“Shiro, George is right, you’d better lie—”
“Don’t waste your breath, New Girl. She’ll lie down after she passes out from blood loss. Hey, wanna bet on how long it takes? Twenty bucks? No, wait: winner gets Shiro’s pain meds.”
I swayed on my feet, holding my shoulder. I had to see her. I had to see the niece’s face. I had to know if I was right. And if she was right.
I took a tentative step. The room was trying to go dark around the edges
(do not do not DO NOT black out do not do not black out)
Good advice.
“Emma Jan. George. Help me.” I ignored their shocked traded looks. So what if I had never asked for their help before? I could grow, could learn, could change. She had. She gave her life to save her boy. She broke through generations of conditioning, and not for herself. She gave up everything so her son could have something. Maybe even just one thing.
I had to. I would see. Nobody saw George Stinney; the whites looked and saw an uppity nigger. His family looked and saw death for them all. And in turn, they didn’t see any of the white boys.
One step. Another. Another. It was taking forever. It was taking forever. I would be here for the rest of my life—lungs burning, shoulder screaming, blood running from me like small red rivers. I would never get out. I would die in here and no one would see me, either. Another. And then
(do not do not DO NOT black out do not do not black out think of the endless teasing you will have to endure from George do not black out do not)
I was there. I was standing over her. I sighed in relief when I saw her face, when I realized I had been right. I had hoped to see her in life. But seeing her in death was not terrible.
She was smiling. There was a sizable hole in her forehead—the nasty old man had been a dead shot, as I was sure he would be. But she was smiling.
She had known it was over. And she faced it without flinching. She had known she was going to her death, and had dressed nicely for the appointment. As the old man could predict her moves, so she could predict his. She could not be fearless to save herself, but she became so to save her son.
“I will advise you again not to move,” Michaela was saying. “It will be the last time I so advise, sir, do you understand?”
“Old man.” I did not try to keep the loathing out of my voice. “Look at me, viper.”
He did it carefully, slowly, so as not to startle the woman who had him in her sights. A woman who was doubtless praying he would make a move. Any move. Michaela, I had decided, was probably a lioness in a former life. She lived for the kill like plants lived for sunshine.
“Your niece was ten of you, old man. Do you hear me? She was the only warrior you produced. Now do me a favor. Move. Do a handstand. Tap dance. Reach into one of your pockets. Move a lot. I promise: the agent drawing down on you will cure your ills.”
“Now, now,” Michaela said, mildly enough. “Let’s not try to goad our suspect into suicide by cop. Do I seem as though I would like more paperwork? Hmmm? And Agent Jones, will you kindly lie down before I shoot you?”
“That is really good advice,” Dr. Gallo said, materializing from … somewhere. He was all dressed up in a clean-but-faded dark denim shirt, clean khakis, and loafers without socks. (In this weather! Frostbite-seeking moron.) His fingers were sinking into my upper arm. “Here we go.” He was easing me down on my back. What the hell. I let him. “Nice and easy.”
“We knew you were here,” I said triumphantly.
“I’m so sorry for what happened to you,” he told the killer. One of the killers. He was kind to the dead woman who had killed his nephew. He had nothing to say to the old man, I noticed with inappropriate glee. “I don’t forgive you, though.”
“That’s all right,” I said, even though
(DO NOT)
he wasn’t talking to me.
(DO NOT black out, idiot!)
Good advice. And I took it; I did not black out. I vomited instead. Emma Jan would need a new purse.
chapter seventy-three
When a paramedic says, without being asked, that you will be “just fine” (as in, “Oh, hey, you’re gonna be just fine”) within the first three seconds of wound assessment, it means you are going to die.
So I laughed at the boyishly earnest EMT (he had freckles, of all the silliest things) when he lied to my face. I had lost too much blood. I felt chilled, and sleepy. I would sleep and then I would die. Maybe it was the shock talking, but I was at peace with it. All of it. If George Stinney’s great-great-great-aunt (or whatever she had been to that long-ago executed child) could face death with a smile and her nicest outfit, could I do less?
Never!
“All right, let’s get her set up with—ow!”
George, for some strange reason, had insisted on riding with me to the hospital. The stressful day was getting to him; he seemed frazzled and unkempt. He had sacrificed his tie (bees stinging babies against a background of jack-o’-lantern orange) to try to control my bleeding. I could not help but observe that he and Dr. Gallo did little but get in each other’s way.
When the EMT, dodging both of them, tried to give me an injection, George grabbed the boy’s wrist.
“Don’t you lay a hand on her, pusbag. How long have you been an EMT? Are you even qualified to touch her? Show me your driver’s license; if you’re old enough to vote I’ll kiss you on the mouth. And if you’re not I’ll kill you and sink your body in Lake Calhoun. This is a federal agent! Why isn’t the boss EMT along for this ride? Gallo, will you for Christ’s sake do something?”
“B-b-because nobody told us any of that stuff,” the poor child stammered, terrified. “We just rolled when they told us we had a Code One. Please don’t sink me in Lake Calhoun. I can legally vote next month.”
“George, release him at once,” I ordered while Dr. Gallo seized the radio and told an unseen person on the other end just what to expect. I noticed he did not mention George, which was just as well.
“Hey, I don’t want just anybody messing with you. Enough shit’s gone on without something happening to you, too.”
Perhaps I was hallucinating from blood loss. I had never seen George evince concern for any living being save himself.
“George, everything is fine.” Enormous lie. “Let the boy work. Ouch!” I glared at the boy, who went even paler. “And I must say, I cannot help but be touched.”
“If you think I’m breaking in another partner the same year I had to get a prostate exam, you’re out of your fucking mind, Shiro Jones!”
“And now, I am not.” I had never wished so urgently to pass out from blood loss as I did just then. I was delighted when my body obliged me.
* * *
As it turned out, the EMT had been correct. I did not die. Though it was a bit of a trial, recuperating from a gunshot wound and forcing down hospital food. It was a while before I was back to myself. Pardon me … before the three of us were back to ourselves. My sisters and I.
In the meantime, I needed answers. And owed them to someone else.
chapter seventy-four
It took a long, long time, but finally they left me alone. Michaela was gone, and so were Emma Jan and George (the latter had been “escorted” off the premises). My wounds had been treated—fortunately, I needed no surgery this time. I had been checked and checked and checked again, and had even managed to grab a nap between bouts of unconsciousness.
Now. I had twenty-seven minutes before the nurse came back to check my vitals. It would only be harder to find Max Gallo and tell him things he thought he needed to know. During first shift, there would always be too many people, both on my floor and in his blood bank. During third shift, I would be too exhausted.
Now. It had to be now: the middle of shift change, 10:55 P.M. The nurses were giving their reports at the station; people were focused on leaving, or arriving. It was as chaotic as it ever got.
I slowly sat up, and carefully untangled and straightened the many tubes ru
nning out of or into my body. I would have to bring the IV pole; ugh. Hated, hated the benighted things. Like being on a leash. A leash that continually dripped things into my bloodstream.
I swung my legs over the side. Took a deep breath. Stood.
All right. All right! This … this wasn’t terrible. I was sore, yes, but it was distant soreness. I must be on a morphine drip, or still riding a shot. And I was in the sweet spot, too—pain was distant, but I wasn’t too fog-headed.
After I’d shuffled about twenty feet, I decided I had been wrong, entirely wrong: there was not enough morphine in my system for my midshift jaunt. Not by half.
Ah, well. Nobody said the life of an MPD-suffering, gunshot FBI agent with a dog and a baker boyfriend and stacks of paperwork would be an easy one.
I made it to the elevator without incident—it helped that it wouldn’t occur to the staff that I’d get the urge for a pre-midnight stroll. And even if I were spotted, I would be in no real trouble.
It made me think of Aldo Raine—Brad Pitt’s character from Inglourious Basterds. When Col. Landa snivels, “You’ll be shot for this!”, Raine says, just as calm as you please, “No, I don’t think so. More like chewed out. I’ve been chewed out before.”
The urgency of this mission was of my own making. If I were caught, I would not be shot, just scolded and escorted back to my room. But I owed Gallo an explanation. Barring that (could anything like this ever truly be explained?), I owed him the full story. I did not trust BOFFO to tell it. So I, Shiro Jones, temporary civilian, would tell him. If found out, I would not be shot. And I, too, had been chewed out before.
Of course, that was all contingent on my reaching the blood bank—assuming Gallo was even there at this time of night. I was making steady progress, but the hallway had started slowly pitching and yawing up and down, back and forth. I could navigate, but was spending an awful lot of time bumping into walls. When had they moved the hospital onto a cruise ship in the middle of a hurricane? Normally I was one to notice things like that.
Ah! There. There at the end of a seventy-mile-long hallway were the doors to the torture chamber/blood bank place. I was supposed to find someone there. I was supposed to tell them a sad story. I was supposed to make them feel worse about a situation they could never, ever change. And then I was supposed to go back to my life. Who had given me this terrible assignment? Someone with no heart. Someone who had been chewed out before.
I shoved against the doors; they remained stubbornly shut. Locked! No. Wait. I had the strength of a febrile grasshopper; I should make another attempt before being chewed out.
So, in my cleverness, I fell against the doors.
chapter seventy-five
I opened my eyes and saw Dr. Gallo’s black ones staring at me from a distance of less than a foot. “Ha!” I crowed. “My plan worked.”
“You’re insane,” he informed me, trying to take my pulse through all sorts of bandages.
“And you are drunk.” He was. As I had collapsed through the swinging doors, I caught a glimpse of him sitting bleary-eyed at his desk, a half-empty bottle of rum at his left elbow. In one of those odd moments in time that seem to take hours but are only microseconds, I’d seen his eyes widen, seen him clutch the side of his desk with whitened fingers, seen him vault the desk like a leather-wearing gymnast, and race to me in just enough time to catch me as my knees went. If I had not been groggy and dizzy and sweaty and racked with blinding pain, I would have complimented the man on his fine reflexes. He did that, drunk? What could he do when sober?
“Adrienne, what the fuck? How did you even get off the ward?”
“That is not my name.” Shhhh! That’s a secret! Shut up, inner voices. “The ward, phagh! I could have left anytime.” This was a lie. “I am a trained federal agent and they are overworked, underpaid, taken-for-granted hospital employees who are forever six steps behind me.”
“Good point. Now stay put,” he added, easing me off his lap. I was sorry to go. “I’m gonna call the—”
I clutched his bony wrist and squeezed in the right spot; he whitened, but said nothing, and nothing changed in his face. In that moment, I admired him greatly. In that moment, I may have fallen in love. Later, I could never be sure. The entire encounter had the quality of a fever dream.
“Wait,” I begged in a voice I had never, ever used with anyone else. “Wait. I have to tell you. I have to tell you about George and Luann, and all the dead boys in between. I can only tell you right now. Later I’ll be very official again. Later won’t be now.”
His eyebrows arched and the corner of his mouth twitched. “You realize, hon, you’re half out of your head with blood loss, among other things?”
“Of course. That’s why I had to come now.”
Now he was smiling; he looked delighted and clearly did not care if I saw that. “Now? When you’re half-dead from blood loss and half-doped on morphine? And dripping from sweat and you’ve torn several stitches, and I’m drunk off my ass on Captain Morgan’s and wondering if this is some sort of booze-induced hallucination and thinking very inappropriate thoughts about the helpless hottie in my lap? Now?”
“I am never helpless.” Then I laughed up at him. I shouldn’t have felt at all comfortable, cradled in his lap like I was, but I did. “Yes, now.”
“Fine.” He rubbed his eyes, reached in his pocket for a Kleenex, offered it to me, and when I waved it away, put it back in his pocket. “The quick version. And the second you pass out, I’m calling the ward.”
“All right.” I closed my eyes. Thought for a moment. Said, without opening them, “I have not passed out; I am gathering my thoughts.” He grunted, but did not comment. His hands were everywhere, but it did not feel inappropriate. He was smoothing and examining and even absently patting. I was the inappropriate one; I was dizzy, in pain, weak, thirsty, had a crushing headache … and was now sexually aroused. If I could have spared the breath to groan at my self-indulgence, I would have.
“Once upon a time, there was a boy named George Stinney who was legally murdered by the state of South Carolina on June 16, 1944.” As beginnings went, it was not exceptional. I was fortunate, though: I had a captive audience. Even if he had been willing to risk dumping my gunshot self off his lap to find a phone or gauze, he was as captivated by George Stinney as I had been.
“Then Luann died smiling,” I finished several days later. (To be fair, my sense of time might have been skewed.) “And that is all. There is no more.”
“Sure there is,” Max said. He was still deathly pale, still had breath that smelled like rum and coconut, but a lone tear had tracked from one eye down the side of his face, and I think he was unaware. “Why’d you tell me this? You could have told me the government-sanitized version and I never would have known.”
“I would have known. Besides…” Things were getting dark around the edges. The blood bank was suffering a gradual blackout, or I was close to passing out. “Besides, you took me flying. Your Honda … it’s like a storm cloud on wheels.”
“Oh, my. A poetic FBI thug.” He smirked, but did so in a way that made it impossible to take offense. Then the smile fell from his face and he bent and brushed a quick kiss across my forehead. “I’m in your debt forever. Not just for telling me about George. For getting them. Both of them. You need a favor, you come and see me first.”
I could hear rapid footsteps down the corridor. “I sense my imminent rescue. I suppose they were eventually going to notice my absence.”
He laughed, and held up his left hand to show me his cell. “I kind of called them when you weren’t looking.”
“You … sneaky…” I couldn’t finish. I was too annoyed. And too filled with admiration. Max Gallo: a man who, in another life without MPD, could have been the love of my life. “Sneaky … treacherous … wonderful…”
Fortunately for my pride, I passed out. Who knows what other insanity might have escaped my lips?
chapter seventy-six
Patrick whis
tled when he saw me in the hospital bed the next morning. “Oh, man! Cadence is gonna be pissed.”
“Do not,” I sighed, aware I felt more guilt than gladness to see him, “add to my troubles.”
He set the cake box down without looking and rushed over to my bed. “Jesus! What happened? You know what? Never mind. I know what happened. You took a bullet for somebody, didn’t you? Don’t answer that. Agghh!” He had plunged his hands into his thick red hair and they had locked into fists. “I can’t believe this! My God, is there gonna be permanent damage? You can’t go back to that apartment alone!”
“Calm down. Stop screaming. I will be fine. The prognosis is full recovery.” Gallo hadn’t fallen to pieces when I’d lurched through the blood bank doors like a blood-spattered Frankenstein.
Not fair, I told myself. Gallo was a doctor. He was used to mayhem.
“Full, painful recovery plagued by far too many visits from physical therapists. Oh, and there is nonsense about a medal. I won’t show up for it and that is all there is to it. How is Olive?”
“She’s with me,” he said absently. “After George told me you’d be laid up for a few days I went and got her. And there was a doctor in the hall who gave me this … he said he forgot to give it to you earlier. I think he was a doctor. He looked like a real hard-ass. Thin, dark?”
Gallo had come to visit me! “Oh, I must have missed him,” I politely told the man I no longer loved. Maybe … had never loved?
Patrick handed me a catalog of the latest Honda motorcycles. Ah! My reward for foiling evil and surviving the gunshot and then stumbling to him in the middle of the night to vomit up everything I knew about JBK. Fortunately I had a bank account Cadence did not know about. I opened the brochure and a small folded note fell out. I pretended to ignore it.
“They said that guy’s from the blood bank … you’ve been getting your own blood.”
Yours, Mine, and Ours Page 24
