by Hill,Joe
“The world is fulla free cars now,” said the Mazz. “On account of a person relinquishes ownership of their wheels after goin’ up in fuckin’ smoke. There’s probably a thousand cars in this state ain’t no one ever gonna claim.”
Harper stepped toward the convicts. Ben leaped up and caught her wrist.
“Don’t. I don’t want you near him. Stay behind me. This guy—”
“Is in need of medical treatment. My arm, please, Mr. Patchett.”
He seemed almost to flinch from the formal use of his name. Or maybe he was flinching from her tone: calm, patient, but impersonal, quietly in charge. He let go of her arm, and if there was unhappy surprise in his face, perhaps it was because he understood he was letting go of his control over the situation as well. He could argue with Harper, but not with Nurse Willowes.
He looked past her to the prisoners. “You touch her—either one of you—I won’t be using the butt of the gun on you, understand?”
Harper came close enough to the Mazz to smell his breath: a metallic odor of fresh blood. She leaned in to inspect his pink teeth.
“You won’t need stitches,” she said. “But I’d like to get a cold compress against your mouth. How are your feet?”
“Been a while since I could feel them. Gilbert is worse. Gil can hardly stand.” He gestured with his head toward the other convict, who had not spoken yet. “And my hands . . . the cuffs . . . I got no circulation.”
“We’ll get those right off. Mr. Patchett?”
“No. They stay on.”
“You can cuff them to something else if you think it’s necessary, but you can’t keep them like this, in a stress position. That has to stop. Whatever you think they’ve done, it doesn’t justify abuse.”
“I’ll tell you about abuse!” cried the Mazz. “Keepin’ us strung up here is the least of it! You ought to hear how I wound up with a busted mouth. See, I could take being locked up with my arm coming out of the socket, and I could take no food, nothing to drink, and no rest. What made me lose my composure is the feeling like maybe I need to have a crap. This one says he’d be glad to help me with that, soon as I start answering his questions the way he wants ’em answered. He said the next thing to come out of my mouth better be something good. I didn’t want to disappoint him, so I spat in his fat cop face. Then he smashes me one. He would’ve hit me again, but I put my knee in his stomach and dropped him on the floor, which just goes to show I can whip his ass with one hand cuffed behind my back. Literally.”
Ben said, “Why don’t you shut up before—”
“Before you give a handcuffed man another pistol whipping, Mr. Patchett?” Harper asked quietly.
Ben shot a startled, embarrassed glance at Harper, an expression that made her think of a sixth grader caught looking at a dirty picture.
“Shoot,” he whispered. It was obvious he didn’t want the convicts to hear him, but the acoustics of the bare metal room made a private conversation impossible. “Now, Harper. Come on. It wasn’t anything like that. I cuffed ’em there because it was the easiest place, not to cause suffering. The towel full of rocks—that was just to scare them. And this guy tried to stomp my head in, same as he stomped in Father Storey’s skull. I was lucky to get clear. I can’t believe you’d take his word over mine. I have to think that’s hormones talking.”
“I don’t care which of you is telling the truth,” she said. It was an effort to keep the anger out of her voice. Hormones. “My concern is medical. This man is injured and can’t remain hung up like he is. Get him down.”
“I’ll let him down. But he can wear the cuffs right into the crapper.”
The Mazz said, “Fine by me. Long as you promise to wipe my ass when I’m finished. And I better warn you, brother, this one feels like it’s going to be wet.”
“That’s not helpful,” Harper said.
“Copy that. Sorry, ma’am.” The Mazz cast his gaze downward, but a smile teased the corners of his mouth.
“What about you?” Harper asked, turning to the man who hadn’t spoken. “Gilbert. Do you need to use the facilities?”
“No, thank you, ma’am. I’m fairly constipated. I’ve been buttoned up for several days now.”
This was met by a moment of silence and then Harper laughed. She couldn’t help it. She could not even say why it was so funny.
“Gilbert. What’s your last name?”
“Cline, but you can call me Gil. I don’t need the bathroom, but I’d commit any number of crimes for a bite to eat.”
“Don’t worry,” said Renée Gilmonton. “We won’t let you go hungry, Mr. Cline. No felonies required.”
Harper wheeled and saw Renée standing in the open locker door. Renée went on, “I don’t know how you can maintain an appetite in here, though. Whoo, it smells bad. Is this the best we can do for them?”
“Jesus,” Ben muttered. “First her, now you. I’m sorry the frickin’ Hilton didn’t have any rooms available for an attempted murderer and his accomplice. What the heck are you doing here? You ought to be asleep. No one should be out during the daytime. We have rules for a reason.”
“The girls wanted an update on Father Storey and when I checked the infirmary, Harper wasn’t there. I figured the cafeteria was the next best bet. Anything I can do to help?”
“No,” Ben said.
“Yes,” Harper told her. “This man needs a cold compress for his face, a cup of hot tea, and a visit to the bathroom, although probably not in that order. Both of them ought to have breakfast. And you’re right, this is a filthy place for them. There’s two unused beds in the infirmary. We ought to—”
“Out of the question,” Ben said. “They stay here.”
“Both of them? Right. I was meaning to get that. You said Mr. Mazzucchelli assaulted Father Storey. I’m not clear why Mr. Cline is also locked up.”
“Because they’re in it together, these two. They already partnered up to break out of one place.”
“But I take it Mr. Cline was nowhere near the scene of the attack on Father Storey?”
Ben’s eyes were dull, expressionless. “No. He was in the boat with me. Father Storey and Mazzucchelli arrived back at camp first. Then Allie and Mike. Cline and me got lost paddling around in the mist and for a while I couldn’t find the bay. Finally I spotted a flashing light and we rowed toward it. It was Allie, signaling us from the beach. She stayed on the beach to be sure we found our way back, while Michael went on ahead. We had barely pulled the canoe onto shore when we heard Mike screaming for help. We proceeded to the scene”—Harper noted the way Ben had unconsciously begun to tell the story as if he were giving a deposition to a hostile lawyer—“and found Mike sitting in the snow with Father Storey and blood everywhere. Mike said someone had killed him. But when Allie checked his pulse, we determined he was still with us. Michael carried Father Storey into camp, which was where we found a few men holding Mr. Mazzucchelli. Allie observed that Mazzucchelli was wearing Father Storey’s boots and coat. After that the situation turned hostile. Both these men are lucky they weren’t killed.”
“That still doesn’t explain why Mr. Cline is being treated as a threat,” Renée said.
Gilbert said, “When things turned ugly, my partner shouted for help. I gave it.”
“He broke three fingers in Frank Pendergrast’s right hand,” Ben said. “And punched Jamie Close in the throat so hard I thought he crushed her windpipe. Jamie is nineteen, by the way, barely more than a kid.”
“A kid who was holding a broken bottle,” Gilbert said, almost apologetically.
“I’ll need to see them both,” Harper said. “I should’ve seen Mr. Pendergrast before now.”
“He didn’t want to distract you from Father Storey,” Ben said. “Don bandaged him up pretty good with some rags we had laying around.”
“Goddamnit,” she said.
T
he injuries she couldn’t adequately treat because she didn’t have the supplies kept piling up: subdural hematoma, facial contusion, advanced exposure, John’s sprains and smashed ribs and dislocations, now a badly shattered hand. She had iodine, Band-Aids, and Alka-Seltzer. She had sealed the hole in Father Storey’s skull with cork and candle wax, like a doctor from the seventeenth century. It was the seventeenth century out here in the woods.
Ben went on, “Whatever Cline did and why ever he did it, let’s be clear. We all knew who bashed in Father Storey’s head, Cline as well as us. He chose his side.”
“He chose not to watch his friend be killed by a lynch mob,” Renée said. “That’s understandable.”
Ben looked at Gilbert Cline and said, “What I understand is he ought to pick better friends. His buddy nearly killed a man. Cline knew it. He could’ve stayed out of it. He chose to commit some life-endangering assaults of his own. You want to dispute any part of this story, Cline, you go on and speak right up.”
“No, sir,” Gilbert Cline said, but he was looking at Renée. “That’s how it happened. The Mazz is the only reason I didn’t die in the lockup. And I never would’ve made it through the smoke and down to the canoes if not for him. I could barely move my legs. He just about carried me. I felt obliged not to stand back and watch him get killed.”
“And did you think he bashed in Father Storey’s head?” Ben asked.
Cline looked at Mazzucchelli and back to Ben. His face was a calm, composed blank. “It didn’t cross my mind it mattered one way or another. I owed him.”
Harper had, until now, been concerned with injury and exposure. She had not paused to think about what it meant if Mark Mazzucchelli had really done it . . . really taken a rock to the back of Father Storey’s head, all for a pair of boots.
The rock.
“Was the weapon on Mr. Mazzucchelli when you discovered him trying to get away?” Harper asked.
“No,” the Mazz said. “ ’Cause it’s all bullshit. I never had no weapon.”
“We haven’t found what he used to crush Father Storey’s head in,” Ben said, his voice stiff. “Not so far. We may turn it up yet.”
“So what you have is an assault with no witnesses, no weapon, and a man who professes his innocence even after you hung him up in a stress position and struck him with your gun.”
“It wasn’t even a little like—”
Harper held up a hand. “You’re not in court and I’m not a judge. I don’t have any authority to go casting judgments. And neither do you. As far as I’m concerned you don’t have proof of anything, and until you do, these men ought to be treated as well as anyone in camp.”
Renée continued, “And without any evidence of wrongdoing, I’m curious how long you plan to keep them locked up and on what basis. There needs to be some kind of fair process. They have a right to a defense. They have a right to rights.”
“I’d love to take that dump now,” said the Mazz, but no one listened to him.
“I don’t know if you heard, Renée,” Ben said, “but the Constitution went up in flames, along with the rest of Washington D.C. The people in this camp would like very much not to wind up as cinders as well, Ms. ACLU.”
“I used to donate to them every year, in fact,” Renée said. “Never mind that, though. I’m trying to make a point. We don’t just need to decide whether or not this man tried to kill Tom Storey. We need to decide how we decide, and who does the deciding. And if Mr. Mazzucchelli here is found guilty, we have to make a choice, as a community, about what to do with him . . . about what we can live with. That’s the hard part.”
“I don’t think it’s that hard. I think this community has already made a choice. You would know that if you’d been there when they started throwing rocks. I don’t know what you were doing all night, but you missed all kinds of fun.”
“Maybe I spent my night hiding in the woods,” Renée said, “waiting for a chance to kill Father Storey.”
Ben stared, his mouth open and his brow furrowed, as if she had just posed a particularly irritating riddle. He shook his head.
“You shouldn’t make cracks. You don’t have any idea what Carol and Allie and that crowd would do to you if they thought . . .” His voice trailed off, and then he started again, with a hard smile on his face. “Thing about you, Renée, you’re a good-intentions person. With your tea and your books and your story sessions for the kids, you’re just as harmless as they come. And like most really harmless people, you don’t have the faintest idea what other people are capable of doing.”
“But don’t you see, Ben? That’s precisely my point. We don’t know what other people are capable of doing. None of us does. Who could say for certain Father Storey wasn’t surprised by someone in this camp who wants to do him harm? For all you know, I might have a reason to want him dead, and it might’ve been me waiting in the trees with a rock. It could’ve been anyone, and without certainty we can’t publicly execute a man. We ought not to even lock him up indefinitely.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Renée. That’s where you talk yourself into a corner. See, Mark Mazzucchelli here, he had a motive and he had an opportunity. Which is bad. But what’s worse, I can’t think of one other person in this whole camp would wish harm on the sweet old man who took us all in, who gave us shelter, and who taught us how to protect ourselves from the Dragonscale. It’s that simple. I can’t think of one reason why anyone else would want Father Storey dead.”
Which was when Harper remembered what Tom Storey had told her in the canoe.
I’m going to have to send someone away, he had said. Someone who has done . . . unforgivable things.
“Oh,” Harper said, “I can think of a reason.”
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollinsPublishers
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3
From the diary of Harold Cross:
June 19th
THE SHITTERS. THE LOATHSOME IGNORANT SHITTERS.
June 19th, Later:
OFFICER CATSHITT TOOK MY PHONE. AND BEFORE HE SWITCHED IT OFF HE WIPED IT, RIGHT IN FRONT OF MY EYES. EVERY TEXT, EVERY MAIL, EVERY NOTE.
THEY DIDN’T UNDERSTAND ANYTHING. THEY DIDN’T EVEN TRY TO UNDERSTAND. AS SOON AS I TOLD THEM I HAD BEEN COMMUNICATING WITH PEOPLE ON THE OUTSIDE THEY WENT INTO HYSTERICS. IF THEY HAD THE JIM JONES KOOL-AID ON HAND THEY ALL WOULD’VE BEEN LINED UP FOR A CUP. NOW THAT I’VE CALMED DOWN, I WONDER IF I SHOULD HAVE ANTICIPATED THIS.
THE MOST UNIQUE CHARACTERISTIC OF THE FUNGUS IS THE WAY IT BONDS WITH THE MIND. DOCTOR SOLZHENITSYN IN NOVOSIBIRSK HAS SHOWN THE SPORE IS DENDRITIC IN NATURE AND COMPATIBLE WITH THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE BRAIN. OXYTOCIN TELLS DRACO INCENDIA TRYCHOPHYTON IT HAS FOUND A SAFE ENVIRONMENT. THE FUNGUS, IN TURN, STIMULATES FLOCK BEHAVIOR TO PRESERVE ITS OWN WELL-BEING, THE SAME GROUP-THINK THAT MAKES A CROWD OF SPARROWS TURN ON A DIME. THE ’SCALE IS SO OVERPOWERING, IT CAN TEMPORARILY ERASE EVEN FUNDAMENTAL NOTIONS OF PERSONAL IDENTITY. OTHER PEOPLE’S IDEAS SEEM LIKE YOUR OWN, OTHER’S PEOPLE’S NEEDS SEEM MORE IMPORTANT THAN YOURS, ETC. WE REALLY ARE LIVING IN THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE, IT’S JUST THE ZOMBIES ARE US.
ALL THIS MAKES SENSE, GIVEN THE NATURE OF OYXTOCIN, WHICH BRINGS COMFORT TO THOSE WHO PARTICIPATE IN TRIBAL BEHAVIOR. I’M NOT PART OF THIS STUPID CHRISTING TRIBE WHICH IS WHY I’M SMOKING ALL THE TIME AND GETTING NO CHEMICAL BENEFIT FROM THEIR IDIOTIC DAILY SINGALONGS. IT ALSO EXPLAINS WHY EVERYONE WAS SO EAGER TO TURN IN THEIR CELL PHONES (YES, FUCKFACE TOOK ALL OF THEM, NOT JUST MINE). THE ’SCALE HAS THEM ALL ADDICTED TO SOCIAL APPROVAL.
I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW WHY THE FIREMAN CAN STEER THE ’SCALE INSTEAD OF BEING STEERED BY IT. NO ONE IS MORE ALOOF THAN HIM. I WOULD KILL TO KNOW HOW HE CAN SET FIRE TO PARTS OF HIMSELF AND NOT BE HURT.
I’M NOT THE ONLY ONE WHO WANTS TO KNOW WHAT HE KNOWS, EITHER. I WAS DOWN ON THE BEACH THREE DAYS AGO AND HEARD THEM OVER ON THEI
R ISLAND, YELLING AT EACH OTHER. WHATEVER HE KNOWS, HE WON’T TELL SARAH STOREY, AND BOY OH BOY IS SHE PISSED.
IF SHE TEARS HIM A NEW ASSHOLE, IT’S TOUGH SHIT FOR MR. ROOKWOOD. THIS INFIRMARY IS ALL OUT OF ASSHOLE PATCHES. AND EVERYTHING ELSE.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollinsPublishers
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4
She swatted her thigh with the notebook and looked out the window. Goosedown flakes of snow floated about, couldn’t decide if they wanted to fall or rise. Camp was a snow globe and some God-child had given it a shake.
Harper had been awake for fifteen minutes and still wasn’t sure if it was morning or afternoon. The light was diffuse and gray, as if the whole world were hidden under a bedsheet. She sat on the edge of Father Storey’s cot. Every once in a while he would draw a sudden, startled-sounding breath, as if he had just read something terrible in the newspaper. The obituary of a friend, maybe. His own obituary.
One thing that had been true in the summer of Harold Cross was even more true now. The infirmary was out of asshole patches and everything else. She had disinfected Father Storey’s trepanation with a splash of port and had treated John Rookwood’s mauled arm with a weak dose of good intentions. She wasn’t sure good intentions always paved the road to hell, but they for sure weren’t the highest standard of medical care.
She stood on the chair and reached up to put Harold’s notebook behind the ceiling panel. Some little movement or gesture at the edge of her vision caught her attention. She looked around and discovered she and Father Storey had company that morning.
Nick was in the cot closest to the door, sheets pulled to his chest. His hair was a pretty black tousle. He gazed at her as if he had forgotten how to blink. He must’ve crept in while she was asleep and quietly settled into the first empty bed.
She pushed the notebook up out of sight, deciding to act as if this were a perfectly normal thing to do. When the ceiling tile was back in place she climbed down off the chair and stood at the foot of Nick’s cot. Harper moved her hands carefully, using what he had taught her so far to ask why he was here.