“What’s the matter, Candy? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“Lirium, I… what happened to you? I’ve been so worried.” Her oily, false-maternal voice creeps over my skin and makes me shudder. Her eyes are wide, trying hard to turn the devil-green into something resembling innocence.
“Don’t bother,” I say. “I know you sold me out to Kolek’s mob.”
“I don’t know who told you that, but I would never—”
I lean forward and rest my hands on the arms of her chair. She shrinks back.
“Kolek’s chief collector told me. Don’t worry, he’s dead now.” I let that linger a moment while Candy sizes me up anew. I want her to think I’m a ruthless killer. Just because I need to have her alive a little longer doesn’t mean she needs to know that I’m not. “You sold out Ophelia and me both. I made it out, but Ophelia wasn’t so lucky. You killed her, Candy. So…” I push back from the chair, out of her face, and lean against the desk. “Tell me why I shouldn’t kill you, just to make things even. Because drinking down all your life energy is sounding awfully good to me right now.”
She holds up one hand, the other gripping the side of the chair. “Lirium, let’s not be hasty. No one needs to die. That’s a terrible shame about Ophelia, but you can’t hold me responsible—”
“Oh, but I do,” I say calmly, not moving. “You’ll have to do better than that.”
Her face contorts with fear and panic. “What do you want? Just tell me, and I’m sure we can be reasonable and work something out.”
“I want a transfer. I’m thinking Florida sounds nice.” Of course I’m not going to transfer anywhere, at least not at first. But she’ll have to log in—while I’m watching—to put it through. I don’t know if just having access to Candy’s files will be enough to figure out how high the conspiracy goes, but it’s a start. I’ll have to knock her out or drain her until she passes out or something, so I’ll have time to search her files.
I'll probably enjoy that more than I should.
“A transfer?” She lets out a shaky sigh, like she’s trying to figure out if I’m serious. Then her green eyes narrow, probably trying to find my angle on this.
“Here’s what you’re going to do, Candy: register my tracker, recommend a transfer, and put a hold on any collections until the transfer goes through. I don’t want Kolek’s men showing up at any of my assignments.”
“Lirium, I wouldn’t—” She stops at my cold stare.
“I killed Kolek’s enforcer and two of his henchmen.” I lean in again and she tries to find a hole in the chair with her back. “I don’t plan to be anywhere you can find me until the relocation goes through, but if I happen to meet someone from Kolek’s mob in a dark alley, you had better hope they’re the winners in that fight. Because I’ll be coming straight here afterwards. Or maybe I’m foolish to allow you to live at all,” I muse. “Maybe I should just kill you now. I hear there’s good freelance work in Florida.” I’m completely bluffing now; I don’t even know if debt collectors freelance outside the mob.
She visibly swallows. “Lirium, please…”
I straighten up from her chair. “As much as I enjoyed my time in the mob…” I flex my hand open, and her gaze fixates on the red burn marks across my palm. She knows exactly what those are. “I would really prefer a cushy government job somewhere tropical.”
She nods fervently.
“Log in, register me, and submit the transfer. While I watch.” I gesture to the screen on her desk. “Those are the terms. You can say ‘yes, Lirium’ or you can die now, and I’ll find out how good the freelance business is in Florida this time of year. Your choice.”
Candy’s eyes go wide. “Yes, Lirium.”
“Good girl.”
My palm phone buzzes. “Get started,” I say to Candy, ignoring the phone. But then I realize the only person who has my number is quaking in front of me, wondering if I’m going to kill her after all… and Apple Girl.
I flip open my palm screen and take the call. “Yes.”
“Joe!” Elena’s voice makes my heart jump, and not just because I like that she’s speaking to me. There’s panic in it.
I turn away from Candy and drop my voice. “What is it?”
“You need to get over to Mercy Hospital right away. I’m sending you the coordinates. I’ll meet you there.”
“You’re meeting me there? What…?”
“Joe, I found your mom.” Her voice is soft now. “She’s scheduled to be transferred out today.”
My mouth works, but nothing comes out. My mom is in the hospital. Candy’s chair behind me squeaks, and I swing back to look at her, my mind spinning with Elena’s words. Candy reaches inside her purse for something, so I drop my phone hand from my ear and lunge for her. I catch her wrist, and she yelps as I pull her hand out of her purse, but she’s only holding a tracker scanner. I shove her away, and she recoils back into the chair.
Words slam through my head. My mom is sick. They’re transferring her out. The world telescopes down, playing them again and again in my mind. The bottom drops out of my stomach. I stare at the login screen on Candy’s computer, still waiting for her to key in the passcode.
Something squawks from my hand screen. I lift it to my ear.
“Joe!” Elena cries. “Joe, are you okay?”
“I’ll meet you there.” My voice is dead. “I’m leaving now.”
I take a taxi and yell at the driver the entire way to Mercy Hospital. It’s a wonder we don’t get in a wreck. I leave without paying, ignoring the cries of protest. I hope the driver doesn’t come after me or try to slow me down, because I might kill him if he does.
I stride into the hospital lobby, but stall out in the middle of the entrance, unsure what to do. I’ve never visited someone in a hospital before, even though I’ve been in one dozens of times on business. I freeze up. Should I flash my debt collector badge and ask for Alice Miller? If I was really here to collect her debt, I would already have her file.
Oh God. Some debt collector has her file.
Panic starts to bubble up through my chest. How can I find out what room she’s in? How can I get her out without the staff calling security to arrest the rogue debt collector who’s kidnapping a patient?
What if she doesn’t want to see me?
I run my hand through my hair, clutching a fistful of it and trying to think.
“Joe.” Elena arrives at my side, seemingly out of thin air and slightly breathless.
I grab hold of her shoulders. “Elena! Do you know where she is? I need to get her out! What am I going to do?”
Elena gently pries herself out of my grip and hooks her arm around mine, dragging me off to the side. I can tell I was making a scene by the way heads turn, following us to the small upholstered waiting bench. I put a hand to my temple in a belated attempt to not broadcast my face to everyone in the room. The attention slowly drifts from us.
Elena keeps her voice low. “I found your mom’s original health records. She changed her name a couple of times, but she always had to use Alice Miller when she was checking in for health services, so it wasn’t that hard to track.” She speeds up with my panicked look. “Anyway, she got sick about two months ago. She had a small heart attack. They were going to let her go, but she contracted pneumonia while she was in the hospital and got very sick. Almost died. She was in intensive care for almost a month.”
“Intensive care?” I say, my voice weak. Intensive care is very expensive. There’s no way my mom has that kind of money. That must be why they’re transferring her out. Elena takes my hand. I don’t notice it shaking until it quivers in hers. I grip her hand, mostly to stop the shakes.
“The intensive care wiped out what savings she had,” Elena says. “The actuarial tracker automatically engages whenever someone goes into intensive care. That’s when she got on the Department’s radar. But she recovered, and she was doing well for a while. They were about ready to release her, when—”
“She got si
ck again.” I know the story. I’ve read the files of too many debtors not to see the pattern. Once you’re sick, the bills pile up. You use up your savings, then you get a secondary infection or illness. If you don’t recover fast enough, you quickly use up whatever you could possibly earn. Especially if you’re a pharmacist’s assistant, living hand to mouth with a low-wage job. Even if you’re still young. My mom’s too young to be having heart attacks, but if you start having them that young, then something’s wrong. Something genetic. Which means your life expectancy goes way down.
“She had another small heart attack,” Elena says. “This time they did surgery, but the damage was already severe.” She pauses and searches my face. “She needs a transplant, Joe.”
“A new heart.”
“Yes. They could have put in cybernetics, but—”
“Cybernetics cost money.” I can’t look at Elena now. My gaze sweeps the waiting room, and I see the other faces: the sick and their families, coming to the hospital for what they hope will be their cure and not their death. Sometimes it can be both—a cure that works, but then some secondary problem takes hold, and the bills pile up until the debt collectors are called in. The actuaries can’t foresee everything. Normally, if they know there’s no way the debtor’s life will cover the balance, the doctors don’t even try. Those patients are lucky: they just go home to die, taking the rest of their life energy with them. The unlucky ones—like my mom, with no family to help pay, no one to care for her—rack up bills at the hospital. Until they reach the balance and are transferred out.
“I’m so sorry, Joe,” Elena says, pulling my gaze back to her.
“I should have been here for her.” I’m not sure if I’m talking to her or myself.
“You’re here now,” she says, and that snaps me out of my fugue.
I drop her hand and cover my face with both of mine, rubbing away the remorse and pain and panic. My mom’s dying, and I’m only here because I screwed up so massively that the mob is looking to kill her first, if only they can figure out where she is.
I push all that away. There’s only one thought I can afford to have right now.
“I have to get her out, Elena.”
“I know,” she says quietly. “I have a plan, but I’m not sure if it’s going to work.”
I look at her for a moment. Her soft brown eyes are lit with that serious determination again. “Thank you.” I want to say more, but the words are stuck in my throat.
“You might want to wait to thank me until you hear my plan.”
I ride the elevator to my mom’s floor by myself.
Elena has gone to find her nurse-friend in the pediatrics ward. The one who has helped sneak out kids before they can be transferred out and who will help us smuggle out my forty-year-old mother who is dying way before she should.
The elevator dings on my arrival, and the doors slide open. I stride out, my face set in my typical mask: a stoic imitation of Death come to reap the dying’s life energy and transport it to someone more worthy. I hope the mask sufficiently covers everything that’s roiling inside me.
My trenchcoat flaps against my legs as I stop briefly at the nurses’ desk to flash my credentials. The nurses hardly look up. They’ve already seen me coming with my jackboots and aura of death. They must know Alice Miller in room 403 is on the list. Looking the other way is what nurses prefer to do, and I hope these nurses in particular are the kind who keep their distance while the actual killing happens.
Because that’s what I’m going to do—kill my mother.
Elena’s plan is terrible. Horrific. And probably the only way we can get my mom out of the hospital alive. I didn’t realize how difficult it was to get the kids out of the system; I just didn’t spend any time thinking about it, really. But I should have known it would take more than just signing out, once the Department of Health and Life has decided that your life energy belongs to them and sends a debt collector for you.
I whisk away from the nurses’ desk, my boots scuffing the polished floor. My reflection runs ahead of me. It’s the spook that has haunted me ever since I joined the Agency, making his appearance again. I don’t spare him any more than a glance as I arrive at the door of room 403. I’m not an angel of death today, and the spook can go back to hell where he belongs.
I hesitate at the threshold, bracing myself, then force myself to cross it.
I don’t get more than two steps inside the door before my feet refuse to go any further. My mom is hooked up to monitor patches and IVs and generally looks like the dying I visit all the time. Only they don’t normally have my mom’s pretty face ravaged by two months in the hospital. Her beautiful, long brown hair has thinned, and it tangles in a limp attempt to cover the pillow. Her long fingers have turned into sunken sticks, knobbed at each knuckle, like the flesh has already left and only her bones remain.
I must have been holding my breath, because all of a sudden, I have to pull in air, and a sound escapes me. It draws her attention away from the blind-covered window letting in small stripes of hazy sunshine. Her clear blue eyes have the same dead look as the last time I saw her more than two years ago. But they come alive for a moment when she realizes it’s me.
“Joey.” Her voice is a wheezy imitation of her true one. “I should have known it would be you that would come to collect my debt.”
Her words suck all the air from my chest. “Mom,” I say, but I can’t seem to move, like my boots are welded to the floor by the weight of her assumption. My head slowly shakes as if I can ward off her words with the motion. “I’m not… I wouldn’t…”
She frowns, just slightly, like even that is more effort than she has energy for. “Then what are you here for, Joe?”
I can’t help it. My face twists up, and tears crowd the edges of my eyes. My legs finally unlock, and I stumble to her. I fall to my knees by her side and hold her hand to my forehead. It’s cool and frail, but I press it to my feverish head, like I can’t live without the contact.
“I’m sorry, Mom.” My words are sobs. “I’m so sorry I left. I shouldn’t have… I should have found you sooner. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay, Joey.”
I feel a light pressure on the side of my head. She’s petting me, the way Elena did with Tilly. I keep my eyes closed, head bent, hoping she doesn’t stop. But she does. I look up through tear-blurred eyes. Her worn-out blue ones have leaked tears as well. I gently brush them away. Her skin is so thin, too thin, under my careful touch.
I swallow the rest of my tears and say, “I’m here to get you out of the hospital before your debt collector comes.”
“Oh, sweetie.” She pets my hair again. Her hand is so light, I almost don’t feel it. “I’m dying. There’s no stopping it. You of all people should know that.”
Her words slice through me. “You still have time. We still have time. You can come with me and we can… we can have that time together.”
“I need to pay my debt, Joey.”
“No!” I say fiercely. “You don’t.”
“It’s not something you can change. There are some things that happen. Bad things. To people you love.” She pats my cheek. “Like when you found out what you could do. That you would have to be one of those people who… do this.” She makes a small motion with her shoulders that might have been a shrug if she wasn’t a woman on her deathbed. “If I could have taken that away from you, I would have. I never wanted you to have to live this way. Bringing death to so many, just so others could have their piece.”
“I know you hated what I was. What I am. But none of that matters now.”
“I don’t hate what you are, Joey. I never could hate you. You’re my baby boy.”
The tears slide from the corners of my eyes, and I don’t bother to try to stop them.
“I hated what I knew it would do to you.” She drops her hand to the bed, fatigue drawing down her face as well. She lets out a long sigh. “I wish I had been stronger for you, Joe. I am sorry for that.”<
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“Well, I’d tell you all the things I’m sorry for,” I say, wiping my face and standing up, “but right now I’m going to get you out of here. Then we’ll have time to tell each other all our mistakes.”
“You can’t just take me out of the hospital. Besides, they’ll find out what you did, and you’ll get in trouble. You don’t need to do that for me.”
“Yes, I do.”
“I’m going to die anyway, Joe. I might as well pay my debt.”
“Well, we’re certainly going to make it look that way.”
She frowns, and I can tell she’s not following me.
“I’m going to have to drain you of some life energy, Mom.” I can hardly believe I’m saying these words to her, and they twist a knife in my gut. “The nurses think I’m here to collect your debt, so we need to convince them that I have. They won’t be fooled if you don’t look, well, like you’ve been collected. I won’t take all your life energy… but I’ll tell the nurses that I’ve transferred you out. You’ll have to lie very still and, well, pretend that you’re dead. A nurse will come to take you away, but she’s a friend. She’s going to help us get you out. Then, once you’re away, I’ll give it all back to you—and more. You’ll feel better. I promise.” I don’t tell her that I’m afraid her heart won’t be able to take any of it. That I might actually kill her with this horrible, desperate idea to save her. But I know that her true debt collector is on the way, and we don’t have any other options.
“I don’t know, Joe. I’m worried that you’ll get caught for this. It can’t be legal.”
I give her a small smile. “It’s very not legal. One of the better not legal things I’ve done in a while, let me tell you.”
That earns me a smile. It’s a faded echo of the smiles I remember from my childhood. It almost breaks my heart.
“Okay.” I shuffle closer to her. “We don’t have a lot of time. I should probably… start.” I strip off the monitor patches and their signals go dead. The nurses shouldn’t be alarmed because this is what they expect to happen.
Promise (Debt Collector 7) Page 4
