«allie did that?»
“Damn straight she did, you fucking geek,” Chuck whispered. Then he fell over, losing consciousness.
12:16 PM
A twelve-year-old child stood next to an unmarked gray van, watching the paramedics take Chuck Wilson away. The boy had sandy red hair cut in short bangs. He wore jeans and a black T-shirt with Marvin the Martian on it. He wore a Walkman headset, and the wires fed into the case clipped to his belt.
People passed him on the street. The few who met the boy’s gaze would quickly look away, as if by reflex. If asked, those people might have said the boy’s eyes looked a little too deeply for comfort.
At the moment, there was only room in those intense green eyes for the ambulance, and Chuck Wilson.
“Why didn’t we follow the girl, Mr. Jackson?” The boy’s voice was a barely audible whisper, but it was picked up by a microphone embedded in the Walkman headphones he wore. The case on his belt wasn’t a Walkman. It was an altogether different kind of radio.
“Our instructions are to monitor and take in Mr. Wilson, Elroy.” The voice in the headset was slightly distorted by a mass of digital scrambling equipment. The boy called Elroy thought the radio made everyone sound like Darth Vader.
“But she’s loads better than Charlie.”
The doors to the ambulance closed and the voice in the headphones told Elroy, “Come back to the van. We’re following him to the hospital.”
“Loads better,” Elroy repeated.
“We have time. You got a good look at her, right?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Then get in the van. You can look through yearbooks for her while we’re at the hospital.”
Elroy turned around and the sliding door in the side of the van opened for him. Inside was a bank of surveillance equipment and a balding, gray-haired man who wore a bald eagle clip on his tie.
The door slid shut, and after allowing the ambulance a respectable lead, the van pulled out and followed.
07:55 PM
As far as Webster’s NewWorld was concerned, “teak” was a kind of wood and “teek,” “teke,” “teake,” and “teec” didn’t exist. That exhausted Allison’s research material at home.
She ran that, and the overheard telephone conversation, through her head as she sat down with Mom for dinner. The questions kept gnawing at her, and Allison kept trying to think of a way to broach the subject without admitting she’d been eavesdropping.
They were halfway through dinner, and a comparably long uncomfortable silence, before Allison got up the nerve to ask, “How come you never talk about Dad?”
Mom’s fork screeched on the plate. The sound startled Rhett, who dashed out from under the table and up the stairs. “Why do you ask?” Mom looked away from Allison. Her distress lined her face. It wasn’t just the overwork that Mom always complained about. She looked worried.
She looked old.
“You don’t talk about him. About why you left or what he was like…”
Mom nodded slowly, still looking away. The light carved harsh shadows on her cheeks. Her eyes were too shiny. “I’m sorry. Maybe I haven’t been fair to you. But—” Her eyes closed. “It’s hard for me.”
Seeing Mom like this upset Allison, but she tried to keep it out of her voice. “I’d just like to know what he was like.”
“He was stubborn. He was persistent…” Mom’s voice lowered until it was barely audible. “He was better than I gave him credit for.”
“Mom why…” Allison’s voice trailed off. Mom was on the verge of tears and she was about to hit her with something like “Why did you say he was dead?” or “Why are you hiding things from me?”
Allison couldn’t do it.
Mom stood up and grabbed the plates. Her hands shook. “I loved him,” she whispered. She talked more through Allison than to her. She hurried to the kitchen with the plates, and Allison barely made out the rest of her words, “…but I loved you more, Allie.”
The sentence ended with what could have been a sob.
Mom?
Allison felt her own eyes burning. After a moment she got up from the table and walked to the kitchen door. Mom stood there, leaning on the edge of the sink, staring down, her body shaking, crying too softly to hear.
“I’m sorry,” Allison said. She stood in the doorway, paralyzed, unsure of what to do.
Mom shook her head and did a shallow imitation of laughter. “I’m just a bit tired, Allie. I’m overreacting.”
Are you? What was that call about?
“Mom I heard—”
The phone rang. Mom seemed to wince as Allison reached and picked it up.
It was Macy, “Hi, Allie?”
“Uh-huh?”
“Me, Ben, and David are going to the Cinemark to see a movie. Can we swing by and pick you up?”
“Uh— I really got to work on that history paper—”
“I know, David’s been talking about your ‘research’ at the library—”
“Talk to you later.”
“Wait a minute, girl. You got to tell me—”
“Bye.”
Allison hung up the phone. Mom still seemed tense from the call.
“It was Macy,” Allison said. “The guys wanted to take me to a movie.”
Mom nodded and said, “Maybe you should get going on that paper, huh?” She gave Allison a weak smile, wiped a cheek with the back of her hand, and started running water in the sink.
“But…”
Allison shook her head. She felt as stressed out as Mom looked. Not now. She would wait until she was a little calmer. That’d be the only way she could deal with Mom breaking down on her.
She sighed and climbed the stairs back to her room.
She spent her evening slogging through the bibliography and whatever other homework she could think of, anything to keep her mind busy. By nine, she’d reached the point where sleep was a dull ache pulsing just behind her forehead. She knew she’d reached her limit when she’d read the same paragraph five times and had to look at the cover to see what textbook she was reading.
Is it me, or is it a prerequisite for textbook authors to be unable to write an interesting word?
She let the textbook slide from her hand and over the edge of the bed. She was surrounded by a rat’s nest of homework paper and notes, all of which now seemed terribly obscure.
She looked at her alarm clock, nine-oh-one. It seemed longer since the last time she looked.
At the foot of her bed, her TV blabbed on at low volume. She turned off the light on her night-stand, and the room filled with the blue phosphor glow from the picture. On the TV flickered a PBS nature documentary. She yawned and told herself that she’d turn it off in a sec.
She just wanted to close her eyes for a moment.
FIVE
CLEVELAND, OH: Sunday October 24, 1999
12:03 AM
Chuck Wilson’s first conscious thoughts weren’t his own.
«fucking doctor should be here by now. fuck they want me to bleed to death? fuck.»
«“It’ll be all right honey. god let her be all right The doctor will give you something to make it all better is it strep, please don’t let it be strep Shh, Mommy’s here. can a baby die from strep?”»
«should have known better than come here on a saturday night. too many people.»
The thoughts were accompanied by a fractured view of a crowded waiting room. The scene came from a dozen different viewpoints, some overlapping, none lasting long enough to make any sense of. Here sat a black woman holding a squealing baby as if it was a life preserver. There sat a scruffy looking man in an army jacket holding a bloody bandanna to his thigh. A dozen others, all of whom tried to grab space in Chuck’s semi-conscious mind.
«when are they going to get to me? I think my arm’s broke.»
«so much easier when they’re a minor. just lean on the parents a little. feelings of fatigue. fingers come to rub eyes. a glance down at the papers in his lap.»
What the fuck? was Chuck Wilson’s first lucid thought that he could call his own.
He felt the last contact slipping, even as Chuck realized the papers in the man’s lap had a header bearing the name Charles W. Wilson. For the first time in a long while, Chuck tried to hold onto the voices in his head.
«should have been here a year earlier. no question the mother wants to be rid of him. another glance downward. glimpse of a tie graced by a gold bald eagle. papers in lap with chuck’s picture on them. dates, ages, police record. shouldn’t have left him out there to bait the girl. now we got all this hospital red tape. glance up at a clock on the wall of the waiting room. clock reads 12:09. yeah, a year early, before the asshole turned eighteen. mom would’ve caved in five minutes, and then nobody would miss the creep. glance down at the papers. especially the euclid heights police.»
Chuck Wilson was fully awake now, dimly aware of straps holding him down on some sort of table.
«a tap on the shoulder. right hand experiences an almost subliminal jerk toward left armpit. awareness of pressure of a holster, and of the dozen civilians. surprise over in an instant, hand doesn’t move. turn to look over. sandy-haired kid with a black cartoon T-shirt. “What is it Elroy?” don’t like that look of his. never did. what the hell does the kid really see? the kid looks up and says, “Charlie’s awake, I can feel him—”»
Chuck’s eyes snapped open and he lost contact. Shit boy, you in trouble.
The voices in his head might mean he was nuts, but some hard experiences made him trust them. Hell, if the voices weren’t right all the time they wouldn’t have fucked up his life so much. Chuck tried to sit up, and found that he really was strapped down.
“Fuck,” he whispered.
The stellar medical staff of wherever the hell he was had parked him on a rolling bed off in a corridor somewhere. A chart lay on his stomach, and was slowly sliding off, knocked askew by his attempt to sit up.
Thick leather straps held him down, across his chest and arms just above the elbow. Large cuffs restrained his wrists and ankles. Another belt held down his legs just above the knee. None was tight enough to be painful, but any real movement was impossible.
God, why didn’t they just get a straitjacket and get it over with?
Chuck had been questioning his sanity for so long that there was little doubt in his mind that they were bottling him up for the nut factory. That must be what the man with the eagle on his tie was all about. Either that or he was some sort of cop. Either way, Chuck didn’t want to deal with him.
But, strapped down here, he didn’t have much choice.
The chart kept sliding until it fell into the crook of his arm.
“What the fuck I’m going to do?” Chuck muttered. He tossed his head around, to get an idea of where he was. It didn’t help much. He was in an empty corridor flooded with florescent light. The corridor was a short one ending with a T-intersection at each end. All the doors around him were closed, no signs of any doctors, nurses, or anyone else.
He suspected he was close to the emergency room.
Midnight? I’ve been here twelve hours?
At least they hadn’t taken his clothes, such as they were. His jeans were splattered with blood, and the sleeves of his shirt had been slit up to the shoulder. A bag suspended over him dripped into a needle in his left arm, and bandages swathed his right hand.
Fuck that bitch. This is all her fault.
Chuck froze as he saw a uniformed cop cross past the intersection in front of him. He didn’t breathe until the cop had passed. Then he had to catch his breath again as a barely audible conversation started up around the corner.
“Hey, Doc, how’s the patient?”
“Fine, still sleeping,” said a mumbled voice.
“Any more word from those feds?”
A grunt.
“Yeah, I know. Never heard of the ASI either. But I’m just here to take a statement from the kid.”
Chuck’s eyes finally focused on the chair by the foot of his stretcher. It was surrounded by a half-dozen paper cups, and hanging off of the chair’s arm was a cop’s hat.
Fuck and double fuck.
Whoever the eagle dude was, the bastard had to be the fed the cop talked about. And if he didn’t want to meet up with the guy, he had to get off this stretcher before the cop came back.
Chuck, quietly, tried all the restraints. For a few seconds it seemed hopeless. Then he realized that the cuff holding his right hand was looser than the one on his left, to accommodate the bandages and his injury.
Listening to the cop’s voice, just down the corridor, made Chuck desperate. He folded his right thumb over the palm to make his hand as small as possible. The effort reminded Chuck that this hand had put him in the hospital. His thumb barely moved before he felt the gash in his palm. As he kept closing it across his palm, his hand burned. It felt as if his hand split in half along the seams of his wound.
Somehow he managed to touch his thumb to the base of his pinkie with only a grunt. He held his hand like that for a few moments, letting the pain recede to a dull ache. To his surprise, the white bandages didn’t erupt into a blossom of arterial blood.
The cop still talked to the doctor.
Now comes the hard part.
This was where he had a chance to undo everything the doctors had done. He took a deep breath, and pulled his arm back, pulling his hand through the cuff. It felt as if he was trying to tear his hand off. First the bandages caught on the edge of the cuff, then they began to rip and peel off his hand. The tape holding the gauze felt as if it was made of tiny metal hooks embedded in his skin. He clenched his teeth and stopped breathing to keep from crying out. His eyes watered, and tears streamed down his cheeks.
He didn’t stop pulling. The worst thing that could happen was to get his injured hand caught inside the cuff.
The half-minute he pulled his hand felt like half an hour. Pain shot up his arm so bad that it caused his bicep to vibrate. Sweat broke out on his arm and forehead, and blood began seeping through the folds in his palm. Between the blood and the sweat, his hand finally slipped free of the cuff. The bandages were left on the other side like shed skin.
For a few long seconds, all Chuck could do was lay back and breathe. But the cop was still talking, and any second he could turn the corner. No way he could afford to stop now.
What he saw of his hand was an ugly mass of black bruising and stitches. He didn’t look too closely. He lay back, breathing heavily, as he fumbled with the strap on his chest. Every movement hurt his hand, but nothing like what he’d just gone through. The main problem was the fact that he had to work with only his last two fingers and his thumb. He couldn’t move his index or middle finger at all.
The strap fell away and Chuck sat up. When he did, he had to make a panicked grab for the chart, which had escaped to slide to ground. Chuck grabbed it, leaning so far over that he thought the stretcher would tip over. He clasped the chart between his thumb and little finger. The pressure he exerted felt as if it was dislocating his pinkie. It wasn’t enough. The chart slowly slipped through his fingers, sliding on the blood and sweat covering his hand.
The chart slid out of his grasp and fell the remaining few inches to the ground. Chuck’s heart stopped as the chart fell. The sound seemed to echo in the corridor forever. He waited for the cop to come running around the corner.
He waited.
Around the corridor he heard the cop say, “So, did you catch the playoffs?”
“Eh?”
“Somehow one of my friends got hold of some Indians tickets and I haven’t heard the end of it.”
Chuck could breathe again. They hadn’t heard, or hadn’t noticed. Once he relaxed a bit, he felt the tension of the tube pulled taut in his arm. He leaned back into a sitting position and realized that the place where the needle fed his arm hurt like hell now. Nothing like his hand, but pretty nasty.
He pulled the needle out of his arm, gripped between his
thumb and pinkie. After slipping three times, it came out with a sickening, sliding pressure.
Then Chuck began freeing himself in earnest. Once he got his other wrist free, the remaining straps were loosed in short order. He had just taken his first unsteady step off of the stretcher when he heard a gasp and a crash from behind him. He turned to see a nurse. She had dropped a tray full of test tubes on the floor, and blood samples had gone everywhere.
She took a step back, more from the blood than from him. He heard her say, “shit” just before the cop came around the corner. Unlike Chuck’s chart, the shattering of a dozen test tubes wasn’t a sound to be overlooked in the midst of conversation.
Chuck turned to see the cop at the other end of the corridor, a cup of machine coffee in his hand, arms held wide. “It’s all right, Charlie.” Said the cop in what was supposed to be a reassuring voice.
Chuck looked back, and saw the nurse looking at the cop. No voices played in his mind— thank God— but Chuck could see in her face the event change from a mess on the floor to psycho on the loose.
He was trapped. He knew if he ran toward the nurse, the cop would shoot him. That was the way cops thought. Chuck froze, his hands out in a parody of the cop, trying to think of what to do. Fear tore through him like a pack of dogs gnawing at his gut.
“Look, you had a scare. That’s all right. You had a bad time at the library, but everything’s all right now.”
Chuck knew that voice. It was how cops talked to crazy people. The bastard would grab him and someone would shoot a needle in his arm, and Chuck would wake up in a little cell, padded or unpadded, with no way to escape the voices in his head.
His temple throbbed.
«view of himself, standing befuddled. “Everything’s all right Chuck” just a little bit closer and I can grab him.»
Chuck turned to face the cop. The cop was almost to him now. Behind the cop, he saw a nervous looking doctor inching toward the intercom. Fuck, what did I ever do to deserve this?
“Look man, I just want to go home.” Chuck heard the note of hysteria in his own voice.
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