Afterburn: A Novel

by Colin Harrison

  “Go on.”

  “I am, I fucking am,” Rick breathed, trying to move his foot. Impossible. Still bleeding, but not dangerously. Tommy returned and handed him a bottle of iced tea. Why was he talking so much? What else would he say? “It’s been a few years, you know? So Christina explains this and he says, Fine, but come up with a bunch of different places, I want a way so that you and the fence don’t have to talk to each other. So Christina figures that one out, too.”

  “But how do you know what time to go to the same place?” said Morris. “You got to decide on that every month.”

  “You could just set it at a regular time … but that makes you predictable. So Christina put a wrinkle in for that, too. You get the time and day from the numbers themselves. You combine the last number with the new number,” he remembered out loud. “The last number gives you the hour and the new number gives you the day. So if the old number was three and the new one was four, then you met at three o’clock on the fourth day of the next month to get the next number.”

  “What about the numeral zero?” Morris looked at his piece of paper. “How do you handle that?”

  “Zero was ten. Also, she made a rule that numbers seven through nine were a.m., zero was 10:00 A.M., and numbers one through six were in the afternoon … that way she was always out when lots of other people were around, didn’t look strange. Now, with the date, zero was also treated as ten. So that gave you the date of the next meeting. It was always in the first ten days of the month, that way.”

  “What about the time and date of the drop-off? You can’t just make that any old time, with traffic and parking and all. Plus fucking parades and shit.”

  “That’s true. She had some kind of trick for that.”

  “You could just set a regular time for a particular date, taking into account the traffic for the truck.”

  “You could,” Rick agreed, “but if the same drop-off place number came up twice in a row, which can happen, then you have the truck appearing in the same place at the same time on the same date two months in a row, which was too risky. No, she had something in there for that, but I can’t remember.”

  Morris consulted his piece of paper. “What about the places where you got the numbers?”

  “I remember a few,” he said, feeling tired. The pain from the foot wound was indistinguishable from the ankle pain. “One of them was in Penn Station, looking at the train board. Another was that big stock market board they got over on Times Square. Then I think a third was the digital thermometer on the top of the Gulf & Western Building, probably the last digit, since that would—”

  Morris took off his watch.

  “Hey,” yelled Rick, “I just gave you everything!”

  “You didn’t give us Christina.”

  “I told you, I’m looking for her myself. I’m getting—”

  “Drill.”

  He fought them as hard as he could now, butting with his head, whipping his feet out, but they’d kept his cuffs on, and while Tommy pulled his arms over his head and Jones sat on his feet, Morris touched the drill against Rick’s rib cage. He could feel it powdering the bone, vibrating his whole chest.

  “Rick,” Morris hissed next to his ear. “Come on, be a champ here, tell us where she is, guy.”

  He breathed as best he could. “I don’t know,” he cried in misery. “I—wait, I—oh …” Suddenly he found his hatred. “Oh, you cocksuckers can fucking go to hell.”

  Morris nodded to Tommy and Jones. “The jaw.”

  He felt their fingers grab his neck and head and shove it down on the old wooden table. He fought with everything he had left, kicking with his good foot, hitting one of them hard in the chest, not even feeling his foot, his rib, but just fighting blindly, fighting against them and his own fear, fighting for the idea of survival, and they snatched his hair and lifted his head up and pounded it against the table and he fell asleep for a moment, and that was when the drill started again and went in and through his unshaven cheek and destroyed one of his upper teeth. The pain burned through into his eye and ear and neck, and he saw hot white lights in his head yet held his mouth open and kept his tongue pressed down to avoid the drill. It stayed in there, whirling blood and tissue inside his mouth, riding back and forth across the destroyed roots of the tooth, killing his head with pain. He may have been screaming, he didn’t know. He went limp, eyes shut, mouth filling with blood. Morris pulled out the drill, not cleanly but dragging it over the bottom tooth, and again the pain cabled into Rick’s eye socket and pushed outward along the ear canal and even into his nose. He felt air coming in coolly through his cheek. The blood was sticky and warm in his throat, and he tentatively closed his mouth and opened it, tonguing little pieces of tooth against his gum.

  “That, I will freely confess,” said Morris, “was a mistake.”

  “Why?” asked Jones.

  “You want a guy to talk, you don’t drill his mouth.”

  “Got a point there.”

  Morris drew close and whispered, his breath metallic, like the side effect of medication. “You’re all over the Village, Rick. You been snooping around, looking in shops and talking to people. Right? You think we don’t know this?”

  “Ha-wait, wait,” he breathed thickly. “She probably down there—could be anywhere … I don’t know—”

  Morris wasn’t listening. “Tommy, you pack the ice chest like I told you?”

  “In the car.”

  “Go get it.”

  “Right.”

  “Also bring the camera.”

  “You got it.”

  “Hey, Rick,” Morris said, “you know, she’s not worth it, okay? I mean—hey!—we’re reasonable people. You tell us, we drop you at the hospital, they patch you up. You’re bleeding now, see. You’re in a little bit of trouble. Tell us now and it’s the emergency room.”

  He made a noise with his mouth.

  “It’s not a big problem. It’s like five minutes.”

  His groin felt wet, his head hot. His hands were cold, and he wanted to sleep. Maybe they would take him to the emergency room. Of course. He couldn’t really die now, it wasn’t time.

  Morris started the drill.

  Rick shut his eyes. “Jim-Jack,” he called, mouth a socket of agony. “Bleeck-er.”

  “What about it?”

  “Work there.”

  “What days?”

  He didn’t know, but they would not believe him if he said so. “Monday to Sat-day.”

  “Nights, day?”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “Downtown—we can pick her up anytime,” said Tommy.

  “Right.” Morris turned back to Rick. He looked at the drill, then started it. “Where’s she living?”

  “I—I don’t—” He didn’t want to say it. He was sorry. He was sorry for everything, and he closed his eyes, choking.

  “It’s coming, I can tell,” Morris narrated. “I’ve seen this.”

  “I love her … I love that girl!” The drill started near his ear and he began to cry, convulsing in despair at how worthless and weak and broken he was, a nobody afraid of dying. “I loved …” He sobbed shamefully and covered his eyes with his shackled hands.

  “No, no, Rick,” explained Morris, “not that, not yet, you can’t break down yet. You have to just hold on now, say the address. Just say it—you can. Just let it out.”

  “I love her, I do!” he cried, hating himself.

  “I know you do,” came Morris’s voice of understanding. “That’s admirable, I respect you for that, but it doesn’t help anything. You have to tell us the address now, Rick. You have to say it. If you don’t, then I’ll give you the drill again. You know I will. Right? I know what I’m doing, Rick. I worked as a paramedic for nine years, I’ve seen everything. I have control of you, Rick. I have control of your body and your mind, and I have more things in my box that hurt. Now, you need to give me her address or it will get very bad for you.”

  “Ah …” he breathed, no
t knowing what to do.

  The drill started. His eyes were closed, but the drill was so near he could smell the burn of the electric motor. The noise was close to his nostril, just inside, tickling—“East Fourth!” he cried. “East Fourth … First Avenue. Blue building. The mailbox says Williams.”

  “Williams?” said Morris, withdrawing the drill.

  “Yeah.”

  Morris let the drill stop. “Good, very good.”

  A few minutes passed. He dribbled spitty blood from his mouth. He didn’t care about the ankle or the rib, it was the tooth, all gone, all drilled away, the roots sensitive to the air, his tongue feeling the hole in his cheek. They sat him up again and gave him a carton of orange juice. He spilled some of it down his shirt. It burned his tooth but cleaned out his throat.

  “Okay?” asked Rick finally. “Thah’s it?”

  Morris shook his head. “You didn’t tell us about the money.”

  “What?”

  Tommy dragged a large ice chest across the floor. A Polaroid camera swung from his neck.

  “The big money, the boxes.”

  “There’s no money like that!” cried Rick. He tried to stand but fell to the floor. “You gotta take me to the hospital now!”

  “We’re not quite done here,” Morris noted. “Tommy, show Rick the ice chest.”

  Tommy pulled over the cooler. “I usually take this on my boat.”

  “We’ve got this thing under control, Rick,” said Morris. “Help him back up on the table.” He wet his finger in his mouth, then pulled off his wedding ring and slipped it into his pocket. “Okay, so now we’re going to find out if you know where the money is.”

  “Nah—” He didn’t understand.

  “This is under control, Rick, you don’t have to worry.”

  He couldn’t really talk, his mouth was so swollen and thick. Morris pointed to his arms.

  “We’re going to cut one off.”

  “Nah! Please!” He checked Morris’s eyes.

  “Tommy, you put film in that fucking camera?”

  “’Course.”

  “Tony wants proof, see.”

  “Fuck!” yelled Rick. “What? What?”

  “Left or right? We’ll accommodate.”

  He didn’t believe them, did he?

  “Which?” asked Morris.

  “Need the right!”

  “It’ll be the left, then.” He pointed to Rick’s handcuffs. “Take it off the left, and cuff his right to the table.”

  Morris opened one of the carpenter’s boxes while the men held Rick and moved the handcuffs. “I have an arterial hemostat I’m going to put on your upper arm,” he said softly. A sweetness, even a calm appeared to pass into him. “Nobody is going to bleed to death. And no problem on the limb recovery. Cooled, you’ve got four hours maybe. So there’s no problem.”

  “I fucking told ev-thing!” Rick cried.

  Morris came over and sat down. “See, this is what we’re going to do, Rick. We had a good discussion, but now we have to talk about the big topic. If you tell us where the money is, we stop right now.”

  Rick searched Morris’s face for an explanation. He didn’t understand anything anymore.

  “But if you don’t, then my procedure keeps going. Once it goes far enough, though, we have to keep going. I’m not leaving a messy job. So that’s where we are. Okay, also, listen to me, because the more anxiety you allow yourself, the more unfortunate everything gets.” Morris’s eyes moved closer to Rick. No redness, no fatigue in them. “First I’m going to start a saline IV on your other arm. This allows me to compensate for the blood loss, which really should not be excessive if I get the artery clamped quickly enough—”

  “No, no!”

  “I’m figuring that I really must have that artery closed off in sixty seconds, forty-five being optimal,” Morris explained. “On the IV, I’ll use a fourteen-gauge, which is big enough to give you a liter a minute if I have to. It also lets me administer morphine as necessary. We’ll be starting you off at fifteen milligrams, but watching to see if your respiration drops. I usually give the patient five milligrams, but with this, I think fifteen is warranted.” Morris nodded to himself, satisfied by his own analysis. “I’ll be cutting through the upper arm, through the biceps muscle and the humerus—just one bone—and then through the triceps. It’s easy. Muscle and bone. I don’t feel like going through the elbow joint, see. The joint is very complicated—lot of nerves and blood vessels running through there. I do have enough morphine for the pain that would cause—that’s not the problem, it’s that if it got messy I might have a little difficulty finding the artery.” He was a man in his element. “If it takes me ninety seconds to get you clamped, then we might have a bleed-out. Upper arm, the artery is no problem. Also, if we cut through the elbow, your arm is damaged forever. But the upper arm—should be fine. The boys at the replantation center at Bellevue are magicians if they’ve got a clean cut. So the key to this whole deal is the aforementioned hemostat.” He held up a stainless-steel needle-nosed clamp with locking finger grips. “More effective than a tourniquet. Once we get the arm off and the clamp on, you’re in good shape, Rick. You’re not going to die. You might feel that way, you might go into shock, but you are absolutely not going to die. The body’s ability to recover is astounding. The body protects itself. We’ll make sure the wound is washed with betadine and bandaged so that the boys are working on a wound that is clean. Tommy will take pictures of each step. As for the arm itself, I’ll be putting a piece of Saran Wrap on the cut surface and then will wrap the whole thing in aluminum foil and put it on the ice. It won’t be in direct contact with the ice. I don’t want you worrying about that, either. We want that arm cool but not frozen. That arm, once chilled down rapidly in a sanitary environment, is going to be good for three, four hours. You’ll be in Bellevue by then and they’ll be sewing it back on. I’m making it easy for those guys.”

  Morris appeared to wait for Rick to protest, but he felt despondent, exhausted, the pain sawing across his bleeding tooth stump, his eyesight purpled and darkening.

  “I’m going to take good care of you, okay? But if you try to resist me now, start calling me names or fighting, then I’m going to give you Narcan. What is that, you might ask? I call it God in a syringe. It blocks the reception of morphine. The antidote. You can make guys who look dead from an OD get up and sing. I’ve done that, a real crowdpleaser, let me tell you. You start giving me shit, Rick, then I’m going to give you two milligrams of Narcan and that is going to block the fifteen milligrams of morphine that I gave you before. It takes twenty seconds to work. All right? Which is to say that your arm is going to go from feeling not bad at all to feeling like someone just cut it off, which”—Morris calmed himself—“of course, someone did.” He looked at Tommy. “Get my circular saw. Also, I folded some plastic overalls in there. Okay, we’ll put that music on.”

  “You got tapes?” Tommy’s voice echoed in the cavernous room.

  I love my hand, my fingers, Rick thought with strange detachment. “Wait, wait,” he said weakly. “Wait—”

  “I’ve got the Rolling Stones, I’ve got Salt-N-Pepa, the Bruce Springsteen, Willie Nelson—you know, ‘Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain’—all kinds of good music.” Morris turned back to Rick. “You got a request?”

  Rick made a fist with his left hand, just to remember. Oh, Paul, he thought, please do something.

  “Make your pick,” ordered Morris.

  He spittled a piece of tooth onto his lower lip. The pain came back to his rib. “Give me the Bruce.”

  “Great choice.” Morris nodded his approval. “Fine. Make it loud, Tommy. Good. Yes. I’ll take the saw.” He looked at Rick, his mouth a tight slit of concentration. “This goes quick, man, just listen to the music.”

  ROOM 527, PIERRE HOTEL

  SIXTY-FIRST STREET AND FIFTH AVENUE, MANHATTAN

  SEPTEMBER 21, 1999

  SOMEBODY BUYS HIS SUITS FOR HIM, she realized, seeing Charlie
leaning darkly against the hotel bar reading a sheet of paper and sipping his drink. He didn’t notice her come toward him, which worried her, since she’d spent what time and money she had to make him think she was someone she was not, buying new lipstick, perfume, and a pair of fake gold earrings. How ridiculous the trouble she’d gone to, considering that he’d probably gone to no trouble at all! Wriggling into her one little black dress again—what choice did she have? Well, you gotta do who you gotta do, they used to say at the prison. She’d worked the lunch shift at Jim-Jack’s, finally leaving at four, then hurried home through the windy rain to shower and put herself together, wondering what men in their late fifties liked in a younger woman. Youth, for starters. But nothing flashy or cheap-looking. If a man like Charlie wasn’t comfortable, he wasn’t going to get involved. He would smile politely and move on. Now she slipped past the few other men at the bar and let her hand touch Charlie’s sleeve.

  “Hey, mister,” she whispered close as he turned. “Remember me? I’m that girl who flirted with you last night.” She kissed him quickly on the cheek, leaving a smudge. She felt nervous, a little insecure, but a drink would fix that. “Been here long?”

  “No.” He shook his head and folded the paper and slipped it into his breast pocket. They stood silently, and as before he seemed to be studying her. But his attention was not cold and hard; rather, it seemed to come from some other part of him. His blue eyes were sorrowful. She remembered what he’d said about his son.