“This man must never stand trial,” Boss says. “Ever. He is evil, and sadistic—”
“I’ve got the name. Understood. Make the payment in the usual way when the job is done.”
“Okay, okay. Good. Thank you. Goodbye.”
He hangs up, and I put my hands behind my head and rest my head in them, staring up at the ceiling. The ceiling is patterned, carved pictures of seashells and starfish gazing down at me. Darius, Darius fuckin’ Taggart. I shouldn’t get so angry thinking about him, but he really pisses me off. I nearly had him, back in the day, was in the same building with him when he slipped me. Made me look a damn fool, truth be told.
I stand up, stretch my arms, my legs, work out the kinks from last night. No point reflecting on that last job now, anyway. I look down at my yin-and-yang tattoo and grin. Yeah, everything has a balancing force. Darius Taggart wants to throw acid in little girl’s faces and sell chemical weapons to despots? Fine, then that gives me free reign to go after him using my methods: my bloody, violent methods.
When I leave my hotel room, I think again about Lily, about her fresh lipstick-colored cheeks, about her skillful hands, about her laughter, and the look of wild excitement in her wide hazel-brown eyes. I even think about that cute little cleft in her chin.
By the time I’ve stepped onto the street, I’ve killed all thoughts like that.
They ain’t for men like me.
Chapter Four
Lily
June turns to July, and July to early August, and life goes on with the same routine: stitching, comforting, consoling, cleaning, changing. I pull doubles, triples, and most nights when I ride the bus home I am so exhausted that I just manage to put my clothes in the wash basket, take a quick shower, nuke a microwave meal before collapsing into bed. I give myself little time to think about anything: anything these days meaning Roman, the man who is swiftly becoming a ghost in my mind. Once the aches of our frantic sex have gone, once my body has recovered, I sometimes wonder if any of it really happened. Did I really go to bed with a stranger? Did I really go absolutely wild on him? Was he really as handsome as I remember?
But these are questions which come either very late at night or very early in the morning, when I lay awake in the minutes before my alarm screams through the apartment. Apart from that, I am too busy to ask myself anything that might make me uncomfortable. I throw myself into my work with renewed vengeance, Nurse Sherlock patrolling the hallways with her hair scraped close to her scalp and her eyes burning with the desire to help. Yep, that’s me, and I don’t need a man named Roman and a yin-and-yang tattoo and the irresistible touch of his hands on my body.
“But damn, it’s hot today,” I mutter one morning, as I go into the breakroom to stow away my lunch. It’s only nine o’clock and the temperature is already reaching the high eighties. My scrubs stick to my body and the air conditioning is like the breath of a chesty child, breathing pitifully into the massive building.
But as I look around, I see that nobody else seems to be having as hard a time as I am. It is hot, but most people—even the larger nurses—seem to find the AC sufficient. I shrug, and go about my work. Maybe I’m just overreacting. If women twice, three times my size are pacing up and down the hallways and only just barely breaking a sweat (no more than usual) then surely I can do the same. For the next few hours, I make sure not to change my behavior because of the heat. Nobody else is.
But as the day wears on toward my first break, and as the heat outside gets angrier and angrier—aiming all its energy at me, apparently, because everybody else is skipping the hallways as sprite-like as ever—I feel sickness rising in my belly, a churning, rolling sickness; it feels like water rolling over and over in my belly. I ignore it, because I’m not about to let a little sickness interfere with me doing my job. I have ten hours left yet, and it’s a busy day, so I won’t abandon the other nurses by slinking home just to lie in bed with an icepack on my head.
I keep up this brave attitude until a boy comes in with a cut on his head. It’s a normal cut. The kid just fell down the stairs. A fine slice across his forehead. I go about cleaning it up, telling him it’ll be okay, telling him he’s a champion, trying my best to ignore the flustered mother who paces up and down and breathes heavily as though her boy has not just received a minor cut to the head but a gigantic gash. The boy himself is calm, just staring blandly ahead with a vaguely embarrassed look, as though his mother is prone to causing scenes like this. It’s not even the cut which sets me off; it’s the mother. There’s something off-putting about the way she paces back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, and though I try to ignore it, my eyes invariably track her, even if subconsciously. Back and forth, like I’m sitting in a boat, rocking, rocking, and my belly, and—
I swallow bile, acidic, burning, and carry on with my work. My throat pulses. My mouth fills with saliva, too much saliva, so much saliva I’m sure I’ll start to dribble in a moment. I swallow, but that does nothing; more saliva rises. What the hell’s the matter with me? When the cut is cleaned, I send for the advance practice nurse who’ll do the stitching, and then leave the room with as much calm as I can muster.
But the second the door closes behind me, I’m running. I can’t help it. I feel it now, rising: not just a swallow of bile. No, there’s a keg of it down there, rolling over and over, back and forth like the pacing of the frantic mother. I try to swallow, but now it’s in my throat, a mass of it pushing up toward my mouth. Then it’s in my mouth, on my tongue, my belly contracting tightly as I rush through the hospital. I barge into the bathroom, kick open a stall, and collapse onto my knees at the very last moment. Sick explodes out of me into the bowl for around two minutes. I sit next to the toilet, panting, wondering what’s wrong with me. I want to say the heat, but nobody else is like this. So it must be something else. Something I ate? Something I drank?
I’m thinking over this when Carol walks in and peeks her head around the stall. “Bad day, huh?” she says.
“You know,” I say, mouth tasting of bile, “it’s really disconcerting to have your double poke up like a jack in the box just after you’ve been sick.”
Carol pouts. “Always the joker. I think you’ll find I’m two years your senior, so that makes you the clone.”
I chuckle at her old joke, but that sets something off and I vomit again. I turn away from the bowl when I’m done and reach for the toilet paper. Carol is there before me, pulling me off a few pieces handing them to me. I wipe my mouth, my cheek—how did it get on my cheek?—and then rise unsteadily to my feet. Now that it’s out, I’m beginning to feel better. I lean against the wall, getting my breath back, hands on my knees.
“How’re you feeling?” Carol asks.
“Better,” I tell her.
“Hmm.”
Carol goes into the main bathroom area. I hear the paper towel dispenser going click-click, the tap running, and then she returns with the blessedly cool and damp towels. I take them and rub myself down, hold one against my forehead. “If you’re sick, you should go home,” Carol says. “The worst thing we can do is stay here when we’re sick. We’re just putting ourselves and the patients at risk. Who knows what you have?”
“Don’t lecture me, big sister,” I say, offering her a smile. She doesn’t take the bait, just pouts at me. That pout kills me. Do I pout like that? I hope not; it’s terrifying. “Okay, listen. I don’t feel sick anymore, I promise. So whatever was making me feel sick, it’s gone. I was feeling hot before, but that’s gone, so it can’t be a proper fever. I’m not crippled with stomach pains, so no food poisoning. Just a sudden, incredible wave of nausea. Nothing to write home about.”
“Hmm.”
“Stop saying hmm,” I snap.
Carol holds her hands up. “Hey. I don’t have to spend my break in here with you.”
“I know. I’m sorry.” I feel like a cowed child.
“How long has this been going on?” Carol asks.
I turn away when sh
e asks me the question. You’d think somebody looking like you would make lying to them easier. You could just lie to them like you lie to yourself, and really, who doesn’t lie to themselves? I should be able to turn to Carol, pretend that she’s me, and tell her a simple, straightforward lie. But Carol looks like me; she is not identical. Her eyes are green, probing, impossible to ignore. I cannot lie to her.
“About a week,” I admit. “But today was the first time I felt really, really hot.”
“So for a week you’ve had random bouts of vomiting?” Carol says, in a tone of voice which suggests I should be seeing something very obvious.
“Yes,” I say, missing the point.
Carol rolls her eyes. “So for a week, you’ve been being sick for no apparent reason?”
“Yes. But I don’t see what you—”
I stop, my eyes going wide. Carol’s eyes go wide, too. We stare at each other for a long moment, a moment so long that somebody has time to enter the bathroom, splash water on their face, and then leave. We just stay like this, frozen, as if neither of us wants to admit the inevitable. And then Carol says, quietly: “One week, minus one month . . . you know what that means, don’t you?”
“Might mean,” I say, desperately. “Might mean.”
“Okay,” Carol says. “Let me ask you this. Have you had your period?”
I feel myself blush. “I thought I was late,” I mutter. “Just a week late.”
“A week late . . . how often has that happened to you since you were a kid?”
“Alright, Jesus! No need to lecture!”
Carol nods. “Okay, so I guess it’s lucky we’re in a hospital, right? Wait here. I won’t be long.”
Carol leaves the bathroom. I throw the towels into the toilet bowl and flush, then go to the mirror and splash cold water on my face. I let it slide down my skin, into the sink, imagining that it is cleansing me. I stare at myself, wondering: wondering if that one night of random, animal pleasure is coming back to punish me. Punish me for what, though? We didn’t do anything wrong, just two adults having a good time.
But we didn’t use a condom, I reflect, feeling like an idiot. I truly hadn't even thought of it before now.
“We didn’t use a condom!” I hiss aloud, as though this will make the slightest bit of difference now. My anger is five weeks late.
Carol returns with two pregnancy sticks. She shoves them at me professionally, and for once I get to feel what it’s like to be on the receiving end of Carol’s nursing. “Pee on these,” she commands, her voice peremptory.
I take the sticks and go into a stall—making sure it’s a different stall than the one I was sick in—and sit down, placing one of the sticks stop the tissue dispenser and holding the other one in my hand. I hear Carol on the other side of the door, right on the other side of the door. “Do you think I can go with you lingering like that?” I say.
“You’ve got ten—no, nine minutes until you’re back off break. Pee quickly.”
“So you don’t want to send me home now,” I murmur.
“Pardon?” Carol says loudly.
“Nothing! Get out of here, you pervert!”
Despite Carol’s best efforts, I do eventually manage to pee on both the sticks. Then I pull up my pants and return to the bathroom proper, sticks in hand. I lay them beside the sink and wash my hands, all the while watching them out of the corner of my eye. A smiley face means I’m pregnant, a neutral face means I’m not. For a moment I’m furious with whoever designed these sticks. Why would they automatically assume a smiley face for pregnancy? That’s a tad presumptuous, I think, and I think I’m going to write them a letter outlining my—
“Really?” Carol says, tilting her head. “You’re going to write them a letter?”
I didn’t even realize I was speaking aloud. I glare at her, and then we both watch the tests silently.
First one smiley face appears, and then another. Two smiley faces. There’s no doubt. I’m pregnant. I’m pregnant with Roman’s child. I’m pregnant with the child of a man whose last name I don’t even know.
Suddenly, Carol is standing over me, saying, “Are you okay? Are you okay?”
Somehow I’m sitting on a toilet seat, knees to my chest. Carol massages my shoulder. For once, her face is not playful or sardonic. She looks like she really cares, like she really feels for me. It’s too kind, that face. I have to turn away before I weep.
“You could, you know—”
“No,” I interject, before she can go further. “No, I can’t. I don’t know if I ever told you this, but I don’t really believe in it—generally, I mean, for myself. Other people can do whatever they like, but I don’t think I could ever . . . it just makes me . . . I’m not judging anyone who has . . .”
“I know what you mean,” Carol says, nodding. “I understand.”
For a few minutes, we sit like this. Then I notice Carol glancing at her watch.
“Time to get back to work?” I ask.
She winces. “For me—not for you.”
“No!” I jump to my feet, grit my teeth. “No, I won’t let this interfere with my work. We have patients to see, Watson!”
With that, I pace from the bathroom, heart smashing repeatedly in my chest, Roman front and center in my mind.
Chapter Five
Roman
I stand in the shadows in an alleyway between two towering buildings, the man who might lead me to Darius tied to a chair in front of me, gripping a knuckle-duster with one hand and holding my pistol with the other. Lester—or Les, as his friends call him—is a ginger-haired, short man with freckles spread over the parts of his face which aren’t permanently deformed with acid. He wears a flashy suit, a gold watch, and he was wearing gold-rimmed sunglasses before I crunched them into the ground with my boot.
I kneel before him. All around us, the sounds of Vegas echo: cars honking; slot machines, the ever-fuckin’-present slot machines; people giggling; a woman faraway moaning into the afternoon air. I lean across and place my hand on Les’ knee. I haven’t touched him yet, and in truth I don’t really want to hurt him. He is a scumbag, or at least he used to be a scumbag. Back in the day he was Darius’ henchman, helped him with a lot of deals. Helped to kill a lot of people, in other words. But he’s got a life now, works down at a garage, got a steady girl. No reason to hurt him if he don’t give me reason to.
“Listen,” I say. “I don’t want to go in on you with this.” I heft the knuckle-duster. “Or this.” I heft the pistol, which has a long tubular suppressor attached to the barrel. “But I will if I have to. Not out of any sense of power, or pleasure; I’m not like the men you used to kick it with back in the chemical-sellin’ days. No, but I’ll go in on you ’cause I’ve got a job to do and I reckon that Darius doesn’t deserve your loyalty. Have you seen your fuckin’ face recently, Les? It’s well known that Darius did that to you because you started asking questions about the killing-innocent-people game. So you see my problem? You’re not a bad man—not a completely bad man, anyway—and I don’t really want to have to go in on you. But I will.”
Les watches me with wide, terrified eyes. One side of his face is a mass of old scars and ruined tissue from the acid, making one his eyes squint permanently. Piss spreads across his crotch, the smell sickly, but you can’t blame the man. I guess I can be pretty damn scary to some folks. I reach forward and carefully remove his gag, making sure to aim at him with the pistol to let him know to make no noise. He gets the message.
I throw the gag aside and stare at him for a few seconds, watching as he musters and then loses and then tries to muster his resolve. “You don’t understand,” he says after a long pause. “You don’t know shit about Darius, man. You don’t know shit about him. You think if I talk to you now—”
“I am so tired of this fuckin’ argument,” I mutter, leaning back on my haunches. “I’ve heard this a hundred times. You’re going to say: ‘If I tell you this now, he’ll kill me later.’ Well, here’s the problem wit
h that. If you don’t tell me now, I’ll kill you—not later, but right fuckin’ now.”
“There’s a hit out on me?” Les says, voice pitched high. He raises his eyebrows . . . well, he raises one eyebrow and one twisted spot of flesh where an eyebrow should be.
I don’t answer right away. I know what he’s driving at. Everyone who’s heard of me knows that I rarely kill people unless there’s a hit out on them: unless I’m being paid for it. But this man just fucked himself, ’cause I hadn’t even thought of telling that lie.
“Yes,” I say. “There’s a hit out on you. It’s not my contract, but I know the man who’s got it. I reckon if I served your corpse up to him, he’d give me a nice cut. Or maybe I’ll just take your body to the man himself, take the whole cut.”
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