We took seats next to one another in the waiting room and did just what the name demanded of us. Nothing happened for a long time. Nothing for us, at least. Around us, people waited for news of loved ones. They read out-of-date magazines or stared at their cell phones or tried to nap in unforgiving plastic chairs. Anything to make the seconds move faster. They all looked tired, too exhausted to let the full weight of whatever the worry was hang on them. Like a hangover, it would hit them in the morning, the inevitable reckoning of the universe where it crashes into you like an unexpected tidal wave. Maybe you lost someone. Maybe you came close to losing them. Maybe it could have been prevented, maybe it couldn’t. Maybe you would never know the whole story. None of that mattered. Right now was only about making it through the night, pushing through the darkness into the first wisps of dawn.
The sheriff’s deputy who found Deacon came by, and he asked Dagny questions to see if there was any hint why Deacon was using again, or where he might have gotten the heroin. Dagny gave responses that didn’t really answer any questions.
The doctor came out and pulled her to the side. I couldn’t hear anything distinct, just mumbles. Dagny wiped tears from her face as he spoke. The doctor patted her on the shoulder and walked down the hall. She came back to her chair and kept her head down, eyes to the floor.
“He’s in a coma,” she said. “Not sure when he’ll come out of it, either. He’s . . .”
I reached my arm around her, and she pulled back and shook her head and said, “No,” in a small, sharp voice, and disappeared toward the restroom.
I stayed where I was and asked myself where Robert Charles was. Once Dagny came back, I didn’t ask her. I sat beside her and let the night move on.
32
Sunlight was a few turns down the road when I walked out of the hospital to go home. The doctor told Dagny to go home, that they’d call her when anything changed. His heart rate and breathing were steady, but he was still unconscious. I said she needed sleep, and she agreed.
The world is surreal at four in the morning. Your brain’s way of saying you should be asleep, that nothing good can happen at this time of night. Or morning. That’s when you know it’s not good, when you can’t decide if it’s night or morning. That was rattling in my head as I got the keys out for my car.
The guy leaning against the Aztek smiled at me as I came around to the driver’s side door. In the soft sodium vapor light, I made out a round, bearded face and a bald head he had combed a few dozen hairs across to imply more grass on the field than there was. He was short and built like a chemical drum, with a hard-earned physique built on nights spent pounding back the cheapest brew the bar offered. His white shirt was untucked and unbuttoned halfway down his chest, the V open wide enough to reveal a forest of gray hair and several gold chains nestled in, along with a gold cross that might have been hanging out there without the benefit of support.
I slid the ignition key between my fingers, balling my hand into a fist so the key jutted out. Woody had taught me the trick—to use what I had handy as an offensive weapon. I calculated the damage it could do. A right cross would pierce a cheek, or I could aim for the soft, fleshy parts of the throat. Enough force with an underhanded jab would push the key into his stomach, or between ribs. For once in my life, I wished I had a gun.
He stopped just out of arm’s reach of me. I dropped my hands to my side, trying to hide the key.
Maybe it was the buzzing of the lights or the pumping of blood through my ears, but I didn’t hear the guy come up behind me, grabbing my arms and pulling them backwards.
My first instinct was to struggle, but White Shirt stepped in and drove a fist into my gut. I tried to double over, but the guy behind me kept me upright.
Gee, thanks.
It took a moment for me to catch my breath. White Shirt watched with a shit-eating grin.
“You have things that don’t belong to you,” he said. “We want them back.”
“Apologize to your mother for me,” I said with half a breath.
White Shirt tilted his head to the side like a cat staring down a red dot on the wall. “Excuse you?”
“Tell your mother I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll get the underwear she left at my place back to her, I promise. I used them as sails for my catamaran.” I leaned my head back toward the guy holding me. “That’s a boat, in case you didn’t know.” Back to the first guy. “I’m calling your mother fat, just so we’re clear.”
His smile took on a sharp, bitter edge, and he punched me with a right cross that snapped my head back so hard, I thought it would come unhinged from my neck. The world blurred around me, and my eyes watered and I gave my head a few shakes to get my focus back. White Shirt was massaging the knuckles of his right hand in the palm of his left.
“Don’t make this hard,” he said.
“That’s what I tried to tell your mother, but she couldn’t help herself,” I said.
It was lame, but it pissed him off enough he hit me again. He was angry this time, and the blow was looser, sloppy, and I brought my head back so he barely clipped my jaw. I wondered if I could hurt his hand enough to make him stop. It was a terrible plan. I wasn’t awash with many better ideas.
White Shirt shook his hand. “Let’s keep this simple. The paperwork and the cell phone. Where are they?”
I spit blood. Did a quick mouth check. No loose teeth. Score one for me.
“No clue,” I said. “Have you checked with your mom?”
White Shirt drew his fist back and stopped. “I’m not sure what you think you’re accomplishing here, but it won’t work.”
“Tough titty, Disco Stu,” I said. “You can want in one hand, and I’ll gladly shit in that other one for you, and you see which one fills up faster, but I’ve got no answers for you. I got plenty of what your mom wants though.”
He slammed his fist into my stomach again. He might have lacked muscle, but all of that fat propelled the blow enough that my belly button pressed against my spine. The meager contents of my stomach bubbled, and I belched, and then I vomited. It streamed out of my mouth and down my shirt, the stench of bile filling my nose, and chunks of a half-digested dinner dribbled down my chin.
Somewhere on the west side of the parking lot, there was the distant sound of traffic. I wondered if anyone saw us. Now would have been a wonderful time for a sudden and random bit of divine intervention. A set of headlights. A pedestrian walking by. A security guard on patrol.
Instead, all I got was the glop of my vomited dinner dripping off of my clothing and on the ground.
The guy behind my back said, “This fucker stinks, Pete.” He said it in a voice like an echo from a bottomless cave. “How long I gotta hold him like this?”
“Until I say to let him go, Dean,” Pete said.
I sniffed, sucking up stomach acid and snot. “Hard to get good help these days, ain’t it, Pete?” I said. “They fall apart at the slightest.”
Pete grabbed my hair. He rang my head around, and drops of puke flung off me. He didn’t even try to hide his disgust.
I took a deep breath and shook my head hard. Puke flew off me in clumps and chunks, and Dean gagged and gasped and let go of my head as he reeled backward.
Dean loosened his grip on me, his right arm giving slack. I drove my car key into the guy’s thigh. It didn’t want to give at first, but I pushed harder, twisting my body to the side and using the momentum to get through the fabric of his pants and to pierce flesh and muscle.
He screamed and pulled loose from me. I let go of the key and side-stepped away from him. Pete telegraphed his next moves, bringing up his right to take a swing at me. I ducked backward as his fist whizzed by my face, grabbed his arm, and twisted it behind him, shoving him into the Aztek. I banged his head on the hood hard enough to leave a dent, then did it again because it felt good.
Pete’s knees weakened, and his body slumped against the car. I pulled up on his arm, and he screamed.
“Who are you wo
rking for?” I said. When he didn’t say anything, I bounced his head off of my car again. “You want me to ask again?”
I should have been paying attention, but I had adrenaline coursing through me, so Dean caught me from behind with a ham-handed punch upside my face that sent me backward. I lost my balance and stumbled and landed on my ass.
I caught sight of Dean, who was about twenty and looked like he’d done nothing but make bad life choices in all that time. His complexion was five miles of gravel road, and his sleeveless T-shirt displayed a choice of badly done tattoos. Oh, and he had my car keys dangling from his leg. They hung there like a flag planted around the large red island forming on his blue jeans. Every time he moved, the keys jangled. He didn’t look pleased with me.
Pete pushed himself up and glared at me.
“Motherfucker,” he said, his words slurred. “Now we’ve gotta hurt you.”
“Hadn’t thought we were dancing before now,” I said.
They each stepped toward me. I scooted my ass across the concrete. I calculated options. Pete had a concussion, and Dean had a car key sticking out of his leg. It was maybe a hundred yards to the hospital entrance, and I had a shit knee and a week’s worth of accumulated beatings holding me back from feeling too spritely.
I needed to carry a gun with me.
Then, with a sound not unlike a celestial choir, someone said, “Mr. Malone?”
Katie Dolan looked at me with a puzzled look. She was dressed for a shift at the hospital, hair pulled back, a purse slung over her shoulder, an angel in pink scrubs.
I blinked, wondering if she’d fade away like a mirage. She didn’t.
“I said you can call me Henry,” I said.
Pete knocked me in the side of the head. “Shut the fuck up.” To Katie Dolan, he said, “Go on inside, lady. This isn’t about you.”
Katie Dolan didn’t move. “Mister, watch how you speak to me or I’ll smack you so hard, you won’t know to scratch your watch or wind your ass.”
“Bitch,” Pete said, his voice coiling tighter. “What part of—”
Katie reached into her purse, produced a revolver, and trained it on Pete.
“Excuse you?” she said.
Pete’s shoulders slumped. “Goddammit,” he said. To Dean, he said, “Come on. Let’s go.”
Dean limped behind Pete as they crossed the parking lot to a Jeep Wrangler and drove off. Katie kept her gun on them until the tail lights faded into black.
She placed the gun back in her purse and helped me up. She must have caught a whiff of me because her face went sour.
“Are you wearing your puke or theirs?” she said.
“Mine,” I said. “If it had been theirs, that would have been gross.”
33
Katie Dolan found an unused bed in the ER for me while she found a set of scrubs and threw my clothes into a trash receptacle marked for biohazards. Once I’d rinsed the vomit off—there’s a phrase no one ever hopes to say—I assessed the freshest damage.
The previous week of my life had been such a collage of abuse, it was tough figuring out what the latest work was. The stuff from Charleston was yellowing into shades of jaundice. There was less of it since Woody and I had spread one steroid freak out between the two of us. What Milo and Otis had done was still vibrant and purple, though, like overripe plums. To their credit, they’d stayed away from the face. I respected them for that.
Max and Dean, though, had left me with a raw, red visage, like I’d been dragged behind a pickup. My cheek was ripped open in several spots, and it looked like someone had shoved a golf ball underneath my right eye. I hoped Lily liked roughed-over me, though I was only a few good blows away from being a Dick Tracy villain.
Katie pulled the privacy curtain around, stitched my face up, and handed me packets of painkillers. “You’ll need them,” she said. “Your face will hurt like hell. It’s killing me as it is.”
“You must be a sparkle of sunshine with kids,” I said.
“Those guys, was that about Eddie?” she said.
“Yes and no. A little. Somewhat. The fuck if I know anymore.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“That means that everything about Meadow’s murder, and your brother being in prison, is more complicated than I thought it was.”
“Most things are. I know that Charles boy, that girl’s brother, he’s here. I guess he’s got the same problems lots of other folks got right now.”
“Money has never fixed the things inside us that are broken.”
“True,” she said. “When I started here, I worked in the ER. Back then, it was all the normal stuff. You get car accidents or kids with broken bones. The folks with no insurance and no other choices. And the women, they’ve been beat up on by their drunk-ass boyfriend or husband, and they come in with bruises and swollen faces and the same old stories about how they ‘fell down the stairs.’ They always tell that story—like anyone ever believed it. All of that changed about a few years back. Then, we got drive-by drop-offs.”
I touched various spots on my face. Every one hurt, every time. “What do you mean?”
“A car pulls up outside, they throw someone out onto the ground, and then they speed off. The person left behind, they’re always OD’ing. They’ll be blue in the face, the barest of a heartbeat, eyes glazed over. It changed when heroin got cheap, and then it got mixed with stronger stuff. They think they’re getting heroin, but they’re pushing elephant tranquilizer into their veins.” Her laugh was small, sharp, and unamused. “People will do bizarre shit trying to escape from the real world.”
“When I was a state trooper, I thought I’d seen all the insanity that the world offered.” I ran my finger along fresh stitches. “Then it got worse, like someone had popped a piñata, and nothing but crazy rained out.”
Katie Dolan smacked my hand away from my face. “Leave your face alone. You’ll end up with a staph infection if you’re not careful.”
“Which is a concern in my life. The being careful thing.”
“You find yourself in many situations where you’re getting the shit beat out of you?”
“I end up in situations where I think I can make a difference, and then I’m not so sure anything I do matters anymore.”
Katie Dolan pulled up a chair across from me and sat down. “It’s why I left the ER, went to neonatal. Couldn’t take it anymore. I couldn’t take watching the folks work so hard to kill themselves. I thought it’d be better to watch new life come into the world. Sad thing there is these women who come in, high when they get here, and the babies, they’re born strung out. You ever seen a baby addicted to heroin? Addicted to fentanyl?”
“No. Thank God.”
“They never stop crying, Henry. And it’s not crying babies do when they’re hungry or tired or want their mother. It’s crying from a need they don’t understand, wired into tiny brains not meant to deal with it. It’ll break whatever’s left of your heart.”
She rubbed her small hands together. They were rough and dry, no doubt from a million washings in harsh hospital soap. Her nails were painted light pink, just a shade past her own skin tone.
“The Charles family, they hate us,” she said. “My people. They called us everything but white trash right to our faces. Before the trial was to start, they’d be on one side of the courtroom, and we’d all be there on the other, and the dad, he’d glare at us like we’d flung dog shit through his car window. Never blamed him for that, because I knew deep down inside him, he was hurting. He lost a daughter, same way I was losing a brother, and my parents, they were losing a son.”
“They’d argue that point. You go to Mount Olive, see your brother. They want to see Meadow, they visit a grave.”
“You’d be surprised how little difference there is, a prison and a graveyard. There’s a finality for them; I watch him die a little more every time I’m there. Not that I think what they went through was easy. We’ve all got our hurting in this. None of us get to
walk through it without scars.” She put on the fakest smile I’d ever seen. “So why’d those guys knock you around?”
“They’re looking for something, and they thought I could tell them where it was.”
“Could you?”
“Yes.”
“Would you have told them?”
“If I had, they might have stopped whooping my ass,” I said.
“But you didn’t. How come?”
“Matter of principle. I don’t like getting told what to do.” I looked over to her purse resting on top of a counter. “You bring a gun to work with you every day?”
“I do. Got my concealed-carry a while back.”
“Would you have shot those guys?”
“If I’d had to. You ever shot anyone?”
“I have. More often than I like, and it’s not been on the decline lately.”
“Did you kill them?”
“A couple.”
“Did it bother you?”
“Would have bothered me more to have been the one dead.”
“Makes sense. Do you think you can get Eddie out, Henry?”
“I’m not giving up on it.”
“Thank you.”
“Thank you,” I said. “My new friends weren’t inclined to give up.”
“The young guy, he was bleeding bad.”
“I kind of stabbed him with my car key.”
“Resourceful. And gross.”
“Necessity is the mother of invention,” I said. “Unfortunately, now I can’t move my car.”
“From the looks of that thing, I’m surprised it can move anyway.”
“Don’t hate on the Aztek. It’s a finely tuned piece of automotive engineering.”
I reached for my cell phone and called Woody.
“What fresh hell is this?” he said.
I told him what happened. Between the gales of laughter, I asked him to go by my trailer and pick me up clothes and my spare car key.
She Talks to Angels Page 15
