Light swung into the room. A nurse in her white uniform entered. Patty or Sarah. A name like that. Alex had been told but couldn’t recall. A chunky middle-aged woman, a career nurse. Short curly hair, glasses. Going to check her chart, add a scribble, the late late shift. Efficient, a degree away from brusque. Seen it all, wiped up after. Whatever compassion brought her to this work had long ago burned off. Now she chattered, filled the room with white noise that Alexandra’s brain was too slow to process. Caught a word, then another a moment later. Snatches. Something about the television. The news. Alex a big deal. Mayor King. A long time ago, but Patty remembered. Heard stories about the boys. A couple of losers.
Alex gave up trying to decipher it all. Closed her eyes, gave herself to the pillow, the drugs. Feeling the cold, empty presence of the phone in her hand.
Then a man in the doorway. His voice opened Alexandra’s eyes.
He was older, a bushy mustache, bald head gleaming. White doctor’s smock with a plastic ID clipped to the pocket. She’d seen him before. He was somebody. Somebody she knew but didn’t know.
The doctor shut the door behind him.
The shadows deepened, the room lit by the glow of night-lights.
“How’s our patient?” the doctor said to Patty. He had the exasperated tone of a man with better things to do.
The man was looking past the nurse at Alexandra.
Patty handed him the chart, and the doctor held it without looking at it.
The man smiled at Alex, something evil in it. Something inhuman. Then he turned the smile on Patty.
“Wait a minute,” Patty said. “I know you. You’re that guy.”
“No, I’m not,” he said. “I’m Ms. Collins’s doctor.”
“Well, you look exactly like that guy. That television guy, the politician.”
“Oh, please, not a politician.”
“Okay, yeah, not one of those. But government, FBI, something like that. On TV. Yeah, I know. You’re the guy that stood up to Congress, didn’t take any crap. That war down in Costa Rica or somewhere.”
“You can go, Nurse. I’ll take it from here.”
“That Hot Seat show.” She snapped her fingers. “Runyon’s Hot Seat.”
“Oh, darn,” the doctor said. “I wish you hadn’t.”
“You must get it all the time. You’re a dead ringer.”
Alexandra was staring at him, gripping the phone, trying to dig her thumb between the lid and body, open it.
“I loved that show,” Patty said. “I guess they moved it to a different time slot. That, or switched networks.”
“Canceled,” the man said.
“My husband thought Runyon was a total nut job, but he watched anyway. He was into it, answering back, you know, arguing with the TV.”
The man nodded.
And the smile came back. Malevolent. It was so clear to Alex. She wondered why Patty couldn’t see it. Probably attention deficit disorder, her mind pinballing from one thing to the next. Amazing she was a nurse.
Beneath the white jacket the man wore a green Hawaiian shirt, khakis. His head shone in the light, bushy mustache. Wrong, very wrong.
Alex got the phone open. Used her thumb to feel for the speed-dial number. One for Thorn. A monumental effort that required her full concentration.
The man stepped close to Nurse Patty. She tightened up, tried to smile, squinting at his name badge.
“Dr. Blas? Reynaldo Blas? You’re not him. I know Dr. Blas.”
Something happened out of Alex’s view, and Patty slumped into the man’s arms.
Alex pressed the button. One for Thorn. Battery was probably dead. Or Thorn back home in Key Largo now. Hunkered down, disappearing into all that water and sky the way he always did. Becoming one with the blue.
Out in the hallway she heard a phone ring. Down toward the nurses’ station. The identical ring tone she’d chosen for Thorn. First ten notes of “Yellow Submarine.” Something goofy for the man she loved.
Down the hallway she heard those ten notes play again as the man, Runyon, stepped to the bed and lay a hand on Alexandra’s throat. Testing to see if she would struggle. She wouldn’t. She couldn’t.
He wore surgical gloves. Dry and cool against her flesh. Unnatural. His right hand was malformed. There were hard stumps where the first two fingers should have been. A bony nub that prodded against her airway.
The man’s shadow enveloped her. Alex smelled his breath. Green peppers, something meaty. Tacos, empanadas. He was going to strangle her one-handed. Didn’t even require both to do the job.
Alexandra heard Thorn. His electronic voice in her hand.
“Alex? Alex? Hello? What room are you in? I can’t find you. Alex?”
Thorn coming to save her. Delayed by her call. Delayed just long enough for Runyon to finish his work.
Runyon peeled back the sheet and pried the phone from her hand and clicked it shut. Then got back to work, his deformed hand pressing against her windpipe. Alexandra’s hands fluttered beneath the sheets. She was a fighter, always had been. Scrapping for everything, having to try harder, being a female in that cynical man’s world. Cops, cops, more cops. She held her own. More than her own. Traded jab for jab. She was tougher than most of the guys she worked with. The karate was one thing, but it was deeper down than martial arts. The spirit she’d inherited from Lawton, his gristle.
She pictured a move to knock Runyon’s hand loose. She’d fire the heel of her right hand at his nose. Break it, send him reeling. She pictured it, what she’d do if she weren’t drugged. But she could do nothing but wiggle her fingers feebly as if she were waving good-bye.
She kept her eyes on him, memorizing his face for later, for the lineup. Until after a few seconds, it began to come clear that there would be no lineup. No later. No more Thorn. No Buck, that smart dog, so eager to please. No more anything. And she shut her eyes because this man, this Runyon, was not what she wanted for the last thing she saw on this planet.
She closed her eyes and felt the pressure on her throat, felt her body shudder, but no pain, she was just fine down inside where it counted, still and quiet and accepting, then once again she saw Lawton Collins with his mower, marching back and forth in straight, even lines across the backyard. The air dense with sweet green cuttings. The sweat on his back sparkled and his muscles rolled. His mouth was shaped into a wide grin as he looked across the yard at her, an impossible distance between them, and he winked at her, father and daughter separated by such vastness, but in that second, no more than that, she snapped across those years, those empty miles, flying back to that hot summer yard into her father’s strong arms. Her protector. Her shield.
And everything was fine again, exactly the way it had been on that Miami afternoon many years ago. Perfect. Just perfect.
Thorn saw the doctor bent over Alex. He went into the room. Stayed for a moment at a respectful distance. Didn’t want to interrupt a procedure.
But something wasn’t right. He saw Alex’s foot wiggle hard beneath the sheets. Saw the man’s thick neck straining.
“Hey,” Thorn said. “Hey.”
He went forward, saw the man’s hands gripping her throat, then threw himself at the man and shouldered him aside.
The doctor who was no doctor swiveled into Thorn, throwing a looping right hand out of the shadows. Thorn took it on the cheekbone, his head snapping back, and he saw the spin and whirl of galaxies and felt the floor tilt beneath him.
Thorn grabbed the man’s lab coat for balance, got his eyes to focus, and set his feet and slung the big man to the right against the bedside table. Just buying time till his vision cleared.
Glass shattered on the floor, and the man growled and came back at Thorn with another punch, this one to Thorn’s gut. Hardened by long hours of poling his skiff across the flats, his stomach took the blow and took the next, and he was still standing. The light was coming back; the air had more oxygen.
Thorn crushed an overhand right into the man’s jaw
. Then hooked a left hard into his kidney, then another left to the same tender spot, and a right digging into the man’s gut. The man belched up a string of spit.
As Thorn stepped in to deliver the knockout, the man snarled and drove his knee into Thorn’s crotch. Thorn gasped and staggered backward, and the man pushed past him around the bed.
He was old and slow, but stronger than any man Thorn had ever fought. The man staggered out of the room, and made it to the hallway, turned left, and hustled away.
Breathing hard, Thorn went back to the bed, touched Alexandra’s shoulder. Spoke her name but got no response. Her face was the wrong shade of white. She was cooler than she should have been, quieter.
He tilted her head back at the proper angle, bent over her, pinched her nose shut and pressed his lips to her lips and emptied his lungs.
Fighting off the dread, he found the rhythm and did it all again. And again. He pressed down on her chest, fit his lips to hers, and repeated and repeated again. A prayer he’d known as a child came into his head, and the words fell into the rhythm of his movements. Breathe, pump, breathe, pump. Hail Mary, full of grace.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Except for Carmen’s gold crucifix hanging on the west wall, Snake’s room was bare. Sheets on his bed, a single pillow, but otherwise a cell. The walls scrubbed clean, the floor dust-free, windows polished. Snake’s daily ritual of exorcism, cleansing his cubicle of impurities. It was the room of a monk, a convict, a man deep in training. Snake thought of himself as some of each.
Two shirts in the closet, two pairs of jeans, running shoes. A wallet, key chain, and sunglasses. Traveling as weightlessly as a spirit, leaving no footprint, no evidence of his passage.
He needed a weapon fast and thought he knew where to find one.
It had been years since he had been in his brother’s room. Carlos had kept the door shut, used multiple locks. Never admitted anyone, not Snake, not Lola, no girls, nobody. Part of his vast paranoia. Carlos’s bedroom was thirty feet from Snake’s. Neither had summoned sufficient motivation to move out, get his own place. Still boys, still orphaned kids. Suspended animation.
With another kick, Snake splintered the wood around one lock, and with two more jolts, another and another gave way, and with a final side kick the last two locks clattered to the floor inside the room. Snake leaned his weight against the wood and shouldered the broken door aside.
He stood in the entryway, absorbing the scene.
Carmen was everywhere. Carmen. Her long black hair, her brown eyes, her soft, rounded cheeks, those innocent lips. That look of happy resolve and joyous faith in God’s generous, guiding spirit.
Carlos had reproduced the photo of Carmen from her thirteenth birthday. He had duplicated the image hundreds of times and blown it up or shrunk it, then grafted her smiling face to another and another and another cut-out photograph. Wallpapering his room with Carmen as a nun, Carmen with white angel wings, Carmen as a housewife minding three steaming pots on a stove, Carmen on a sailboat waving across the blue sparkle, Carmen driving a station wagon, piloting a fighter jet. There was Carmen’s perfect smile sitting atop the bodies of Olympic gymnasts and movie actresses. An entire wall that set their sister’s innocent face on the grotesquely inflated bodies of porn queens.
Snake stepped into the room and began to search. On a closet shelf he found a shoe box too heavy for shoes. He hauled it down and opened the lid. A .38 Colt with a four-inch barrel and a box of shells.
On his way to the door, Snake took a last look at the walls. Among all the photos, one caught his eye. Carmen wearing a red blouse and a white skirt. The same outfit she wore to her last Christmas Mass.
Christmas Eve 1963. Carmen is sitting next to Snake on a pew in the chapel of St. Michael the Archangel only a few blocks from the Morales home. In two months Jorge Morales will be murdered. So will his wife, María, and his daughter, Carmen. Five of his militiamen.
Snake sits in the aisle seat. Carmen is radiant in the red blouse and white skirt. Her bare arm brushes Snake’s. He looks at her, but her rapt attention is fixed on the rituals of the Feast of the Nativity. “Glory to God in the highest: and on earth peace to men of goodwill.”
Past Carmen’s face Snake sees his father in a white shirt and dark tie. At this moment Jorge Morales turns his head and sneaks a look several rows behind them. Snake’s mother notices and turns also, and her eyes settle on the object of her husband’s attention. Carlos is babbling to himself and clicking together rubber soldiers in the battlefield of his lap.
In the middle of a prayer, María Morales comes to her feet. She snatches Carlos by the shirt and hauls him upright and motions for Snake to rise and lead the way out of the aisle. The rubber soldiers fall from Carlos’s hands and he squirms to retrieve them. María Morales jerks him straight and herds her children toward the aisle.
They are causing a stir. People around them mumbling, others at the front of the church craning to see. Carmen is flushed with humiliation. Moving into the aisle, Snake snatches a look to see who is sitting behind them, the cause of this exodus, but it is all a blur, a clutter of faces, as he is jostled toward the exit.
Outside on the street, Carmen is aghast. Such a scene, such sacrilege.
María and Jorge Morales march ahead down the sidewalk. María speaks in harsh whispers near Jorge’s ear. His face is forward. The children tag along. Carlos bawls about his abandoned soldiers. Snake turns to Carmen.
“Who was that?” he asks his sister.
“It was her.”
“The other woman?” Snake says.
Carmen doesn’t answer, but the affirmation is in her face.
Snake is two places at once. A child fumbling to understand, a man stretching back into the stillness of the past. Snake searches his mind for her face, this woman. This dark force haunting his family. He scans the rows of people sitting behind the Moraleses’ pew, the faces caught in the flashbulb of memory. Going slowly, one by one down the benches. Row by row, holding them up to the harsh light of recollection, freezing them. Seeing the bald man in a tight suit, the pimpled teenage boy, the blond-haired baby in the arms of a young mother, then one woman sitting apart, a space on either side of her.
The revelation must have been coming for years, working upward like a wisp of superheated steam sifting through the hard strata of the past, finding fissures in the layers of rock, finally massing just below the surface, massing and massing until it was ready to erupt in a volcanic flash. On some unspoken, pent-up level, Snake must have always known who she was. The other woman. The woman whose face is hardening into focus.
Snake sees her exactly as she was that night at Christmas Mass, the third person from the aisle, two rows back. She wears a black hat cocked to the side and a burgundy dress. Her hair is a thick and lustrous red, falling over her shoulders, and eyes are dark blue and clear and have an eerie distance in them, as if she has stared too long at the horizon. A woman ablaze with desperate longing.
It is Lola.
Snake rocked back against the wall across from his brother’s bedroom. He was breathing fast, the scent of church incense still lingering. The echoes of “Silent Night,” the crèche, Baby Jesus in his crib.
Lola.
Outside on the lawn male voices approached, bickering and cursing. Cops coming to take his statement, trying to trick the truth from him.
Snake shoved away from the wall, scrambled down the stairs, cut through the garage, and exited out the door opening onto the bordering woods. He jogged along the property line to the neighbor’s stone wall, mounted it, sprinted out their drive to the street, then stayed in the shadows to Main Highway, where he had left his taxi.
He was just unlocking the door, sweat trickling down his chest, when his cell phone jingled.
Snake dug it out, checked the caller ID: Friendly Service Yellow Cabs.
“You coming to work, or you quit?” Nelson Mendoza, the graveyard dispatcher, was as close to a boss as Snake had.
&nbs
p; “I won’t be there tonight. I’m into other things.”
“Yeah, I heard about Carlos,” Nelson said. “But people been calling for you. Thought you should know.”
“What people?”
“Couple of reporters. Homicide cops. Some other asshole.”
“What asshole?”
“Guy wanted you to pick him up. Very pushy.”
“A regular?”
“No, some guy, muy anglo. He gives me your cab number, asks if you was the driver. ‘Does Snake drive cab 4497?’ That’s what he says. ‘Does Snake drive that cab?’ ‘Keep this to yourself,’ he tells me, like you and him are long-lost buddies or some shit and he’s going to surprise you.”
“Didn’t give his name?”
“No name, just the wiseass bullshit.”
“Sounds like my buddy Thorn.”
“Thorn?”
“He wanted me to pick him up?”
“That’s what he said.”
“He give an address?”
“Riviera Motel on Dixie, across from Suntan U. Room two-twelve.”
“If this gentleman calls back,” Snake said, “you didn’t reach me.”
“This about Carlos getting shot?”
“None of your damn business what it’s about. Go back to sleep.”
“Too bad about the kid. He was all right in a fucked-up kind of way.”
Snake clicked off.
The Riviera Motel was about ten minutes away.
He got into the cab, dug out the .38, broke the cylinder open. He loaded it from the box of ammo, filled his pockets with the extras.
Snake started the engine, then sat for a minute, hands on the wheel.
A smart guy like Thorn had to know the dispatcher would check in with Snake, give him the address. Which meant it was a trap. On the other hand, Thorn would have to be an idiot not to know that dispatch would also tell Snake how he’d recited the cab number. Making the ambush obvious.
So either Thorn grossly underestimated Snake or the asshole was in such a hurry to do some head-butting that he didn’t care. Then again, maybe there was some other angle Snake was missing.
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