The Mercy of the Night

by David Corbett

  She sensed Teddy somewhere in the room, a mere reach away but lost in a trippy haze, like everything had turned to a kind of smoky shimmer.

  “I gotta,” she said, “leave,” a whisper lost inside another whisper.

  Not lost. Trapped.

  Then his arms wrapped around her waist, he was hoisting her to her feet. “Come on,” he said. “Up.”

  She couldn’t stop blinking. It was the blood—dripping fast and steady now, into her eyes—and she lifted her hand, clumsily tried to wipe it away as he dragged her toward the door, her legs scissoring beneath her, the weight and bulk of her body sloshing left and right, until it came again, that freakish earsplitting boom.

  The gun. LeQuan.

  The sound like a shock wave, a rippling pulse of noise, as Teddy staggered with a back-bending jolt, his hold weakening around her waist, then clenching tighter, a shudder in his legs. He hit the floor hard, both knees, just toppling, dragging her with him.

  She lay there, unaware of time, feeling the crippling throb of pain in her head, exploring with shaky fingers the sticky coppery paste tangled in her eyebrow, clinging to her cheek, her lips, her chin. She could hear LeQuan’s scratch-like wheezing and feel Teddy trembling from shock.

  No voices, not from them, but soon there were footsteps, quick at first, then hesitant, a faint whiff of men’s cologne and someone murmuring, “Puta madre.”

  62

  Someone trying to drag her up, onto her feet—instinctively, she fought back, squirming, windmilling, the effort comical—butterfly elbows, katydid kicks. So weak it was cruel.

  “Jacquelina.” A man, a hiss. “Knock it off. We gotta get you the fuck outta here.”

  Vague recognition, the voice. Ben Escalada. Navarette’s recadero. His sicario. But it wasn’t his arms around her. Those belonged to the bear, Hector.

  “We’re taking you home.”

  She struggled. “No, no . . .”

  Hector, whispering through his teeth, “Pinche chicabonchia.”

  Escalada again: “Your family is worried.”

  “Fuck my family. You can’t leave him here.” She pointed at Teddy, bleeding out.

  “He’s not your problem.”

  The room swam, her legs swam with it, the world muddy with color, plus this throbbing hum, a soundtrack in her blood.

  Hector, arms locked around her waist, dragged her down the hallway in windmilling hops, finally entering the living room, where the Blu-ray flickered, some kind of televised fight.

  Escalada came around, grabbed her jaw and squeezed, pooching out her lips to get her attention, his own mouth curled in a pending insult, but before he could get out a word the first window shattered.

  The crash came from the front, work of a ball bat or crowbar, jagged glass shards flying so hard and fast they tagged the beaded curtain ten feet away. The clicking tendrils began to sway as Hector let go—she dropped to the rug, he reached inside his jacket for a weapon. Escalada drew as well as the next two windows exploded—the two men crouching, shielding their heads—while from the rear of the house Jacqi heard other windows breaking, the thumping crack of impact, the clang of splintering glass, every pane bashed in like some kind of ritual blinding.

  Whoever it was, they had the house surrounded. The neighbors, she thought, recalling Fishbelly pissing on the pickup’s windshield, LeQuan and his redneck paranoia.

  No sooner did this idea form in her mind than a squarish bottle with a lit rag stopper, tossed in through a broken window, clunked across the floor, careening off the far wall, bouncing back in ricochet, not breaking. She could make no sense of it at first, like it was a flaming toy.

  Escalada chased it, picked it up, cocked his arm to pitch it back out, only to see it followed by a second through a different window, a third through another. These hit and shattered and the flames spread fast, thick black smoke erupting in boiling clouds, the sickening smell of burning kerosene.

  She scrambled onto her knees. Not toward the front, she thought. They’ve got the place surrounded, fine, take your chances out back. If you can just get your legs to work.

  Through terror or madness or animal will she managed it, got herself upright, staggering out of the room, pinballing down the shotgun hallway, arms stretched out, pushing off against one wall then the other as she stumbled forward, glancing just once into the bedroom, seeing the two bodies—Teddy curled up in a lake of blood, LeQuan corkscrewed across the room, half on his back, fish-mouthed, eyes bulging.

  She found the back door, unlatched the bolt, threw it open and tumbled out onto the rain-slick deck, almost losing her feet just as Hector and Escalada caught up, barging out blind, hacking up toxic phlegm. On cue, one after the other, they skidded and slipped and dropped like sacks.

  She blinked at the darkness, making out a patch of yard, shallow and rimmed with a ragged hedge, and beyond that, towering evergreens.

  She stepped off the deck onto wood chips and sawdust and fumbled her way ahead, reaching the hedge and searching for a gap just as an arm reached out, a fist gripped her sleeve.

  Someone ripped her through the bushes. A blinding light flashed on, straight in her face.

  “The girl.”

  “Jesus—”

  “Careful now. Don’t touch that blood.”

  Rough voices, muffled by bandannas, a touch of Arkie twang. The hand gripping her sleeve dragged her farther beneath the evergreens and shoved her toward someone else, the figure coming clear for just a second in the flashlight glare—just as stocky as the others but shorter, a woman.

  Jacqi’s eyes adjusted. She could make out a hat tugged down tight on a pigtailed head, the face, like the men’s, masked.

  Back near the house, Hector and Ben kept coughing up their lungs.

  “Well well, look at you.” The woman’s voice, throaty and even more thickly accented than the men’s. Older, too. “I’m guessing you deserved what you got.”

  Now Jacqi started coughing and couldn’t stop. It felt like her lungs had turned to paper and something intended to rip them to shreds.

  The woman waited her out, then: “Ain’t no more reason for you to come around here, little girl. Nowhere to come to. Closest station house? Twenty minutes away, ever since they closed the one in northtown. Time the fire crews get here place’ll be a total loss. Too bad. But you live like an animal, got nothing to cry about you die like one.”

  A small scrape of a voice. “I didn’t live here.”

  “Like that’s the goddamn point.” The woman turned her head, lifted the edge of the kerchief, and spat. “Don’t come out here no more. And you tell the police or anybody you were here, you say anything at all, we’ll find you. You can bet your cheap little life on that. Now git.”

  She gripped Jacqi’s shoulder and dragged her down a cramped path of well-trod mud bristling with pine needles and steepled with dripping trees, the smell of the fire mingling with a heavy scent of resin, freshened by the rain.

  Stumbling, her skin feeling raw and hot: “There’s four people back there, at least two of them alive, maybe three.”

  “I told you once, girl. Get gone. Don’t test me.”

  63

  At the crest of Holcombe Hill, Cass asked him to stop the car—“Just for a minute”—facing away, a whisper against the glass.

  They’d driven in silence from the river road bus shelter—tacit agreement, mutually reached. Best to wait, let the surroundings of home buffer what was to come.

  The storm had broken; through islands of cloud you could make out stars. The rain had scrubbed the landscape clean, streets etched with pinpoint lights, downtown a display case of window-lit high-rises with the incandescent transit center at the western end. The river drew a glimmering, sinuous curve in the dark, city on the nearside, the black sprawling marshlands beyond. Further still, sawtooth mountains lay shrouded in haze.


  “This is where I stop when I’m walking Noble,” she said, looking out. “Reminds me why I live here.”

  Day like this, he thought, some reminding can’t hurt.

  He shuddered at the thought of the nightly news. But he understood what she meant. Those who stayed here, who stuck it out, hanging in there—stone masons and jazz guitarists, yogaphiles and Harley freaks, the sleep-deprived hoi polloi: dental techs, vet techs, taco techs—all of them trying to eke out some kind of American life, all of them nailed to one question: Why?

  You bought yourself a fixer-upper in a neighborhood on the edge, settled in and found a few like minds, made a few friends, dealt with the hassles and discovered, sooner or later, that you genuinely liked the town, the boondock pace, the funky charm, liked the ease of ferrying into San Francisco or day-tripping up into the wine country on weekends.

  Now? Some couldn’t afford to leave, hopelessly underwater on their mortgages. Some had stubbornly put down roots and refused to budge. Some had grand ideas the place might change.

  But sooner or later, in a quieter moment, you’d hear them admit that there were nights like this, looking out across the town and the river and the wetlands, stars or storm clouds overhead, spray of lights below, the scent of orange and lemon trees in the background, heavy with winter fruit, or the fragrance of gardens thick with rosemary and lavender and jasmine. If home wasn’t here, then where?

  Trick question. Sitting there, watching Cass gaze out across the city, he reminded himself that home, now, was her.

  Finally she broke the silence, saying quietly, “I don’t need any more apologies, okay? What I need is a decision.”

  She turned away from the view. The yellow T-shirt with its red interdit sign lent an air of the absurd. Her eyes, though, canceled that.

  “I always thought,” she said, “the problem would be that I’d never measure up. Measure up to Roni, to what the two of you had. What the two of you went through.”

  “Cass?”

  “I’m scared, Phelan. I’m not smart the way she was, I don’t understand the books and movies and other stuff you talk about like she did. How am I supposed to compete with a ghost?” She looked at his face as though hoping to find the thing she’d lost. “Ghosts are perfect. Ghosts can’t let you down.”

  “Trust me,” Phelan said. “Ghosts let you down.”

  She turned away, taking a sad tight smile with her. Outside, the wind shook the branches of an ancient magnolia, ripe with waxy blossoms, towering over its white-fenced yard.

  “Know when I fell for you? I mean, I’d kinda had my eye on you for a while but that happens. Flirting, I mean. Weird, I know. But cancer gets real fucking tedious.”

  “Hon, you don’t need to go into this.”

  “But when I fell for you,” she said, “was after the clinical trial failed and you met with the doctors and they said, That’s it. That was your last best shot.”

  “Her last best shot.”

  “Phelan, stop interrupting, okay?”

  “Sorry.”

  She fussed with a thread working loose from her turtleneck’s sleeve. “And you had to make the decision, end all treatment, just nourishment and morphine. You had to let her go, watch her die.” She broke the thread off, whisked it off her fingers. “And I remember the look on your face, wandering the halls the next few hours, and I wanted so bad to hold you, make you feel better, but when you finally broke down it was Agnes standing there, holding you—I mean, come on. Agnes?”

  He hadn’t thought of the woman in ages: slender, tiny, Taiwanese, a gunnery sergeant among nurses. “She could be strangely maternal in her way.”

  “If Agnes had babies, they’d hatch. And I asked you not to interrupt.”

  “Sorry. Again.” He lifted a hand. Surrender.

  “Make matters worse, I can’t remember who it was now but somebody ordered the morphine recalibrated, and we had to back it down, then build it up again, like there was some sweet spot to find instead of just knocking her out. You know how that went.”

  He did. So much for fabled comfort care.

  The pain team, as they called themselves, had told him, well before the decision to end treatment, that Roni’s suffering baffled them. “If the six of us,” the team leader said, “were hit with the same dose she’s on we’d all be asleep.” Which meant, no question, the pain was real. Roni, anxious and restless and demented, refused to lie still. But some genius decided to reinvent the wheel, drop down the painkiller to see what level she really needed. They turned the love of his life into an exercise.

  “There was nothing the nurses could do, we had to follow the protocol, only her oncologist could change it and he never got back to us—calls, pages, nothing. What was it, about five hours went by.”

  Four, he thought, keeping quiet this time. Four hours watching Roni writhe in her bed, neither asleep nor quite awake, wincing, turning, like she was trying to claw her way out of the grave.

  “And you’d had it. You went out into the hallway—I’ll never forget this—you went out into the hallway and bellowed like you’d just escaped from a cage: ‘Who the fuck do I have to kill to get my wife out of pain?’”

  Strange, he thought, how blurry his own memory of that moment felt now. And he couldn’t decide whether it made him feel heroic, romantic, or pathetic.

  “You spotted Goerling over by the nurse’s station, writing something up in a chart. Sitting there like nothing was happening, oh la-di-da, ignore it and it goes away. Narcissistic dork. But most of them are, the men anyway.”

  For whatever reason, the doctor came through crystal clear: young guy, hip little beard, chichi glasses, tennis player from the look of him, maybe a cyclist, trim and fit. Probably a lady-killer, ho ho.

  “And you went over and asked him to check Roni’s morphine level. He gave the door to her room the over-the-shoulder bit, then said, ‘She’s not my patient.’”

  I would’ve been a hero in prison, he thought, if I’d strangled him to death right there just for saying that.

  “The rest went by pretty quick. I remember him screaming, ‘Call security!’ I hurried over and grabbed your arm, stuffed you in the visiting room.”

  He remembered that part well. He’d felt cared for in a way he hadn’t in a very long while. The preceding few seconds, though, remained a mystery. The doctor, Goerling, would claim he was attacked. “The man lunged at me.” Phelan, in contrast, remembered the guy getting up to leave and he just naturally followed. They were probably both right.

  “The other nurses and aides and me, we got together, and when security showed up we told them: Look, he’s not some kind of loon. He’s not a menace. We’d all seen you there, day and night, no sleep, no food.”

  “I had no right to go off the way I did.”

  “Oh, please.” She raked back her hair with her fingers. “At least you didn’t break his jaw.” Something seemed to unlock inside her. Letting a little of the anger out. “To be honest? I was kinda sorry you didn’t kill the twerp.”

  “You’d come visit me on death row?”

  A dry, sad chuckle. Still not looking at him. “Well, I’m kinda engaged to the Night Stalker, but I could probably fit you in.”

  “So hard, being popular.”

  “My point is, what I saw in you that day—I dunno, it’s complicated. It wasn’t just that you loved her—I mean, duh—it was that you were still trying to save her and you couldn’t and you’d never forgive yourself, so you started howling at the moon, wanted to kill somebody—to protect her, sure, but to get even too. You’re bitter, you’re lonely, you’re wicked sad and you know it’s only gonna get worse. All of that, all at once, like you were utterly crazy and stone sane. I’d seen a lot in that ward, but never that. Not until then. Until you.”

  “No offense, but I find that hard to believe.”

  “Maybe I just didn’t se
e it till then. Maybe you showed me.”

  The warmth of their breath as they spoke had begun to fog the windows, the cityscape now gauzed in a beaded haze.

  “I wasn’t half the noble mess you’re making me out to be. Secretly, I felt relieved. Finally we had an answer. It sucked, but it was an answer.”

  She looked at him as though, if she saw him just right, things might change. “That’s nothing to feel guilty about. We all get there. You deal with death enough, day in, day out, sometimes it can’t come too quick.” Tucking two fingers inside her mock turtleneck, she tugged the clinging fabric away from her throat, as though suddenly too warm, or bothered by how close it felt. “My point is, when the time came, it was like your golden moment and your worst nightmare were all wrapped up together. You were never better, never stronger or more true than you were with her at the end. I know. I saw. But you never failed so bad, either. And you’re stuck there, Phelan. I didn’t see it till this thing with Jacqi Garza, but you are. Stuck, trapped . . .”

  The magnolia groaned and rustled in another burst of wind.

  “I mean, it’s not like I’m blameless here,” she said. “I know that. I was jealous of a dying woman—how sick is that? Still am jealous—Christ, if anything it’s worse. Maybe you feel guilt for letting her go and you think you have to atone—that happens a lot—but people die, Phelan. We all do. But you just won’t accept that, not down deep. It’s like you’re still back in that room with Roni, trying one more time to get it right. Save her. Except now it’s this Garza kid. After her it’ll be somebody else, a married woman in a lousy marriage, another woman with cancer—”

  “No—”

  “I feel so fucking beside the point. What am I supposed to do? I don’t need you to rescue me, Phelan. I need you to love me. And if you can’t—I need you to leave.”

  For just an instant he pictured Roni rising from her hospital bed right after he’d told her the treatments had failed, shuffling in her gown and her treaded slipper socks toward the bathroom, opening the door as though it might lead somewhere else, somewhere better, a place where you get to live.