Dark Duets Part 28

She could feel the pulse in her palm, rapid and thready, her flesh a b.l.o.o.d.y sponge. She was on the cusp of losing consciousness. She steadied her trigger hand and fired.

The bullet hit her pinkie square in the middle phalanx, severing the interphalangeal joint and blowing off tendon, skin, and nerve, leaving a jam-filled hole in a stubby one-inch sausage casing of flesh. A mound of shredded muscle sat on top of the hole, like a scoop of sorbet on a cone. It didn't hurt. She brought her hand to her face and looked down at the b.l.o.o.d.y stump, ringed with a thin layer of skin.

Thin-skinned. Figured.

Dizzy from loss of blood, she crawled forward, looking for the phalangeal corpse. She found her pinkie on the bed. It was still alive and making quite a scene. She could hear a faint, pitiful rasping coming from it as it twitched on the chenille bedspread. Her finger seemed helpless without a hand to anchor it, unmoored.

She curled next to it on the bed.

"I'm pressing charges," her finger coughed. "You won't get away with this."

"Oh, shut up," she said.

SHE WOKE TO the sound of her own heart-or the awful bleeping of a heart monitor anyway. Everything around her looked beige and blurry. She could only be in a hospital. No place else smelled like someone s.h.i.t air freshener. She tried to focus. Her face and head felt heavy, almost like lead. With her good hand she reached up and felt around; bandages covered her nose and ear. Something was under the bandages. Firm body parts, it felt like, splints. They had sewn her back together. Reattached her veins, arteries, bone, muscle, nerve bundles, and skin-sutured, cauterized, and clipped. She jutted her chin down toward her chest-yep, judging by the pain, they'd reattached her poor b.o.o.b, too. She shuddered to think what it might look like-a bruised deflated balloon? There was only one place left to look.

She brought her hand of violence and terror up toward her face. The finger was there. As if it had never left. She tried to speak, but a cough came out. Finally she said "Hey" to her betraying appendage.

The pinkie swayed back and forth a little.

Was it still . . . alive?

Nothing.

Two nice-looking policemen came in later to take her statement. Her neighbor had heard the gunshot, they said, and called for help. She was lucky to be in one piece, they said. The policemen opened their notebooks and gave her grave stares. "What happened?" they asked her. "Who did this to you?"

She glanced at her bandaged finger. It throbbed slightly.

"I don't remember," she said.

Nurses came and went, checking on her vitals, speaking in hushed tones about the tragic, brutal attack she'd survived, shaking their heads back and forth with sympathy. Noses, ears, fingers-they had slow metabolisms, the nurses said. They were quite durable, really. You could misplace an ear for a few hours, and as long as it was a clean cut, the surgeon could pop it back on, no problem. p.e.n.i.ses did especially well when they got lopped off. They could last fourteen hours in a bucket of ice.

She drifted in and out of sleep. There were two more surgeries on her breast. The doctors cut into her lower belly, loosened skin, fat, and muscle, and then tunneled the tissue up to replace the flesh that had died. She had long talks with surgical residents about nipple sensitivity.

The police came back twice. She pled the Fifth. No one asked to talk to the finger.

SHE WAS RELIEVED when her chest drain came out and they finally let her go home to her beautiful Restoration sofa set and her carefully crafted floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and her array of Pottery Barn knickknacks, candles, bowls of rocks and thistles. But instead of feeling at home, she felt like she'd stepped into the scene of a terrible crime. Her kitchen suddenly looked too shiny and unwelcoming, like things cooked in there would be toxic. Her bathroom held dark, unseemly, naked secrets like in a horror movie. It scared her a little to sit and pee. She eyed the toilet paper with strange trepidation. And her bedroom, her beloved, safe, gigantic bed with its 600-thread-count sheets, the velvet sage-colored curtains, the corresponding soothing sage walls, somehow seemed menacing now, like it had all turned against her-the bedroom, the house, her very life. All these beautiful things. Were they laughing at her?

She looked at her pinkie-the st.i.tches rather Frankensteinian-looking, even if they were the self-dissolving kind. Her pinkie remained silent, black and blue, swollen.

The next morning she prepared for work like she always had in the past, coffee in the coffeepot, but she couldn't help a strange feeling coming over her. Why hadn't anything in her stupid house lifted a finger to help her in her time of need? She stared at the knife rack. Shiny useless inanimates. She leered at the pots and pans dangling sw.a.n.kily from the ceiling. Typical hangers-on. She ignored the dirty dishes in the sink. They would have to wait. f.u.c.k them. What had they ever done for her? Her kitchen suddenly seemed like everyone else's in the universe. A cartoon kitchen.

She showered, washing all her fingers as though they were fingers. One ached and hung slightly askew compared to the others, but she tried to ignore it. She avoided the mirror-her nose and ear had not quite settled into their old positions-and she dressed for the weather, red boots, a rain jacket, and red leather gloves she bought to make herself feel special in the brick cubicle that was her office and destination.

On her way to the door she took a quick detour back upstairs to her bedside drawer. There, she dug out the Glock and tucked it among the day's paperwork and to-do lists. It comforted her, the Glock.

On the freeway, her car merged with all the others, traveling at a constant speed not faster than traffic and definitely not any slower. For the first time she saw the road as four lanes wide of nothing but asphalt leading to a million dead and middle-aged ends. Her commute was forty minutes, and midway there she dialed down the heater and removed her gloves. A text buzzed in her purse. It started to rain again. Her exit loomed ahead of her . . . Exit 17. Why did it suddenly seem ominous? She could almost hear the minor notes of scary theme music. A voice-over booming out "Exit 17 . . ."

Then quite suddenly her pinkie hooked around the steering wheel. She stared at it. It was difficult to know whether the actions that followed were intentional or due to some force outside her-some metaphysical power steering the car crazy fast across all four lanes of traffic, almost clipping Suburus and Priuses and mom vans en route. Her pinkie had the lightest touch, and yet her car drifted toward a completely wrong, completely unknown exit ramp that swung back over the freeway in a giant sky loop. When her exit was executed, she faced a strange and previously unknown long narrow road. Soon, signs presented themselves. Her pinkie acted like a finger at the end of her hand. It said nothing. Though she thought she might have heard a sigh, a long outtake of breath that sounded as if it had taken a lifetime to build . . . with her good ear.

She looked ahead of her. This was not going to work. She looked in the rearview-all she saw was her own eyes, and the receding image of the job she was supposed to get to. Who was she and where was she going? She was a woman with a nose job. A b.o.o.b job. Plus an ear job. A hand job. But so not like advertised on TV. Her breast burned, her nose ached, she still had two black eyes from surgeries, her ear felt hot and fevered, and what she used to regard as her pinkie, well, who the h.e.l.l knew what it was thinking? And why did she suddenly want to know?

"h.e.l.lo?" she said in the gla.s.s cave-world of her car, and then almost in a whisper, aimed at her pinkie, again, "h.e.l.lo?"

To the north, the narrow road led to a giant air traffic control tower in the distance. Planes leaped into the air all around her. People flying away from their lives-maybe to clandestine government jobs where they got to play spy or carry weapons. To the east, the desert . . . roadkill and scrub brush and red dirt and heat, where a woman could even lose herself, or find herself, or where murder-suicides were, in fact, common.

HOLLOW CHOICES.

Robert Jackson Bennett and David Liss.

What struck me was that I didn't feel happy in any way at all when they walked me down the hall. I'd seen other prisoners whoop and cheer they were paraded through the doors and gates and checkpoints, nodding to friends or enemies-especially enemies-as they made their big exit. I'd seen smirks and s.h.i.t-eating grins and knowing smiles. I didn't feel like celebrating. I couldn't. I couldn't even imagine how.

Maybe it was who was walking me out. The guard on my right I knew pretty well. I knew his baton for sure, which I'd felt on my shoulder or cheek occasionally when I didn't look at him the right way, or when he just needed to show off. The guard on my left had never hurt me, or at least never struck me or wounded me: but he had been the one to look away and slink off on the afternoon when Hutchins and his friends, who I'd apparently slighted, crowded into the shower with me, slowly penning me in the corner. . . .

I wondered, as this guard walked beside me, if he had listened. He must've known what they were going to do to me. And I wondered if he'd known then, as I had not, that it wouldn't be the last time.

They showed me the papers. Recited the appropriate texts. Notified me of all the strictures that'd be placed upon me when I walked out those doors. They were telling me, in a way, that though I was free of this place, though I'd served my time and paid my debt to society, I was not truly free, for they still had some part of me, some part still locked up in here. I nodded, and nodded, and nodded.

The squeak of cheap shoes on linoleum. The flutter of fluorescent lights. Then doors fell open before me, one after the other, and there was a blast of chill and the gray, flat light of an overcast sky.

I walked out. Snowflakes danced down to my shoulders and hands. The guards pointed the way toward the bus I'd be taking to a halfway house. I thanked them, bag in my hand, and started walking.

I smelled exhaust and seawater and winter wind and snow. I smelled the tang of a Swisher Sweet and the rot from a Dumpster. I did not smell freedom. None of it smelled free to me. Maybe I'd forgotten what that smelled like.

WHEN YOU GET out of prison, it's like visiting a foreign country: you watch, amazed, as people go about their inscrutable tasks that feel loaded with threat, meaning, subtext. What would have been impossible for you to do a mere week ago-getting a soda, opening a window-is white noise to them. You realize that these people are not yours, nor are you part of them. You can walk through a city where you once belonged, but now you're an alien.

This was the world I now lived in. I slept at the halfway house ("ST. MART N'S MEN'S TRAN ITION L HOUS NG" read the sign), awoke every day at 6:30 A.M. (expecting each time to hear the blare of the morning alarm), and applied for jobs, with no response. That was no surprise: I wasn't in the front of the line for work by a long shot.

I wandered the city. It felt so strange to move freely. I was so used to tight rooms and winding corridors, to the musty aroma of underoxygenated air. . . . To have the sky spilling in on me from all directions was terrifying and thrilling.

One day, while waiting on one corner for the signal to walk, I looked up and saw a woman standing beside me. There wasn't anything especially notable about her. Her heavy winter coat was wrapped around medical scrubs, like she'd ducked out of her workplace to run an errand. She was neither beautiful nor ugly. She wasn't even plain. There was nothing about her appearance to make an ordinary person take note, but when I looked in her eyes, I saw it.

Nothing.

Well, not nothing. Her eyes were there, like actually in her skull, but there was nothing in them. There's a spark to eyes, an aliveness when there's an intelligence behind them, looking out, watching, learning. You forget it's there, and only realize what's missing when you see the eyes of the dead, or those in drugged stupor, or-a third option-those like her.

She looked at me and said, with a note of some irritation, "Can I help you with something?"

I was so surprised to see her move and speak, I had no idea what to say. It was as though a mannequin had suddenly come to life. She scoffed, a.s.suming, I guess, that I was a perv, and when the walk sign came she hurried away.

I DIDN'T KNOW what she was, but I suspected, and it was a pretty good suspicion. Better than a guess. I'd seen men with empty looks in prison, but that was the norm. The men inside were beaten down, defeated, dispirited. They had surrendered to a life without possibilities or choice, but there was more in those men than there had been in that woman.

I began following her without intending to. I was half a block behind her for five minutes before I even realized what I was doing, and let's be honest, what I was doing was dangerous-for so many reasons.

Maybe trouble was exactly what I needed. I had a ticking clock and a lot of grudges, and I was either going to spend my days watching the sand dribble out of the gla.s.s or I was going to settle some old scores. I knew which one I wanted to do, but the path of least resistance is sometimes hard to resist.

I felt the need growing inside me, all the time. I had to do something. I couldn't let it all go. I wanted justice, or at least something that felt like justice to me. I was going to rebalance the scales of my little corner of the universe, and I'd do it with a hammer.

That was the plan, anyhow, until I saw the woman. Because she was so like them, the ones who had put me in prison in the first place. She reminded me of decisions I'd made, questions I'd never gotten answered. More than anything, I had to know if she had . . . well, if she had done it.

If she had, then I had to know why, because if she'd had to make the same choice I did, she would have been asked the same question I'd been asked once. Only her answer had been different.

She turned the corner at a coffee shop. I rushed to catch up, but when I came around, she was waiting. She leaned against the building and looked at me, those dead eyes revealing nothing, her lips twisted in maybe amus.e.m.e.nt, maybe pity.

"Jesus," she breathed through pursed lips, sending a lock of blond fluttering against her forehead. "You again. What do you want?"

I realized I was panting, blowing out puffs of wintry breath like a chimney. "You did it, didn't you?" I said. "You got the offer and you took it."

She looked frightened or caught or guilty. And then she didn't. She steeled herself and met my gaze. "How do you know? Who told you?"

"I don't know how I know. I just . . ."

"Just what?"

"I just . . . looked at you. And I knew."

She watched me a second longer, maybe gauging if I was a threat. Finally she said, "I took it. Yeah, I took it. I'd have been an idiot not to."

There were so many things I wanted to ask her, to make her explain, but I knew I could not have that conversation. It would take hours. So I asked the most important question I thought she might be willing to answer: "Do you feel any . . . different?"

She thought about it. Shrugged. "I guess I feel different because my life doesn't suck anymore. My kid's kidneys aren't failing. I'm not about to lose my house. That feels different."

"That's it?"

"Yes. That's it."

I was silent. She couldn't have known it, but her simple answer had reached inside me, broken me up, crumbled me to dust. I felt faint, but I didn't fall. I stumbled backward, nodding to her, and managed a weak, "Thanks."

"You said no?" she asked.

I nodded.

"Why?" It was the incredulous voice of a parent speaking to a child who had done something utterly stupid and inexplicable.

"It seemed like the right call at the time." I turned away.

"Hey," she said. "How did you know? What gave it away?"

I almost said it was her eyes, but then I stopped myself. Obviously she did not know, and I didn't think it was right to tell her. Even though this woman had done something unspeakable, it wasn't my place to judge her. She was already, in a very real sense, d.a.m.ned. There was no need to make her feel like c.r.a.p about her appearance.

THERE ARE A lot of ways to go to prison. Most of them are stupid. Criminals, after all, do criminal acts because they can't make a straight living, either because circ.u.mstances prevent it, or because they can't figure out how to get their s.h.i.t together.

I was a little of both. Me and my friends Marco and Teddy had been busboys at this restaurant for what felt like years. In truth, it'd only been a handful of months, but when you're young, time is different: the days move slowly when you're miserable, and in that steamy restaurant, elbow deep in gray water sc.u.mmed over with old cheese, they moved even slower.

So when Marco heard that we could make more money as movers, Teddy and I jumped at the opportunity. He didn't mention that we'd be moving gambling machines. And he didn't mention until after we'd already worked a few jobs that what we were doing was highly illegal. By then we'd been paid, many times over, and it's hard to say no or think straight when you've got a wad of money burning a hole in your pocket. So we kept going back to the well.

At the time, it seemed like things could never go wrong. That's the problem with being young: it seemed like it would be beer and dancing and money and p.u.s.s.y forever. But when I look back on it now, all that was over in an instant.

I remember everything about how it ended. When you're in prison, that's all you ever think about. So much more than getting out.

I remember the call in the night. Marco's girlfriend, telling me Marco was hurt. Then I remember rushing into his apartment, the tile of his bathroom a raw, brilliant red, lakes of blood stymied in their crawl across his floor, and the gray-white hand twisted in the shower curtain.

When I pulled the curtain aside, it was not Marco: it was an old man, white, midfifties. He was dressed like a security guard, and his throat had been slashed so wide I could see inches into his neck.

Then I heard the sirens. I remembered how Marco and Teddy had been so secretive the last few days, always pulled aside to talk to the bosses, presumably arranging a big score.

What I remember most, out of all of it, was the way their eyes had looked the night before I was arrested. Empty. Dead. Something had been in those eyes once, but it was gone. They had smiled at me, and it had tasted false and wrong, like someone had drawn a smile on a mannequin.

When the cops brought me in, booked me, and questioned me, I learned piece by piece that a huge amount of electrical equipment had been stolen at the docks. The guard had gone missing along with it: to be found, of course, in Marco's bathtub, beaten about the face and bathing in several gallons of his own blood.

They never found the thieves, but they'd found me, and they were intent on keeping me. Among all the riffraff in Marco's apartment, they'd found a Glock with my prints on the barrel hood, a Glock whose handle just happened to have traces of the guard's blood on its grip. The bruising on the guard's face matched the pattern of the grip. And while you can explain away some fingerprints on a handle, a fingerprint on the inner workings of a gun is a tall order.

I told them I didn't know anything-even how my fingerprints got on the gun. That went down about as well as you'd think. They asked me who else was involved. They told me it would go easier if I gave up the guys who had left me flapping in the breeze. They used words like deal and probation and first-time offender, but even a f.u.c.kup like me knew what that meant. They wanted me to flip.

In some distant part of my mind, I'd always known things could go south. I hadn't believed it would, but I'd known it might, and I understood there was a way you accepted these things. You took your lumps. You did your time. You didn't sell out your friends. A man who turns on his friends is vermin-that's why they call it ratting. And he deserves to be dealt with like vermin. I wasn't going to go that route.

I stayed silent, and they seemed to accept that pretty easily. They didn't beat me. They didn't press me too hard on accomplices. They didn't need to. They had a crime, and they had a suspect. Somewhere some suit who worked in the D.A.'s office was saying they had enough to convict. Why sweat the small stuff?

So that was that. They were done with me.

I spent my first night in jail that night. The first night of what would be fifteen years.

I DIDN'T SPEND it alone.

I'm still not sure when he arrived. He was just there, like he'd always been there, slouched in the cell across from me.

"You look," he said, "like someone in a world of hurt."

I looked up at him. He was a thoroughly unremarkable man: skinny but not too skinny, with salt-and-pepper hair but not that old, his eyes a plain, dull shade of brown. His clothes were nice but nothing particularly special: he could belong anywhere and nowhere.

"What?" I said.

"I said, you look like someone in a world of hurt."

I looked away, said nothing. I was terrified. I was angry. And I was aware that there was a very good chance I'd be spending a lot of time in a place like this.

"I've seen a lot of people in your state," he said. "Tons. G.o.d, I can't even count 'em. I've seen so many folks at the end of their ropes, I guess there must be rope ends all over the f.u.c.king place. I really do."

"Shut the f.u.c.k up," I moaned.

But he didn't. He sat up and leaned against the wall at the far end of the cell, all nonthreatening-like. "Now, the thing is, I don't usually see them in such a sorry state for long. You know why?"

"I sure as s.h.i.t hope you're not going to tell me they find Jesus."

He was quiet. Then he burst out laughing. He laughed long and loud, a rough, throaty laugh that sounded like it hurt. "Oh, man! That's good. That's some good stuff, it really is. s.h.i.t, no! That Jesus stuff, it only works on folks who are buried deep in."