Red Sky at Night, page 28
“Don’t worry about him,” Pepper said. “He’s lovesick is all it is. A silly boy who’s been carving hearts in tree trunks, putting my initials inside. Go on, Tran, load up your luggage. Mr. Echeverria isn’t going to do anything to you.”
Tran hesitated, saying something in Vietnamese, something so pissed-off and angry, she didn’t need any translation. Then he came forward and chucked the luggage in the rear and scurried around to the passenger door and got in.
“Now look, Echeverria. I’m just taking Tran to the bus station. Sending him on his way. Tomorrow, I’m taking the boat out like you said. Give me ten minutes, wait right here, I’ll be back and we’ll talk some more about this.”
Fuck that. Don’t try to bullshit me, Pepper. You’re running off, I can see what’s going on here.”
He came around to the front of the hearse and stood in its path and said, “Get out of the car and get your hands up, both of you sex freaks.”
Pepper opened the door and got in behind the wheel.
“One minute you want to marry me, next minute you’re going to kill me. You’re not convincing me of your mental stability, Echeverria.”
“Get out of the fucking car. I’m warning you.”
A light came on across Fleming. Some old man stepped out onto his porch wearing pajama bottoms and carrying a white cat in his arms. He stood at the railing of his porch and stroked the cat and watched Echeverria aim through the windshield of the hearse. He had an old bony chest that was yellow and papery in the porchlight.
Pepper cranked up the engine. All the talking she’d been doing had made her jaw ache worse than ever. A tom-tom throbbed in her throat.
Pepper put the car in gear and inched forward toward Echeverria, trying to nudge him out of the way.
He stepped back, stiffened his arms, and the goddamn windshield exploded.
Tran howled and slithered down to the floorboard. There was glass everywhere. In Pepper’s hair, a piece embedded in the upholstery next to her shoulder, all over the dashboard. Tran was gabbling and cursing, saying some of the words Pepper had taught him.
“Jesus Christ, Echeverria. Look what you did. You fucked with my car.”
The man on his porch was stroking his cat, just standing there, the cat watching too. No big deal, gunfire in the street right outside his house.
Echeverria came closer, right up to the grille, aiming his pistol at Pepper.
“Don’t be doing anything else to my car. You hear me, Echeverria?”
“You going to come away with me or what?”
“Those my choices, come away or die?”
“Come away or die, yeah. That’s how it is. That’s the corner you backed me into, you bitch.”
“I think I’ll take what’s behind door number three,” she said, and flipped the switch for the hopping pumps.
The front end of the hearse flew three feet up in the air and knocked the pistol loose and it skittered down the sheet metal hood and slid toward the windshield. Echeverria dove for it, sprawling across the hood. He fumbled around, got hold of the pistol, then lifted his head, looked at Pepper, tried to say something, but before he could get more words out to confuse her further, she tripped the hopping pumps again, left front, then right front, bouncing him from one side of the hood to the other, scrambling his brains a little, then she flipped both together, which threw him off into the street.
When he didn’t get up, she switched on the hydraulic lifters and slowly raised the car two feet off the ground.
“What’re you doing? What’re you doing, Miss Pepper?”
She took a breath. The guy’d just proposed, then tried to shoot her. No reason in the world to be crying, but there were the tears, filling her eyes.
“Don’t worry about it, Tran. The guy was trying to kill us, trying to wreck my car. I’m within my rights here, self-defense. It’s a cornerstone of our American legal system. The right to defend yourself against rogue DEA agents trying to murder you ‘cause you’d refused their advances.”
The man on his porch was still petting the white cat. But now Pepper saw the cat didn’t look right. Its head was crooked to one side, front legs droopy like a beanbag cat. Or a dead one.
Maybe it was time to get out of Key West after all. Men petting their dead cats on their front porches in the middle of the night. Terminal freakiness all around. The whole town rotting away—decaying around her like some old tooth you didn’t even know was going bad till all of a sudden one day you bite down on a blackberry seed or something small like that, and the whole thing that’s been there all your life and has never hurt and always been invisible, this bone you thought was solid and secure, all of a sudden it just crumbles away, and you have to spit out the pieces of bone into your hand, dark and rotten, and all at once the nerves inside that tooth are exposed to the air and the awful pain begins.
Pepper inched the car forward and when she was fairly sure they were over Echeverria’s body she lowered the hearse again, listening to the hum of the pneumatic lifters until they ground to a halt.
Something in her stomach turned over. Her jaw throbbed. There was a man under her car. A big American man with a government job and a pension coming his way eventually. There was a life out there Pepper could have disappeared into. Kids at soccer, grocery shopping on Thursdays, barbecues with the inlaws. Blend in with all the other wives who vacuumed and dusted and taught themselves new recipes every week. A life her daddy had trained her for. Marriage. With a big man moving above her in the dark, drops of his sweat dampening her breasts. A big American man who could share his twisted secrets with her. The bad shit he’d been into.
But Pepper had done that already. Her daddy had shown her all she ever needed to know about that way of doing things. He’d shared his own fucked-up secrets and he’d been good to her and yes, Pepper had enjoyed their time together, but she’d had enough. She had no interest in another turn around that same old racetrack. Not with Echeverria, not with Bean. Not with any of them. It was time to strike out for new territory. Keep her secrets to herself if she wanted, let Tran keep his.
It was a little frightening, sure, going all the way to Vietnam. Being a concubine or whatever Tran had in mind. But then how scary and weird and different could Vietnam be? After all, Pepper had paid her lifelong dues at the mecca of weird, that tiny coral island jam-packed with more misfits and degenerates than they’d invented names for yet She brushed some of the broken glass off her lap, then very slowly she drove down Fleming into the jittery shadows, hearing the noise of Echeverria’s body dragging and scraping along beneath the car. At the next corner, she took a quick look in the rearview mirror to see the trail they were leaving. It was like she and Tran were riding inside some kind of big snail, coasting slow through the two A.M. streets of Key West, leaving behind them the long red slick of an American male.
***
Greta’s pain was gone. Like someone had shut off an alarm bell that had been ringing deep inside her flesh for months. An immense vacuum echoed in her ears.
But the opposite of pain was not pleasure. It was nothing. No feeling. Just being there. Lying on that bed. And that was what was in her ears now, that was what she felt at the core of her bones. Nothing. Not pleasure, not joy, not the tickle of sensuality. She felt as neutral and colorless as water in a glass. No taste, no smell. A dull peacefulness.
She was awake, alert. Hearing the croaks of the ship, the harsh squeak of the anchor line as it pulled tight against the tide. Greta Masterson lay still and watched the starlight through the porthole across from her. She was the squeaks and the starlight now. That’s all she was anymore. Not daughter, not mother, not woman. Just a screen on which were projected the impressions of the moment.
She breathed in the musty wood of her cabin, the stale dust that lined the cracks of the ship. She was alive and without pain, without judgment or regret or longing. She did not miss her daughter. She did not miss her legs, or her freedom to move, to dance, to climb garden walls to clip orchid blossoms. She was alive, in the cabin of a ship anchored offshore a few miles from the southernmost tip of Florida, inhaling the night air, basking in the flicker of ancient starlight, Greta Masterson without worries or wishes.
Whatever Bean Wilson had injected into her pump was by now bathing her spinal cord. Greta Masterson didn’t care what it was, didn’t care about its name or its history, its source or chemical makeup. She cared about nothing but the blue curtains over the porthole, fluttering, giving shape to the wind. She cared about the wood beams of the decking above her, teak or mahogany. Parallel rows of wood. Parallel lines that could run to infinity and never intersect, unless some man-made error had miscalculated and pigeon-toed them slightly, in which case infinity was plenty of time for them to find each other, to cross for the briefest of moments and begin to move away from each other for another eternity.
Adrift in those airless solar winds, Greta was indifferent—no longer hungry, not thirsty. Her body was the same, but she was a new creature, as if some great knowledge were passing through her wordlessly. Like a conduit carrying a wisdom she couldn’t comprehend. Changed by the drug flooding her spine, changed into something with a smooth unbroken history, a connection to the primitive earth more natural and profound than anything human. As though she’d been transfused with the plasma of angels, a dense light saturating her brain and nerves and filaments.
A rising breeze moved through the porthole. Starlight shivered. Insights strobed through her head faster than she could absorb. She felt the weightless presence of knowledge course through her bones. Watching the breeze toss the curtains, listening to the water slap against the hull, the boat’s slow undulations. Knowing something she couldn’t say.
Maybe she was dying. Maybe that’s what this was. Life leaking from her, replaced by this other thing. But even that was all right. It simply no longer mattered. For a short while the world had made a space for Greta Masterson and now that space was closing. She watched the blue curtain flutter, subject to each new impulse of wind.
CHAPTER 29
When Thorn woke before dawn, Monica was gone and the room was as bleak as an Alabama jail cell. Wind gnawed at the edges of the house, the oak creaking.
For the next hour he struggled through his morning routines. Like one of those pommel horse gymnasts, he straight-armed himself from the wheelchair to the wooden straight-backed chair sitting in the shower stall, soaped and rinsed, then hauled his body back to his wheelchair, using his wooden slat as both lever and inclined plane. He was slightly better at the complicated maneuvers than he’d been a couple of days ago, but they weren’t skills that came fast.
Lying on the bed, he dried himself with the flimsy towel, then squirmed into a pair of khaki shorts and a blue work shirt and wedged his boat shoes onto his swollen feet. By the time he was done he was out of breath, heart heaving. He lay there for a few minutes watching the first light gather against the pitted walls.
Maybe Monica had been right after all. He should give up the idea of saving Greta, call in the blue suits and let them fumble with it. Maybe this was simply beyond his abilities. If he was pushed to his physical limits just to shower and dress, how in God’s name could he expect to take Bean down and maybe a couple of others as well?
It was sunrise and he’d heard no flushing toilets yet, no water running through the noisy pipes. But that wouldn’t last long. This was not a house of heavy sleepers. After struggling back into the chair, he rolled out into the hallway, stopped just beyond his door, and listened for signs of activity. When he heard nothing, he moved down to the small supply closet near the TV room. For the last couple of days he’d seen the nurses getting rolls of gauze and fresh linen there. Rubber gloves, ointments.
He opened the door, moved in close to the shelves. Mainly bandages and first-aid materials, a stack of towels and washcloths. He pawed through the boxes and bottles until he found something that might work. A roll of strapping tape, steel filaments running through the sheer plastic wrap.
As he closed the door, behind him the elevator clanked to life and began to rise toward Bean’s third-floor apartment. Thorn rolled quickly back to his room and shut his door. He pulled out a length of strapping tape, and with his teeth he tried to rip the piece loose but got nowhere. In his shaving kit he found a pair of nail clippers and rolled back to his bed and began the tedious snipping, a quarter inch at a time till he’d bisected the tape.
As he was finishing, he felt the thud of the elevator settling to the ground floor and heard the clatter of its door opening. There was no time to cut loose a second piece of tape. One would have to hold it.
He snatched the Colt .38 from his gym bag, bent forward till his chest was hard against his thighs, and he pressed the pistol to the vinyl bottom of his wheelchair seat, and flattened the length of strapping tape across it, mashing the adhesive hard against the underside of his thighs.
Bean didn’t knock.
He swung the door open and stood smiling in the doorway as Thorn was coming back up to a sitting position, feeling the blood hot in his face.
“All dressed and ready to roll, are we?”
Bean wore white linen trousers and a crisply pressed French blue sport shirt with a yellow pinstripe, those same heavy tennis shoes. A man about to pilot his yacht around the Bermuda coast, swill martinis in the luxurious shade.
“Sure,” Thorn said. “Let’s go meet Greta. See how she’s holding up.”
Bean chuckled dryly and stepped around behind him and guided the wheelchair into the hallway.
“Did we sleep well?”
Thorn played the words back, checked for irony, any hint that Bean had the room wired, maybe a video camera in the light fixture. But no, his tone had been neutral—probably only Thorn’s paranoia heating up.
“I slept fine, Bean. Just fine.”
“Just one quick stop before we head out. Got to stay with the program, you know.”
He rolled Thorn into the small examining room, switched on the lights, and walked over to the medicine cabinet. He unlocked the door with a single key and swung it open. For a moment, as Bean poked the syringe needle through the rubber stopper and drew the solution from the vial, Thorn considered bolting. He might be able to make it out to the sidewalk before Bean caught up to him, scream for help, draw a crowd. But he didn’t move. He watched Bean put away the vial, lock the cabinet, flick the side of the syringe.
Obliging, he pulled his shirt up and bent forward, giving Bean access to the catheter. Bean’s hands were gentle and efficient, fingertips cool against Thorn’s back. He slid the needle into the spout of the catheter and pressed it to the hilt, then he halted and stepped away.
“You finished?”
“No.” Bean’s voice strained.
“What’s wrong?”
There s a kink or something. The needle’s not going all the way in.”
“Same thing the nurse yesterday said. Jankowski, or whatever her name is. A kink in the tube.”
“She didn’t tell me about it.”
“Probably got bent from all the wrestling I’ve been doing. Or maybe that marathon I ran yesterday.”
Bean hummed to himself, then stooped back to the catheter and finished the process.
“There now,” he said as he retaped the spout. “Didn’t feel a thing, did you?”
“That’s the idea, isn’t it?”
Bean stepped around and gave Thorn a puzzled smile.
“To feel nothing,” Thorn said. “That’s what you’re after. Your career. Numbness. Deadening the flesh.”
Bean’s small smile grew to a grin.
“Are you trying to say something, Thorn? Is there a metaphysical point here? A critique of anesthesiology perhaps.”
“Nothing so grand as that. Just a small, very personal observation. You’ve been dedicating your life to doing away with pain, but that’s hardly the same thing as curing illness, is it? That’s not your concern. That’s for other kinds of doctors. Like your dad. What you are is the doper. You put them out, keep them out. Let the other guys worry about fixing what was wrong.”
His smile melted away.
“It takes both kinds, Thorn. Those doctors can’t do their work until I first do mine.”
“Just like the war. You’re in control. On your mountaintop. Everybody waiting for you to tell them when to go to work. You whine about it, but you love it, Bean, being the guy who calls the shots.”
“How stimulating,” he said. “And to think, without any formal education, any systematic study of psychology, you can come up with such penetrating insights into my personality. Someday, when you get a spare minute or two, Thorn, maybe you should try examining your own pattern of behavior. Withdrawing from the world like you’ve done, shrinking away into your infantile self-absorption. Isn’t that your own version of anesthesia? Your way of numbing the pain? Come on, Thorn, face it. Being in the world hurts and you’ve made a career out of dodging that.”
He glared at Thorn, all that hate dammed up, brimming into his eyes.
“Okay, Bean. You win. You crossed the finish line way out ahead. Education, money, prestige. Important social contributions to the world. No doubt about it. You’re better in every way. The war’s over. I surrender. I’m yours, do with me what you will.”
“You bet your ass you’re mine. You bet your ever-loving ass. You’ve been mine all along. You just didn’t realize it until now.”
He rolled Thorn outside and down the ramp. Thorn expected the red hearse, Pepper, Echeverria, hail, hail, the gang’s all here. But there was no one on the sidewalk, no sign of the big red car.
Bean pushed him along the walk, rolling across the intersections at Elizabeth, then another block across Simonton and on to Duval. Thorn had to fight off the urge to lean forward, steal a hand below his seat, press the strapping tape tight again, afraid that all the jounces along the sidewalk had loosened it, that the heavy weapon was hanging by a last smudge of adhesive, that any second it would fall and clatter onto the sidewalk. But he held himself still, depending on the generosity of industrial giants, the dollop of stickiness they’d allotted to that single strip of plastic.
