There were voices coming from down the hall. Bean's father doing a little Sunday morning consultation. Pepper drew the #15 scalpel from the pocket of her shorts. You never knew when you might have to make a quick incision. She slid through the door back to the examining rooms.
"Still nothing?" she heard the old doctor say.
Pepper'd met him twice before when he'd visited the Eaton Street clinic in the last couple of years. Nice old gentleman who smiled a lot and had good Southern manners like he thought every woman was a lady and every man a gentleman until proven otherwise.
"Numb as a hunk of roast beef," another man replied.
Pepper edged down the hallway to the room with light coming from it.
"Jesus, Eddie, I don't know what it is," the old doctor said. "But there's something wrong here. I simply don't understand this."
"I'll say there's something wrong. Christ, maybe you used the wrong stuff."
Pepper snuck a quick look around the edge of the door. The old doctor had his drug cabinet open and was fumbling around inside it. A tall thin man with a bald head was sitting on the examining table. He wore white tennis shorts and a white T-shirt.
"I'm going to have to call for an ambulance, Eddie, get you into the hospital. I'm sorry, but I don't see any other choice."
"Shit, Bean, it's just tennis elbow. What the hell's going on? I walk in here, I'm fine. What is this, some kind of heart attack?"
"No, no. I need you to calm down, Eddie. I'll get that ambulance down here and we'll sort all of this out at the hospital."
"Jesus Christ, Bean, it's the club mixed doubles tournament. There's going to be some very pissed-off people if I don't show."
"Blame me," the old doc said. "It's all my fault."
Pepper ducked across the hall into a dark examining room and listened to the doctor walk back to his office and call 911. Four or five minutes later the ambulance was outside and the two of them left, Eddie still bitching about his arm.
Pepper went into the examining room where they'd been, opened the drug cabinet, and took out the four remaining vials. She was back in the hearse a minute later and on her way back to Key West.
As she drove, every few seconds she'd forget and touch her teeth together and there'd be another explosion of splintered light in the back of her brain. That bastard had broken her jaw and she wasn't going to be right again for a long time. There wasn't any brand of love she knew that could stand up to something like that. Pepper sure as hell wasn't one of those women with self-esteem problems. Some brute of a husband beating the shit out of her in the morning and the woman all dressed up in her frilly things with his favorite supper on the table by evening time, greeting him at the door with a gooey hello. No, sir, she wasn't one of those. Her daddy'd taught her about love, and though she knew the world considered their marriage perverted, at least her daddy had never once hit her, never once done anything but praise her efforts, no matter how paltry they'd been. Didn't matter he was a child molester. Give her one of those any day instead of a bastard who broke the jaw of the woman whose only fault was loving him.
As she drove through Lower Matecumbe, Pepper minced up a hot claw on the back of a folded-up road map, then pinched the crumbly pieces into her mouth one dab at a time and sucked their juices. In no time her mouth was filled with dazzling fire, her eyes watering furiously, then the numbness began to seep into her gums and after that everything was fine for a little while.
CHAPTER 25
At noon Thorn called the offices of the Key Largo News, though he knew Monica would not be there. It was Sunday after all, day of rest. Not like the Herald up in Miami, where it took every hour of every day to cover the unceasing parade of outrages. In Key Largo you could miss a day or two, nobody'd notice, maybe a month. He was just going to leave a message on the answering machine, ask Monica to call him first thing on Monday. Then maybe slip in another discreet sentence or two, tell her he loved her, say he was sorry for how he'd acted last week, pushing her away like he'd done, leave it at that for the time being.
He was getting the words right in his head when the phone snapped up on the first ring and a man barked an impatient hello. When Thorn hesitated, the man snarled hello again.
"Is Monica there?"
"Who is this?"
"Who is this?" Thorn said back to him.
"Monica's not here."
"I want to leave a message for her."
"Who is this?" the man repeated. Thorn was forming a picture of the guy. A square head with tiny ears and small weak eyes. A phone bully—all those safe miles of cable between them.
"My name is Thorn."
The guy took a three- or four-second break to think that over. "You're the boyfriend."
"That's right. The boyfriend."
"Well, she's not coming into the office today."
"I know. I just want to get a message to her. I want her to call me.
"So you heard about what happened?"
Thorn didn't like his tone. Ominous and gloating.
"No," Thorn said. "Why don't you tell me."
"Three dead. Two by gunshot, one with her throat slashed."
Thorn lost the air in his lungs.
"They did Roy Everly execution style, two bullets through the temple, and his mother had her throat cut, then some old woman across the street was shot in the face."
"And Monica!"
"She got grazed on her neck. No big deal. Innocent bystander."
Thorn gripped the phone harder.
"No big deal," Thorn said.
"That's right."
"You ever been grazed by a bullet?"
"Fuck you, Jack. I don't have time for this."
"Where's Monica now?"
"Home, I think. Or over at your place. She had to bury the pooch."
"What?"
"Her dog. It got shot too. Lots of bullets flying."
Thorn closed his eyes. Worked on his breathing for a few seconds.
"Listen," Thorn said. "Whatever the fuck your name is. Get your self-important ass up right now, and drive over there and tell her to call me."
"Can't do it, lover boy. Herald's bringing me on board to do some interviewing on this. I don't have time to be running messages. This is my shot."
"You're going to go over there," Thorn said. "And you're going to tell Monica to call me."
"Wrong," the guy said, and hung up.
Thorn stared at the dead phone in his hand. He was losing it. Couldn't even intimidate a guy over the phone—like the asshole knew Thorn was crippled, stuck in an aluminum chair, his threats without weight.
He dialed the Key Largo sheriff's department, worked his way past the receptionist to Jennifer Bell, head cheerleader back in Thorn's football days. Pert and blond and full of serious pep. Captain Bell now. No-nonsense Captain Bell. Her school devotion had turned civic.
"She's fine, Thorn. We talked to her a good part of the night. Upset, of course, discombobulated, but okay. She's probably sleeping it off now."
"Is anybody watching her?"
"What? You mean like protecting her?"
"That's exactly what I mean."
"This wasn't about her, Thorn. She was just an eyewitness to the event and got herself between the shooters and their escape vehicle and they took a couple of potshots at her. That's the way we read it."
"You're sure of that?"
"If we thought she was in the least danger, there'd be somebody over there, Thorn. Believe it."
"Can you get a message to her, Jen? I need to talk to her."
"When I get a minute, yeah, I'll send someone over. It's kind of crazy around here at the moment. Three dead, that's a year's worth for us. But I'll send somebody when I can. Okay?"
It wasn't okay, but it was the best he could arrange so far from home with Sugarman off on vacation.
All afternoon he waited for the phone to ring, exercising in the rehab room, doing dips on the parallel bars, and working his useless legs. As the hours drifted by, he fel
t the anger swelling at the bottom of his gut like a tumor that seemed to double in mass with every breath.
The clinic's phone was silent all afternoon, and after his workout, a long shower didn't cool him down, and the rum and Coke he accepted from Ginny only gave his frustration a brittle edge. At six o'clock he made himself a grilled cheese sandwich and a simple salad from the paltry supplies in the kitchen, and a while later he submitted to his second steroid injection of the day at the hands of Nurse Jankowitz, a humorless woman with an impenetrable Slavic accent who untaped the adhesive strip that covered the catheter tip at the base of his spine, flooded his spinal cord with the useless steroids, then retaped the spout, all with the soft-handed tenderness of a meat packer.
Back in his airless room, Thorn sat and stared at the bleak wall, watching the daylight die. He was trapped in someone else's failed body. The ice in his legs had rooted itself deep in his marrow, and again and again as he tried to work a single toe, tilt his ankle, pass even the faintest signal to the dark mass of his legs, nothing made it through. Tipping up his foot a quarter of an inch was as far beyond his abilities as levitating a granite boulder. His mind throbbed from the effort, and the anger snapped through his veins like the tattered claws of flame.
At ten that evening he used Bean's office phone to call the sheriff's department again, but Jennifer Bell had gone home for the day. She'd left no messages for anyone named Thorn. He slapped the phone down, then raked the thing off the desk onto the floor.
Afterward, he took the elevator up to Bean's darkened apartment and stationed himself beside one of the windows. While he waited, the anger grew, its heat radiating up into Thorn's chest, down into his deadened legs, a glow of warmth that seemed to give some small nourishment to the cold empty spaces below his waist. As though he could heal himself with this anger, regenerate the nerves and fibers that relayed the electronic pulses from brain to toes. As if anger alone could do it, anger becoming rage, rage becoming fury, fury becoming miraculous cure.
It felt like he was breathing in darkness and exhaling fire. Little by little filling the room with the heat of his impotence and frustration, packing it tight, pumping more and more pressure into the room until soon he would reach the critical moment when the door would explode, the walls blow away.
Out the window where he sat a heavy wash of stars was visible above the electric haze of Key West. For the next hour he stared at the Big Dipper, forcing himself to muse about the unknowable distances between those bright dots, trying to picture the immense journey starlight made to the earth—all the old reliable metaphysical gymnastics he'd used since childhood to put his trivial affairs in perspective. Against the night sky his worries never seemed so goddamn important.
But on that night it wasn't working. Not even close.
If he'd had a Higher Power, it was the perfect moment to beseech him. Make a deal, maybe swap his soul for the use of his legs. But Thorn was no foxhole convert. He'd laid no religious groundwork and was not tempted to mouth the name of the one or two gods he was acquainted with to see if the dark air shuddered and answered back. If those stars didn't do the trick, nothing would. Religion was all self-hypnosis anyway. Placebo effect. What you trusted deeply enough might get you through. And what Thorn had always relied on even more than the stars, more than the healing power of an easterly breeze off the Atlantic or perfect days of fishing or tying flies or any other of the constellation of natural pleasures, what had gotten him up one shit creek after another was the white knot of gristle at his stubborn core.
Whatever it cost, he was going to finish his pursuit, find out who struck him down and why, then he would find Monica no matter where she'd fled, and plead with her to forgive him for his stupid show of pride. He would tell her the truth, that he had pushed her away because his feelings for her frightened him to his core. But he loved her, and wanted to marry her and live with her till the end. And she would demand to know why he was frightened, and then Thorn would have to tell her the truth. That somewhere in the last few weeks he had finally admitted to himself that Monica was the only woman he'd ever loved who needed him less than he needed her.
That's where he was just after midnight, feeling a soul-splitting wail taking shape inside him, when a crack of light widened at the door, and Bean came thumping through the darkness, hit the switch, saw Thorn and nearly toppled over.
"Jesus God, you scared the red-hot devil out of me."
Bean circled the room, turning on the rest of the lights. His pants were torn and his prosthetics looked badly mangled. He tottered on them as unsteadily as a tightrope walker in a hard wind.
Without another word, Bean stalked into his bedroom and shut the door. He was gone five minutes and when he returned he wore a pair of faded designer jeans and a white silk T-shirt that clung to his tightly muscled body. His hair was wet and raked back off his face and his eyes were fired up. As he headed for the kitchen, Thorn saw his gait was back to its normal stiffness.
"Join me in a drink, Thorn? I'm breaking out the Cristal."
"What is it, Bean? You make some progress with your wonder drug?"
He halted and turned around slowly. A smile crawled across his face.
"Well, well. You've been investigating again, haven't you? You just can't seem to stop doing that."
"Call me crazy." Thorn rolled forward, left the Big Dipper to empty itself. "But whenever someone knocks me on the head and paralyzes me, I just get this itch to find out why."
Bean's smile soured and the glitter in his eyes sharpened.
"And you think I had something to do with your injury?"
"Of course you did."
"I see," he said. Then he smiled. "Well, all the more reason for that drink."
He opened the champagne, presented Thorn a glass, foamed it to the brim. Thorn held the glass by its fragile stem, staring into Bean's eyes. Bean nodded and clinked his glass against Thorn's and went back to the couch and sat.
"Tell me something, old buddy."
"No," Thorn said. "You're going to tell me something. A lot of things."
Bean smiled again, all pleasantness and good cheer.
"Ah yes, one of our old familiar standoffs."
Thorn had a bite of the fizzy wine, then in a swift unthinking motion he tipped up the drink and swallowed it. Bean got up and refilled his glass and topped off his own.
"Okay, then how about a truth swap? Tit for tat." Bean turned to Thorn and scratched a finger against the raspy bristles on his chin. "And since I'm the host and providing the refreshments, it seems only right I begin. Because there's something I've always wanted to know, Thorn. That's been eating at me for almost thirty years."
"Name it."
"Why didn't you go to the war? Vietnam."
"I wasn't drafted."
"There was a lottery, Thorn. It was based on birthdays, and yours was in the top fifty. I know, because the second after I looked at my number, I looked at yours. They called everybody in the top hundred numbers. What do you think happened to you? Did they lose your name? Couldn't find your address?"
"I don't know. I was never called."
Bean stared down at his drink.
"Did you realize that back then my father was on the Monroe County draft board?"
"No."
"I've always been deeply curious about that." Bean had a careful sip and set his glass down on the wicker side table. "I wonder if perhaps he might have swayed things to your advantage somehow, playing favorites. Because, you see, my lottery number was higher than yours. I was in the nineties. But I was called and you weren't. I went and you didn't. What do you think, Thorn? Is it possible my father gave you a pass but didn't give his own son one?"
"I never got a notice, Bean. I would've gone if I'd gotten one. It wasn't anything I cared about one way or the other, but I would've gone."
"Oh, yes, yes. Because you're a good citizen. Because you always do your duty. Yes, isn't that nice? Isn't that all morally admirable and noble."
Thorn drank down half his second glass and set it on the window sill.
"Why does it matter, Bean? It's gone, it's over. What difference does it make now?"
"What difference does it make? Oh, that's good. That's just like you, Thorn. Immanently practical. Get on with it. Do what's in front of you, forget the past. Yes, yes, that's very enlightened, a very wise way to live, I'm sure."
"This isn't about you and me, Bean. This is about you and your father."
Bean lifted his eyes, fastened them on Thorn.
"What about my father?"
"You should ask him what happened on the draft board, hear what he has to say."
"Oh, it's all so simple, isn't it? The world according to Thorn. An uncomplicated place. Just ask and hear the answer. Oh, yes, so easy. Well, listen to me, Thorn. You think you can drop out of the world and go about your merry business and it has no effect on anyone. Well, I'll tell you what, that's not how the universe works. When you drop out, someone else has to take your place. And in the case of Vietnam, that someone was me, Thorn, me. You stayed home, played with your navel, and I went to war. I lost my legs. I live with that every fucking day. The torment."
"And that's my fault?"
"You got a pass, Thorn. I didn't. So what do you think? Is it your fault? In the larger scheme of things?"
Bean stared into his eyes for a long moment, then let his gaze drift back to the photos on the wall.
"So is it my turn yet?"
"Of course," Bean said. "Fire at will."
"How many people have you murdered already?"
He flinched but recovered quickly. He turned his head and peered again at Thorn.
"I suppose you're referring to my experiments?"
"That's right."
"Well, I don't want to quibble over semantics," he said. "But there's a considerable difference, legally, ethically, in every way I can think of, between murder and assisted suicide. Wouldn't you agree?"
"So that's how you work it out, is it? You find vets who're so desperate, they've stopped caring if they live or die, they're happy to let you exploit them. That makes it okay to kill them."
Red Sky At Night (Thorn Series Book 6) Page 23