“The worst is over, he’s fine. The man you all refer to as D-Lux… was dead long before he got here.”
He didn’t need her to tell him that; he’d seen the man’s head explode. But he had mixed feelings about Chester.
She perched her considerable hips on the side of his bed and went on to tell him all the juicy details about his own condition, making sure to use laymen’s terms. He’d been shot in the right arm, but it was the least of his wounds—the bullet had torn through the outer layer of muscle. He’d have a small scar, but after a few weeks normal mobility would return, she said. He’d lost a lot of blood from the two knife wounds—one in his left shoulder, another in the back, low and between the shoulder blades—and muscle had been seriously damaged on both of them. They could affect his mobility pretty seriously, and could potentially be painful for years to come.
“The thing that’s most distressing, though,” she’d said, looking very serious, “is the gash across your face.” He reached up again to touch the area she was talking about, but again she pushed his hand down. “I’m… I’m pretty certain I was able to save the vision in your left eye, but, well. I’m not an eye surgeon, am I?”
“My vision?”
“The blade was apparently slashing in a
downward
motion,” – she illustrated, slowly karate-chopping the air in front of her as if he wasn’t sure what she meant—“and it got you from right above your left brow and down to your cheekbone. I’m afraid you’re going to have a very noticeable scar, Crowe.”
So that was what was all over his face, bandages. The whole thing started coming back to him then, the squad of killers, the eighteen-wheeler, the slaughter. And the Ghost Cat.
He said, “Food.”
Dr. Maggie nodded. “Of course. I’ll have the man fix you up something. Marvis will bring it up for you. I’m off to call Mr. Vitower, I’m sure he’ll want to see you.”
Crowe mumbled, “Bet he’s worried sick about me.”
She cocked one formidable eyebrow behind her wire frames. “Most men take at least an hour after waking from a near-death experience to regain their bad attitudes.”
He didn’t answer her, and she sighed resignedly and left the room, Marvis trailing her.
Later, Marvis brought up a bologna sandwich and a bowl of cream of mushroom soup. Crowe ate left-handed since his right arm ached too much for use, finished it in no time flat, and drained three glasses of water, which he knew he would regret later when Dr. Maggie brought the bedpan up. Marvis, a stout little man in his early ‘30’s, with a receding hairline and skin the color of used-up coal, showed him that morning’s newspaper.
BOLD AMBUSH, ESCAPE OF KILLER PETER MURKE, the headline read. The lead story said that Peter Murke was at large, and that the transport vehicle had been ambushed in route, smashed by an eighteen-wheeler, which led the very clever authorities to wisely conclude that Murke had been aided in his escape. Four Sheriff’s Deputies were dead, one had been rushed to Baptist East, where he was currently listed in critical condition.
The story didn’t say anything about signs of another vehicle, or the possibility of a third party. But then, it probably wouldn’t have.
Crowe started nodding off after that, but when Vitower showed up Marvis shook him awake to talk to him. Vitower looked drawn and tense, anger simmering behind his cool façade. Crowe had to run over the whole crazy story three times before Vitower was satisfied, although
satisfied
isn’t quite the right word.
He sat on the edge of Crowe’s bed, where Dr. Maggie had sat earlier, and nodded grimly and gritted his teeth and black clouds played in his eyes. He smelled like gin. He said, “This… this is completely fucked. All over the motherfucking news, and nothing to show for it. I need you to still be in this, Crowe.”
Crowe shrugged. “As Dr. Maggie pointed out, it’s not like I have somewhere better to be.”
Vitower said, “What kind of fucked-up plan were you running? Ambush the fucking truck? Sonofafuckingbitch.”
He stood up and paced around the room for a long minute, furious. Crowe watched him until he calmed down and came back and sat at the edge of the bed again.
Vitower said, “But on the other hand, what plan could have foreseen a goddamn eighteen-wheeler smashing into the van out of nowhere? Or a bunch of weirdos slaughtering everyone?”
“I’ll admit, I didn’t see it coming.”
That drew a slim, reluctant smile. He said, “Rest up while you can. You promised me something and you’re gonna deliver, motherfucker. As soon as Dr. Maggie says you’re okay to get up and around, we start over.”
Crowe went to sleep after that. It was the next morning when Dr. Maggie started pulling up her dubious medical credentials and telling him that, in her “professional opinion”, he had to stay in bed for three more days.
He kicked the blankets off and sat up, feeling woozy. His blood by then was about half-composed of pain meds, but he managed to make it to his feet and took a moment to make sure he wasn’t about to drop. Dr. Maggie folded her arms and glared. She shook her head, turned on her heel and walked out of the room.
He braced himself on the side of the bed, waiting for his head to catch up with the rest of him. They’d stripped off his clothes, so he was shivering in nothing but boxer briefs, and his body looked unhealthily thin and pale.
After a few minutes, he felt okay enough to pull on the khakis and tee-shirt Marvis had left out for him. It wasn’t easy, pulling the tee-shirt on—his right shoulder ached fiercely, and the wound in his back felt as if it would bust open whenever he moved his arms higher than mid-level. The neck of the tee pulled against the bandages on his face when he slipped it over his head, and he tried not to think about that particular wound. A scar on his face, well, that would be pretty goddamn inconvenient. In this line of work, any distinguishing marks, as they say, were a hindrance. But losing the vision in his left eye would be considerably
more
than inconvenient.
He left the room, walking fairly straight, out into the hall. The walls were bare and the pine wood floor was cold on his bare feet. Chester was bedded up in the room almost directly across.
Crowe opened the door and went in. There was more light than in his room. Two windows instead of the one, facing east and the mid-morning sun streaming in. Chester was sleeping in a metal frame bed, looking very small, with the blankets pulled up to his sharp chin and a heavy growth of beard on his face.
Dallas half-dozed in a fat easy chair by the windows. She looked up when Crowe came in but didn’t say anything.
She looked tired. Her hair was pulled back and half-covered by a kerchief. A threadbare blanket was thrown over her legs. Crowe said, “The distressed wife, keeping vigil over her ailing husband.”
She said, “Marvis didn’t call me until Chester first woke up, early this morning. So I haven’t been here long enough to qualify as being on a vigil.”
He almost asked her who was looking after her kid, but didn’t. Instead, he said “Has he been awake since you’ve been here?”
“Yes. He didn’t say much, though. Just ‘oh, hello’ when he saw me. He nodded when I told him Tommy was at home with the sitter. And he kinda chuckled when I told him you were in the other room.”
“It’s good that we can laugh about it now.”
She stood up and stretched cat-like, the slim muscles in her arms and legs taut and her smooth white stomach showing between jeans and sweater. She had a new tattoo there, just above her belly button, in red and black, but it was too small to be able to tell what it was—some sort of cross or something. He looked away from her.
She said, “Lucky I was able to get the day off from work.”
“Work?” Crowe said. “What, you have a job now?”
“Yeah. Some people do work for a living, you know.”
“Don’t give me that. You don’t have to work.”
“Has it ever occurred to you that maybe some people want to work?”
“No, not really.”
She huffed. “Funny. Chester said the same thing. I got a job at the Mall of Memphis about four months ago. Working the evening shift at the shoe store.”
Crowe said, “Well, you always were obsessed with shoes.”
Chester snored peacefully. Crowe gently lowered his blankets a bit and saw the bandages around his torso. Dallas joined him next to the bed, standing entirely too close, and said, “What exactly happened out there?”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out.”
She laughed softly. “Another daring adventure with Crowe and Paine comes to its inevitable conclusion. You two will be hard-pressed to top this one.”
“I suppose so.”
Her smell, again, that flowery scent that always went right to his head. He moved away and went to the windows. Another bleak winter morning out there, an expanse of dead brown grass trailing away from the house, into some sparse woods beyond an unpainted wood fence. In the distance, he could see a road, winding away toward what he could only imagine was civilization. A farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. The Dr. Maggie Memorial Hospital for the Criminally Inclined.
“Well?” she said after a minute. “Are you going to tell me what happened or what? All I could get out of Marvis was that you two were on a job and everything went south.”
“That about sums it up,” he said, staring out the window.
He didn’t have to look at her to see the anger. “Oh, well thank you for clearing it all up, Crowe. I swear you drive me insane sometimes.” She sighed and he heard her moving behind him, away from Chester’s bed. “You haven’t changed a bit.”
And then Chester said, “Yeah. He’s still a jag-ass.”
Crowe turned around and Chester was grinning at him weakly from his bed. Dallas went to him, touched his forehead with a gentle hand. “Chester,” she said. “How are you feeling?”
“Right as rain,” he said. His voice was scratchy and dry. “Fucking starving, though.”
“I’ll go get Marvis, have him bring some food.”
“Yeah.”
She kissed him lightly on the temple, and, with a wary glance at Crowe, left the room.
Chester looked around with bleary eyes. He started to sit up, but winced in pain. Settling back down, he croaked, “You got a smoke? Ah, never mind, I keep forgetting you don’t smoke.”
“Bad for your health,” Crowe said. “Haven’t you heard?”
“I think I remember hearing something about that. Thought it was an old wife’s tale. Shit, I could use one. What the hell day is this?”
Crowe told him they’d been at the farmhouse for two days now, and what Dr. Maggie had said about his condition. Chester peeked under the blankets at the bandages around his torso, frowning philosophically. “Huh,” he said. “Y’know, I
thought
I felt something like excruciating pain. Now I know.” Then, “Looks like you didn’t come out so well, either.”
“You remember much about what happened?”
He sighed and adjusted his shoulders against the pillows. “Yeah, I think so. Big-ass truck outta nowhere. A bunch of weird cats with guns and what-not. I remember… I remember a guy wearing some metal shit over his face. And... there was some Goth kid, I think. They… they got D-Lux, didn’t they?”
Crowe nodded.
“What the fuck?” Chester said, echoing his sentiments from that day. “What… who the hell were those fellas?”
“Don’t know. But Vitower was here yesterday, and he wants me to find out. They sprung Murke.”
“No shit.”
“I’m heading back to Memphis tonight, and tomorrow morning I start asking around.”
Chester frowned. “Asking around where? The Crazy-Ass Freako Killer Society?” He laughed at his own joke, but the exertion of it made him groan and wince. He slid down farther under the blankets. “Oh,” he said. “Ah, shit. I ain’t gonna lie to you, this hurts like a bitch.”
Crowe studied him for a moment, thinking about how easy it would be to kill him, right here and now. Just grab one of his pillows, push it over his face, and hold it there for a few minutes. He was far too weak to be able to do anything about it.
“Earth to Crowe,” Chester said. “You’re looking at me kinda funny.”
Crowe gazed back out the window. “Million miles away,” he said.
“Yeah? Well, I hope the mattresses are softer wherever you are.”
They were dangerously close to small talk, so Crowe said, “I’ll see you around, Chester,” and headed for the door.
Chester said, “Yeah, okay, I’ll see ya,” and then, “Hey, Crowe.”
Crowe stopped and looked at him.
He said, “Listen, there’s something I been meaning to say to you.”
“Yeah?”
He shifted painfully under his blankets. “Well, see. It’s like this. It’s about when you got sent up.”
“What about it?”
“I just wanted to tell you, you know. I mean, I know what you must’ve thought, what with the Old Man not doing anything to help.”
Crowe said, “That was a long time ago.”
“Yeah, but I think you should know. There wasn’t anything I could do, you know what I mean? He was… pissed, right? Pissed that you killed Leon. And the cops had Leon just about cold on a lot of stuff that the Old Man didn’t wanna be involved in.”
Crowe didn’t say anything, just watched him and tried to keep the coldness out of his face.
Chester said, “I reckon you felt… I don’t know. Betrayed? But the Old Man had to think about the organization, you know?”
Every word he said was another layer of ice in the pit of Crowe’s stomach. Crowe had ideas back then, ideas about loyalty. Ideas about professionalism that almost bordered on sacred. He knew better now, but that didn’t stop Chester’s little speech from filling him with a sort of ebbing fury.
He took it in hand and said, “Some reason you’re telling me all this?”
“Well. I’m thinking about giving it all up. I’m thinking about telling Vitower I’m done. I got some money saved up, you know, and I was thinking about going into business for myself. I mean, a legit business.”
“Like what?”
He said, “Heating and cooling. I took a class, you know, and I can fix shit. I’m pretty good at it.”
“Heating and cooling,” Crowe said.
“Yeah. I mean, just a normal kind of life. I got a kid now. I gotta think about the future. And this whole mess, well… we kinda cut it a little close, don’t you think?”