I snorted. The sensation was not unlike a hand grenade going off in my sinus cavity. “She can barely help herself to another fix,” I said, once the tears had cleared from my eyes.
“We’re not going to talk about that,” Benedict said. I could see why. “Whatever you think of Haverty, she’s good. You’d be dead without her.”
I met that moronic comment with a dull stare. I think I got the point across.
“Believe me, it could be worse.”
“Go away.”
“Jimmy, you’ve been oozing blood from your pores for six days. We’ve practically had you hooked to a tanker truck of O positive—and you’re not getting better.”
“The fuck do you care?”
Benedict studied his hands for a long moment. “You did good, Jimmy. You got Kelsen. You got Old Man Chebyshev, too. So how about letting us help you out, huh?”
“He’s dead? The old man?”
“Let me put it this way: We found most of his head. Something had bitten a chunk out of it like an apple. The rest of him—well, it was tough to tell which bits belonged to whom.” He made an unconscious moue of disgust, looked away, and swallowed a couple of times. “What did you do?” he asked again.
I thought about this. Did I really care if they helped me or not? The alternative was almost certainly a slow, miserable death, during most of which I’d be drugged out of my mind. Maybe dying wouldn’t be so bad, but after that? I thought of the black hole of Kelsen’s eye socket, and the thing wriggling inside. Rarely had I encountered such a compelling reason to live.
“I . . . called something.”
“What?”
I sighed. “No fucking idea.”
“What did it look like?”
“Scaly. Walked like a man. Mouth like a crocodile or something. And . . .” A shudder rippled up my body. “I can’t really—I can’t describe it. It was . . . horrible.” That last came in a whisper.
“The diagram. Can you remember it?”
“It’s on my hand,” I said. “Left hand. Heh.”
“Back of your hand?”
“Yeah.”
“No,” Benedict said. “It, ah, it burned itself away when you did the summoning.”
“My hand?”
“The diagram. Your hand is scarred but fine.” He cast a dubious glance at my body. “As fine as the rest of you, anyway.”
I didn’t have much more help for Benedict. Drawing the diagram was out of the question. Lifting my arm was manageable only with a great deal of pain, and higher coordination was hopeless. He’d just have to figure it out on his own. Fuck, I’d had less to go on when I started fiddling with all this crap.
He left, eventually, unsatisfied but weary, and probably in need of a drink.
I slept.
* * *
“It’s called a Devourer,” Benedict said. His eyes looked as sober as I’d seen them in months, though the smell of booze still boiled off him. Scared sober, I thought.
I said nothing.
Benedict continued. “You shouldn’t have called it. You shouldn’t have been able to call it.”
“Well, I fuckin’ did. Jealous?”
For a moment, Benedict looked a thousand years old. “No,” he said. I believed him. If he’d told me, in that tone of voice, that the Earth was made out of brightly colored plastic, I’d have believed him.
“I got the job done.”
“Maybe it would have been better if you hadn’t.”
I owed him a “fuck you” for that, just for form’s sake, but I couldn’t muster it. Maybe he was right.
He interpreted my silence as argument, though. “You didn’t call up a dumb mutt this time, Jimmy. These things are smart. Maybe smarter than us. The price . . .” He shook his head.
“Don’t talk to me about the price,” I said, my voice a hoarse whisper. “Ever again.” He had no idea.
“There’s a physical price, too. You know they need blood. This one . . . needed a lot of blood. You shouldn’t have been able to call it,” he said again. It was no more or less true this time. “Anyway, that’s what we think happened. You, uh, sort of acted as your own blood sacrifice.”
I coughed out something like a laugh that seemed to spin my bed in dizzying, eccentric orbits. “I’m not quite dead.”
“Not quite.” He didn’t need to add close enough. If I could be alive and feel any deader, I didn’t want to know about it.
“But the Devourer—from what I can gather, once it has hold of something, it doesn’t let go. What it takes, it keeps. If we don’t figure out some way to stop it, it will bleed you forever. Hopefully Haverty can help,” Benedict said.
“Yeah. Hopefully.” Silence settled around us, awkward for Benedict, who kept looking around the area like he’d find something he hadn’t seen before. He didn’t seem inclined to leave, though. I let him sweat.
“My crew,” I said, after a good long while. “Any of ’em make it?”
Benedict hesitated, as if wondering how much he should tell me. “Lazzaro.”
I waited, but nothing else was coming. “That it?”
“Yeah.”
“What happened to the others?”
“Kelsen got Skinny Steve. Alfie Teeth got filled full of bullets while you were inside Kelsen’s apartment.”
“Tink?”
Benedict met my eyes. “Tink fucked up.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It’s supposed to mean Tink fucked up,” Benedict said. “One time too many.”
I processed that. It seemed to take forever. My focus wasn’t so hot, what with all the itching. “He was supposed to be babysitting me,” I concluded.
“The Russians should never have gotten to you. He should have been there.”
“And he was already on the Slob’s shit list,” I said.
“He fucked up,” Benedict repeated.
So they had killed Tink. Not the Russians—our guys. One of our guys, anyway. These were the people I’d surrounded myself with, the crowd I’d been so eager to impress, the club I’d wanted to join. The thrill had worn pretty thin, and all the gold rings looked like so much painted plastic, grimed with blood.
To say nothing of the price.
“Go away,” I said.
Benedict left.
* * *
“Jesus Christ, are you trying to freeze me to death?”
My sheet was pulled down to my waist, and Haverty stood over me, eyes wet and darting. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand every ten seconds or so, which did not do wonders for my confidence in her cleanliness. Still, I guessed that was the least of my problems.
“Gonna get colder,” she said, producing a sponge from a bucket by her feet. Before I could protest, she started wiping the blood off my chest. She was right. It was colder. The sponge became saturated with blood after just a few swipes, and she rinsed it and wrung it out in the bucket over and over again. It felt like she’d pulled the water right out of the harbor, and I shivered.
Little gleaming dots of blood popped up on my chest and belly seconds after Haverty cleared most of the mess away. I’d been conscious for this ritual a few times, and it usually took a good three or four hours to soak the sheets again. Amazingly enough, Haverty dressed the bed with clean white sheets every time. It was the only nod toward cleanliness I’d ever seen her make, and I appreciated it out of all measure, considering what was inevitably going to happen to the sheets anyway.
This time, though, she didn’t get a new sheet. She got a scalpel instead.
“Doc, what are you doing with that?”
She held the thin blade up to the light, inspecting it carefully. Maybe she was making sure she’d rinsed it off after the last use. She looked down at me, his eyes lost in the sinkholes of their orbits. “Gonna fix you right up,” she said.
That was among the least reassuring things I’d ever heard anyone say. “How? Going to bleed me?” The joke stumbled, fell flat, and died.
“A
series of wards,” she said.
“How about you use a pen instead of that machete?”
A cadaverous grin stretched across her face, like spreading rot. “Sorry, kid. It don’t work that way.”
“I didn’t figure.”
“I gotta tell you, though—this is deep magic. There will be a price.”
“Don’t even fucking talk to me about the price. Just start cutting, okay?”
The life dropped out of her grin. She leaned over, put the tip of the scalpel against my blood-dotted flesh, and started cutting.
Chapter 22. Out
The sunlight hit my face like a bucketful of acid as Benedict pulled the sliding doors open. Haverty’s place, it turned out, was an abandoned factory near the waterfront, and the glare off the water would have blinded me even if I hadn’t been effectively living in a cave for weeks. I squinted and emerged into the regular world. It didn’t feel so regular anymore. Despite the brightness, everything seemed shrouded under a dingy yellow veil, turning the blue of the harbor into a metallic green that I could almost taste, like blood on my tongue. The normal depth of the world was compressed, and it seemed like I could reach out and touch anything I could see. It was all I could do not to try to pluck a boat off the water and put it in my pocket.
I was outside. Outside. Out. The words had a certain savor to them. Out of the hospital. Out of a cage, out of something confining. Out of Hell.
For the first time since my brief night in jail, I thought of my whole life to date, the mess I’d gotten myself into, and I thought I might like to be out.
“Come on,” Benedict said, gently enough.
I took a step after him, then turned around. Haverty was already closing the doors behind me, but I gave her a nod. The doors slowed a fraction, and I thought the vague shape of Haverty’s head dipped, and then she sealed herself inside her oversized tomb.
“Come on,” Benedict said again. “We’re going to be late.” I followed him to his car, none too steadily. Walking was an unfamiliar, half-remembered exercise, and the flat, even ground felt like it was balanced on a ball bearing, sliding and pitching this way and that.
I was sitting in the car, panting from the short walk, when Benedict’s words caught up with me. “Late for what?”
He pulled a flask from his jacket pocket and took a swig. It occurred to me to be glad he had a driver. “We need to get you into some decent clothes,” he said, a ghost of a smile haunting the lines around his mouth.
“You’re kidding, right? I can barely stand.” Recuperation had taken a hell of a toll on my body. At a guess, I’d have to say I lost thirty or forty pounds, and I hadn’t had thirty pounds to spare. When I had my shirt off, if you managed to see past the whorled lines of scars on my torso, you could see my ribs standing out like railroad ties. My skin had paled, and even sitting up took a surprising amount of effort.
I wasn’t bleeding anymore, though. Doc Haverty had worked her magic well.
“I wouldn’t joke about this,” Benedict said.
I sighed. “No. I didn’t figure.”
There was little doubt that Benedict was taking me to get straightened out—to get made. You never got an explicit invitation to that particular ceremony. You were just told to show up somewhere at a certain time, and to come dressed in your best. Everybody knew that.
I should have been exhilarated. For a mob guy, this was the crowning moment. After this, I would be untouchable, except by order of one of the grand high muckety-mucks. Maybe there had been a time, months or years before, when I would have been exhilarated, but today the flat appearance of everything I saw was matched by a flatness inside. I wanted to see my parents. I wanted to see Kit, even. I wanted to see anyone whose hands hadn’t been stained with blood—but of course, I was so thoroughly stained, through and through, that I couldn’t imagine those people wanting to see me. And, instead, I was going to go spend the rest of my day, weary as I was, with guys who were steeped in blood, who waded in the stuff, who drank it. Guys like me.
I thought of oversized maggots. I smelled burning.
I kept my mouth shut and stared out the window at the flat, compressed world, all the way to my apartment.
* * *
“Do you know why you’re here?” the Slob asked me. “Here” was the back room of the club, which was considerably nicer than out front. Wood paneling everywhere, a clean bar at the end. No leaks. On the table in front of me were the obligatory knife, gun, and picture of a saint. I didn’t know which saint. My saint vocabulary was pretty small. Saint Sebastian would have been full of arrows, and Saint George typically had a dragon around somewhere, so it wasn’t either of them, but that was as far as I could narrow it down. Ma would have known.
“No,” I lied. Why? Because that’s how it’s done. Everybody knows that.
“Are you ready to swear loyalty to this family, to this thing of ours?” A handful of people watched. Big George. The Slob. Some old guy I didn’t recognize was there, face small behind oversized horn-rimmed glasses that looked like they’d been perched on his face since 1954. Benedict, too, surprisingly enough. He wasn’t made, couldn’t be made, if Lazzaro was right, so it was pretty fuckin’ strange that they’d have him at the ceremony.
The Slob’s eyes looked small and mean, like he was waiting for me to say something stupid, some smart-ass remark he could use as an excuse to pound me.
I played it safe. These guys would gut me on the spot if I made light of their ceremony, and I’d had all the pain I could handle. “Yes, sir,” I said, meeting his gaze.
“Above your country?” the Slob asked.
“Yes.”
“Above God?”
“Yes.”
“Above the family you were born to?”
No room for hesitation here. My family wouldn’t have me, anyway. “Yes, sir.”
There was a long pause, and then the Slob took the knife from the table.
“Give me your hand.” I did. He cut the end of my right index finger. The cut was deeper than strictly necessary, I thought, but it barely rated on the scale of things. Blood welled up and dripped to the floor.
The Slob put the knife down and picked up the picture of the saint. Everybody knows how this goes, too—they give you the picture, light it on fire, and make you swear an oath while it burns in your hand.
Except that’s not what they did.
The Slob gave me the picture to hold in my left hand. Benedict started chanting something, just low enough for it to be unintelligible. Was I about to be double-crossed? I couldn’t imagine how, and why wouldn’t they just shoot me if they wanted to fuck me over? I schooled my face to stillness, and hoped the shaking in my hands would be attributed to my poor health.
The Slob took the end of my cut finger and pressed it against the face of the saint. Blood wicked into the paper, staining it, covering the face in an irregular cloud.
“Repeat after me,” the Slob said. “If I betray this family, may I burn in Hell for eternity.”
I almost laughed aloud. By all appearances, it wouldn’t matter if I betrayed the family or not. Occupational hazard, I guess.
I said it, though. “If I betray this family, may I burn in Hell for eternity.”
The Slob handed the picture to Benedict, who stopped chanting and slipped it into his inside pocket.
A big grin broke out on the Slob’s face, and the other guys smiled, too.
“Welcome to the family,” he said, and he kissed me on the cheek.
* * *
I kept a smile on my face through sheer bloody-mindedness for the next hour or so as the club filled up and the celebration got rolling. I was hot shit now, a made man, and a lack of enthusiasm at this point would have been construed as disrespect akin to kicking God Himself in the shin. It would have made the Slob look foolish, and I would have ended up in a hole, or a barrel, or a concrete piling, or the harbor in a matter of minutes if I’d told them all to kindly go fuck themselves, like I wanted to. I was hollowed ou
t, spiritually and emotionally, but I didn’t have a death wish. No way.
Surprisingly, though, I started to warm after a little while—or if not warm exactly then at least thaw some. Ricky Giacomo and Left Foot Joey and a couple of other guys I’d done jobs with came up and patted me on the back, grinning like fools, like they were the ones who’d got straightened out. It might have been the only genuine good feeling I’d ever known them to have on behalf of somebody else, and even though I was exhausted and in pain, some deeply buried emotion moved inside me. These guys had covered my ass on a dozen occasions each. That made them family or something, right?
So I shook their hands and tried my best to smile amid my own confusion, and I even made nice to the Don himself—the old guy from the ceremony, up from Providence for this round of inductions. There were a few of us entered in the books this time around, taking the place of the dead. I had highest honors, due to offing Old Man Chebyshev and throwing the Russians into complete disarray, but others had made their bones, too—including Lazzaro.
“Jimmy!” he said, oozing up to me near the bar. Ricky had just wandered off, three sheets to the wind, to go tackle his cousin or something, and I had found a small quiet space for one moment, and then Lazzaro was in my face, hand extended. His sudden presence was disquieting, and the warm feeling I’d started to drum up took on a sour tinge, but I shook his hand. His palm was clammy, his cheeks were red, and he swayed as he stood in front of me.
“Hey, Frankie. I hear you got made.”
“Fuckin’ A. You, too, right? I mean, what you did to the old man. Damn. Nothin’ but bone chips and a thin red film left of him, huh?”
I said nothing.
Lazzaro leaned close. “Nice fuckin’ work. Don’t think I coulda pulled that one off, myself. Hands tied and everything. Nice fuckin’ work.” It was tough making out his words—drunk was a state he’d passed hours ago without even slowing down to wave, and he was now in the exalted realm of destroyed, hammered, wasted. Pick your metaphor.
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