seeing these patterns.?
?I understand. I think.?
?But what these represent is not arguable. During the subsets of higher spikes, the subject should be speaking. During the subsets of lower spikes, he should be listening. A subject having a bit of mental give-and-take with himself, even when he?s awake, produces no such subsets. After all, for one thing, when you?re talking to yourself, conducting a little interior debate-?
?Technically, you?re always talking,? Ethan said. ?You?re both sides of the debate. You?re never really listening.?
?Exactly. These subsets are indicative of conscious conversation between this individual and another person.?
?What other person??
?I don?t know.?
?He?s in a coma.?
?Yes.?
Frowning, Ethan said, ?Then how is he talking to anyone? By telepathy??
?Do we believe in telepathy?? O?Brien asked.
?I don?t.?
?Neither do I.?
?Then why couldn?t this be a malfunctioning machine?? Ethan wondered.
O?Brien accelerated the data flow until the brain-wave patterns disappeared from the screen, replaced by the words DATA INTERRUPT.
[363] ?They took Whistler off the EEG, the one they thought must be malfunctioning,? the doctor said. ?They connected him to a different machine. The switchover took six minutes.?