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n the steep, rolling hills of downtown Kansas City just south of the Missouri River, a man dressed in blood-spattered doctor’s whites regained consciousness, sprawled face-down on a driveway. Snow bit into his face like icy needles. Tasting his own blood, he groaned, got weakly to his knees, spat, and brushed the stinging snow from his face and hands. Glancing down, he saw the pink-stained, jagged rock responsible for his misadventure, peeking from its camouflage of drifting snow.
After a few moments he staggered to his feet and, hunched into the biting December wind, staggered across the drifted, snowbound parking lot to the threshold of Dettmer Clinic’s main entrance as a fresh wave of dizziness assailed him. On the verge of fainting, he clutched the frigid doorknob for support with his left hand and cradled his pounding head with his right. Like a blind man learning Braille, a slow trickle of blood cautiously felt its way from the gash on his scalp downward through a forest of stubbly whiskers on his cheek and neck, and soaked into his collar.
In addition to the blow to his head, a series of dull, throbbing aches informed him that he had bruises on his shins, arms, and torso.
What had he been doing, he wondered? He felt like a hockey puck run through an abbatoir.
The bruises were bothersome, but it was the blow to his head that concerned him most because he suddenly realized that he couldn’t recall his name.
The only thing he was sure of was stitching up emergency walk-in patient Daniel Hill earlier that morning, but even parts of that seemed hazy. The UAW factory worker had cut his hands on a piece of metal trim destined to become part of an ’07 F-350 King Ranch Edition diesel truck. It had taken twenty stitches to sew up the patient’s wounds. Vaguely, he recalled leaving Daniel sitting comfortably with his hands resting in his lap in one of the recovery rooms, but that was all.
After the dizziness had receded to a dull, throbbing ache, he glanced down and saw the name on his right breast pocket: Dr. Henry Dettmer. Well, that made sense, he thought grimly, turning to reaffirm the clinic’s name on a twelve-by-eight sign that was dwarfed by some of its more robust neighbors. Like many of his memories, the sign faded in and out like a bad radio transmission with each new blast of frigid, wind-whipped snow. Frustrated by the stubborn resistance of the gritty, red brick high-rises that dominated Kansas City’s northern skyline, the wind redoubled its efforts. Shrieking, its icy fingers curled cleverly around foundations and roared unabated through gray, forlorn intersections. As tattered as the team’s recent fortunes, part of a billboard sponsoring the Kansas City Royals baseball team tumbled and skittered down the street.
Turning his back on the storm’s fury, he shook his head again to clear it. No doubt his memories would return in time, but he made a mental note to have himself checked out by another member of the staff when they returned. Severe concussions were nothing to fool with. Sometimes, they masked more serious physiological damage caused when the brain was bruised by the fall, and later when swelling set in. Most likely, he’d be looking at a few days off. Or more if his memories were slow to return.
Closing the door behind him, he paused in mid-stride. The clinic’s antiseptic odor had triggered a fuzzy half-memory—a place that had smelled much the same, but with an undercurrent of mustiness—a place that was white and . . . soft?
Wrinkling his brow in concentration, he struggled to recall where the place might have been. Probably one of the hospitals he’d frequented over his years as a doctor.
But like a teasing, nubile woman, the memory danced just beyond reach of his mental fingertips.
Encouraged despite his initial failure to recall part of his past, he shuffled to a nearby window, noting that the surprise mid-December storm was going to be a real piss-cutter, more typical of those that traditionally came in January or February, if they came at all. Even as he watched, the storm seemed to strengthen. Wind gusts of fifty-plus screamed around eaves and corners, whipping snow into frenzied, constantly-shifting pirouettes. Ever-shifting, waist-high drifts battered the few cars that had stalled along the streets. Occasionally, snow drifts consumed each other like cannibals fighting for supremacy.
Shivering, he turned his back once again on the meteorological carnage and ambled to his desk to check the appointment book he’d noticed on the way in. Jeanette Woodruff, the last patient of the day, was scheduled for three-thirty—twenty minutes from now. Most likely, she wouldn’t show in this hellish weather. That was fine, he thought. He had no business attending to patients in his current state. If she showed, he’d have to cancel the appointment, anyway.
Just as he started for the bathroom (not sure where it was), the phone rang. The shrill sound cut into his pounding head like barbed fishhooks tearing through raw meat. Grimacing, he grabbed the receiver.
“Dr. Dettmer speaking.”
“Hi, Hank. This is Jeanette. Are we still on for this afternoon?” she asked in a bubbly voice. “I’m running late due to the weather, and . . .”
“You’re still planning to drop by?” he interrupted. “Are you sure that’s wise in this weather, Miss Woodruff?”
Jeanette paused a moment before replying. “You are such a tease,” she giggled. “I’m Mrs. Woodruff, not Miss, as if you didn’t know.” She stifled a sneeze before continuing in a low, seductive voice, “And you know full well I wouldn’t miss our weekly ‘exam’ for the world.” Then in a more serious tone, she inquired, “Are you all right, Hank? Your voice sounds—different.”
“I, ah—slipped and hit my head on a rock in the driveway earlier, er, Jeanette. Knocked the stuffing out of me. I’m not feeling too swift right now.”
“I have just the perfect ‘therapy,’” she purred. “I’m feeling very horny. ‘Riding’ has been on my mind all morning, cowboy, and I’m not talking about the kind involving little dogies, either. See you in about forty minutes.”
Stunned by her final comments, he hesitated before answering. “Listen, Jeanette, I don’t think . . .”
But it was too late. She’d already hung up.
Letting the phone settle back into its cradle with stunned, nerveless fingers, his eyes wandered to an old family portrait on the desk, and he picked it up. Smiling back were the images of a handsome, dark-haired man with penetrating, chocolate brown eyes and a prominent Roman nose, dressed in doctor’s whites. A svelte, petite, sandy-haired woman stood at his side. To her right, a tow-headed boy, age twelve, completed the portrait.
He rubbed his pounding forehead with one hand, and wondered where his wife was. Maybe at work? Surely, his son was in school. But which school? Probably, he thought, school had been cancelled, today. And if his wife worked, where? Would she even be at work, today? What were his wife’s and son’s names, for God’s sake? What city, for that matter, was his clinic in?
Unbidden, the line “Who’s on first?” from Abbott and Costello’s famous comedy skit popped into his head. Right now, it wasn’t a matter of who was on first, but where in the hell first was.
While wandering around the office, rubbing his head in frustration, he overheard a radio broadcast coming from a nearby office. Stepping closer, he discovered that an undermanned but gritty Missouri Tigers basketball team was playing the perennially powerful Kamsas Jayhawks in Columbia, Missouri. The game’s broadcast gave him modest encouragement because he remembered both college teams, if not exactly where he was.
Shutting out the game, he returned his thoughts to his current dilemma: the Woodruff woman was a serious problem; she certainly seemed to know him in a more than casual way. Their earlier phone conversation implied that he was having an affair. The situation was frightening and potentially volcanic.
With trembling hand, he returned the portrait to the desk and beat his throbbing head with his fists, but no answers came.
Suddenly, he needed to relieve himself, and renewed his search for the bathroom. After a couple of false starts, he found it. Washing his hands afterward, he paused in front of the mirror to examine the cut on his forehead, and was confronted by further shocks.
Puzzled by the mane of thick, blonde hair reflected from the mirror (shouldn’t it be black, he wondered, remembering the family portrait on the desk), he froze. He finally reasoned that he must have had it dyed.
But there were further problems not so easily dismissed.
Distinct frown lines on his forehead and cheeks didn’t match the image he’d seen of himself earlier in the family portrait. Even allowing for age difference, the features seemed spacially wrong. Almost as if someone had hit him with a sledgehammer, and slammed them into different places.
His nose was vastly different, too, and it wasn’t an improvement for the better. God knows why he would have chosen the Karl Malden-like honker glaring back at him now, or the exorbitant cost of the plastic surgery it must have entailed.
But most unsettling of all was the shape of his face.
Instead of the prominent chin and squared jaw he’d expected to see, a weak, receding chin reflected back from the base of a mantis-like “V.” Only the eyes seemed right.
Cold sweat beaded on his forehead. For several seconds, he clutched the edge of the sink with both hands, biting back a scream.
Taking several deep, slow breaths, he managed to block out what he’d seen, and returned his attention to his scalp wound. Parting clotted hair, he saw that the blood had stopped flowing and dabbed at the cut with damp paper towels to clean the wound. Better, but still no Casanova, he thought, remembering the tone of Mrs. Woodruff’s earlier phone conversation.
Maybe some relaxing lovemaking would help him recover his memories, and put an end to this madness. At this juncture, he was willing to try anything. But unless he changed out of his bloodied smock, his lady fair’s ardor would most likely evaporate. Hell, he couldn’t even remember what she looked like. How ironic, he thought, wondering how many times men (and probably many women, too) wished they could forget the physical appearance of some of their past (or present) lovers.
Minutes later after changing into clean whites, he paced the exam room in distress still seeking answers, when something on the radio caused him to cock an ear in shock:
“. . . still have not found escaped mental patient Alford Weems, who vanished from a transfer van during a wreck caused by black ice in North Kansas City late last night. His trail led into the maze of railroad tracks north of the Missouri River near the stockyards, where it was lost. It’s likely the fugitive died of exposure in last night’s storm, but the search continues. Weems, a former doctor, is a paranoid schizophrenic who is deemed extremely dangerous . . .”
. . . and Alford Weems’ memories returned with the suddenness of an avalanche burying an Alpine village: White, soft, and musty, with an overtone of sterility—the padded cell where he’d been locked away for eleven years.
Last night and this morning—the frigid, semi-conscious struggle through the stockyards after escaping from the van—stumbling down the steep bank of the Missouri River with branches raking his face, shins, and forearms—the perilous crossing of the ice-choked river in a small, battered boat—clawing his way up the steeper south side river bank—staggering across Interstates 35 and 70 at three a.m., unnoticed—climbing the final steep embankment leading to the north fringe of downtown Kansas City—stumbling across Dr. Dettmer’s clinic garage four blocks later and forcing entry—huddling beneath tarps and supply boxes to keep warm—surprising Dr. Dettmer when he parked his car inside around five-thirty a.m.—skewering Dettmer through the lower back with a pick axe, pinning the hapless doctor to a wall to scream out the final seconds of his life in agony—fishing out the doctor’s keys and wallet, entering the clinic, and later posing as Dr. Dettmer after stacking the bodies of Dettmer’s receptionist and two nurses beneath Dr. Dettmer’s pinned torso like fleshy cordwood in the garage—slipping in the snow after his final trip to the garage late this morning—hitting his head on a rock in the driveway, and losing his memory. . . .
Smiling in that peculiar, serene way that only the clinically insane can, Alford Weems switched off the radio and glanced in on his earlier patient, Daniel Hill.
Again, Alford saw that his memory had failed him.
Years ago before he’d lost his mind, Weems had been a fastidious surgeon. He had used twenty stitches earlier that morning. . . .
To sew Hill’s bloodied, severed head to the corpse’s palms to prevent it from tumbling to the floor.
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