Whorl

by James Tarr

  “Ain’t got no bedtime in summer vacation.” The boy paused. “So, you gonna die or what? You want us to call the po-lice?”

  “Shit, Manny, look at all that blood.” The other boy had rolled a few feet closer to Mickey and looked over his handlebars. He could see a large puddle of blood under the man’s head.

  “No, don’t call the police.”

  “Why not? You white.”

  “Police are the ones who shot me,” he told them. He hadn’t moved his forehead off the street, and still was curled up into a tight, pain-wracked ball.

  “Shit, really? Why? Who you be?” But they didn’t get a response. He’d passed out.

  Jorge Eligio was leaning one hip against the grille of his pickup, relaxing. He had an ice-cold Budweiser in his hand, the Red Sox were on, and he didn’t have to work tomorrow, so all was right with the world. Didn’t even matter that the Sox were down by three in the eighth inning. Lots more games in the season.

  Most Saturdays he worked, and today had been no different. He was still wearing his paint-splattered coveralls. He’d take a shower before bed, and tomorrow was church and family dinner, but now was his time. Time at the end of a long week to unwind. He’d had to replace the radiator hose on the Ford, but that had only taken ten minutes, and had only been his excuse to go outside. Not that his wife didn’t know he was out here by himself, relaxing. Graciela knew a man needed some time alone. And maybe, later on, she’d be in the mood for some company herself…….

  Manny rolled up with his friend on their bikes, out of breath. “Papa, papa, we found a dead guy!”

  “What?”

  “He not dead. He’s only maybe half dead,” D’ Shaunte said.

  “What are you talking about?” Jorge asked his son. Sometimes he just didn’t understand children at all. The only thing he could remember about his childhood was working every day after school for his father.

  “Dead guy—almost dead guy,” Manny corrected himself, “in the middle of the street. Got shot. I thought he got jacked, but he said the cops shot him.”

  Jorge looked down his nose at the boys. “Are you telling me another story?” Even if you took away the video games they made up stories all day long, played cowboys versus aliens.

  “No!” Manny insisted.

  “He’s a cop too,” D’Shaunte added.

  “What?”

  “He white, in a suit, wearing body armor.” D’Shaunte beamed proudly. He’d been the one brave enough to first approach the man and poke him, feel the hard vest under his shirt.

  “What? You touch his gun?” Jorge stood tall and looked down at them.

  Manny knew how his father was when it came to keeping them away from guns. “No, no, we didn’t see no gun.” Not that D-Shaun hadn’t been looking for it, but when he touched the man’s body armor he’d groaned, they’d gotten scared, and pedaled for home as fast as they could.

  “Go get your cousin Emilio,” Jorge told his son.

  The next memory Mickey had was of pain as he was lifted into the bed of a pickup truck. There were silhouettes of men around him, but he couldn’t see their faces. He could smell cigarettes and beer and spicy food. “Please, no ambulance,” he gasped. It felt like he was getting stabbed by flaming knives, it hurt him just to breathe.

  “Your wallet says FBI,” one of the men said to him.

  “Don’t call them,” he pleaded with his rescuers, if that’s who they were.

  “Why. The ID fake?”

  “No, they’re the ones who shot me.” It sounded ridiculous even to him, and he knew it was true.

  “Why?”

  “I know the wrong secret.”

  “Shit.” He was lying in the back of the pickup, he could feel the steel under his shoulder, the vehicle shift as the men moved around him. “Then what the fuck we supposed to do with you, mister?”

  Mickey groaned and cracked an eye. “Give me til morning. If I’m still alive, I’ll leave. If I’m not…..then bring my body back here. You can have whatever money I’ve got, it isn’t much.” Mickey slid back into unconsciousness with the colorful sound of what he guessed was Spanish profanity ringing in his ears.

  Mickey wasn’t sure what was real and what were his dreams, but he remembered opening his eyes and seeing a hulking Hispanic teenager staring at him from a chair. There was bright light coming in a window, but exactly where he was he couldn’t remember. He had no recollection of falling asleep again, but found himself waking up to the sound of steps. Lots of footsteps, on creaky wooden stairs.

  Mickey cracked his eyes. The teenager, who looked like a fifteen-year-old linebacker with a peachfuzz moustache, was still sitting in the chair, just putting away a cell phone. There was a window above and just to the left of the kid, and golden sunlight was streaming into the room. Dust particles danced in the light. Looking around the room, Mickey saw he was in a young girl’s bedroom. The walls were white, and there was a lot of pink in the room—wood trim, stuffed animals, assorted items on a small dresser sitting nearby.

  The steps arrived outside the door, which opened to admit a couple that looked Mexican. She was small woman and the man, while he wasn’t huge, had the same thickness as the teen in the chair. The man was in a suit, the woman a very pretty flowered dress. “Emilio,” the man said, and jerked his head toward the open door. The teen got up with a scowl at Mickey, and as he passed him the man muttered “Gracias.”

  “We are not Maria and Jesus,” the man told Mickey, giving the name the Spanish pronunciation, “so this is not Heaven. You did not die.” It appeared he wasn’t sure if he was happy about that. The woman gave him a dirty look and moved closer to the bed.

  Mickey could tell he wasn’t dead, because he was in too much pain. His entire neck was stiff and sore, and the left side of it burned like it was on fire. He reached up and found there was a fat bandage there. His chest hurt as well, and he could feel it every time he took a breath.

  “You have a hole in your neck, you need a doctor,” the woman told him. “I think you have broken ribs, too. There were bullets in your vest when we took it off. Some of them fell out, but we saved them.”

  “That’s okay,” Mickey said. For just having slept through the night, he didn’t feel rested. He felt like he’d just had his ass kicked by a gang armed with baseball bats. With great difficulty he pulled the sheet and comforter down off his chest. Hell, it looked like he’d had his ass kicked by guys with baseball bats, his chest was covered with angry red swollen circles the size of quarters. What hurt the most were the two down by his floating ribs.

  “Drink some water, take some pills,” the woman said, gesturing. Mickey looked and saw that on the bedside table was a glass of water and a half-full prescription medicine bottle. With some difficulty he reached over and saw it was a six-month old prescription for amoxicillin for Graciela Eligio. Take three a day until gone. There was also a big bottle of ibuprofen. “I never finished the pills, and they should help. But you should see a doctor, your neck looks very bad.”

  Mickey got a pill out of the bottle, stuck it in his mouth, and washed it down with water. He did the same with four ibuprofen. “Thank you,” he said in a tired voice. He’d told the man that if he was alive he would leave in the morning, and he’d meant it. “I will go.” He tried, he really did, but it hurt too much to even sit up, much less get out of bed and walk down stairs.

  Panting and sweating, Mickey said, “I don’t think I can. Not on my own. Can you help me downstairs? Maybe drive and drop me off somewhere where I can sit for a while? Get my strength back?” He had no idea where he should go, but he didn’t need to put them in any more danger by his presence.

  The woman turned to the man, whom Mickey presumed was her husband, and they had a long and very intense conversation in Spanish. The man was on the receiving end most of the time. Mickey caught the name “Jesus” several times. Finally the man, frowning, turned back to Mickey. The woman looked at Mickey, nodded, then headed downstairs. “You are lucky
today is Sunday, and the priest talked about compassion until my ears bled,” the man said. “My wife wants to be a good Samaritan, and use you to get into Heaven. You may stay two days. If you can’t walk then….I drag you.”

  Jorge thought about the body armor he’d peeled off the unconscious stranger’s body, currently stored on the top shelf of the closet, along with the misshapen bullets that had fallen out of it. “Are we in any danger? From the men who shot you?” He’d examined the FBI identification as well. It looked authentic enough, although he had no idea what a real one might look like.

  “Not if no one knows I am here. Although…did you find a cell phone in my clothes? You should take the battery out and throw it away, just in case. Somewhere away from here.”

  Mickey changed the bandage on his neck twice a day, and Graciela Eligio was right—it did look ugly. It looked like someone had stuck a finger in the muscle on the left side of his neck and ripped it out sideways. Even with the antibiotics he was taking it seemed to be a little inflamed, but he didn’t dare go to the hospital. They were required by law to report gunshot wounds, and this didn’t look like anything but that. He couldn’t really turn his neck more than two inches in either direction without the wound pulling, and he was careful not to tear it open. He was taking 800 milligrams of ibuprofen every four hours, but it still was only taking the tiniest edge off the pain. Kevlar saved lives, but it didn’t keep getting shot from hurting.

  They never left him alone in the house, and never with just Graciela home. Either Jorge or his surly nephew Emilio made sure to let him know they were around, even if they were just outside in the driveway tinkering on the car. Mickey got the impression they were calling in sick those days, for which he felt both grateful and ashamed.

  By the second day the bruises from where the bullets had hit his soft body armor had doubled in diameter and turned a nice shade of dark purple. He was pretty sure he had two fractured ribs just from the amount of pain he caused himself by moving around the room. While everything still hurt—a lot—he was able to get up and walk around. Admittedly, he moved like someone three times his age, with bad arthritis, but he could move under his own power. Then it was time to go.

  “My clothes will be baggy on you, but are the right length,” Jorge told him, handing Mickey an old t-shirt, button-down shirt, and fraying blue jeans. When he had the jeans and t-shirt on, Jorge said, “Oh, wait.” He strode to the closet and opened it, then pulled out Mickey’s vest.

  Mickey examined the vest. It had definitely been damaged by the bullet impacts, there were deep divots in the woven polymer material. Charcoal-hued circles. Mickey wasn’t positive, but he was pretty sure that unless he was shot again in the exact same place, the vest should still stop more bullets. With a few grunts he got it on over his head and secured it with the elastic Velcro straps. The button-down shirt was blue, and he let it hang, as tucking in the shirt was beyond him in his current state. He was the same height but barely more than half the width of Jorge, and the shirt was more than baggy, but as long as it didn’t have bullet holes or bloodstains he didn’t care. His FBI ID went into his pocket.

  He didn’t have much money, but he still tried to give it to Jorge. “For the food,” he told the man. Three meals a day, that’s what they brought up to him. He ate it all, every time, even though it hurt him to both chew and swallow.

  Jorge wouldn’t take it. “I think you’ll need it more than we do,” Jorge told him. Mickey had been studiously avoiding thinking about anything beyond the moment for days, as when he did the world seemed a crushing weight on his head. The thought of where he’d go when he left the safety of their little girl’s bedroom—he hadn’t seen her, they wouldn’t let the children up to even peek at him, but he learned her name was Esmeralda—Izzy—was just one of a number of questions he didn’t have answers to.

  He had enough amoxicillin pills left for another two days, enough ibuprofen in the bottle for maybe a week. Not a full dose of antibiotics, but it would have to do. “Take this too,” Jorge said, handing him a paint-splattered hooded sweatshirt. “It’s too hot to wear now, but you might need it.”

  “Thank you,” he said sincerely.

  By mutual consent he’d waited to leave until after dark. Less for prying eyes to see. Going down the creaky wooden staircase hurt like hell, and took him over a minute. At the bottom a rail-thin boy and a doe-eyed girl stared at him.

  “Mister, you look like a zombie,” the boy told him. His mother, standing nearby, shushed him, but Mickey smiled. He hadn’t shaved in two days, but that was deliberate. He figured looking like himself was a pretty bad idea. Between the dark stubble and the whiter than usual skin (from the blood loss) he didn’t look like the man who’d climbed into the Lincoln belonging to the Director of the FBI Lab. And he wasn’t.

  “Thank you for letting me sleep in your bedroom,” he told the little girl, who quickly ran and hid behind her mother’s legs.

  Graciela lifted a plastic bag off the kitchen counter and handed it to him. “Vaya con Dios.” Mickey looked inside and saw it was filled with food.

  “I sure hope so.” He looked at the food again. “This is very generous. I hope to repay you someday.”

  Graciela shook her head. “We did what we did because we are good people, and I think you are good people too. You repay someone else with a kindness.”

  And just like that, Mickey realized where he needed to go, and what he needed to do.

  “I’m sorry—believe me, after seeing what happened today—yesterday—I’m really sorry I wasn’t able to get here sooner,” Mickey told Dave. “But those six days in the hospital in Philadelphia because my neck got infected really set me back.”

  The treating physician had notified the police, but Mickey had hidden his FBI employee ID, wallet, and vest in an alley three blocks away from the hospital before walking into the emergency room with a swollen purple neck and 104° fever, giving a fake name.

  When the exhausted and overworked cop had shown up Mickey flat-out refused to answer any questions, saying he couldn’t remember anything. The cop didn’t believe him, of course, but he couldn’t arrest Mickey for getting shot. The wound was old, that much was obvious. He checked with his department to see if there were any recent reports of shootings, and when he could find no connection between Mickey’s wound and any recent police activity, he just cursed at Mickey for being stupid, completed his report, and left. They kept him in the hospital much longer than he thought they would, because the infection was so close to his spine and brain, and was initially resistant to the first antibiotics they tried. The only thing that really surprised Mickey was finding his wallet and vest undisturbed behind the dumpster after almost a week.

  “I was actually surprised how willing truckers were to give me a lift,” Mickey observed. “I guess they like the company. As long as you’re polite and don’t seem crazy, hitch-hiking from truck stop to truck stop is pretty easy. It’s just not as quick as you think. Sometimes you have to wait a whole day for another ride in the direction you want to go.”

  He’d remembered the name of the street Dave lived on, and the city, but he couldn’t quite remember the address. A few internet searches using a borrowed cell phone hadn’t helped at all; apparently Anderson didn’t have a home phone number, so he couldn’t call ahead. Not that Mickey was sure he would have—what were the chances Anderson would believe his crazy story in person, much less over the phone? But Anderson’s profile picture on Facebook was him standing in front of a black Mustang in the driveway of a house Mickey assumed was his home, and after arriving in the area he’d pretty much figured out which house that was. He also saw all the police activity two streets over, and quickly learned what had happened from neighbors standing on their lawns. Mickey’d then bounced around between three local fast food restaurants until dark. The house was still dark when he returned. He’d walked around back and tried a few windows, and was surprised to find the one over the kitchen sink unlocked.

&nbs
p; “Shut up about your fucking hitch-hiking,” Dave told him. He was sitting across his kitchen table from him, Mickey’s FBI ID in his hands. “I don’t care about your goddamn hitch-hiking. I had two car-loads of SWAT cops just try to kill me this morning. Yesterday morning. And you’re telling me that they were trying to kill me. Not some random person, not some stranger, me. Because my fingerprints match two other people. Because you matched my fingerprints to two other people.”

  Mickey had borrowed a little cash from some good Christian folk along the way, so he’d been able to eat at least once a day, but he’d dropped close to twenty pounds and had been skinny to start with. Between that and the stress of having life as he knew it end, he looked and felt horrible. Dave pointing out that it was his forensic skills—and naiveté—which had put both of them in this position didn’t make him feel any better. “Yes,” he said simply. Mickey was pretty sure he was still in shock, or psychological denial, or something, because everything seemed so surreal. This couldn’t be his life now, could it? He had a great job at the FBI Lab. This whole thing seemed like it had to be a dream, or a movie, or something. He kept waiting to wake up.

  Dave felt as tired as this FBI asshole looked, and was having a hard time focusing his eyes, but he put down the ID and pulled out his cell phone. “What’s this other guy’s name? The one in Jersey that my finger matches?” As he said it he glanced at his fingertips. He found he’d been doing that a lot ever since the news. They looked….normal. Not something worth killing him over.

  “Beiers, Jerome Beiers.” He spelled it. “I think he was in Newark? Somewhere in that area.”

  Dave’s thumbs were moving over the phone. “How old was he?”

  “Maybe ten years older than you? I can’t really remember.” Mickey wondered exactly what the kid was doing, then remembered that this ‘kid’ was the same age as him, and had been working as a private investigator for several years. He was probably pretty damn good at tracking down information.