Vital Parts by Nancy Fisher

Author:Nancy Fisher [Nancy Fisher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction/Thrillers/Medical
ISBN: 9781612308616
Publisher: New Word City, Inc.
Published: 2015-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

Nearly two weeks had gone by, and Eric was comfortably settled in. His room at the top of El Lobo’s rickety exterior staircase wasn’t fancy, but someone had made a real attempt at homey attractiveness. The walls were freshly whitewashed, the bed was large and covered with a heavy tapestry spread, and the bathroom, though small, was modern and en suite. Blue mountain flowers peeped from a local ceramic vase on the dresser.

Not so surprising, thought Eric; the hotel’s few guests were nearly all hospital visitors, people who could well afford to pay dearly for what was, in fact, the only game in town. Even renting the room by the week, he’d discovered, didn’t reduce the cost to what one would reasonably expect to pay in such a backwater.

His days had begun to form a pattern.

Eric arrived at the hospital each morning at eight, having breakfasted on bread, cheese, and fruit in his room. He checked in, made rounds, and assisted or operated as directed by Talmidge, who seemed to enjoy keeping him off-balance with unexpected procedures and schedule changes.

A simple buffet lunch was provided in the hospital staff lounge, but lingering was not encouraged, and conversation was stilted and unsatisfying. Eric rarely finished before eight or nine at night. He’d gotten into the habit of breaking for a walk in the nearby hills if things slowed down. It kept him alert. And it began to establish a practice of random absences at various times during the day; later on, this might prove useful, he thought.

Each evening after a shower and a drink, he ate his dinner alone at El Lobo’s outdoor tables, enjoying the sharp tang of the mountain air. Sometimes Vincente and Felipe would join him briefly, and they would have a rather basic conversation in Spanish. Once they introduced him to Vincente’s aunt, a heavy, pleasant woman in black. She was friendly but not garrulous, and soon hurried off home to her family.

He’d assumed that, isolated as they were, the hospital staff would get together after hours. But most of the small staff appeared to have been drawn from the local population, and if they socialized, he wasn’t included. When he occasionally came upon this one or that in the town square, they exchanged waves or pleasantries, but no one tried to befriend him. They weren’t rude, they just kept to themselves.

Eric was beginning to realize how much the town depended on the hospital as a revenue generator. In fact, he’d noted with amusement that two days after he’d paid three weeks’ rent in advance, the bar’s rusting metal tables and chairs had been replaced by modernistic new ones of white plastic. No matter how much they knew or suspected, no San Lorenzian was going to rock Talmidge’s boat.

And how did Talmidge spend his evenings? Eric identified an old green Mercedes in the parking lot as belonging Talmidge. It was always parked in the same spot when Eric arrived in the morning and still there when he left in the evening.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.