0 0 0
Doctor Bryant had come out and introduced himself to Perry and Lois. He briefed them on Clark’s condition – still critical. His heart had stopped twice during surgery while they were repairing a damaged coronary artery. Then his temperature started spiking and they didn’t know why, yet. The lab tests had come back with nothing aside from some blood anomalies – Clark was fairly seriously anemic, and there was no indication of a cause for that either.
Then Bryant asked Lois questions about the shooting.
She told him of the shots being fired, Clark falling to the floor, her attempts to staunch the blood with her hands. Perry actually went pale at her description. “He wasn’t bleeding a lot,” she explained. “Not at much as I expected. And what blood there was I think ended up on me.” She shuddered at the memory. Clark wasn’t really bleeding, but my hands were red with his blood.
“Lois, I’m going to head back to the office and I’ll call Clark’s parents, let them know what’s happening,” Perry told her as soon as Bryant left to attend his other patients.
Lois nodded. “I’ll stay here,” she said. “I’ll call you if there’s any change.” She remembered something. “Perry, Clark found a movie ticket stub from the Rosebud cineplex at the bank Dillinger robbed. He said Superman told him it fell out of Dillinger’s pocket.”
“Did Clark tell the police?”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “I don’t think he had a chance to. I didn’t think it meant anything.”
“Lois, hon’, don't you know?” Perry asked. “That's how the FBI caught Dillinger sixty years ago. He was coming out of the Biograph Theater. He was a real movie buff. Do you know what Clark did with the stub?”
She shook her head.
“Never mind,” Perry said. “But you’re sure it was the Rosebud?”
“I’m sure.”
0 0 0
Wolfe hung up the phone. Reporters on the city beat were generally bad enough when it came to cooperating with police investigations. The ones from the Daily Planet were in a league of their own. Kent had simply picked up a piece of evidence at an active crime scene and put it in his pocket? Then he ‘forgot’ to mention it to anyone besides his partner in crime, the even more infamous, Lois Lane.
He contemplated the information Perry White had given him. One, Kent was the John Doe at Metropolis General, and two, Superman had seen a movie ticket stub fall out of John Dillinger’s pocket while at the first bank job. A ticket stub that was from a theater only four blocks from one of Capone’s suspected hideouts.
Wolfe checked the entertainment section of the Daily Planet for the film listings. The Rosebud was hosting an Edward G. Robinson film festival all this week. The matinee feature for today was ‘Little Caesar.’ He ordered two detectives to check out the theater on the off chance Dillinger had resumed his old movie going habit. He sent another team to check out the address on Old North Road.
It might have been a coincidence, but Wolfe didn’t believe in coincidences.
0 0 0
Gowned, gloved, and masked, the nurse finally allowed Lois to enter the small ICU room – the room where contagious, or possibly contagious, patients were kept. She’d been told by the nurse that he had to stay quiet, that he’d been sedated to help with that. A clear tube was tied across his face, two prongs feeding him oxygen. Plastic bags hung on a pole by at the side of the bed, with tubes that dripped colorless liquids into veins in Clark’s left arm.
Lois stepped closer. He was pale, paler than Lois had ever seen him. Paler than he’d been when Trask had beaten him and then tried to kill him. She had a hard time believing it was just over a year ago that Trask had accused Clark and his parents of being part on an alien invasion that Superman was allegedly the front man for. Aside from letting Lex Luthor fall to his death, Superman had only done good for the city, the world. At some point Lois knew she would find out where Superman had been when Luthor fell. But not today.
A group of electronic monitors occupied a rack on the wall beside Clark’s bed. There was a sensor on the index finger of his right hand with a wire that ran to one of the monitors. Various lines and wires attached the other monitors to Clark’s body. There were a lot of wires. She glanced at the monitor readings, although she knew she probably wouldn’t understand what any of them meant. The EKG beeped with a persistent rhythm of 80 beats per minute but the tracing on the little screen didn’t look quite normal, assuming she knew what normal looked like aside from what she saw on TV. She was the daughter of a physician and a nurse, but science had never been one of her best subjects.
His dark hair was mussed, over his forehead. She reached out and brushed his hair away from his face. He was warm to her touch, too warm, fever hot even through the gloves. He was covered only by a thin sheet, and there was a cold pad on the mattress beneath him. Another readout caught her eye. She recalled reading somewhere what anything over 106º Fahrenheit was incompatible with human life. The internal temperature monitor read 107º. That can’t be good.
His eyes were half open, unfocused, unseeing. Lois didn’t know if he even knew she was there. “Clark?” she asked softly.
To her surprise he moved his head to look at her. His expression was puzzled as he tried to focus on her. “Lois? What happened? Where am I? Why…?” His voice was weaker than she’d ever heard it, barely above a whisper.
“You’re in the isolation ICU at Metropolis General Hospital. You were shot three times by Clyde Barrow,” Lois told him. “We thought you were dead.” As she spoke, his eyes widened in terror and he tried to sit up. He gasped in pain, clutching one hand to his chest. She grabbed his shoulders, forcing him back onto the mattress as one of the monitor alarms began to shrill. “Clark? What is it? What’s wrong?”
“I can’t be here,” he said in panic. “I can’t stay here. They’ll… they’ll…” He was trembling under her hands.
“Clark, you’re hurt, you’re running a high fever, and you need to rest,” Lois told him. He was still trembling but was no longer actually fighting her.
“I want to go home,” he said. There was a waver in his voice but his expression had turned stubborn, as though he were trying to overcome the pain, the fear, by shear force of will.
“Clark, you’re not out of danger,” she said firmly. “You have to stay and let them help you. If you leave, you will die.”
“You don’t understand,” he told her. The fear was still palpable in his voice. “They had kryptonite.”
“Clark, we knew they were gunning for Superman,” she reminded him. “They shot you instead. So, please, just do what the doctor tells you, okay? I thought I lost you and I don’t ever want to go through that again. I don’t…”
He was watching her, breath ragged as he listened.
“When I thought you were gone, I did some thinking about my life. You know, what it would be like without you in it...” she continued. “It’s not a life I want to deal with. I want my life to have you in it, and if that means I have to sit on you to keep you here so the doctors can help you, I will.”
“You don’t understand,” he repeated.
“So, explain it to me. Explain to me why you’re willing to die to get away from here.”
“They’re going to find out I’m not normal and…” he began.
She opened her mouth to ask another question when the door opened and a brightly uniformed nurse rushed in. She grabbed a mask and gloves and put them on before hurrying over to the hospital bed. “Mister Kent?”
Clark nodded to her, his eyes still filled with worry.
The nurse checked the readings on the monitors and turned off the alarm before turning back to him. “How are you feeling?”
“When can I go home?” he asked her.
She chuckled. “Doctor Bryant will be in shortly to talk to you. In the meantime, he has ordered complete bed rest.”
“Why?”
Lois answered with a sigh. “Because one of the bullets damaged a coronary artery and bruised your heart. It’s kind of like you had a heart attack. A major heart attack.”
