Final Stroke by Michael Beres Read Free Book Online

Not unless he had an other stroke and this one knocked him for a loop. Or maybe in his condition a seizure would do it. He had a seizure a few weeks earlier and, even though the doctor said seizures wouldn’t damage his brain, he still wondered.
    But what good did it do to think about it? Only thing to do was keep working on it and get the hell out of here. A lot more years left in this old dick. Fifty-three down, or so they told him. Given a week’s notice, he could still get it up.
    He laughed, then wondered why the hell he was suddenly in such a damn good mood. One minute he’s worried about seizures, next minute he’s a laughing hyena. Here he is poking into the circum stances of Marjorie’s recent death and he gets this idiotic self-satisfy ing feeling.
    The puddle on the floor was not quite a yard across, exactly as Sue had described it less than an hour earlier. But when he leaned forward and studied the edges of the puddle more closely, he could see that it was surrounded by a series of barely discernible rings marking where the puddle had originally extended, but had dried.
    Across the hall was one of those janitors’ closets he’d been think ing about when he recalled being awakened each morning by the noisy cleaning crew. The closet was straddled on either side by a men’s room and a ladies’ room so as to line up the plumbing during construction. As he stared across at the door to the janitors’ closet with its Staff Only sign, he saw where small droplets on the floor had dried. The drop lets were in front of the Staff Only door and seemed to lead toward the large puddle as if someone had stomped in the main puddle like a kid with brand new galoshes.
    The hallway tile was one of those nondescript patterns of flecks on a beige background. Foot squares placed so tightly together it was difficult to see the dividing lines between them. And, because of the apparent randomness of the pattern, it was difficult to find the repeti tion. Like looking at the photograph of a planet surface. But eventu ally he did find the pattern, and when he did he saw that each tile had been turned ninety degrees from the previous tile by the installer.
    Before the perimeter dried, the puddle had been spread out over roughly a three-foot circle and he could see, because of breaks in the dry line at the edge of the perimeter, that something had disturbed the puddle not long after it was made. When he examined these breaks in the dry line more closely, he could see where thin tires had rolled through the puddle and gone on down the hallway away from the ac tivity room and toward an alarmed door. Although the tire tracks were dry, he could definitely see them.
    He rolled down the hallway and studied a floor plan mounted on the wall with arrows showing various emergency escape routes. Ac cording to the map, the alarmed door opened to a hallway that bor dered the kitchen and eventually led to a loading dock. The spread between the wheels that had made the tracks was too large to be a wheelchair, and each wheel was paired with another that almost, but not quite, paralleled its course. And, since it was way past any meal time and no food carts would have passed this way late in the evening, he figured the tracks leading away from the puddle must have been made by the gurney that had taken Marjorie away. Made sense that the ambulance would park at the loading dock, back here where resi dents wouldn’t have to watch one of their own being carted away.
    Felt good to be doing a little dissecting at the scene, even if it wasn’t a crime scene. And Marjorie, who loved mysteries and conspiracy theo ries, would have been proud. She was probably sitting on cloud nine right now, happy as a clam he was staring down at the tracks of the gur ney that took her away. Of course, if he found something …
    The self-satisfaction he felt a moment earlier turned bitter, then became comic as he imagined himself smiling to death the perpetrator of the