Afterburn

by Colin Harrison

  "That, I will freely confess," said Morris, "was a mistake."

  "Why?" asked Jones.

  "You want a guy to talk, you don't drill his mouth."

  "Got a point there."

  Morris drew close and whispered, his breath metallic, like the side effect of medication. "You're all over the Village, Rick. You been snooping around, looking in shops and talking to people. Right? You think we don't know this?"

  "Ha-wait, wait," he breathed thickly. "She probably down there—could be anywhere . . . I don't know—"

  Morris wasn't listening. "Tommy, you pack the ice chest like I told you?"

  "In the car."

  "Go get it."

  "Right."

  "Also bring the camera."

  "You got it."

  "Hey, Rick," Morris said, "you know, she's not worth it, okay? I mean—hey!—we're reasonable people. You tell us, we drop you at the hospital, they patch you up. You're bleeding now, see. You're in a little bit of trouble. Tell us now and it's the emergency room."

  He made a noise with his mouth.

  "It's not a big problem. It's like five minutes."

  His groin felt wet, his head hot. His hands were cold, and he wanted to sleep. Maybe they would take him to the emergency room. Of course. He couldn't really die now, it wasn't time.

  Morris started the drill.

  Rick shut his eyes. "Jim-Jack," he called, mouth a socket of agony. "Bleeck-er."

  "What about it?"

  "Work there."

  "What days?"

  He didn't know, but they would not believe him if he said so. "Mon-day to Sat-day."

  "Nights, day?"

  "Yeah, yeah."

  "Downtown—we can pick her up anytime," said Tommy.

  "Right." Morris turned back to Rick. He looked at the drill, then started it. "Where's she living?"

  "I—I don't—" He didn't want to say it. He was sorry. He was sorry for everything, and he closed his eyes, choking.

  "It's coming, I can tell," Morris narrated. "I've seen this."

  "I love her . . . I love that girl!" The drill started near his ear and he began to cry, convulsing in despair at how worthless and weak and broken he was, a nobody afraid of dying. "I loved . . ." He sobbed shamefully and covered his eyes with his shackled hands.

  "No, no, Rick," explained Morris, "not that, not yet, you can't break down yet. You have to just hold on now, say the address. Just say it—you can. Just let it out."

  "I love her, I do!" he cried, hating himself.

  "I know you do," came Morris's voice of understanding. "That's admirable, I respect you for that, but it doesn't help anything. You have to tell us the address now, Rick. You have to say it. If you don't, then I'll give you the drill again. You know I will. Right? I know what I'm doing, Rick. I worked as a paramedic for nine years, I've seen everything. I have control of you, Rick. I have control of your body and your mind, and I have more things in my box that hurt. Now, you need to give me her address or it will get very bad for you."

  "Ah . . ." he breathed, not knowing what to do.

  The drill started. His eyes were closed, but the drill was so near he could smell the burn of the electric motor. The noise was close to his nostril, just inside, tickling—"East Fourth!" he cried. "East Fourth . . . First Avenue. Blue building. The mailbox says Williams."

  "Williams?" said Morris, withdrawing the drill.

  "Yeah."

  Morris let the drill stop. "Good, very good."

  A few minutes passed. He dribbled spitty blood from his mouth. He didn't care about the ankle or the rib, it was the tooth, all gone, all drilled away, the roots sensitive to the air, his tongue feeling the hole in his cheek. They sat him up again and gave him a carton of orange juice. He spilled some of it down his shirt. It burned his tooth but cleaned out his throat.

  "Okay?" asked Rick finally. "Thah's it?"

  Morris shook his head. "You didn't tell us about the money."

  "What?"

  Tommy dragged a large ice chest across the floor. A Polaroid camera swung from his neck.

  "The big money, the boxes."

  "There's no money like that!" cried Rick. He tried to stand but fell to the floor. "You gotta take me to the hospital now!"

  "We're not quite done here," Morris noted. "Tommy, show Rick the ice chest."

  Tommy pulled over the cooler. "I usually take this on my boat."

  "We've got this thing under control, Rick," said Morris. "Help him back up on the table." He wet his finger in his mouth, then pulled off his wedding ring and slipped it into his pocket. "Okay, so now we're going to find out if you know where the money is."

  "Nah—" He didn't understand.

  "This is under control, Rick, you don't have to worry."

  He couldn't really talk, his mouth was so swollen and thick. Morris pointed to his arms.

  "We're going to cut one off."

  "Nah! Please!" He checked Morris's eyes.

  "Tommy, you put film in that fucking camera?"

  "'Course."

  "Tony wants proof, see."

  "Fuck!" yelled Rick. "What? What?"

  "Left or right? We'll accommodate."

  He didn't believe them, did he?

  "Which?" asked Morris.

  "Need the right!"

  "It'll be the left, then." He pointed to Rick's handcuffs. "Take it off the left, and cuff his right to the table."

  Morris opened one of the carpenter's boxes while the men held Rick and moved the handcuffs. "I have an arterial hemostat I'm going to put on your upper arm," he said softly. A sweetness, even a calm appeared to pass into him. "Nobody is going to bleed to death. And no problem on the limb recovery. Cooled, you've got four hours maybe. So there's no problem."

  "I fucking told ev-thing!" Rick cried.

  Morris came over and sat down. "See, this is what we're going to do, Rick. We had a good discussion, but now we have to talk about the big topic. If you tell us where the money is, we stop right now."

  Rick searched Morris's face for an explanation. He didn't understand anything anymore.

  "But if you don't, then my procedure keeps going. Once it goes far enough, though, we have to keep going. I'm not leaving a messy job. So that's where we are. Okay, also, listen to me, because the more anxiety you allow yourself, the more unfortunate everything gets." Morris's eyes moved closer to Rick. No redness, no fatigue in them. "First I'm going to start a saline IV on your other arm. This allows me to compensate for the blood loss, which really should not be excessive if I get the artery clamped quickly enough—"

  "No, no!"

  "I'm figuring that I really must have that artery closed off in sixty seconds, forty-five being optimal," Morris explained. "On the IV, I'll use a fourteen-gauge, which is big enough to give you a liter a minute if I have to. It also lets me administer morphine as necessary. We'll be starting you off at fifteen milligrams, but watching to see if your respiration drops. I usually give the patient five milligrams, but with this, I think fifteen is warranted." Morris nodded to himself, satisfied by his own analysis. "I'll be cutting through the upper arm, through the biceps muscle and the humerus—just one bone—and then through the triceps. It's easy. Muscle and bone. I don't feel like going through the elbow joint, see. The joint is very complicated—lot of nerves and blood vessels running through there. I do have enough morphine for the pain that would cause—that's not the problem, it's that if it got messy I might have a little difficulty finding the artery." He was a man in his element. "If it takes me ninety seconds to get you clamped, then we might have a bleed-out. Upper arm, the artery is no problem. Also, if we cut through the elbow, your arm is damaged forever. But the upper arm—should be fine. The boys at the replantation center at Bellevue are magicians if they've got a clean cut. So the key to this whole deal is the aforementioned hemostat." He held up a stainless-steel needle-nosed clamp with locking finger grips. "More effective than a tourniquet. Once we get the arm off and the clamp on, you're in good shap
e, Rick. You're not going to die. You might feel that way, you might go into shock, but you are absolutely not going to die. The body's ability to recover is astounding. The body protects itself. We'll make sure the wound is washed with betadine and bandaged so that the boys are working on a wound that is clean. Tommy will take pictures of each step. As for the arm itself, I'll be putting a piece of Saran Wrap on the cut surface and then will wrap the whole thing in aluminum foil and put it on the ice. It won't be in direct contact with the ice. I don't want you worrying about that, either. We want that arm cool but not frozen. That arm, once chilled down rapidly in a sanitary environment, is going to be good for three, four hours. You'll be in Bellevue by then and they'll be sewing it back on. I'm making it easy for those guys."

  Morris appeared to wait for Rick to protest, but he felt despondent, exhausted, the pain sawing across his bleeding tooth stump, his eyesight purpled and darkening.

  "I'm going to take good care of you, okay? But if you try to resist me now, start calling me names or fighting, then I'm going to give you Narcan. What is that, you might ask? I call it God in a syringe. It blocks the reception of morphine. The antidote. You can make guys who look dead from an OD get up and sing. I've done that, a real crowd-pleaser, let me tell you. You start giving me shit, Rick, then I'm going to give you two milligrams of Narcan and that is going to block the fifteen milligrams of morphine that I gave you before. It takes twenty seconds to work. All right? Which is to say that your arm is going to go from feeling not bad at all to feeling like someone just cut it off, which"—Morris calmed himself—"of course, someone did." He looked at Tommy. "Get my circular saw. Also, I folded some plastic overalls in there. Okay, we'll put that music on."

  "You got tapes?" Tommy's voice echoed in the cavernous room.

  I love my hand, my fingers, Rick thought with strange detachment. "Wait, wait," he said weakly. "Wait—"

  "I've got the Rolling Stones, I've got Salt-N-Pepa, the Bruce Springsteen, Willie Nelson—you know, 'Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain'—all kinds of good music." Morris turned back to Rick. "You got a request?"

  Rick made a fist with his left hand, just to remember. Oh, Paul, he thought, please do something.

  "Make your pick," ordered Morris.

  He spittled a piece of tooth onto his lower lip. The pain came back to his rib. "Give me the Bruce."

  "Great choice." Morris nodded his approval. "Fine. Make it loud, Tommy. Good. Yes. I'll take the saw." He looked at Rick, his mouth a tight slit of concentration. "This goes quick, man, just listen to the music."

  | Go to Contents |

  Room 527, Pierre Hotel

  Sixty-first Street and Fifth Avenue, Manhattan

  September 21, 1999

  SOMEBODY BUYS HIS SUITS FOR HIM, she realized, seeing Charlie leaning darkly against the hotel bar reading a sheet of paper and sipping his drink. He didn't notice her come toward him, which worried her, since she'd spent what time and money she had to make him think she was someone she was not, buying new lipstick, perfume, and a pair of fake gold earrings. How ridiculous the trouble she'd gone to, considering that he'd probably gone to no trouble at all! Wriggling into her one little black dress again—what choice did she have? Well, you gotta do who you gotta do, they used to say at the prison. She'd worked the lunch shift at Jim-Jack's, finally leaving at four, then hurried home through the windy rain to shower and put herself together, wondering what men in their late fifties liked in a younger woman. Youth, for starters. But nothing flashy or cheap-looking. If a man like Charlie wasn't comfortable, he wasn't going to get involved. He would smile politely and move on. Now she slipped past the few other men at the bar and let her hand touch Charlie's sleeve.

  "Hey, mister," she whispered close as he turned. "Remember me? I'm that girl who flirted with you last night." She kissed him quickly on the cheek, leaving a smudge. She felt nervous, a little insecure, but a drink would fix that. "Been here long?"

  "No." He shook his head and folded the paper and slipped it into his breast pocket. They stood silently, and as before he seemed to be studying her. But his attention was not cold and hard; rather, it seemed to come from some other part of him. His blue eyes were sorrowful. She remembered what he'd said about his son.

  She ordered a drink. "You seem glum. Or preoccupied. Or noncommittal."

  "Nah," he said, "just business." He shifted his weight uncomfortably.

  "Just glum old preoccupying business?"

  "That's it," he said. "Everybody wears a nice suit and you try to kill the other guy first."

  She touched the scar on his hand, rubbed it. "Why did you become a businessman?"

  "I wanted to make money."

  "Did you ever have any other inclinations?"

  "You mean artistic or musical or something? Tap-dancing?"

  "I don't know."

  "At the time I had to think of something to do to support my family. I had to pull a rabbit out of a hat."

  She sipped at her glass, not sure what to say.

  "I was in my early thirties and I needed a new start."

  It seemed impossible that he'd never been able to do whatever he wanted. "Something happened?" she asked.

  "Something always happens, Melissa. I'm sure a few things have happened to you."

  "Why do you say that?" She felt the drink warming her cheeks. "You don't think I'm just some nice young woman who likes talking to you?"

  "I think you are nice and young, and what I don't get is why you're not married already or with some great guy starting out."

  If you only knew, she thought. "If you only knew," she said.

  "It can't be that bad."

  "No," she agreed. "It's not. But I wandered into this place last night and heard you eviscerate whoever it was on the phone, and then you glared at me like I was the problem and I thought, Well, here's a live one." She gave him a soft jab in the arm. "Okay?"

  "Okay." He smiled. "You're something."

  "I better be something," she teased. "How else am I going to get your attention?"

  "You did all right in that department."

  "I noticed before that your back looks like it hurts."

  "I'm okay."

  He was a little defensive. "You just walked stiffly, that's all."

  He didn't say anything.

  "You hurt it?"

  He pulled the same piece of paper from his breast pocket, scanned it distractedly, refolded it, and put it back. "Long time ago."

  Again a silence fell between them. He looked down with a troubled expression. She wanted to kiss his brow. He can't say it, she thought; he wants to, but he doesn't know how. She leaned closer to him. "Charlie?" she whispered.

  "Yes?"

  She kept her hand on his arm, rubbed the material of his suit ever so softly. "Get a room."

  "Here?"

  She nodded. "C'mon. You can lie down. I'll give you a back rub and make charming conversation that you won't appreciate because you like the back rub so much."

  He studied her, with sadness it seemed, a yearning that pained him. "Melissa," he exhaled, "I'm an old guy. I—"

  She touched her finger to his lips. "Trust me," she whispered next to his cheek. "We'll just talk if that's what you want."

  He sighed heavily, as if unable not to comply, and pulled out his billfold. He slipped a credit card onto the bar, then found a napkin, unclicked his fountain pen, and wrote, as she watched the letters appear, "I need a nice room for two, now. Arrange this, please—and tip yourself $500." He beckoned the bartender and slid the card and napkin toward him.

  The bartender inspected the napkin, blinked his quiet assent, did not look at Christina, then disappeared to the phone.

  THE ROOM WAS TOO COLD, and he turned down the air conditioning. They left the lights off, and the last edge of the day fell in through the windows. He sat in a padded armchair and faced her, and she said to herself, Look at his eyes, that's where you'll find him. The other things are not him, maybe even a disguise somehow, as you have
disguised yourself for him. She lit a cigarette. "I shouldn't do this."

  "I don't mind."

  She took one puff, then stubbed it out. She wondered if she could seduce him. She wondered why she wanted to know. "When you were my age what were you doing?" she said.

  "How old are you?"

  "Twenty-seven."

  He was silent. "I was flying airplanes."

  She was surprised. "What kind of planes?"

  "Fighter jets."

  She examined him, trying to connect the statement to the man she saw. "How fast could you go?"

  "I did Mach two lots of times. About sixteen hundred miles an hour."

  All she could see was one half of his face. The light caught the wet curve of his eyeball. "Did you fly in the Vietnam War?"

  He nodded.

  "You dropped bombs?"

  "Yes."

  "Missiles and napalm and all that stuff?"

  "All that stuff, yes."

  "You saw Saigon during the war?"

  "Absolutely."

  "You ever cheat on your wife over there?"

  "No."

  "Never?"

  "Never."