Follow the Crow

by B. B. Griffith

  But he doesn’t act like it. And that’s the third thing I notice. Joey walks right into the hospital without even blinking. Not a care for the security cameras at every door. Not even a glance in either direction. This is not a man who is worried about the twenty-five-to-life he’s facing if and when these suits pull him in.

  The agents are on their earpieces, muttering. Parsons nods and turns to me.

  “Ninth floor. Oncology. He’s going up. It’s showtime, Mr. Dejooli.” He pops open the door.

  “Remember,” Douglas says, “if you can hold him, hold him. Shoot him if you have to. Just don’t kill him.”

  Those are some pretty open orders right there. Back at the station Danny would call that “permission to start shit.”

  I nod. Then I’m off. I pull my hat down low, and I have to grin at the thought that I’m doing more to disguise myself than Joey did. When I reach the elevators he’s already gone up. I push the button a bunch of times and wait for an interminable thirty seconds as his elevator hits nine then comes back down. When it opens, it’s empty.

  When I reach the ninth floor, I don’t see him anywhere. I stutter step onto the floor and look around. No Joey. I go up to the receptionist, who is nervously tapping a pack of cigarettes and checking her watch.

  “Did you see a guy come up here? Biker guy? Dressed in leather?”

  “When?” she asks.

  “Just now. Like right now.”

  She looks at me sideways. “Nope. You’re the only visitor in the last couple of minutes.”

  I stare at her long enough to make her nervous. “Anything else?” she asks sharply.

  I turn around and go back out to the elevators. It makes no sense. He had to have walked by the front desk. I finger the com on my shoulder. “You sure he went up the main elevator?”

  “Yes,” comes the reply. I can imagine Parsons grinding his teeth.

  “The front desk says—”

  “He went in. He’s on the floor. Now you see what we mean when we say he’s tricky.”

  Tricky my ass. Something else is at work here. He’s nearby. It’s like I can feel him. The sulfur has been picking up in intensity, packing deeper in my nostrils. I have to go near the corner and hold the crook of my elbow over my mouth to keep from retching. When I stand up again, I waver a bit before snapping to focus. This chemo is nasty, but then again, I was warned.

  I walk back towards the desk. Then right past the desk.

  “Can I help you?” the receptionist asks again.

  “I’m here to prep a room for an inmate transfer,” I say over my shoulder. I can tell she wants to stop me, but I think she wants her cigarette break more. I pass through to the main hall.

  The floor is laid out like a horseshoe, the front desk at the bow and patient rooms at intervals down either rung. In the middle are a slew of computers and cubicles and lockers and whatnot for the staff. I shoot a glance down one side and don’t see him. I cut across the middle to the other side, and I still don’t see him. There’s a fire exit at the far back, but it’s alarmed. And anyway, I know he’s still here somewhere. Ever since the Evilway, like it or not, I’ve been feeling more, seeing more, smelling more than I should be. Could be that I sweat out toxins for two straight days. Could be that I have a quart of cell-bleach in my system. Could also be that I’m dying. Whatever it is, if it helps me get this shit straight, I’ll take what I can get.

  I start down the near hallway, noting which doors are closed on my left and swinging my head right to clear the computer area. I don’t see him, but when I turn around, the doors I thought were closed are open, and some of the ones that were open are closed. It’s a funhouse from hell. I really don’t want to start knocking on doors. At the end of the hallway, I find the pill case, right where the agents said it would be.

  I also find Doctor Bennet, staring at it with wide eyes because it’s swinging open like a rusty gate and with a circle the size of a fist cut out of it.

  “Shit,” I mutter, and Bennet looks up at me. His eyes get wider.

  “Are you here for him?” Bennet whispers.

  “Yeah. When did this happen?”

  “Now. I mean just now.”

  “Did you see where he went?”

  “No. I didn’t see anything.” He steps up and in front of the case as a pair of nurses walk by. He nods weakly at their passing greeting.

  “What are you talking about? Which way did he go, Bennet?”

  “You don’t get it. I was watching the case. I’ve been watching it for twenty minutes. Nothing happened. I blinked and then this.”

  My eyes start to water. My face feels like it’s burning. I try to hold my guts in, but I have to grab a trashcan quick, turn away, and puke. Thankfully I have nothing left in me now. It just sounds like I’m spitting. I turn back to Bennet, and he’s softened.

  “You shouldn’t be out like you are. You must be in a good deal of pain.”

  “I’ll be in worse pain if I can’t catch Joey—”

  And then there he is. I see him out of the corner of my eye, clear as day. Dressed in black with the red bandana pulled down around his neck. He’s right there, twenty feet down the hall, staring at me. Except when I turn to look at him, he’s gone.

  “What? Do you see him?” Bennet asks.

  “Sort of…” I say, turning back to Bennet, and then there he is again. Same spot. This time I stay still and don’t turn to look. It could be that my eyes are dripping water, could be that I feel like I have a hotpot on my head, but he looks like a nightmare. His eyes are way too big, and his mouth is the same black circle shape as his eyes. The rest of his face has been smudged. Pasty skin coloring extends beyond the borders of where his face should be. And it’s moving. All by itself. He looks like he’s screaming, but he’s not. He’s standing still with his hands balled in fists at his side, and he’s staring right at me. And now it’s my turn to feel scared. Whatever this is, it’s not Joey Flatwood. Not the Joey I knew.

  Then something grabs Joey’s attention, and he darts off sideways across the horseshoe to the other side of the floor. He’s gone in a blink. It’s like he steps through the walls. A second later, the bells and whistles go off. It’s a code. I know that from the old days. Someone is dying. The Navajo people don’t believe in coincidences. But even if I did, I sure as hell wouldn’t believe this was a coincidence. Bennet looks at me. I nod. He straightens and rolls up his sleeves. I respect that. I respect a guy who owns up to what’s coming.

  “Follow the running,” he says, and he takes off down the hall. We’re joined by a bunch of other people in scrubs, and soon five or six of us whip around the bend and towards the blinking blue light above the room at the far end of the corridor. I put my hand on my gun. I feel like I’m gonna throw up again, but this time I’m not sure if it’s all about the chemo. I strain forward and pull ahead of the wave, and I’m the first one into the room. There he is. He’s leaning over the patient, his face inches from the old man’s. His black hair forms a waving tent over the small figure in the bed. He’s speaking. Chanting something, but it’s muddled. It’s not unlike what Gam was singing in the Evilway, but it sounds like it’s coming from a tinny speaker underwater.

  “Joey, get away from the bed!” I say, and I pull my gun. He looks up at me with a jerk, and I’m expecting the vacant black holes and the dripping oil face I saw in the corridor, but it’s just Joey. A rail-thin, walking-dead-man version of Joey, but Joey.

  And then he’s gone.

  And I have people yelling at me. I’m spinning in a circle in the room, but he’s nowhere. And then I’m being pushed away, and I see Bennet calming people down and pushing me out of the room, and calming some more. People are giving orders, and I hear the whining sound of that shocker pad revving. The nurses are crowded around the unconscious old man on the bed, and I’m just outside, looking in.

  No Joey.

  “I think I’m losing my mind,” I say out loud, just to hear my voice, just to make sure I’m stil
l here and not dreaming. I wipe sweat from my clammy brow, and Bennet comes over to me.

  “I…I think I’m worse than I thought I was. I’m seeing things,” I say. I feel like I want to cry. This must be what it’s like to go insane: visual hallucinations so strong you swear on your family that they’re true. I get this loopy thought that maybe I died during the Evilway and this is where I ended up, doomed to chase the man I banished forever. I feel at the wall, only half sure it exists. Then I collapse against it.

  “I saw him too,” Bennet says quietly. I look up at him, reach for him with my eyes like a drowning man would a raft.

  “You saw him?”

  Bennet nods. “Ben. Can you tell me what is going on here?” He speaks very slowly, as if he’s walking a thin line of sanity himself.

  “Wish I could. Holy hell do I wish I could. He’s still here somewhere. I can feel it.”

  Alarms are still blaring in the room. Bennet pops back into the chaos and then out again to check on me. He shakes his head. No Joey. Then he steps on something with a loud crunch. He looks down. He’s crushed a white pill to powder under his shoe.

  “He must have gotten by in all the shoving,” Bennet says.

  “Can you go across to the other wing?” I ask. “I’ll start at the back end of this one. We work our way forward. If you see or hear anything, or think you see or hear anything, you call out. You hear me?”

  Bennet nods, takes one more look at the code to assure himself it’s being taken care of, then trots across the horseshoe again.

  I walk down my hallway towards the back fire exit. I walk slowly, with my palms held out and my hands open, like I’m trying to catch the air. If I can’t see him, maybe I can feel him.

  It’s difficult to focus on your periphery. Impossible, actually. So my mind’s eye watches my side view while I try my best to keep staring at the fire door straight ahead of me. Every time I hear a door open or close, I look toward it in a snap, but it’s just the hospital moving around me, doctors and nurses and staff going about the day. I reach the far door. No sign of him. I spin around and curse under my breath.

  I listen for Bennet on the opposite side, but nothing is out of the ordinary. A small cheer comes from the code room, and nurses and staff start to file out. Guess the little old man made it after all. At least somebody is getting a happy ending here. I slump and walk back towards the front bend. My mind tells me Joey is long gone, but I still sense something in my heart. I still sense that burning darkness that came from his eyes, but it’s weaker now. I pause by the door to the little old man’s room, still open. His little old wife is crying tears of joy at his side, her head not far from where Joey’s had been, but this time he’s looking back at her with rheumy eyes. They clasp hands, thin and frail like dried flowers, but there is life there still. They have another minute with each other. And another. His wife has this sort of delirious pitch to her voice, like when you’re on the tables at Wapati and you’re playing on house money. It draws me a little closer to the room. It makes me smile. They don’t have a care for anything but each other.

  Maybe that’s why they don’t see Joey.

  Because he’s right there. In the corner of the room. And he’s not some side-seen apparition this time either. No melting flesh, no dark pits for eyes. He’s a flesh and blood man that I can see straight on. And he can see me straight on too. He sees me before I see him. Every cop instinct they drill into you for a time like this, when you get blindsided by something, goes right out the window. I don’t react. I can’t react. If he wanted to tackle me or bum rush me, he could have, right then and there. Joey was always bigger than me, and even down fifty pounds like he is right now, his eyes still have this fire to them. They aren’t the eyes of a dying man. If he wanted to, he could give me a run for my money. But he doesn’t. What he does do is lift a gloved finger to his lips and then move his gaze out of the doorway, beckoning.

  He wants to talk.

  I cock my head and squint. You’re fucking kidding me, right?

  He holds out his hands wide and bobs his head. You know I could run if I want. You know you’d never catch me.

  It’s funny how after all these years I can still read him like a book. No words required. I take a breath and purse my lips. Fine. Joey always got what he wanted when we were kids, why should things change now? I back out of the door and into the hallway. He follows me. We both stare at each other until we stop just a few rooms back from the far corner by the exit.

  “I knew it was you,” he says. And he’s smiling. He looks like he wants to hug me, but he holds back. Instead he just takes me in. “It’s good to see you, Big B.”

  His voice triggers an avalanche of memories I don’t want to feel right now. Things like us screaming down the flood plain on our bicycles with the warm New Mexico night air whipping past our bare chests. I push back against them by focusing on the pack of morphine nodules I see hanging out of his bulging pockets. The audacity of this fucking guy.

  “I gotta bring you in, Joey.”

  “You can’t bring me in,” he says. “I’m not Navajo, remember?” He smiles a hollow smile that reminds me of the holes in his face I saw minutes ago.

  “I’m not working for NNPD here,” I say.

  His smile drops. “Those bastard suits?”

  “They’re the FBI. They don’t fuck around. They want you alive, but I think there’s a big gap between ‘moving’ and ‘alive’ for these guys.”

  “Tell me about it,” he says. “You can’t trust them, Ben. You don’t know what their motives are.”

  “Shut up, Joey. Just shut up and come with me. I don’t want to hash out everything again. I really don’t. I want to get you behind bars and then go home.”

  “They don’t want me,” he says. “Nobody wants me. You of all people should know that.”

  “Fuck you. Don’t start with that shit. You brought this on yourself.” I find myself gripping his jacket, balling the leather in my fist. “All you had to do was talk, you miserable piece of shit. That’s all you had to do. If you didn’t take her yourself, then tell us what you saw. You were in the goddamn room with her!”

  He lets me grab him. He moves with my trembling arms. His face is sallow, his jaw slack, and I can see just how much weight he’s lost. “Look at you,” I say, and I push him back a step. “Instead of facing yourself, you’ve decided to wipe yourself out. You’re a fucking coward, Joey. You’re a coward, and I don’t have room for this shit in my life anymore because it’s destroying me too.”

  For a second, he looks like I struck him across the face, but he rallies. “You’re a good man, Ben,” he says. “A better man that I am. But you’re such a cop. You see two points and work your ass off to draw a straight line between them. But this story is no straight line. I think you’re coming to see that now.”

  “You’re fucked up, Joey. Something fucked you up. You need help. You’re an addict, man. You’re knocking off hospitals and getting crazy. You’ve crossed state lines. That’s why the FBI is here. And they don’t give up.”

  Joey shakes his head. “Yeah, well, neither do I,” he mutters.

  “Let’s just walk out of these doors and nobody gets shot, okay? That’s what they want. That’s what I want, too.”

  “Like I said, they don’t want me.”

  “Well, what do they want?”

  He reaches in his pocket with one gloved hand and grips something. He has it out and in his palm before I can blink, never mind draw my gun.

  “They want this,” he says.

  It’s a turquoise crow. Same as the gambler’s. Same as Gam’s. I can only stare at it.

  “You’ve seen this before?” he asks. “Doesn’t surprise me. Not with the path you’ve walked. Not with the path you have to walk still.”

  “Where did you get that?” I ask, my mind numb.

  “I pulled it from the hands of a dead man in Colorado. Don’t worry. I didn’t kill him. But your friends in the suits did. I snatched it befo
re they could find it.” He smiles. “They were pretty pissed off when it wasn’t where they thought it would be.”

  Part of my mind is telling me not to listen to the words of an addict on the run, but over the past weeks I seem to have put some distance between that part and the rest of me. A rift has opened, a rip in my fabric that started as an unraveling when Ana left me but that has been getting bigger every day and finally split down the seam in that hogan. I don’t understand what Joey is saying, but I know he’s telling me the truth.

  “I don’t know how many of these totems there are, Ben, but they want them all. Bad. And I think they’ll stop at nothing to get them.”

  “But why? It’s just a crow,” I say, but I don’t believe that, and he knows it.

  “No such thing as just a crow, my brother. And they want it for the same reason I want it. Because they want to find Ana.”

  I step back. His words hit me like rocks. I feel bruised. I feel bile rise in my throat. The sulfur smell hits me with the force of a wildfire. My vision wavers and I hitch to the side, but Joey grabs me.

  “You think I’ve been running this whole time—I know it. But I’m not running. I’m looking for her. The suits think they understand everything. That the more crows they get the closer they’ll be. But they don’t get it.” His face is manic. His eyes glassy. “I don’t either, but I’m getting closer. This shit?” He taps the vials in his pocket. “I hate this shit. But it gets me closer. The drugs, and the crow, and…and these places”—he holds out his hands to the hospital around him—“where people are battling death. Each gets me a little closer to finding her, Ben! They’re all pieces of a puzzle, and they’re coming together. But I’m running out of time.”

  “Ana?” I whisper. “Ana?” I say her name like a ward. I say it like I used to say it in my sleep before Gam would wake me and sing to me. An eighteen-year-old man weeping in his grandmother’s arms.

  My com crackles. It’s subtle, but we both hear it. The agents are coming. I grab him by the jacket again, but my grip is weak. He pulls one leather glove off with his teeth and pries my fingers from him.