BAD BOY’S SURPRISE BABY

by Kathryn Thomas

  Les looks into my eyes for a long time, trying to gauge if I’m lying, I guess. For a second a strange thought occurs to me: didn’t that woman, Lily, say something about always knowing if somebody was lying? Yeah, I’m sure she mentioned something. Well, if she couldn’t see the lie in a comfortable restaurant with nothing to lose, I don’t see how this man is going to.

  “Fuck,” Les growls. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” I agree. “So here’s what I need from you. I need Darius’ address, his cell numbers, his aliases, his license number. Anything, everything.”

  “You think I have all that?” Les gasps. His throat is turning red, his cheeks, too. His entire face is burning like there’s fire under his skin. “You really think I have all that?” He’s getting way too fucking flustered. He starts ranting, unintelligible words in a long stream. I smack him across the jaw with the duster. That seems to bring him to his senses, if only a little. “I don’t have all that,” he says. He keeps moving his mouth in an odd way, like some meth-heads do, opening and closing their mouths out of time with their words, waggling their tongue strangely. “I don’t have any of that.”

  “What do you have?” I ask, squinting at him. His hands are tied to the chair, but his fingers twitch as though playing an invisible piano. His shoes shift as though his toes are doing the same. “What do you have?” I repeat. Is he high? Is he fuckin’ high? He could’ve taken something just before I picked him up, and maybe it’s only now kicking in.

  “Oh, I know something,” he says, his voice slurred, eyes rolling back in his head. “I know something very interesting, something positively magnificent.” He giggles, and his voice gets low, and distant somehow; it’s like he’s on the opposite side of a cavern instead of sitting right in front of me. “Do you know what ghosts are, Roman? Do you know what ghouls are? Do you know what mirrors are? Yes, forget the ghouls and the ghosts. Think of mirrors. Do you know mirrors, Roman? Have you ever looked into a mirror?”

  Your senses become honed when you do this work long enough. You get to learn if someone’s just ranting or if they really have something to say. My instincts tell me Les really has something to say, even if he is going about it in the most roundabout way possible. He’s dribbling now, too, a fine line of spit sliding down beside the blood from my duster hit.

  “What about mirrors?” I say, feeling like a fool. “Go on, Les. What about mirrors?”

  “Look into a mirror and you’ll see Darius. You are the same. You pretend you’re different but you’re the same. You are!”

  “What is this? Some poetic point about how we’re all the same, eh?”

  I’m about to give him a punch across the face again when his eyes roll all the way back so that I can only see the whites. He dribbles quicker, and then begins to froth at the mouth, spittle expanding from between his lips until the entire lower half of his face is covered in a bubbly beard.

  “Les?” I snap, dropping my pistol and gripping his shoulders. “Fuck’s sake, Les? What the fuck? What did you take?”

  Then the convulsions start, convulsions so violent the chair topples to the ground. That’s when I remember similar convulsions, similar dribbling. It’s a poison, a slow-to-act poison, the sort of poison you give to somebody if you want them to stay alive awhile before the final death knell sounds.

  There’s nothing I can do without the antidote, so I just stand up and watch as he writhes and spasms, as the life seeps between his lips in the form of growing bubbles of froth. After around a minute, his eyes fall closed and the froth begins to drip onto the concrete. I close my eyes, massage my eyelids with my thumbs. Either this was incredibly unlucky, or somebody—most likely Darius, the fuck—knew that I was going to pick Les up and got to him first. I open my eyes and kneel down, start going over his body, searching for anything. This is a desperate move because I’ve already searched him, but maybe another once over will turn something up.

  Nothing.

  “Fuck.”

  Then my phone begins to beep, two quick beep-beep beep-beep noises. I snatch it from my pocket, open the police scanner app (the only app which makes that horrible fuckin’ noise) and check the GPS. Jesus Christ. Police, surrounding the alleyway. The alleyway has two exits, and patrol cars sit at both exits. The cops themselves are probably either on their way toward me or tooling up. So they knew exactly where I’d be. And somebody planned to kill Les . . . It don’t take a genius to work out that Darius is trying to frame me. I listen, but I can still only hear the woman moaning, the slot machines, the occasional screech of a tire. Which means that whoever tipped off the cops also told ’em to be quiet. I growl from deep in my throat, and then look around the alleyway. There are no ladders leading to the roofs, no side-alleys, no alternative exits.

  For a moment a voice sneers at me in my mind: “Some assassin you are, eh? Choosing an alley with only two exits? What’s the matter with you?”

  I push the voice away. How in the name of God was I supposed to know that Darius had—had what? Poisoned Les and then stuck a GPS on him?

  I have to move quickly now. I let my instincts take over, not thinking about what I’m doing, just doing it. I move around the alleyway, untying Les from the chair and positioning him as though he fell from standing instead of from sitting, and then I go to my duffle bag and get my cleaning supplies, wiping down everything, including the froth. Finally, I wipe down the duffel bag itself, its contents, and then spill them out onto the alleyway as though somebody has dropped it. Yes, I tell myself, looking down at Les. The man attacked us, and then he fled, dropping his bag—his bag full of killer’s implements. I can hear the cops now, rushing down the alleyway, trying and failing to be quiet. This story isn’t going to be very believable, I reflect as I aim the pistol against my shoulder, but then, there’s no CCTV, there are no witnesses. That’ll be enough, I hope.

  I pull the trigger.

  I’ve been shot once before, took one clean through the forearm, but somehow this hurts more. It bites deep into my flesh, searing through skin and bone and muscle and exiting out of the back of my shoulder. I collapse onto my knee, but still somehow manage to wipe down the gun and toss it toward the duffle bag. Then I lay on the ground, knees to chest, as though I am so shocked and terrified by the experience I have reverted to a fetal state. The cops are getting close now, advancing slowly, carefully. They think the killer is still here. Already, I am rehearsing what to tell them, even as my shoulder throbs in agony.

  The thing about getting picked up by the police is, unless there’s some ironclad evidence, they’ve only got what you give them. Most people crack under interrogation. I never crack under interrogation. So I just lie here, bleeding, and then my mind turns to my mother, a sweet nurse saving a cop and getting a gunshot for her troubles. How did she feel, I wonder, lying there on the concrete, turning it red? And then, oddly, my mind turns to Lily. I haven’t taken another woman since her. As I roll over and stare up at the four cops who creep with their guns raised between mine and Les’ body, I see her face: her sweet, flustered, vivacious face.

  I hear one of the cops mutter: “What the fuck?”

  But that’s far away now. Lily is calling me. Lily is whispering to me. Her whisper is a song in my head: “Come to me, Roman. Come and share the pleasure of that first night. Come and lose yourself in it. Come, come, my beautiful wild man. Come, come, come.”

  I roll over, groaning, no longer needing to pretend. And that’s when I see that Les is alive. Les is twitching.

  Chapter Six

  Lily

  I wish Mom was alive. That’s the wish that keeps reoccurring in my mind as I return to work. I wish Mom was alive so I could tell her about the pregnancy. I go about my work like a robot, performing each task expertly even if there is a second track in my mind, running in a completely different direction. Mom . . . I always looked up to her, liked to linger before I left for the school bus to see her adjust her gun and her badge and her uniform: a princess of
justice, dressed in blue. She looked like me, but taller, stronger, sterner. Dad died when I was very little, and so Mom was my only parent. A cop, a protector, a hero. I almost lost her once, before the cancer took her . . . One night, she was responding to a gang exchange, as she often did, but this time there were two bangers when she only thought there was one. She turned up and saw that one was wounded, and was making her way down the street to signal to her backup when another man came out of nowhere and shot at her, giving her a flesh wound. A nurse charged into the street—her heroism was reported in the papers—and tackled Mom to a barricade, where she started to patch her up. And then chaos struck, and the nurse was killed—but she saved Mom.

  Mom . . .

  I imagine telling her that I’m pregnant, imagine her placing her sturdy hands atop mine and offering me that expression that was halfway between a grimace and a smile, as though she was too accustomed to the evil of the world to be surprised by it anymore. I hear her saying: “It’ll be fine, girl. Chin up, grit those teeth, and get the job done.” That’s how I think of her, a hero in blue, not what she later became when the brain cancer began to eat her away. Walking down the hallway between patients, I shake my head, shaking away the memories.

  I’ve just left the room of a kid who crashed his scooter into a hedgerow when the charge nurse advances on me. Sissy Sanders is the most inappropriately named woman I have ever met in my life. When I first heard Sissy Sanders, I pictured a petite, smiling, kind woman with a soft face. Instead, I was met with a six foot, wide-shouldered lady with a hard face and a no-nonsense attitude. “GSW coming in,” she barks. “Get room 202 prepped.”

  I hesitate for only a moment, and then nod.

  Spinning on my heels, I head for room 202. GSW: gunshot wound. I swallow as I walk. They call me the Sherlock of the nursing staff, but that’s because I’m good at talking with my patients and detecting lies—when somebody is trying to scam drugs, for example. It has nothing to do with the gruesome process of treating a GSW. When I get into the room, I begin to lay everything out which the doctor will need, doing it methodically, without having to think about my movements. Most of my mental energy is now directed at steeling myself for what I am about to see. I’ve done two GSWs before, and both were horrifying. One man had been shot in the face so that his eyeball burst like an overripe grape, and the other had the insides of his stomach spilling out.

  When the second nurse comes into the room, I am relieved to see that it’s Carol. If I am Sherlock, Carol really is Watson: the medical woman, who rarely gets queasy in these situations. But all that said, I’m a professional, and by the time they wheel the man in I’m fully prepared for whatever I might see.

  Or so I think.

  At first, it takes me a few moments to recognize him. I am too focused on the wound, a nasty pattern of blood-red dampening his shirt and spreading out over his arm. And then I look from the wound to his face. I take a step back. My heart was the steady beat of a nurse before; now it is the frantic pounding of a lover, a mother. I find myself backed all the way to the window as they shift Roman to the hospital bed from the stretcher. Roman is writhing, moaning, his eyes closed. Blood has dripped down from his shoulder onto his yin-and-yang tattoo. He looks exactly the same as the night we met but for the wound: tall, muscled, somehow handsome even under the circumstances. Roman is shot, Roman is lying there bleeding. I find myself clawing at my throat; I can’t breathe. Roman, the father of my child—but I don’t know him, not really. I only met him once . . . but that once was oh-so-beautiful, and now I am carrying his child. If he dies, my child will be fatherless even before birth, my child will be robbed of even the chance of having a father.

  I am taking shallow, quick breaths when Carol paces over to me. “What is it?” she snaps. Over her shoulder, I can see the doctor, ignoring me but his face knitted in annoyance. Sissy is already in the hallway, calling out for my replacement.

  “It’s . . . him,” I manage to say. “It’s . . . Roman.”

  “Oh.” Carol’s face immediately softens. “Shit.”

  Carol calls across the room to Sissy. “This man is Lily’s cousin.”

  Even hard-faced Sissy can’t argue with this. She nods. “Okay. Fields, you go to room 212. There’s a poison victim in there and they need your help. Can you handle that?”

  I nod, grateful, and pace out of the room as quickly as I can. I can’t stay there, watching as the doctor picks and pokes at Roman, watch as the life leaves him. I don’t know him, I remind myself as I walk down the hallway between his room and the poison victim’s room. No, I don’t know him. But though that is true, I am carrying his life; his life is growing right now inside my belly. How can I one day raise a child after having seen his father die before my eyes? I get to the room, swallow, steel myself. Professional. Professional. Switching off my emotions, I enter the room.

  The short, ginger-haired man on the bed is writhing in agony as the doctor probes him, checking his airways, trying to determine what kind of poison the man has ingested. The man’s mouth is covered in the remnants of froth and his hair is soaked through with sweat. As I enter the room, he begins to convulse. The doctor mutters, “Nurse,” and I quickly go to his side. Together, we restrain him, securing him to the bed, and then the doctor strokes his chin, looking down calmly at the convulsing man. I step back, awaiting instructions. It’s time like this I’m glad I’m not a doctor. Who knows what this man has taken? He isn’t talking. It’s all up to the doctor’s diagnosis now. I help them, sometimes, but this is way out of my league.

  Finally, the doctor tells me what he needs. I get the supplies and return to him, and then insert the needle into his arm so that we can administer the antidote through an IV drip. Inserting a needle into the man’s arm is a weirdly calming procedure. I have done it thousands of times before. Finding the vein, making sure to insert it cleanly, and then ensuring that it doesn’t slip or cause any harm. About half an hour later, the ginger-haired man is asleep, lying on his back, breathing deeply. The doctor and I wash our hands with the alcoholic gel. When I ask the doctor if the man will live, he shrugs. I nod; doctors often give that stark response to nurses. They know that we know how brutal it can be.

  By coincidence, we finish just when it’s time for my second break. I walk toward the breakroom, but then I take a turn, and another turn, and I’m walking back the way I came, toward Roman’s room. I have to see him, have to see him breathing—or not. I have to see what’s happened to him. I can’t go and eat microwave pasta as the father of my child bleeds out in the same building. I stop when I’m a few feet from the room and pretend to be reading a noticeboard. Two cops come out, shaking their heads. One is a woman, short, wide, with gorgeous red hair tied up and bound with a strip of leather. The other is a man, tall, young-looking, with a bowl of black hair.

  The female officer mutters to the man: “What do you think?”

  The man shrugs. “He’s bullshitting us. Of course he is. But the fuck we gonna do? No evidence.”

  “Let’s see what forensics comes up with . . .”

  “Yeah.” The man chuckles darkly. “Let’s see.”

  They walk down the hallway. When they’re out of sight, I creep forward, listening for anybody else in the room. But I just hear the beep of the machines, and a quiet groaning. For a moment, I am transported back to over a month ago, to similar groaning, to when a musclebound stranger in the night leaned over me, groaning his warm breath onto my skin, thrusting: thrusting deep explosive pleasure inside of me. I open the door, wincing as it creaks on its hinges, and then walk into the room and close the door behind me.

  Roman is propped up in bed, but his head is lolling, his eyes opening and closing. The police shouldn’t have questioned him in this condition, but that rarely stops the police. He groans, and then his head lolls toward me and he stops groaning. A sleepy smile lifts his lips. He looks exactly like the Roman I remember, but different, too. Physically, he is the same, but his tough energy has left him.
He looks impossibly tired as he smiles at me. The first thing I do is go to the end of the bed and look at his clipboard. Roman Slade. At least I have his name, now.

  “Hey bea’iful,” he murmurs, smiling that same tired smile at me. “What’s goin’ on?”

  I’m pregnant with your child, that’s what’s going on. I’m pregnant with your child and I have nobody to help me. No parents, no family. Just my work. What am I going to do, Roman? How I am going to support this child and be there for her at the same time? Tell me that.

  But he’s in no condition for this, so I just ask: “How are you feeling, Roman?”

  Even now, as he lies there in a hospital gown, I can’t ignore how incredibly handsome he is. The fabric of the gown is thin and as it rests against his body, it perfectly outlines his muscles. I tell myself to stop thinking like this. It’s inappropriate in the extreme, but my body doesn’t care about whether or not it’s inappropriate. This is the first time in my life I have been horny, shocked, anxious, and scared at the same time, all of it mixing inside of me like a cruel brew.

  “You’re angel,” Roman whispers, his eyelids falling closed. “Angel.”