Drum took a long pull from his own water bottle. She watched his adam’s apple bob up and down and wondered how good it would feel to make him taste his own blood. He put the bottle aside. Might need to make it last. “It is an MRI,” he said. “Very astute of you, officer. You might even pass for an educated member of society instead of a janitor with a night stick for a broom.”
She smiled. “I’d love to show you my streetsweeper.”
Drum wrinkled his nose again. “Let’s see just how educated you are, Sharon. What’s with those pictures. No, no, not the head, you can’t see it there.”
She picked up the full-body view and squinted in the low light. “Just looks like a guy with his skin missing.” She tilted it. “Kinda.”
“Kinda.”
“Fuck you, Fine. What is it I’m supposed to see?”
Just then Harlan let out a low moan through the electrical tape. Drum reached down and ripped it off, taking a layer of skin off his lips. Harlan’s foggy eyes flew open and he yelped in pain. He tried to sit up but the bag restricted him. He held his breath as his eyes flicked from Sharon to Fine. Drum took off the baseball cap and the night reflected iron from his strange irises. Harlan exhaled. “Oh, shit.”
“Harlan, this is Sharon. Very soon you two will be the best of friends. Or, at least on very intimate terms.”
“What’re you getting’ at, Jack?” Sharon said.
“Nothing like that, Sharon. I thought I’d established that I’ve not the least sexual interest in you. That includes voyeurism as well as direct action,” Drum said. “You and Harlan are going to be much closer than lovers in any respect.”
Sharon made eye contact with Harlan. “Just don’t do anything he tells you to do, man. He’ll break any deal he makes.” She held up her subtracted left hand. “I did not get paid to do this.”
“What the fuck is going on here!”
“Be quiet, man,” Sharon nodded at Fine. “He likes that.”
Harlan turned a moon face on Fine. He was sucking in great lung-fulls of air as if savoring a superior vintage.
“He likes what?” Harlan asked.
“Fear. Don’t fear him. This guy’s the—”
“Phobia Killer,” Harlan finished. “I know.”
Drum nudged Harlan’s U.S. Postal issue cocoon with his toe. “Really?”
Sharon’s eyebrows lifted.
“I, uh,” Am an idiot. “I’m psychic.” No, I’m dead. Jesus.
Drum leaned down until the lenses of his glasses almost crunched into Harlan’s. His breath pushed into Harlan’s nostrils. When Harlan was a kid he’d had a ball python that only ate once a month—big white rats with red eyes. When it had been a while since his last meal, Speedy’s breath had been dry and almost odorless. Fine’s breath was like that. Harlan’s heart bounced around in his chest like a rat caught in a terrarium with a hungry reptile…then something squeezed.
“Oh, god,” he whispered. “What?”
Drum’s breathing fogged both sets of glasses. “You can’t be that prescient or you would have foreseen that, wouldn’t you? Now, how did you know about me?” He let go of Harlan’s heart and sat back. “Don’t make me ask again, young man.”
Sharon leaned back, her spine digging into the pipe—her hitching post as she’d begun to think of it. Fine had done something to Harlan. Done something without touching him. “What’d you just do to him?” she demanded.
Fine kept his eyes on Harlan. “In a moment, Sharon.
“Harlan? How’d you know?”
Harlan couldn’t rat out Charlie and Emily, but he was dead if he didn’t tell Fine something. Ah, God, how’d he get into this? He’d just been going home. The light had been out at the top of the landing and he couldn’t see his door. He’d sparked up his Zippo and what? His memory was blurry here. Bells, iron bells. Red and orange eyes, dragon eyes, reflecting the fire in the dark like light off polished iron. And now here, this dark place that smelled like things so long dead they’d turned to paper. Fine had been waiting for him. He had figured out the switch with his MRI scan somehow.
“Harlan?”
“A friend told me about you. Someone I know from the hospital.”
“Someone? Someone with access to that faggot, no doubt. Not that this line of questioning really matters. What does matter, Harlan, is what you saw on my MRI scan and what Sharon has failed to see.” Fine looked at Sharon. “Well, officer, figure it out yet?”
Sharon flipped him her middle finger.
“How many bones are there in the human foot?”
Neither of them answered, but Harlan sucked in a hiss.
“Oh, you’ve got it now, do you, young man? Weren’t asleep during that particular anatomy lesson, were you?” Fine took off his right shoe and sock and held up his foot, wriggling the toes in the night air. He pushed the sole against Harlan’s face, slowly increasing the pressure until Harlan twisted his face away. “There are twenty-six bones in the human foot, Sharon,” Fine said, resting his damp foot against Harlan’s cheek. “Twenty-eight if you count the sesamoid bones at the base of the big toe.” Fine gripped into the meat of Harlan’s cheek with his toes, kneading it like dough. Harlan breathed through his teeth in ragged gasps.
“Get off him, dickhead,” Sharon said.
“Sharon, how many bones are in the foot in that MRI scan?”
“I’m going to guess twenty-eight, you sick fuck. Or maybe you got hooves?”
“Count them, Sharon. Harlan and I will wait.”
“Oh, come off it.”
“Count them or I’ll stand up and put my full weight on Harlan’s cheekbone. It’ll snap like a piece of kindling, won’t it Harlan?”
“All right.” Sharon squinted in the darkness, but the contrast between the black background of the scan and the lighter colored bones was high and obvious even in the gloom. After a minute she muttered, “Wait a minute.”
“Yes?”
“I counted twice.”
“Yes.” Fine said. “There are twenty-nine, aren’t there?”
“Yeah, what’s the deal?”
“Why don’t you tell her, Harlan?” Fine slid his foot off Harlan’s cheek, wiping his sole on Harlan’s stubble as if to scrap off old dogshit. “I’ll bet you know, don’t you.”
“I know you could use some serious Doctor Scholl’s, mother fucker.”
Fine kicked out with his heel and stars burst in Harlan’s vision. “Tell her!”
“Buh-black puh-people sometimes have one more bone in their feet than white people.”
Fine spread his palms. “There you have it.”
“No shit,” Sharon said, glancing at her own foot.
“Took a little for me to find it, but when I did I realized that you were holding out on me, Harlan. As it happens, things in my life have taken a somewhat inconvenient turn. I really don’t know quite what to do with myself to fix the situation and then I figured out that you’d switched my scan for someone else’s—an African American gentleman most likely. I wonder, Harlan, about your reasons.”
Harlan looked at the cop Fine kept calling Sharon. His eyes pleaded. Her own eyebrows knit. What could she do?
“Harlan, you cared enough to hide the truth in the first place, so I can’t imagine you’ll give it to me now. All I can do is threaten you with some kind of torture, but to be honest the prolonged contact I just endured with my foot on your face was enough to sicken me. I hate touching other people. I get what I need wirelessly.”
Harlan wasn’t going to hand Emily to this fucker. Not a chance. “Gee, then I guess you’re screwed here, huh?”
“No, Harlan, you’re not getting me.” Drum sighed. “I’m not going to touch you.” He turned his lamp eyes on Sharon. “Office Dimke is going to do it for me.”
Harlan looked at the cop. “What’s he talking about?”
“I don’t know. I’m not doing shit for—”
The rattle of Sharon’s pill bottle cut through the dark like a sidewinder underf
oot. Drum popped the top, pulled out a single capsule and bit about a quarter of it off. He spit the pink corner of the pill into his palm and held it out to Sharon. It glowed there in the dark. “Here, Sharon.”
She moved so fast that Harlan didn’t even see it. If she ever got her gun back, this cop would be one hell of a quickdraw. The change in her was almost instant even though it was impossible that the drug could have hit her system in so short a time. That little bit of pill was enough to reach into what was left of her mind and rip it out.
Fine bit off another sliver of pill and held it in his hand, this time out of her reach. “Sharon,” he said. “Scoop out one of Harlan’s eyes, would you?”
Harlan’s eyes rounded on Sharon as she crawled over toward him. She was looking right at him—his left eye, actually—but there was no connection between the two of them. He’d gone from human to obstacle in her mind. Harlan knew a junkie when he saw one and he knew that made her capable of things most people would never do. She reached out and pulled off his glasses, turning herself into a dark blue and tan blur. This shit couldn’t happen. It couldn’t. He was going to wake up any second now. This is what he got for reading Poe and then going to sleep. Harlan squeezed his eyes shut and fell into the velvet darkness. Every muscle in his face pinched, collapsing on itself. He whispered, “Hear the tolling of the bells, Iron Bells.” as Sharon’s fingernails pried into the corner of his eye. Harlan’s shrieks pealed into the night.
~~~~~~~~
Chapter 22
SAMUELS’S KNIGHT CHARGED over one square and up three to challenge the encroaching horde. “Take that, ye’ varlet!” His Arthurian accent was crap.
Marty Jenny—sitting up in her hospital bed, in jeweled blue lipstick and matching nails—looked from Samuels to the chessboard perched on the tray table and back to the old man. “You sure you wanna’ do that?”
“Have at thee!”
“’Kay.” Marty pushed his queen’s rook over with a dragon claw fingernail and scooped up the hapless horsy. “Check, honey.”
Samuels crossed his arms and sat back. In his red bathrobe and white hair he really did look the part of a disheveled saxon lord. “Oy,” he said. “How long did you say you’ve been playing this game?”
“What time you got, sugar?”
Samuel’s checked his watch. “Three forty-seven.”
Marty winked, blue glitter eye-shadow throwing sparks. “Forty seven minutes.”
Samuels rubbed his chin, scrutinized the board. Aha! His king’s bishop sliced through the center of Marty’s defenses, blocking her check and threatening her queen. “Take that, boychick.”
Marty bit the tip of a nail. After a moment she spit a speck of glitter from the corner of her mouth, her tongue a tease of pink. She nudged a pawn up a single square. “That checkmate, Mr. Samuels?”
Samuels chuckled. “I don’t think…” He crossed his arms again and leaned forward. He could move his knight, no that was gone. He’d already castled, and if he moved his king to take Marty’s pawn then… His shoulders slumped, but a smile bent his mustache.
“You’re a natural, kid. Yuri Gellar couldn’t have done it better. Hell, Big Blue couldn’t have done it better!” He laughed and shook his head. “Not that I’m any sort of a match for Gellar or IBM.”
“I know what IBM is, but I’m at a loss on the others.”
“Ah, Yuri Gellar was—is—a famous chess master who was the undisputed champeen, but IBM built a super computer back in the 70’s called Blue that beat him. Of course, a cell phone has more brain power than that thing did and it was bigger than a refrigerator. That was back in the day when they were just beginning to talk about people having computers in their homes. Most average folks couldn’t imagine what we’d use a computer for.”
“Didn’t you tell me you used to be an accountant?”
“Ah, you think if anyone could see the use of a computer it would have been a counter of beans, yes?”
“Yeah.”
“Back in my hey-day I could sling numbers faster with a hand cranked adding machine than one of those vacuum tube-gutted monsters. And I had a friend back in school who learned how to crunch on an old abacus. You couldn’t even see his fingers move he was so fast. And accurate? Don’t get me started on accurate.”
Marty smiled. She’d learned that the best way to get Mr. Samuels to spin out one of his wonderful stories was to throw a simple question every now and again and then step back to let the deluge begin. “What was his name?”
“Albert Takashi.”
Marty tasted it. “Takashi.”
“He was one of my very best friends.” Samuels stared down at the chessboard and fingered a few of the pieces into a classic wedge opening. “He was third generation immigrant and spoke better English than I did. Moved to New York from California when his father decided he wanted more for his boy than a drag line fishing license.”
Marty tipped her head at his silence. “What happened to Albert?”
“He and his family were shipped off to one of those goddamned internment camps after Pearl Harbor. In Oklahoma if you can believe that nonsense.”
He blinked and looked out the window. Marty watched his face. Age did this—filled you with life and everything that came with it. A nurse squeaked by out in the hall. The air conditioner seemed very loud.
“Albert and his father were both killed when they tried to stop a guard from raping Albert’s thirteen year old sister. Shot them both like dogs. Said they’d been trying to pass coded messages to enemy spies in the area. Albert’s sister found me over a decade after she and her mother were released. Told me the truth about how they died.”
Marty reached out and put a young, painted hand over an old, liverspotted one. Samuels looked up. He patted Marty’s hand. “You’re a good kid, Michael.”
“Marty.”
Samuels shook his head. “Now how do I know when it’s Marty and when it’s Michael?”
Marty blew on her phantasmagoric fingernails. “When I’m in character, honey, I’m Marty. When I’m not, I’m Michael.”
“And when you’re in character I’m also to refer to you in the feminine her, she, etc.?”
“Coo-rect, sweetheart.”
Samuels nodded. “I can do this. I can do this.”
“You’re ahead of most people even just trying, Mr. Samuels. I appreciate it.”
Samuels waved her off. “It’s who you are, yes?”
Marty smiled. “Yes.”
“And have your predilections ever caused another human being any harm?”
“No.”
“Then more power to you—uh, girlfriend?”
“You ever thought of adopting a twenty-something drag queen with a rotten ticker?”
Samuels laughed. “Ah, you don’t want me for a father, kid. You’d just end up having to pay for an old folks’ home sooner rather later.”
“Such a pessimist.”
“Or, I was thinking,” said Samuels. “I could marry a young witch and learn the secret to eternal life.”
“Think that would work for you, huh?”
“Well, if you can reverse your gender, I might just be able to reverse the aging process, yes?”
Marty thought about it for a second. “Oh, why the hell not?” She tapped the board. “You wanna’ go again?”
Samuels gathered his courage, his ego, and his horrible accent. “It would be an honor, me lady.” He sat up a little straighter. “But I must warn thee, the, uh, gauntlets are off. No more mister nice knight.”
Marty winced. “Terrible.”
“Yes, thank you. Have at thee!”
Marty beat him in twenty-three minutes this time.
* * *
“ARE YOU GOING into see Mr. Samuels?” Charlie asked over his protein shake.
“Yeah,” Emily said. “He’s getting discharged today. I thought I’d see if he wanted an escort home.”
“Escort, huh? You know that’s good money in New York.”
&nb
sp; “Sewer brain.”
He raised an eyebrow and took another sip of protein shake.
“Jesus, how do you drink that shit?”
“It’s just fuel. Gives me everything I need without having to worry about the stuff I don’t. Takes less time to make than real food, too.” He took another sip. “What? What are you looking at?”
She laughed at him. “It’s just that you said all that out loud is all.”
“Oh, shut up.”
She looked at his protein sludge and shook her head. Emily couldn’t imagine treating food like it was gasoline, but men are strange. She stared across the kitchen table at this man she loved. There, she was thinking it straight-up now. She loved Charlie. He was naked to the waist in an old pair of jeans and bare feet. He was naked under the jeans, too. She’d watched him pull them over his ass when she finally let him out of bed twenty minutes ago. And that only because he had to start thinking about going on shift. Could she tell him? People freaked out when you told them how you felt about them. Especially if they were male people. Not like she’d had a lot of experience in the unclouded emotions department, but this one was hers. The feeling came from the inside of her white-noise fortress.
She had the urge to stretch out past the barrier and check, peek in and see if he felt the same. But that would be cheating. Besides, what would happen if she couldn’t turn it off again? She’d just started getting used to the idea of not eating a bullet from her Dad’s gun.
“You want one? I could whip one up for you.”
“One? Oh, a shake, no.” Her face crinkled. “Yeesh.”
“There’s regular food in the fridge.” He stood up and walked around behind her. Charlie printed the side of her neck with a kiss. Her hair smelled like his shampoo. He reached around her in a gentle bear hug, conscious of her breasts under a pilfered tee-shirt against his arms. She looked one hell of a lot better in it than he did. “I’m going in, but I’m off in about twelve hours. Stay here if you want, steel my stuff, read the mail, etcetera.”
Emily leaned her head against his. “Mmm. And international phone calls?”
“Many as you want.”
“You’re very accommodating. It’s that thing I did last night, isn’t it?”
“Nah, I just like you in my accommodations.”
Emily turned around in the chair and put her hands on his face. “Listen.”
Empathy Page 22
