Thalo Blue (37 page)

He heard the sound of rushing water from behind a second closed door off to the side of where he stood. He eased the main one behind him closed. It clicked shut.

When he heard the sound of running water die out he took a step towards the bathroom door with his good leg. With his left hand he withdrew from their hiding place in his sling one of two syringes he had lifted from the ambulance supply room earlier that day. He held it fervently with a steady tenure.

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When Sebastion had told these things to Malin, they came out, not
cold
, but distant—nearly as though he had been talking about someone else’s life. Someone else’s father. But now, standing under the hot stream from his hospital room shower, it was so close to him. There were tears blending with the water on his face and he had to pull the curtain open and step out immediately—an eerie sense of claustrophobia had gripped him. With the squeal of metal shower curtain rings against the metal rod above his head, water sprayed outwards onto tile, mirror, and floor. He reached back in and cranked the two faucet handles closed. The water ended. Moisture hung in the air.

He pulled on his robe which had been hanging on the back of the door and he swiped a sleeve of it across the steamy, spotted mirror above the sink to reveal a smear of his reflection. Then he reached for the door handle.

<> <> <>

Down the empty hall from Sebastion’s room, Malin had just turned right at the nurse’s station after the bell in the elevator had dinged and the doors had slipped open. It was late, and she was the only one roaming this floor, the only one riding the elevator. At the station, only one attendant was on duty; she sat with her back to the hallway. She was still holding that tan book against her chest, this time together with her stack of folders and other papers. As she took her first broad steps past the station, the combined corners of the book and the papers pushed against the white plastic visitor’s badge held at the collar of her blouse. It threatened to unclasp. She was still thinking about Oliver Redfield—that she had known how the man had died long before Sebastion had told her the details. And that she had steered his recollections, like a practicing psychologist might have guided a patient towards an inevitable breakthrough. Or worse, a giant and unavoidable setback. The autopsy report and the hospital records from the Outlook Bay center were among the papers she held, so she had known for days. The grief—she
had
felt the suppressed grief in Sebastion’s voice—was a washed away kind. Like the tide had rolled out on any feeling he had left for his father and the only thing to linger was wet sand and a few broken sea shells. He spoke about it like he might have described the wood-grain surface of his desktop at work, or the points of a particularly straightforward investment portfolio, or like Pinkertt, the police sergeant, who had described the events of Farkukh’s attack on Sebastion at his house that morning. The assault, he had called it. Cold and distant like that:
the assault
. Just the same, Sebastion had described his father’s last night like he hadn’t been there. It seemed, oddly, to fit. And she couldn’t explain to herself exactly why.

She felt closer than she had that whole week to trusting her instincts—believing what she thought she knew from the start. What she thought she had known before. Thinking about how far she had come with Sebastion, she supposed, she readjusted the clasp on the visitor’s badge, and decided that she should tell some truth of her own.

Looking up from the clasp, down to the end of the hall where every second fluorescent fixture had now been shut off, she caught glimpse of what looked like a dark shoe heel passing from the hall into Sebastion’s room.

<> <> <>

On the other side of the heavy bathroom door, a hand—that of Jewels Fairweather’s—rested on the cold metal handle.

Inside, Sebastion’s hand came down on it too. But his bare foot had come down onto a wet spot on the tile floor, causing him to slip forward. It was an awkward, stiff movement and his hand tightened on the door latch, locking it in place with his reflex force. He fell downward, his legs slipping out from underneath him, but his other arm shot out to the wall and it, combined with the tensile force of the other on the handle kept him from falling completely. The stretch of his body, particularly the shoulder and pectoral that had been torn by the bullet, seared with a blast of pain bolting out to his fingertips and down to his stomach. He cried out.

<> <> <>

In the instant between Sebastion’s hand coming to rest on the door handle and the guttural cry that escaped him with the near-fall a moment later, Malin had opened the main door of the room and had stepped inside to see the back of Jewels Fairweather, though she didn’t know it was him from her angle.

Her words,
You can’t be in he—
, were interrupted by Sebastion’s bellow, and she took the remaining three steps towards Fairweather. He, clutching one arm in a sling with the other and still limping from the metal brace at his leg, did his best to step out of her way.

She opened the door and found Sebastion in his robe, hair wet and hanging in his eyes. He was on his knees and clutching his bad arm with his good hand. His other hand was held in front of his face, looking like the overturned root of a dead tree.

Ohmygod, Sebastion!

<> <> <>

Thief wanted to take them both that second. But that wouldn’t work. And he knew it too well. Was in fact, nearly sick by knowing it so easily and quickly. By the time he had been startled from behind, the situation had already broken down and it couldn’t be solved with brute force this time. He had two syringes of epi tucked in the sling but they simply weren’t enough to fix anything. In addition, one of his arms was useless, held in the cage of a cast, and the clamp on his leg didn’t allow for faultless mobility. Jewels’ strength was not entirely useless all of a sudden, but it was hindered. A far sight from a perfect scenario when the psychologist arrived. He wanted to stab her then and there—but he checked his temper. And his impatience.

So he stood hopeless and helpless, hunched at the shoulders, while the doctor helped Zeb from his knees to his feet; the boy’s face was red and he was fighting tears. They passed him, the doctor and the boy, and went to the farthest bed where he eased down on to it, still
ooh
ing and
ah
ing from an apparent spill.
Damn. If only I’d been here sooner. Before the doctor. Maybe she can be gotten rid of yet
—

But then, he found himself looking at the face of Katie Becks where the doctor had been only a breath before—she had a pasted stream of blood on the part in her blonde hair and down her forehead. Both her eyes were blackened and hollow, like sunken wells; her look was empty—

You love me Jewels
, she said to him, flatly.

—He shook his head a little, almost as if he could toss the vision of Katie loose and let it fall away. He tried to breathe deep—a soothing inhalation that might bring about a forced sense of peace—but the air caught stiffly in his lungs as he came against the will of the gauze wound tight around his ribs, invisible under his white uniform shirt. Malin looked up at him then—it really
was
the doctor, and
not
Katie—from her spot beside Zeb. He finally piped up, sounding disparate. “—Uh. Why don’t you go get a nurse? I’ll stay with him—“

The color in Sebastion’s face was fading a little from the intensity of a moment earlier. She grabbed an empty water glass from the nightstand and headed back towards the bathroom, presumably to fill it. “What are you even
doing
here? Visiting hours are over. You would know that.”

Stammering, like Jewels might have—or was the stammering even intentional?—he said, “
I-I-I’m the ambulance tech. I-I just wanted to c-come by and make sure everything was going to be okay. Mr. Redfield, I’m sorry. I came at a bad time...
”

Sebastion, blinked back a tear from the flare in his shoulder and chest, then looked up at the man at his doorway. “No, no, don’t worry about it. Just one of those things. I’m going to be fine. What’s your name?”

The Thief stepped further into the room, forward into the shallow circle of light from the fixture above, still with shoulders hunched. “Julius Fairweather.”

Malin returned from the bathroom with a full glass of jostling water and a handful of pain capsules. Sebastion said to Fairweather, “Well...uh. Julius. You saved my life, then, didn’t you? You and the police. You got down there on your knees with me and got me back...I—I honestly can’t think of anything I could possibly say to express my thanks. I heard about the driver you were working with, the one who died.
Terrible.
I’m
so
sorry.”

Thief, still doing his best, felt a lump in the back of his throat. His eyebrows scrunched and he swallowed. “Thanks, uh, Mr. Redfield. I, uh...” Malin looked at him in a curious way. He brought his thumb and forefinger up to his eyes and pressed them there, like he was having difficulty. He got emotional then, but it wasn’t for Marlon Smithee. Like Jewels so many times before, he was having a panic attack—brought on by the sight of Katie Becks in his head. The room felt like it was spinning and he thought he could feel a warm finger pressing into the center of his chin.

“It’s just—
It’s just
...”

—
You love me. Jewels. You. Love. Me. Jewels.

He brushed at the imaginary finger with his hand.

—
YoulovemejewelsYoulovemejew—

“
It’s just—
”

The Thief started to cry. He broke down and his eyes gushed. Malin’s eyes widened and she, paused for a second halfway between the EMT and Sebastion’s bed, moved towards the Thief.

Struggling with the sight of the dead girl in him, he fought to stay focused. Was this an opportunity? He moved his hand down from his face where he had been pressing fingers into his eyes and crinkling them against more watershed. He reached into the sling. His fingers touched the plastic casing of a syringe. Malin came towards him.

But she passed him. She opened the door, suddenly, letting a rush of hallway air into the room. It flew all the way open and banged gently on the rubber doorstop implanted in the tile. She stepped into the abandoned hallway.

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In Sebastion, there was nothing but confusion. And pain.

From the moment when he had slipped on the tile, his sight had been awash in gingery orange. First the white doors were a swirling, pulsing tangle of different shades of that color. Now, this Julius’s face was the same. It seemed to snarl and move about like a liquid, almost like pus. And in his body were sharp stabs of pain. They were lessening a little and he took a deeper breath finally.

He was startled by this man being there, but more startled, abashed too, now that this stranger was apparently about to break down at the mention of his dead partner. In his state of discomfiture, Sebastion found himself trying to ease the big man. “It’s okay, Julius. It’s—” And off went Malin, just like that. Was she going to throw her arms around him to comfort?
No.
She sailed right past and flung open the door to the room so suddenly that it put a jump into Sebastion.

“—
No,
” Jewels said back, when Malin was beyond him. “
You don’t understand, Zeb. You—
”

Then Malin did the unthinkable: she called down the hall to the nurse’s station for security.

<> <> <>

By the time the security guard had arrived and taken Jewels Fairweather, limping and still with dampness in his eyes, out into the hall, the Thief was rid of his anguish. The vision of Katie was gone, and he was approaching a full outburst of anger. He tried to keep it pressed down, fought to do so, but found it rising in his throat anyway—like a suppressed shriek with its own will, wanting to burst free.

Inside the room, presumably, Zeb would be swallowing those pills with a gulp of water, getting his wits back. The doctor would be beside him at the bed making sure he was okay. The Thief, though, he was outside with his back pressed against the wall. The guard was asking him questions like, “Do you know that visiting hours are over?” and looking at his identification from a wallet he had produced. Beyond him, over his shoulder and down the hall, two nurses and an orderly stood leaning over the counter of the station, watching and talking inaudibly to each other. One of them, the Thief thought, likely has her hand resting on a telephone.

The Thief wanted to slam his cast arm, all hard plaster and glue, upwards into the underside of the guard’s chin. He wanted to belt him there, winding him, wanted to push him aside as he stood doubling and wheezing, wanted to ram his way back into the room where Zeb and the doctor were. He wanted to forget that he only had two syringes. He wanted to throw them down and leave them out of this. He just wanted to—

Beyond the guard, emerging in a wheelchair that Malin had unfolded from its spot behind the room’s door, was Zeb. His face was now a respectable color again. Behind him, pushing the chair, was Holmsund.

The guard heard the squeak of one little wobbling wheel on the chair behind him and glanced back towards the two of them. With the guard’s back to him Thief wanted to seize his opportunity and, clouded by bitterness and a missed break, his arm tensed from the shoulder all the way down to a fist. He wondered, briefly, if the nurses leaning out into his business at the end of the hall behind him would notice. And how long it would take them to get a whole team up here.

Holmsund and Zeb both looked towards Thief and the guard, then turned the other way, towards a joint in the hallway where they disappeared a moment later.

The guard looked back at Thief. His face was tired, like he had been up for a while, like this whole thing, this task of following his procedures, might be giving him a mild headache. Thief wanted to break the bones in that face for such indifference, such ignorance of how important this was—it wouldn’t be the first time he had succumbed to irrational impulse. But his tensile grip on the world abated. He let himself breathe what little he could with his constricted midriff.