Deadlock by James Scott Bell

what I do.”
    Levering sighed, glad to be back on familiar ground. Admissions always made him nervous. “What’s the first step?”
    “I’ll go down and figure out what her status is. I’ve got to see if I can get to her before she talks to anybody.”
    “Can you swing that?”
    Anne took a drag on her unlit cigarette and smiled. “Who’s your Huckleberry?”
     
    | 4
    Millie opened her mouth and finally a sound came out.
    “Help. Oh, please help.” She heard her voice as if it came from outside of herself, a frightened whisper.
    Light invaded darkness. She opened her eyes. A foglike veil shrouded the room.
    She felt as if she were being pulled through that veil, pulled like dead weight toward consciousness. Her body fought against it, shrieking to go back to sleep.
    Her eyelids were like bags full of rocks. But she knew with a certainty bordering on hysteria that she could not go back to sleep. If she did, they would have her. The ones she had felt in the darkness.
    Circles of fear rippled outward from her stomach. She had to fight to stay awake.
    “Help . . .”
    Something at the back of her head. A throbbing, painful thing, reaching around to her temples like burning tongs.
    Did they have her in a torture chamber?
    Sight of curtains, smell of linen and disinfectant. Sounds of voices outside the room, beeping noises, the soft whirring of machines.
    She was not dead. She was in a hospital room.
    The realization came to her, and with it a wave of such sweet relief that she almost wept.
    Come back, she told herself as her eyelids pressed downward. Don’t sleep!
    A nurse — Millie assumed it was a nurse, hoped it was — floated in through the mists.
    “. . . feeling?” the nurse said.
    Millie heard herself groan.
    “How are you feeling?” the nurse repeated.
    “Help.”
    “Are you in pain?”
    Was she in pain? No, it was beyond pain, as if she were awakening into a thick, burning substance. She felt things attached to her body.
    “Help,” Millie said.
    “I’ll get the doctor.”
    Millie wanted to shout Don’t leave me , as if this nurse represented the last lifeline. But the nurse was gone.
    She was alone. Would she die? The word again popped into her mind. Why should she think that? Her mind slogged forward, barely, frustrating her. She knew who she was, that her mind was a sharp one, well oiled, trained. Or had she suffered some sort of damage?
    What was happening?
    She did not have any idea of time. The next span could have been minutes or hours. But she fought to stay awake. Sharp pains helped her. She became aware of a monitor next to the bed, issuing peak and valley lines. Her heartbeat. She still had a beating heart.
    She heard a voice. A familiar one. “How does Justice feel?”
    Myron Cross. Her doctor. He always called her Justice. Not Madame Justice. Just Justice, as if she herself were the principle of law itself.
    Dr. Cross was one of the best. He had been the doctor to many Supreme Court justices over the years, even getting a spread once in Time magazine about his practice to the powerful.
    But he was a gentle and humble man who loved his work. Millie had never felt a moment’s anxiety around him, until now. Dr. Cross must have seen a tortured look on her. He said, “Are you in much pain?”
    She was, but the physical pain was not what concerned her. “What happened?” she asked. Her voice was thick and slow.
    “You are lucky,” Dr. Cross said. “You survived a bad accident.”
    “I thought I . . . was dead.”
    “Truth told, we almost lost you. You were in surgery four hours. Dr. Dickinson performed brilliantly. I was there.”
    “How did I . . . ?”
    “You don’t remember?”
    Millie was barely able to shake her head.
    “A car hit you,” Dr. Cross said. “Don’t try to talk about it now. Let me just tell you you’re going to be all right, but you’ll need a lot of recovery time. You have three broken ribs, a collapsed lung, bruises like you wouldn’t believe, and a