The Four-Night Run (6 page)

SECOND NIGHT

11

S
QUIRREL

Scrbacek dreamed his clothes were being stripped off his body until suddenly he awoke to find his clothes being stripped off his body. He opened his eyes to see a score of hands clutching at him, shouted out from the pain in his arm, and fell hard back into unconsciousness.

He woke again from the pain twisting inside his arm and called out into the darkness. A woman with a broad face and a great halo of blonde hair appeared over him and smiled as she stroked his brow with her hand. He knew then, with all certainty, that she was an angel and he was dead. She disappeared for a moment, and he felt a stinger slip into his arm, and the angel came back and stroked his brow, and he grew light, and the pain eased, and he rose sweetly back into unconsciousness.

For a period of time, the length of which he couldn’t fathom, he slipped in and out of a dream state. His constant companions, whether asleep or awake, were the sound of intense muffled conversation from somewhere distant and the dank smell of deterioration.

A sharp pressure on his chest jolted him to consciousness, and he found himself lying naked on a mattress, covered from the waist down by a blanket, doused with light from a bare bulb inside a cone hanging overhead. A hunched little man with spectacles, big ears, and too many teeth, was twisting a piece of Scrbacek’s chest between his fingers.

“Three,” said the man, a stethoscope draped around his scrawny neck. He sucked air through pursed lips and leaned close to the piece of flesh between his fingers. “Interesting.” The little man raised his other hand. Light gleamed off the short curved blade of a scalpel.

Scrbacek tried to sit up, but a weight of dizziness pushed him down onto the mattress.

The hunched man pulled his hand away with a loud intake of air. “He’s awake.” He took a step back and squealed, “Someone come and hold him down. He’s awake.”

Scrbacek could feel the pain in his left arm but only at a far remove, as if he were somehow floating above the wreck that was his body. His left arm was bloodied, a long strip of gauze was wrapped tightly around his right hand, his chest was mottled with bruises. He tried again to sit up against the dizziness, pushing with his right arm despite the pain in his palm, and this time he succeeded in lifting his upper body. Slowly he looked around.

He was on a bed in the middle of a small, seedy room with stained yellow wallpaper. Holes had been punched through the walls. A single wooden chair, with an open black medicine bag on its seat, sat directly beneath a window through which no light flowed. At first he assumed that meant it was night, but when he raised his hand to cover his eyes from the bulb he saw that the window was boarded up from the inside, and so he had no idea of the time of day. There was the same muffled conversation that had been his constant companion, but now he could identify it as a television, somewhere down a hallway, with the volume on loud. In a dark corner of the room stood a ragged bureau with some sort of large dark object perched atop it.

Scrbacek turned to the little man. “Where’s Donnie?”

“Donnie is currently indisposed,” said the little man. “He asked me if it wouldn’t be too much of an imposition to treat your deteriorating condition. I told him it was, but he implored me to come anyway, so here I am.”

“Are you a doctor?”

“Not exactly.”

“Then stay the hell away from me.”

“Suit yourself,” said the little man. “You’re the patient, and the patient is always right. But be aware the infection in your arm is spreading every minute.” The little man smiled. “Every second.” He dropped the scalpel into the black bag, clasped it shut, and carried it out of the room, leaving Scrbacek alone.

Scrbacek tried to swing his legs off the bed and stand, but the blood drained too quickly from his head and nausea forced him to lie down again. He closed his eyes and felt the nausea subside, and he disappeared into some dark, dreamless sleep.

When he awoke, the television was still blaring, the same endless conversation going on and on about absolutely nothing. The angel was now sitting on his mattress, wiping his face with a wet towel.

“Finally,” she said in flat, bored voice. “I thought maybe I had given you too much. It’s a sin to waste.”

Scrbacek shook his head and sat up in the bed. He was still dazed, though the pain had returned to roost in his left arm, flaring sharply whenever he moved. The woman with the towel was pale and pretty and as all-American as football and pom-poms and butter statues at the Iowa State Fair. She wore jeans and a T-shirt pressed to its limits by her sharply nippled breasts, and as he stared at her, he thought she looked vaguely familiar, though he couldn’t place her. A client? A blackjack dealer? A woman he had hit on once in a bar? Probably that, because he surely would have hit on her in a bar. Standing behind her was the hunched little man with the stethoscope and the scalpel, and when Scrbacek saw him, he started scooting away before a sharp bolt of pain stopped him.

“Calm down, sweetie,” said the woman. “You’ll hurt yourself. My name’s Elisha.”

“Where’s Donnie?” said Scrbacek.

“He went with Reggie and Blixen,” she said, “getting you your drugs.”

“No. No more drugs.”

“Take it easy now,” said Elisha, pushing the wet towel into his chest and forcing him back down on the bed. “You’re cut off from the good stuff. I gave you a taste to stop the pain, but I’ve never been good at sharing. They went to fill a scrip. What was it, Squirrel?”

“Keflex,” said the hunched little man, stepping forward nervously. “We could use Cipro, or Bactrim if forced, fine antibiotics both, but with gunshot wounds Keflex is generally indicated.”

“I thought you weren’t a doctor,” said Scrbacek.

“Squirrel went to medical school,” said Elisha.

“And I told them I needed peroxide,” said Squirrel. “It can be a very effective cleanser.”

“And that’s great,” said the blonde, “because I can always use whatever you have left over.”

“Can I have a cigarette?”

“Sure,” said Elisha, pulling a crumpled pack out of her jeans.

“I would recommend against it,” said Squirrel.

“And if you were maybe a doctor,” said Scrbacek, “I would maybe listen.”

“It’s your funeral,” said the little man with a toothy smile.

Elisha extracted a cigarette from the pack, lit it, took a drag herself, and then handed it to Scrbacek, who stared at it longingly for a moment before placing it in his lips, dragging deep.

He twisted on the bed and coughed the smoke out in brutal spasms. His lungs burned as if he had spent the night swallowing flaming shots of tequila. As he coughed, his throat closed in on him, tightening, until he could barely breathe. He threw away the cigarette. Squirrel hopped around, stamping on the still-lit butt as Scrbacek grabbed at his neck, coughed, fought for breath, and coughed some more. Slowly the spasms stopped, and his airway eased open.

“I guess he’s not used to menthols,” said Elisha.

“He burned the crap out of his lungs,” said Squirrel. “From the smell of him and the burns on his coat and the way he was hacking all night, it was obvious. Frankly, I wouldn’t mind a peek inside that chest. His lungs would be quite interesting specimens.”

“Keep your stinking hands off me,” Scrbacek coughed out.

“It’s only a matter of time, I suppose.”

“No more cigs for you,” said Elisha. “At least for a while.”

“Forever, I would suggest,” said Squirrel. “But what do I know?”

“Other than my lungs,” said Scrbacek, “how am I?”

“You should be dead. But the tourniquet, however crude, saved much blood, and there’s no pulsatile bleeding. The bullet missed the bone and a major artery. You might just survive.”

“Squirrel is disappointed,” said Elisha.

“You were lucky,” spit out the little man with much bitterness.

“That’s just how I feel,” said Scrbacek. “Lucky, lucky, lucky. Call me Mr. Lucky.”

“Still,” said Squirrel, “we may need to amputate.”

“What?” Scrbacek bolted upright, suddenly hyperalert. The pain shot through his shoulder and into his back, but he hardly noticed. Something moved atop the bureau, and he pulled back. It was the dark object he had seen before, but now it had a shape. It looked like a gargoyle holding a pike. He put his hands over his eyes to get a better look. It was a girl, in fatigue pants and a green tank top, holding in her muscled arms some sort of assault rifle.

“Who’s that?” said Scrbacek.

“The Nightingale,” said Elisha. “Consider her your guardian angel. And don’t worry about the amputation. Squirrel’s only kidding.”

“No, I’m not,” said the man. “Not kidding at all.”

“You’re not going to lose your arm,” said Elisha.

“It won’t be lost,” said Squirrel.

“Don’t mind him,” said Elisha. “He’s just a silly little man with a dream and a hacksaw. I brought you some broth.”

“No, my stomach—”

“Shut up and drink,” she said as she brought a mug to his lips. It was warm and rich and it made him gag, but she forced him to finish it, and when he did he felt nauseated again.

“Better?” she said.

“No,” said Scrbacek. “Where’s Donnie?”

“I told you, Donnie’s out getting help,” she said. “You need some, don’t you think? I cleaned your clothes, got as much of the blood off them as I could. The raincoat said dry-clean only, but I washed it anyway, got most of the blacking out, though there are still burn spots. The shirt was too stained to save, so Donnie’s getting you a new one, same size, and some T-shirts from the mission thrift shop. And a toothbrush, which you could use.”

Scrbacek rubbed his tongue along his upper teeth.

“Definitely,” she said.

Scrbacek stared at her. “Do I know you? I have this feeling I’ve seen you before.”

She smiled dimly for a moment, the smile of a movie star when someone comes up to her in a bathroom and says,
I recognize you. You’re somebody.
She waited a moment and then shrugged. “Some say I’m unforgettable. But I know you. You’re the lawyer who was representing Caleb Breest and now has gone seriously missing.”

The whole thing flooded back into Scrbacek’s consciousness, and he remembered the courthouse and Ethan Brummel and the fire in his building and the shot that tore through his arm and the someone out there who was trying to kill him. His breathing suddenly constricted again as if his lungs were filling with fear.

“I have to get out of here,” he gasped. “I have to get out, now. I have to get help.”

“You need to get your arm fixed first,” said Squirrel.

“No time,” said Scrbacek. “I have to go.”

“Where to?” said Elisha calmly. “Where are you going to go?”

He thought for a moment as the panic flowed through him. There was no home anymore, no office, no Ford Explorer to take him away from all of this. He needed Stephanie Dyer. He needed Caleb Breest. He needed his mother. His mother. In Florida. He could go to Florida. Yeah, Florida. But how would he get there? And what would he do? Hide out in The Villages, play mah-jongg, save coupons, eat dinner at four, sit by the pool in his Speedo, chatting with seventy-five-year-old women on the make, waiting for someone to kill him?