Fire in the Blood

  “You’ll need time to recover,” she said.

  Coop fake-blinked awake. Then nodded in dull comprehension. “I need to go back soon.”

  “Back where? The hospital?”

  “Afghanistan.”

  Eva nodded to herself. “You’ll stay here until then. Understand?”

  Less an offer than an order.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Buqa’s eyes were horse-wild, and in the darkness of the room Kosta swore he could hear the galloping of her mind. The landscape of her inner world must be horrible, he thought, given the way she was shivering. The guest bed was too small, and every so often Buqa struggled against the quilt, keening in frustration as she tried to cover herself.

  Kosta watched from a chair that he’d pulled away from the bed, safely out of reach. He’d managed to extract the needles from Buqa’s neck, but all subsequent attempts to care for her had produced a violent thrashing—like a toddler, Kosta thought, but far more dangerous. He had already caught a stray fist while trying to dress her wounds. The punch had doubled him against the wall, and Kosta had sat down, heaving, the pain amplified by bitter admiration. Why did it have to be Buqa who had been poisoned?

  Kosta watched her writhe and mutter, her neck a collar of dried blood. From elsewhere in the duplex came a subtle, insistent scraping.

  Kosta stood up and listened more carefully. Recognizing the noise, he crept from the room and went downstairs. Kosta found Zameer sitting shirtless at the kitchen table, sharpening his linoleum knife. Zameer clutched a whetstone in his gauze-wrapped paw, the good hand making slow, deliberate swipes with the blade. Stickered across his shoulders and arms were dozens of small bandages.

  “She get better?” Zameer said.

  “Of course not,” said Kosta. “You need to do that right now?”

  Zameer inspected the angle of the blade. “The sharper the knife, the less the pain.”

  Kosta stared at him for a long time. “Try to be quiet.”

  He put a kettle on the stove and took a box of herbal tea from a drawer. Then Kosta retrieved the box of Olanzapine wafers he’d been feeding to Sean. He surveyed the tools with regret.

  Things had gone out of control. All morning Kosta had surreptitiously canvassed the neighborhood. Had anyone perhaps seen a madman running through the snow? The old grandmother who ran the Italian ice cart had spat at Kosta’s feet.

  “Criminal,” she had said. “Shame on you.”

  Kosta moved on. Ditmir from the electronics store confided that he had indeed seen a figure wandering through the streets.

  “His eyes were clouded, and he was followed by crackling light. Like Rmoria,” said Ditmir, followed by a hoarse coughing fit. “Hey, you know what my father would do, when he saw a storm coming?” Ditmir had continued. He pantomimed a rifle, aimed at the sky. “He’d shoot at the clouds to chase off the weather.”

  Kosta thanked him but privately deemed the intelligence unhelpful, as Ditmir was known to blend his pipe tobacco with hashish.

  After hours of questioning his neighbors, Kosta found a Daughter of the Homeland who thought perhaps she’d seen a man sitting on the roof of the gazebo in Ciccarone Playground, staring up at the stars. Which meant the soldier had drifted toward the hospital, Kosta thought. Increasing the likelihood he had been scooped up by the police. On the other hand he might be dead somewhere, frozen in a culvert. Had they given him enough formula to take hold? If Buqa’s state was any indication, it was certainly possible.

  A shirtless man, disappearing into winter. It was an appropriate image, Kosta felt, as the whole situation ran wild, beyond his grip.

  Kosta came back into Buqa’s room and knelt at her side, carrying a steaming mug of tea. He put a hand to her forehead but she started at his touch.

  “Hey,” said Kosta. Buqa looked over at him shyly, licked her lips, and burped. Out came a string of apologies in Croatian.

  “Here,” said Kosta. “Drink this.”

  Buqa protested at first, but Kosta put gentle pressure on her forehead and tipped the mug toward her mouth. She coughed and sputtered and sat up, trying to wipe it away. Kosta helped her lie back on the bed. Soon her eyelids began to flutter, the Olanzapine already doing its work. Kosta cooed to her as Buqa fell asleep. Soon the room grew quiet.

  Behind him Kosta felt a displacement of air and turned to see Zameer ghosting into the room. Kosta held up a hand, indicating that he should wait, and Zameer posted himself at the foot of the bed, shifting back and forth on his feet.

  Moving ever so slowly, Kosta leaned over Buqa and began pulling up the quilt around her torso, as if he were tucking her in.

  In Kosta’s view, there were right ways and wrong ways to kill a friend. For instance, some amateurs put their faith entirely in drugs, and while chemicals could help soften the process, there was no such thing as an ecstatic overdose. In Kosta’s experience, death by narcotic was a drawn-out torment of choking and seizures. A gunshot to the skull was instantaneous and pain-free, but for this method you needed a quiet and disposable firearm. Lacking such resources, the gentlest way was the knife.

  Gripping a fistful of quilt in each hand, Kosta stretched the folded bedding across Buqa’s chest. Slowly he leaned forward with all his weight, pinning her.

  “Ssshhh,” he said, and felt her lungs empty under the pressure.

  He turned back to Zameer, ushering him forward with a nod, but suddenly Kosta felt a deep, convulsive shiver pass through the muscular body beneath him. And then he heard the keening, a horrible moan. Looking down, Kosta was dismayed to see Buqa’s eyes flapped wide, awake with naked fear. Looking down at the foot at the bed, and then up at him, her face pleading and terrified.

  Zameer was already coming with the knife. Buqa began kicking, so Kosta leaned with all his weight to keep her down while Zameer fumbled one of her arms from under the sheets, and drew a lazy, jagged cut from elbow to wrist. Blood lanced onto his tracksuit and sprayed the bed while Buqa fought, opening her mouth to yell. Kosta yanked a pillow from behind her head to cover her face. Now Zameer was jabbing the knife into her side, huffing rapidly, spittle bubbling from his lips. Kosta watched the blade vanish and reappear, a magic trick. He had seen many stabbings, but had never been so fixated with horror. It seemed wrong that a knife could obtain such casual passage into the body.

  The bed turned dark and wet and soon it was over. Kosta stared with amazement, seeing Buqa’s face again, her expression at the moment she had woken up and seen him holding her down. The face of a child about to cry, accusing and so horribly disappointed. All the world’s disappointment in those eyes, he thought.

  Kosta eased himself away from the corpse. He turned his gaze on Zameer, who stood panting on the other side of the bed, his knife still sticking from Buqa’s side.

  “Why would you do that?” said Kosta.

  Zameer blinked. “What?”

  “You wanted her to see it,” said Kosta, speaking in Albanian now. “Why would you show her the knife?”

  Zameer opened his mouth to offer a defense, but the hard rage in Kosta’s stare made him reconsider. Slowly Zameer took a step backward, his eyes flashing toward the door.

  Kosta stepped around the bed, blocking his escape. Instead of running, Zameer lunged for the knife. But this time he couldn’t free it. It was as if Buqa fought back, clutching the knife within her ribs. Zameer let out a weird, frantic giggle as he strained to wrench the blade free. Kosta lunged forward and grabbed Zameer by the throat. “You showed her,” said Kosta, his voice a harsh growl, his grip tightening with each word. “You showed her.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  The next day, when Eva had gone to work, Coop decided to attempt the slow, excruciating process of lifting himself off the couch. The ligaments in his back felt as if they had petrified, and it took almost a half hour for him to sit up and hobble across th
e living room, cradling his bladder.

  Standing in front of the mirror in Eva’s small bathroom, Coop examined the purple blossom across his chest. He took another Percocet, swished out his mouth, and spat up glassful after glassful of pink water. Next Coop tried walking around the apartment, hands out like a blind person, paddling to grab at counters and doorframes. He hunted for some kind of entertainment, defense against the dull, useless hours of healing. There was no television, and Eva’s bookshelf was filled with intimidating titles like The Pathological Basis of Disease and Dialectical Behavior Therapy. Coop scoured the rest of the apartment, hoping his sapper’s instincts might help uncover a cache of legal thrillers, spy novels, comic books, anything he could just enjoy as entertainment while he healed, but the only treasure he managed to locate was a collection of erotica paperbacks and a bullet-shaped metallic purple vibrator, all hidden in a handbag under Eva’s bed.

  Defeated, Coop returned to the bookshelf. This time he noticed a stack of older-looking books and papers on the top shelf, set apart from the other volumes. Coop pulled down a pocket-sized book from the top of the stack called Freedom or Damnation. It was a collection of religious quotations, each presented in large text and accompanied by photographs of black clergy. Coop went back to the couch and flipped through the book until one of the quotes stopped him:

  God is not dead—nor is He an indifferent onlooker at what is going on in this world. One day He will make restitution for blood; He will call the oppressors to account. Justice may sleep, but it never dies.

  —FRANCIS J. GRIMKÉ

  He liked that: restitution for blood. The words captured a swarm of feelings and doubts that had grown inside him ever since he’d landed in New York—feelings about the war, about Kay and her vanishing, about his own crimes and what he might do to make amends. It seemed to Coop that his investigations had brought him to the verge of this idea, restitution, and he had been punished for it.

  What he wanted to do was return to the mission. Find Sean, make sense of his connection to the men in masks. But reconstructing his abduction was like scooping up handfuls of dry sand, the memories kept leaking through his fingers. Through the steamed-over windows he heard the sounds of the city, all the commotion rushing through his brain, and spinning in the red-lit darkness behind his eyelids Coop saw the rubber caveman faces snarling at him. He dreamed he was running again through the courtyard of the church on Castle Hill in pursuit of the man in the black suit and sneakers. His footprints were laced with sparks, and suddenly Coop wasn’t sure whether he was chasing someone or running away.

  When he woke, the sun hung low and orange below the window. But the fact that he had slept through the day was secondary to a new and urgent thrill, something that had come up from the cauldron of his brain while he was sleeping: Coop remembered that his enemy hadn’t always been disguised.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Eva was having dinner in the hospital cafeteria when she was joined by Dr. Meyer, an attending physician from Neurology.

  “Dr. Okori,” said Meyer, scooting up close. “I’m wondering if you can help me out.”

  Eva gave him a stiff, polite smile. “Sure.”

  “You remember a no-name patient from a few nights back? I’m told you ID’d him and handled the discharge.”

  Here it comes, Eva thought. She straightened herself, trying to prepare for the fallout. “That sounds familiar,” she said, faking an upward eye roll of recollection.

  “Caucasian male, midtwenties?” he prompted.

  “Sure, sure,” she said, “I remember.”

  “Great. You happen to know his whereabouts?”

  Eve slowly shook her head. Meyer frowned, obviously disappointed. He looked around the cafeteria, then back at Eva.

  “You have a few minutes?” he said, lowering his voice. “I want to show you something.”

  They stood together in the darkness of the neuroimaging lair. On the monitor were a series of black-and-white tomographic images showing the pale border of Coop’s skull, filled with an interior of prunish gray.

  “Imaging never sent these over, I checked,” said Meyer. “So don’t worry, you guys in Psych are off the hook.”

  With a finger he indicated tiny white blemishes in the brain scan. They looked like marks of deterioration in old film.

  “One or two of these I’d chalk up to motion artifacts, but look at them all: three, four, five, maybe this one here…” he said, his fingers skipping across the screen.

  Eva studied the images. It was a relief to be in the darkness of this underground bunker, surrounded by quietly humming computers. So much easier to gain clinical distance.

  “This trauma,” she said, “could it have caused the patient’s hallucinations? From what I understand, the tox screen was inconclusive.”

  Meyer shook his head. “This looks older to me. The patient, he’s maybe a boxer or something? Or a drinker, been in lots of car accidents?”

  “I don’t know much about his history,” said Eva. “But with an addict, there could be any number of lifestyle factors…”

  “Of course,” said Meyer. He was still studying the screen. Nervous about something, Eva thought.

  “So what would be your instinct, prognosis-wise?” she asked.

  “Look, first thing is, we need to get the guy back for more tests,” said Meyer. “MRI, some angiography at minimum. My real worry is that he’ll sustain another trauma. Because the thing is, this guy gets hit again, starts experiencing complications? Well, we’ve got real potential for a malpractice claim. I mean, he never should have been discharged with this kind of brain damage.”

  Eva nodded vigorously. “I understand.”

  “So you think you might be able to find him? Get him to come back? I know it’s a hell of an ask. But if someone else catches this, advises him of his rights? Puts a bull’s-eye right on my department.”

  “I’ll do what I can,” said Eva.

  “Great,” said Meyer. “Listen, don’t have him come in through the ER or anything. Have him contact my office directly.”

  A few minutes later Eva was upstairs in one of the hospital’s bathroom stalls, hyperventilating. Gripping the handicap bar she thought: How do I get Coop back here without explaining why I discharged him in the first place? Especially once it turns out he’s not a junkie from Next Start but a soldier going back to Afghanistan? Suddenly Eva felt a stabbing resentment for Katherine, the dead wife, a coworker she had barely known. This is your problem, she thought, you should be the one taking care of him.

  Okay, she told herself. Close your eyes. Deep breaths. Out of her bag Eva fished the bottle of cough syrup, labeled in its mysterious characters. She took a spoonful of the syrup. Then another. Sat on the toilet and waited. Gently came the drunken sparkles of light behind her eyelids. Little glimmerings, not dissimilar in shape to those white-hot holes burned into Coop’s brain.

  The frozen streets seemed to glide past as she left the hospital, feeling loose and happy. The crisis with Coop and Dr. Meyer was a faraway concern. The miracle of the syrup; everything seeming to drip into place.

  She made her way home through the city’s snow-strewn wilderness, the blizzard lit from within by strings of yellow lights, and on the walk back she realized she was actually looking forward to seeing Coop, her patient. It was nice to have someone in the apartment.

  Except when she got there the living room was empty. Coop’s bedding was neatly folded on her couch, but the pills and medical supplies she’d left for him were gone. Eva stumbled around the apartment. Turning on lights. Turning them off again. There was nothing else missing, though she was surprised to see one of her grandfather’s old books on the coffee table.

  Eva sat down on her bed, the gloom of the empty apartment impeding upon her fog of bodily bliss. Her patient was gone.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE


  Theo’s workplace was a Warren Street high-rise in downtown Manhattan, the entrance surrounded by a complex network of blue scaffolding. Guarding the mouth of this geodesic cave was an enormous rat. It was about ten feet tall, an inflatable monster with red eyes and fearsome teeth, attended by a half dozen protesting construction workers. The men were handing out flyers to passing pedestrians:

  TELL BELLANTE/VANCETTI TO BARGAIN IN GOOD FAITH WITH 9/11 WORKERS!

  Coop stood on the sidewalk, trying to make sense of this. Adding to the surreal moment was the floating, ethereal voice of an opera singer, which drifted up from the Fulton Street subway entrance. Coop had first heard her when he got off the 4 train, and now he felt propelled by her voice as he pushed through the crowd toward Theo’s building.

  * * *

  —

  Just a few hours ago Coop had been sleeping on the couch in Eva’s apartment when he suddenly came awake, gulping for air, as if the memory had pounced on his chest. He remembered a crouched shadow, long fingers pushing a rag down his throat. Then screaming, and as Coop tried to escape the basement he was grabbed again, fighting the shadow, both of them toppling through a window…the man’s face thin and seized in rage. He hadn’t been wearing his mask. Something had stirred in the back of Coop’s brain, and he realized he’d seen the face before: the furtive messenger he’d chased across the churchyard during Kay’s funeral. At one point the man had looked back, just a glance before he vaulted the ironwork, and the more Coop had thought about it, the more he felt sure it was the same man. Which meant the people who attacked him had also delivered something to Kay’s family. A message Theo hadn’t wanted to share.

  * * *