The Taking Part 34

"Because, Johnny, I didn't stab her eight times, and I didn't stab her ten. Precisely nine."

Billy moved so close to the gla.s.s part.i.tion that his nose almost touched it. His eyes were pools of threat and hatred, but they seemed at the same time to be desolate wells in the lonely depths of which something had drowned.

The detective and the boy regarded each other for a long time before John said, "Didn't you ever love them?"

"How could I love them when I hardly knew them?"

"But you've known them all your life."

"I know you better than I knew them."

A dull but persistent disquiet had compelled John to come to the state hospital. This encounter had sharpened it.

He rose from the arm of the chair.

"You're not going already?" Billy asked.

"Do you have something more to tell me?"

The boy chewed his lower lip.

John waited until waiting seemed pointless, and then he started toward the door.

"Wait. Please," the boy said, his quivering voice different from what it had been before. the boy said, his quivering voice different from what it had been before.

Turning, John saw a face transformed by anguish and eyes bright with desperation.

"Help me," the boy said. "Only you can."

Returning to the gla.s.s part.i.tion, John said, "Even if I wanted to, I couldn't do anything for you now. No one can."

"But you know. You know know."

"What do you think I know?"

For a moment more, Billy Lucas appeared to be a frightened child, unsettled and uncertain. But then triumph glittered in his eyes.

His right hand slid down his flat abdomen and under the elastic waist of his gray cotton pants. He jerked down the pants with his left hand, and with his right directed his urine at the lower grille in the gla.s.s panel.

As the stinking stream spattered through the steel grid, John danced backward, out of range. Never had urine smelled so rank or looked so dark, as yellow-brown as the juice of spoiled fruit.

Aware that his target had safely retreated, Billy Lucas aimed higher, hosing the gla.s.s left to right, right to left. Seen through the foul and rippling flux, the boy's facial features melted, and he seemed about to dematerialize, as if he had been only an apparition.

John Calvino pressed the b.u.t.ton on the intercom panel beside the door and said to Coleman Hanes, "I'm finished here."

To escape the sulfurous odor of the urine, he didn't wait for the orderly but instead stepped into the hallway.

Behind John, the boy called out, "You should have brought me something. You should have made an offering."

The detective closed the door and looked down at his shoes in the fluorescent glare of the corridor. Not one drop of foulness marred their shine.

As the door to the guard's vestibule opened, John walked toward it, toward Coleman Hanes, whose size and presence gave him the almost mythological aura of one who battled giants and dragons.

3.

On the second floor, one down from Billy Lucas, the hospital staff lounge featured an array of vending machines, a bulletin board, blue molded-plastic chairs, and Formica tables the color of flesh.

John Calvino and Coleman Hanes sat at one of the tables and drank coffee from paper cups. In the detective's coffee floated a blind white eye, a reflection of a can light overhead.

"The stench and the darkness of the urine are related to his regimen of medications," Hanes explained. "But he's never done anything like that before."

"Maybe you better hope it's not his new preferred form of self-expression."

"We don't take chances with bodily fluids since HIV. If he does that again, we'll restrain and catheterize him for a few days and let him decide whether he'd rather have a little freedom of movement."

"Won't that bring lawyers down on you?"

"Sure. But once he's p.i.s.sed on them them, they won't see it as a civil right anymore."

John glimpsed something on the orderly's right palm that he had not noticed previously: a red, blue, and black tattoo, the eagle-globe-and-anchor emblem of the United States Marine Corps.

"You serve over there?"

"Two tours."

"Hard duty."

Hanes shrugged. "That whole country's a mental hospital, just a lot bigger than this place."

"In your view, does Billy Lucas belong in a mental hospital?"

The orderly's smile was as thin as a filleting knife. "You think he should be in an orphanage?"

"I'm just trying to understand him. He's too young for adult prison, too dangerous for any youth correctional facility. So maybe he's here because there was nowhere else to put him. Do you think he's insane...?"

Hanes finished his coffee. He crushed the paper cup in his fist. "If he's not insane, what is he?"

"That's what I'm asking."

"I thought you had the answer. I thought I heard an implied or or at the end of the question." at the end of the question."

"Nothing implied," John a.s.sured him.

"If he's not insane, his actions are. If he's something other than insane, it's a distinction without a difference." He tossed the crumpled cup at a waste-basket, and scored. "I thought the case was closed. What did they send you here for?"

John didn't intend to reveal that he had never been a.s.signed to the case. "Was the boy given my name before he met me?"

Hanes shook his head slowly, and John thought of a tank turret coming to bear on a target. "No. I told him he had a visitor he was required to see. I once had a sister, John. She was raped, murdered. I don't give Billy's kind any more than I have to."

"Your sister-how long ago?"

"Twenty-two years. But it's like yesterday."

"It always is," John said.

The orderly fished his wallet from a hip pocket and flipped directly to the cellophane sleeve in which he kept a photo of his lost sister. "Angela Denise."

"She was lovely. How old is she there?"

"Seventeen. Same age as when she was killed."

"Did they convict someone?"

"He's in one of the new prisons. Private cell. Has his own TV. They can get their own TV these days. And conjugal visits. Who knows what else they get."

Hanes put away his wallet, but he would never be able to put away the memory of his sister. Now that John Calvino knew about the sister, he read Hanes's demeanor as less phlegmatic than melancholy.

"I told Billy I was Detective Calvino. I never mentioned my first name. But the kid called me Johnny. Made a point of it."

"Karen Eisler at the reception desk-she saw your ID. But she couldn't have told Lucas. There's no phone in his room."

"Is there any other explanation?"

"Maybe I lied to you."

"That's one possibility I won't waste time considering." John hesitated. Then: "Coleman, I'm not sure how to ask this."

Hanes waited, as still as sculpture. He never fidgeted. He never made a sweeping gesture when a raised eyebrow would do as well.

John said, "I know he was transferred here only four days ago. But is there anything you've noticed he does that's ... strange?"

"Besides trying to pee on you?"

"Not that it happens to me all the time, but that isn't what I mean by strange. I expect him to be aggressive one way or another. What I'm looking for is ... anything quirky."

Hanes considered, then said, "Sometimes he talks to himself."

"Most of us do, a little."

"Not in the third person."

John leaned forward in his chair. "Tell me."

"Well, I guess it's usually a question. He'll say, 'Isn't it a nice day, Billy?' Or 'This is so warm and cozy, Billy. Isn't it warm and cozy?' The thing he most often asks is if he's having fun."

"Fun? What does he say exactly?"

"'Isn't this fun, Billy? Are you having fun, Billy? Could this be any more fun, Billy?'"

John's coffee had gone cold. He pushed the cup aside. "Does he ever answer his own questions aloud?"

Coleman Hanes thought for a moment. "No, I don't think so."

"He doesn't take two sides of a conversation?"

"No. Mostly just asks himself questions. Rhetorical questions. They don't really need an answer. It doesn't sound all that strange, I guess, until you've heard him do it."

John found himself turning his wedding band around and around on his finger. Finally he said, "He told me that he likes books."

"He's allowed paperbacks. We have a little hospital library."

"What kind of thing does he read?"

"I haven't paid attention."

"True-crime stories? True murder?"

Hanes shook his head. "We don't have any of those. Not a good idea. Patients like Billy find books like that ... too exciting."

"Has he asked for true-crime books?"

"He's never asked me. Maybe someone else."

From a compartment in his ID wallet, John extracted a business card and slid it across the table. "Office number's on the front. I wrote my home and cell numbers on back. Call me if anything happens."

"Like what?"

"Anything unusual. Anything that makes you think of me. h.e.l.l, I don't know."

Tucking the card in his shirt pocket, Hanes said, "How long you been married?"

"It'll be fifteen years this December. Why?"

"The whole time we've been sitting here, you've been turning the ring on your finger, like rea.s.suring yourself it's there. Like you wouldn't know what to do without it."

"Not the whole time," John said, because he had only a moment earlier become aware of playing with the wedding band.

"Pretty much the whole time," the orderly insisted.

"Maybe you should be the detective."

As they rose to their feet, John felt as if he wore an iron yoke. Coleman had a burden, too. John flattered himself to think he carried his weight with a grace that matched that of the orderly.