Pick a Name

I must warn you that this story stretches the boundaries a little, but I had fun writing it and hope that you have fun reading it. CM

***

"So, you've surfaced at last." The voice came from an out of focus woman, at least I think she's a woman. "Welcome back to the land of the living Mister Dawson."

"Where am I?" I had a pretty good idea that I was in a hospital bed, why I'm here I don't know but, from the swath of bandages, I assume that I've suffered some sort of injury.

"You're in hospital. It was touch and go there for a while but I'm told that you will make a full recovery. Whoever it was that took a pot shot at you will be disappointed at this news. I am here to try to find out who did this to you."

"I've been shot?"

"Yes, you have, several times. Tell me, which one of the thousand or so people that you have rubbed up the wrong way do you place at the front of the queue?"

"Pick a name. Stick the list of names in a hat and draw one out."

"That's not very helpful now, is it?"

"It's my way of telling you that I wouldn't have a clue." I thought about this for a while but no name emerged from the pack.

"That's what I was afraid of. Now we'll have to interview every one of the thousands on the list and check their alibis."

"I gather that you're a cop."

"Yes, I'm Detective Sergeant Cromwell, and I am, for my sins, in charge of this investigation."

"I hope that you're not expecting me to say that I'm pleased to meet you."

"That would be the furthest thing from my mind. No-one is pleased to meet me, it comes with the turf."

She had begun to emerge from her out of focus state and I didn't believe her, there must be someone who would be pleased to meet her. In another time, another place and under different circumstances, I would be pleased to meet her.

She placed her hand on my shoulder. "Now, I have to warn you not to leave the country."

"A comedian as well, is there no end to your talents?"

"I'll see you in the morning." She left me to my solitude and thoughts and, eventually a drug-induced sleep. I got the impression that there was more than saline in the drip that was hanging from the needle in my arm.

"How are you feeling this morning?" The nurse asked as she replaced the intravenous bag on the drip stand.

"I'm not feeling much at all. What are they shooting into my arm?"

"Auto-feed morphine for the pain."

"It's working then, I feel nothing, but there's something up my dick, isn't there?"

"We've placed a catheter in your penis so that you don't pee the bed."

"What if I need a crap?"

"Everything that goes into your body, after being absorbed and filtered leaves through the catheter."

"How long can I expect to be like this?"

"I wouldn't make any plans for the next week or two. You were on the operating table for several hours. There was a lot of shrapnel in you, some of it close to important organs."

"How is it that I can't move my hands?"

"We can't have you pulling out the drip or disturbing the bandages now, can we?"

"If you don't mind me asking, how long have I been here?"

"I don't mind. You were brought in three weeks ago yesterday. You have been in a coma all that time, at least until last night."

"That police officer, what can you tell me about her?"

"She brought you in, she said that she didn't think you'd make it if she waited for an ambulance. It turns out that she was right. You had internal bleeding from the wounds to your body and a bullet in your head that caused us some concern. We got it out okay, without inflicting any further damage. I'd say that you're a very lucky man. The surgeon will be in to see you shortly, he can fill you in on all the details."

I was left to my own devices again and this gave me time to think. It was all a blur, I couldn't remember anything that happened before I surfaced yesterday, or was it today, I couldn't be sure.

I took a look at my surroundings, at least as far as I could see from my bed. There were rails on either side of the bed, I assume that this is to prevent me making a run for it. I could hear the monitor above my head as it sent its messages to the nurses' station. I could hear a general buzz that I assumed was the normal ambient noise in places like this. That was it, apart from the ceiling tiles, as far as the view from my bed, I was surrounded by a screen that was pulled back by, again this is an assumption, the surgeon.

"Ah, good, you're awake then. Mister Dawson, you are a very lucky man. Firstly, you're lucky that the detective ascertained that if she were to wait for an ambulance you might not have survived. Then there was the fact that the admitting doctor recognised the extent of your injuries and rushed you into surgery. And lastly, you were lucky that I was on duty when you were wheeled into surgery."

"So you're the star turn here are you?"

"I wasn't going to blow my own trumpet but, now that you mention it, you could say that."

"Okay superstar, what's the good news, how soon before I can run a marathon."

"Even when you've recovered it will take some work before you're able to run even a half-marathon. You haven't taken good care of your body, have you?"

"If you say so."

"We removed quite a few bullet fragments from inside you, I'll shove them in a bag for you if you like, you can take them to a scrap yard, you might get a couple of dollars for them. As for the bullet we gouged from your head," I got the impression that he was exaggerating somewhat, at least I hoped he was. "The police have that, it looked like a nine millimetre, but then I'm no expert. The good sergeant can fill you in when she arrives later this morning. You can thank her for saving your worthless hide then. We'll think about reducing your pain medication tomorrow, we can't have you fed morphine for too long, you might get addicted to it."

"I have to warn you, I have a very low pain threshold."

"We'll reduce it gradually, just for you."

Sergeant Cromwell arrived about an hour later, dressed in jeans and a tee-shirt, hardly the sort of attire for a policewoman. "Good morning Mister Dawson, how is your memory, any improvement?"

"I understand that I have you to thank for my survival, thank you very much."

"It was nothing, I'd hate you to think that I make a habit of saving worthless arseholes such as yourself."

"Am I to understand that you don't think highly of me as a person?"

"What gives you that impression? Could it be that I called you an arsehole, or is it something else?"

"Calling me an arsehole will do for starters. How is your investigation going?"

"I've had to take a day off from the grind, it was getting me down, all these suspects telling me that they didn't try to kill you, but had thought about it and, given the chance would have. You're a very unpopular person."

"That's funny, much as I've tried, I cannot for the life of me think of why that's the case."

"Do you know what is surprising? I have only spoken to you a couple of times and I don't see it, something doesn't quite gel. You seem to me to be a normal guy, not the total bastard that I've been told you are. It could just be the medication softening your bastard image."

"Oh, so you're the off-duty good cop are you?"

"I'm the good cop all of the time I'll have you know. Simon," She saw the surprised look on my face that changed once I realised that it was on the name tag above my bed and, on the chart hanging at the foot of the foot. "Seeing as I'm off-duty you can call me Olivia"

"Pleased to meet you, Olivia Cromwell, tell me, your parents have a strange sense of humour, calling you that. Getting back to the matter at hand, I believe you, thousands wouldn't. In another time and another place, I could get to like you. You're the first person in a while who I find easy to talk to, not to mention interesting."

"Damn it! I was told that you would do this. I didn't believe it but then you go and spoil it all by doing the very thing I was warned about."

"What have I done now? All I said was that I was attracted to you and found you interesting. Hell woman, I was complimenting you, not because I thought that you would get few compliments, being a cop and all, I was merely telling you how I felt."

"Will you stop that!"

"You don't really mean that do you? Come on fess up, you like the compliments, even coming from a bastard like me." I was hoping that she would contradict that one.

"You're not a bastard," Her voice dropped to a whisper. "you're not a bastard."

Wow, my hopes were realised. "What was that you just said?"

"Don't make me say it again."

"Say it." I told her slowly and firmly.

"All right, you're not a bastard." She pulled the chair over and sat next to the bed. I felt her hand on mine and saw her eyes focussed on mine as if she was trying to read my mind. Good luck with that because I was having difficulty in trying to stop it spinning out of control.

What was happening to me? I was held captive in this bed, my arms strapped to the railings on either side of the bed, I couldn't turn head far enough to get a good look at her now that she was seated, but I could feel her closeness and smell her perfume. My memory of her face and her smell had the testosterone in my benumbed body leaving the starting blocks on its first lap of my body. I seem to recall this as a regular occurrence but couldn't remember if I was ever successful in taking advantage of this situation.

She, Olivia, leaned over me and kissed me. It took a while for me to react to this but react I did. Things were getting out of control. "I have spoken to some of your alleged friends," She was trying to regain control, "they're not very complimentary, there seems to be a theme running through this situation. I feel the need to get your side of the story, sort of context."

"Fire away, who's the first on the list?"

"George Forster."

As soon as she mentioned his the veil was lifting from my memory. "I guess you could say that he owes me one. I pulled a stunt on him one year and he didn't take too kindly."

"Okay, what did you do?"

"We were working on his car and I told him that I needed a metric shifter (Adjustable wrench) and sent him to the hardware store to buy one. He told me that the guy in the store cracked up over that and inferred that he was not too bright to fall for it."

"I can understand him feeling miffed."

"It got worse, I needed to cut some sheet iron and asked him to get a pair of left-handed tinsnips from my toolbox."

" 'Fuck off.' He said, still upset at the shifter thing. That showed how pissed off he was, he didn't normally swear. I got up from where I was working and walked over to the toolbox and retrieved what I had asked him for. 'See, left-handed snips.' I waved them in front of his face. He was even less amused."

"But is that enough for him to want to kill you?" She couldn't comprehend this at all.

"No, but you'll have to consider his ancestry."

"What does that have to do with things?" She asked.

His maternal grandfather was Irish and I have been told that they will take stuff like that to their grave, forgiveness is not a part of their vocabulary."

"What about Stephanie Browning, what did you do to her?"

"I did what she least expected of me, I stood her up."

"That's it, you stood her up?"

"It was how I did it that got up her nose. We had been going together for three months and things were looking pretty good, at least that's what I thought and what she had told me. Then I found out that she was seeing someone else. I did some checking to confirm my suspicions and found them to be true, so I thought that I'd pre-empt the inevitable. We had planned to go to dinner with some friends of hers from her work, I didn't particularly like them, a bit full of themselves I thought. Anyhow, I rang her to tell her that I'd been held up at work and would be five to ten minutes late. She wasn't happy but told me that she would forgive me. What happened when I got there she would not forgive. I was down the road from the restaurant when they arrived and one of the group was the guy that she was seeing, they were, thinking it safe, holding hands. I knew what was going to happen, she would pay more attention to him in the hope that this would provoke a reaction from me and she could use that as an excuse to break it off with me."

"They were seated at the table when I rushed in and they were fully expecting an apology, after all that was what a gentleman would do. I reached the table and before she could say anything I got in first. "Stepanie, you'll have to do without me for the rest of your life. See ya." I turned around and walked out, feeling the daggers of her look thudding into my back. She was furious because she had lost control of the situation."

"Ouch. Now, what about Tom Quick?"

"Known to one and all as 'the tortoise', he had tried on a number of occasions to pull a stunt without a lot of luck, they were so obvious that blind Freddie would have seen through them, so I decided to show him how it was done. That was my mistake, he didn't take to being shown up by such a simple stunt well executed. He broke off our friendship for around three months but he never forgot or forgave. When he's drunk he remembers it, but his memory was distorted. Oh, he'd forget all about it the next day, but it remained in the back of his mind."

"This confirms something that struck me, the thread in most of the people that I've interviewed, except for the lovely Stephanie, she, by the way, will not hesitate to kill you if you cross paths with her, is that it involves stunts that you have pulled on them. Some, I have to admit were amusing, while others could be considered malicious and hurtful. Do you enjoy upsetting people?"

"Not usually. If something happens, someone does something to me that I didn't appreciate, like accusing me of something I didn't do, or taking out of context something that I did do, then my reaction is to return the favour. I have to admit that my desire for revenge sometimes causes me to blur the lines between what is funny and what is not."

"So, you're telling me that every one of the stunts that you pulled was revenge for something done to you?"

"Maybe not all, but certainly most of them were."

"Stay here a minute." And she was off. Stay here? How the hell was I going to go anywhere? She returned a few minutes later accompanied by a nurse and a wheelchair. "I am going to take you for a stroll outside into the courtyard so that you can get a little sunshine into your miserable existence."

I was helped out of bed and into the chair, the IV drip was attached to the chair and I was wheeled down the corridor, down a couple of levels in the lift (elevator) and out into the courtyard. We found an unoccupied bench and she sat down with me facing her. "Simon, I have a confession to make."

"Don't tell me, let me guess, you're a serial killer and I'm just about to become your next victim."

"Will you be serious for a change. No scrub that, I don't want you to be serious, just hear me out."

"Okay, what is your confession?"

"I'm in love with you. There I've said it, you can laugh now."

"What, wow, this has come from right out of the blue. How long have you known this?"

"For years, but I've only now confirmed it. When I first started digging into your background I found myself intrigued by you. Here was a passably handsome man who didn't seem to have been snared into a committed relationship by a woman. I had to ask myself why, or how you had managed this when all of your friends were either married or in a long-term relationship. Then I realised that it was part of what made you who you are. You have been searching but had not yet found the right person. You are not prepared to compromise when it comes to women. I was certain that this person was a woman because there was nothing in your life that would suggest otherwise. I decided that I was going to become that person that you were looking for."

"What a head-spin. I am going to need time to get my head around this news. Give me something to work with."

"How is this for starters." She leaned forward and kissed me and when I say kissed, I mean kissed. This wasn't some sort of tentative peck on the cheek, this was a full-blown tongue involved passionate kiss. Not only that, her hand slid under the gown I was wearing and grabbed a handful of my old fella. "Hello," my old fella said, raising himself from his torpor. "What have we here then?"

"Do you think you should be doing this?" I asked, hoping for a positive answer, no, scratch that, ah hell I didn't know what I was thinking. What I was feeling was a different matter entirely.

"I see that he's interested." She began to masturbate me. This was getting way out of control and I was going to have to put a stop to it before it went too far.

"If you don't stop this we are going to get into trouble." I said, looking around to see if there was someone who would intervene. No-one put their hand up, I was on my own with her.

"You don't mean that, surely, at least a part of you, an important part of you, doesn't want me to stop. I wonder if this chair can take the weight of both of us?"

She didn't wait for me to answer that question. She raised my gown before sitting down, I think that her position is known as 'reverse cowgirl'. Now the only thing between him and her was her jeans. She undid them and slid them down. Shit, she's gone commando. With a wriggle of her hips, he was at the gates of heaven, then inside her.

With our backs to the courtyard, we were able to continue with our carnal manoeuvres until a satisfactory climax was achieved.

"Do you realise that, in certain sections of the Christian faith, what we have done is tantamount to marriage?"

"Ooh goody, I must become one of those." She wriggled her hips in excitement.

"Now who's not being serious?" He, not having slipped out of her, enjoyed this immensely

"I'll have you know I have never been more serious."

We stayed together until he went down and she grabbed some tissues from her bag and cleaned up the mess that we'd made before sitting down on the bench once more.

"Simon."

Uh oh, what was coming now? "Yes, Olivia?"

"I am very serious. I am in love with you and have been for some time."

"How is that possible? How can you know that you love me when we don't know each other, or do we?"

"You may not know of my existence, but I have been aware of yours for positively years."

"How is it that you can be in love with someone who doesn't even know you?"

"You could say that it's by proxy. I have heard a lot about you over the years and, the more that I heard, the more that I wanted to meet you. It got so bad that I gave up dating because no-one measured up to you."

"Now you're really scaring me."

"Are you scared now?"

"Yes and no. Yes, I'm scared that you have been stalking me for years and no, now that you've found me and introduced yourself to me, to him," I pointed to the sleeping giant between my legs, just joking, he's not that big. "I am no longer scared unless of course, this is all some sort of drug-induced hallucination, in which case I'm scared shitless."

"Oh, this is for real, there are no drugs involved."

I found that to be strange because I have been off this planet for I don't know how long. "One thing that is beginning to scare me is your predilection for public sex. I am not sure that I'm in favour of the world looking on when we make love."

"But it adds something to it, the thrill of being caught."

"What would happen if we did get caught?"

"We'll just make to make sure that we don't."

"I don't know about this."

"Pwark, pwark, puck, puck, pwark. Don't tell me that you're chicken."

"Let's just say that I have reservations about this, not that I'm against it."