Oh, please, God, he begged. Please —
Close to the mouth of one of them, open and shut, a tiny adult head on the pink-worm body. Closer. Right next to it.
And it struck.
Yes, like a bass taking the lure, like a snapping trout jumping in the air, it rolled and closed its jaws on two of Kiff’s fingers. It bit down with enough force that Kiff knew — even as his eyes filled with red flashes that signaled horrible pain — that it could easily bite his fingers off.
But it didn’t do that.
Kiff fell backward, sliding on the rat offal, the rain of shit that splattered down upon him.
The others sensed him. He saw them rolling and twisting, making their way to him. He shook his hand.
But the human snake stayed locked on his fingers. And now, besides the incessant screeching of the rats and the popping of the beer, he heard something else. A high-pitched keening.
It was coming from his own mouth.
Something plopped into his open mouth.
“This is bad,” the man said, walking close. Kiff saw just his black polished shoes. The crisp crease of his gray slacks. “But not as
bad
as what will happen to the others, Kiffer. And certainly not as bad as what will happen to Will and his family. Not even close .
.
.”
The man laughed.
The heads nibbled him, on his side, at his legs, through his shoes to his ankle, his toes —
This little piggy .
.
.
The pain didn’t get any worse.
There is a threshold. I reached it. It can’t get any worse. No matter what happens.
The man turned and walked away.
Kiff felt one of the sausage-sized things sliding up his thin chest, squirming, nearly at his throat, his dry tongue, his rheumy eyeballs.
Nearly there. Nearly over.
He heard a door slam. A laugh.
And then — this last bit of awareness.
I know who it is.
I know who it is.
And then the rats fell …
All of them. Onto the floor. Onto him.
* * *
29
The guard was a pleasant, rotund man who smiled too damn much considering how much time he spent listening to the howling prisoners in the county holding pen. And the guard always had a pleasant word for Will whenever he came down to confer with one of his “clients.”
The guard always said, “Nice day, Counselor.” And, “How’s the wife and the kids?” And always the caveat, “Don’t work too hard.”
Will was leaving a half-hour conference with a man staring down the muzzle of his third DWI conviction. It was a hopeless case, and the now-sobered man would probably lose his license for a year, maybe more. And — as the guy just finished explaining, blubbering through his remorseful gasps and tears — there’s no way he could get to his construction jobs without a car.
You’ll have to beg rides, Will told him.
Not adding .
.
.
Tough shit. How long do you think we can let alcoholics pilot their cars like kamikaze pilots, ready to wipe out some poor sap with three kids who doesn’t know he’s sharing the road with a drunk?
Will waited for the electronic cell entrance to beep open, and then he hurried along the corridor. He had a court appearance scheduled in twenty minutes. There was just enough time for a hot dog in the new cafeteria upstairs.
He passed another electronic barrier, another guard, this one with an appropriately grim demeanor. And then past the last guard at a desk, and up the stairs to the courthouse and the cafeteria.
And his hot dog.
But the guard at the desk stopped him.
“Mr. Dunnigan. Your wife called. Left a message. She’d like you to call back.”
Will nodded. “Thanks.”
Will continued up the stairs. He turned left, at the top, heading toward the public toilets — always dicey places considering the clientele — and a bank of pay phones. He called home using his FON card.
After three rings, he assumed Becca was out. Shopping, doing something at Beth’s school. He went to hang up the phone when he heard the click. A breathless “Hello?”
“Hi, babe. Got your message.”
She was breathing hard.
“Had to run in,” she said. Another breath.
Will heard clicking steps down the hall, near the stairs. He heard the sound and he turned around.
Funny .
.
.
It was a young lawyer, a cute blonde right out of
LA Law
. Working with the DA’s office for now.
But not for long, Will knew. The private concerns will snap her up
prontissimo
. She didn’t look at Will. Nobody saw public defenders in this place.
We’re invisible.
“What’s up?” he said to Becca.
“That guy called this morning .
.
. around nine.”
“Yeah? Who?”
“Ted Whalen. He sounded upset, Will. Practically stuttering on the phone.”
“Groan. It probably has to do with yesterday. God, I’m sorry I ever —”
“Wait, Will. He told me to tell you something.” The cute lawyer disappeared around the corner. “He said .
.
. that Jim Kiff is dead.”
The phone seemed to slip in Will’s hands. Oops .
.
.
For a second he thought he again heard the clicking of high heels, lonely and forlorn, echoing in the hallway. But all he heard was the clank of a jail cell rumbling from below.
He took a breath. “What?”
“He said to tell you that Jim Kiff died. That he’s dead. He wants you to call him.”
Will didn’t say anything.
“Will? Will, honey? What’s wrong? Are you okay?”
Will cleared his throat. “Sure. I’m fine. Just a bit. shocked. I saw him just yesterday. Did Whalen say how it — ?”
“No. He just said you should call him.”
Call him. Sure.
I didn’t really want a hot dog anyway, he thought.
He asked his wife to find Whalen’s number, there on a Post-it above his desk. She gave it to him and he copied the number down on the corner of a yellow pad.
“Thanks, honey,” he said to his wife.
She gave him a kiss on the phone, which he forced himself to return. It always seemed like a dumb thing to do.
Then he hung up and called Ted Whalen in sunny California.
Whalen was home. He picked up the phone after just one ring.
“What happened?” Will asked.
Whalen sounded a bit incoherent, a bit sloshed, even though it was pretty damn early in the California morning.
But Whalen had questions to ask first.
“D-did you see him? Did you go see Kiff?”
“Yes, Ted. I went yesterday. He was a wreck. A basket case. Lost to his own paranoid world of voodoo.”
Whalen cleared his throat, a tic, Will guessed. Something he recognized from countless cell-side interviews.
I — er — didn’t do it, Counselor. No way .
.
.
“But, shit, did he talk about what happened?”
“A bit. Look, Ted, it was all this crazy talk. Stuff about human sacrifices and how Narrio
paid
the price and, look, I just wanted to get the hell out of there.”
“Oh, Christ .
.
.”
“What happened?” Will said. “What happened to Kiff?”
“They found my number,” Whalen said flatly. “The police. The guy Kiff worked for. He must have given it to him. I don’t know. They had my number so they called.”
Will looked at his watch.
He was due in court in five. No, make that four minutes.
“Yeah, go on, Ted. I’m running out of —”
“They called me, Jesus. I don’t know why they’d call me. Just because the crazy fuck didn’t have —”
He was babbling.
“Whalen! Could you cut to the chase! I don’t have all day.”
Will hated chewing off Whalen’s head, but the meter was running.
“Jesus, Will, they found Kiff lying facedown on the floor, in the bar .
.
.”
Not surprising, Will thought. Nothing too spectacular about that. The guy was hanging by threads.
“Facedown, and his whole body — shit. It was all chewed up.”
Will’s breath caught in his throat.
“What?”
Two minutes.
“Chewed the fuck up. They found gray fur —
rat
fur — all over the place, and beer cans, and blood, and Christ, Will —”
One minute, fifty. Forty-nine.
I gotta go, he thought.
I got to —
“Look, Ted. I’ll call you tonight. Will you be there?”
“I’m not going anywhere, Will. I’m not going —”
“Good. We’ll talk. I spoke with Kiff. He gave me some stuff. I don’t know .
.
. But I’ll call you. Tell you all about it. Okay?”
Silence. A nervous, prolonged silence, and Will felt the tremendous distance that separated Whalen and himself. And Will thought, Kiff was alone. Whalen’s alone. And who knows about Mr. Tim Hanna? Who knows what his rarefied life is like?
I’m the only one with a family, wife, kids .
.
.
He felt cold.
And Whalen said, whispering throatily, “Okay.”
“Speak to you,” Will said.
And then Will ran — late — to Courtroom C.
Whalen looked at the phone. He looked at it wishing that he could pick it up and call someone else.
But there was no one else to call.
I should have gone to work today, he thought. I shouldn’t have let myself get so rattled. Started drinking. It’s just that .
.
. just that —
What? Just because that somehow there’s a connection between me and Kiff? That, yeah, because Kiff is crazy, because
he
gets himself killed, I have to let it ruin my day, my life?
He stood up.
His beige pants were stained from the poached eggs he ate this morning. That, and the drops of scotch that dribbled onto his pants.
Whalen walked over to his vertical blinds and pulled one strip aside to look out.
It was a brilliant, sunny morning. Another perfect fucking day, with the sun, obnoxious and oppressive, insisting on working its way into his house, through sliver-thin cracks in the folds of the blinds, under the doorjamb, tiptoeing in from other rooms not quite so perfectly sealed.
Why the
hell
am I so rattled? he thought.
What is wrong with me?
He saw an ant.
It was on his glossy black coffee table, almost camouflaged by the black wood. The ant, a big fat carpenter ant, hesitated. Whalen watched the ant do something to its antennae. Cleaning them. Or something. Then it continued moving across the table, up the side of a bowl, leading to the crumbs of some hard-as-wood Pennsylvania Dutch pretzels.
It kept going.
“Bastard,” Whalen said. He slammed at the bowl with his hand, not caring that he was using his fingers to smash the insect.
He smacked at it.
He pulled back.
The ant was stuck to his fingers. Half of its body was crushed, but the other half — including the head — was still alive, still writhing.
“Goddamn —” he said, and he brought his hand
thwap!
flat against the table. Definitely flattening the ant this time.
He tried to return to his thoughts.
What am I worried about? he asked himself.
What?
But a tiny, nagging voice at the back of his head suggested that he knew what he was worried about.
Oh, yeah.
He knew that Kiff wanted to tell the truth about that night. The fucking truth.
The truth that even Will didn’t know. But
I
do.
And I didn’t say anything.
And now what was going to happen? Kiff was going to tell the world. There might have been new hearings.