“Let me get this straight,” Driscoll said. He popped another Moosehead, drained a third of it in a swallow. He closed the refrigerator door, then came back to the kitchen table where Tommy was sitting, watching him intently.
“This guy tried to stab you while you were taking the trash out?”
Tommy nodded.
“But nobody saw it.” Driscoll pulled out a chair, sat down heavily.
Tommy held up the front of his busboy’s coat, wiggling his fingers through a slice just above the pocket, as if he were waving to Driscoll.
Driscoll shrugged. “Clumsy as you are, you could have caught it in the meat grinder.”
Tommy shook his head vehemently, his eyes flashing.
Driscoll sighed, tilted the Moosehead again, set it down empty. He had the kitchen window open for the breeze. He wrinkled his nose. “Goddamn place sure smells like smoke, don’t it?”
He waved his arm around the tiny kitchen. The wing housing his and Tommy’s units had survived the blaze more or less intact. A few windows shattered from the heat, some water damage, a week or so without electricity, but they’d endured all that when the hurricane passed through. Little setbacks like that were old hat by now.
At least they had a roof over their heads, had their health. They were a hell of a lot better off than Deal and his missus. Deal set to get out of the hospital in a day or two, but as for Janice, who knows how long she’d be in there. Thank heaven for Mrs. Suarez, who was taking care of Isabel.
The old lady had her little house back, reclaimed from the salsa brigade. Driscoll had gone down there, explained a few things to her scumbag renters, didn’t even have to use Spanish to get through to them. A good thing, since he didn’t speak any. He flashed his shield, used a little body-language Esperanto, they’d cleared out before dawn, leaving the house filthy in their wake. Mrs. S. had it sparkling again now, though.
Something he’d been able to do, at least. Didn’t seem like much under the circumstances. But a little. Now here was Tommy, trying to give him something else to do.
Driscoll spread his palms open in a helpless gesture. “Let’s say there
was
a guy tried to rob you. You know how many times that happens on a given Saturday night in this town? There’s a zillion slimewads like that out there. You just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, that’s all. Think of it like the hurricane. It was bad luck that it happened, but good luck, too, because you lived through it and what are the odds it’ll happen again anytime soon?”
He got up, headed for the refrigerator. He cracked a beer, came back. Tommy was staring at him, his face red, sputtering as if he were about to pop. If he hadn’t looked so pathetic, Driscoll would have laughed.
“That’s…that’s…
not
…” Tommy stammered, his face glowing with frustration. Suddenly his breath flew out of him in a cry. He slammed his hands down on the table. Driscoll had to grab his beer to keep it from toppling. He was still gaping as Tommy stood and stomped out of the room.
He sat at the table, listening to the slam of Tommy’s door echo from across the way. Thank God he wasn’t going to have to listen to that TV now. Tommy’s set had taken a blast from a fire hose and shorted out.
Still, Driscoll couldn’t help feeling a little guilty. What had he said to get Tommy so worked up, anyway? He had another slug of Moosehead. The answer was clearly nothing. What did Tommy expect him to do about this robber? Nothing he could do about that either.
Deal, Tommy, Mrs. Deal, and all the rest of the goddamned world. What was
he
supposed to do about all that pain and suffering? That was one reason he’d got the hell out of the Department. Because he was sick to death of sticking his fingers into a dike that was so shot full of holes that nothing he did made any difference. Because he was sick to death of people looking at him like he was supposed to give a big shit. Because all he wanted to do was stay home and sit at his kitchen table and drink some beer and not think about a goddamned thing. Which was exactly what he intended to do. Beginning right now.
“Bad luck, nothing more,” Torreno said when Coco had finished his story. They were on the veranda of the lakeside hut. Torreno was casting food pellets out across the water, making motions like a man sowing a field with grain.
“Perhaps.” Coco shook his head. “Or perhaps this man is possessed.”
The pellets pattered down upon the water like raindrops. Soon the sound was answered by the awful sucking noises of the fish, their mouths breaking the surface as they swarmed in for the food. Coco wished it were daylight. Better to see the things than to simply hear them. In his mind he saw a million tiny drains breaking the surface of the dark water, each one ringed with teeth like needles.
Torreno glanced at him, his face catching the faint glow of a kerosene torch. “You are going to start talking like a cane cutter, now? Bad magic? The evil eye?” He snorted. He looked like a devil himself in the flickering light.
Coco didn’t waver. “You said it yourself, this is a man not right in the head.” Coco’s fingers traced an angry welt that lay across his cheekbone. “But he fights like a demon.”
“I would not advertise it,” Torreno said dryly. “The great Coco, laid waste by a man not right in the head.” He turned back to his feeding. “Maybe you were drinking before you went there?”
Coco glared at him. The fish thrashed the water in a frenzy, as if ready to unfold their unnatural legs, climb onto the platform and take the food for themselves. Torreno knew he did not drink, did not use drugs. His employer was only baiting him.
Coco pondered the problem for a time. Torreno was a man of immense power and wealth. He had not achieved his position through foolishness. Surely he had not under-estimated their opponent in this case. Perhaps this was a test of sorts. Perhaps Torreno was measuring Coco’s worth. A possibility occurred to him.
“There is something you have not told me,” Coco said finally.
Torreno lifted an eyebrow, but his face stayed in profile, his gaze intent upon the roiling waters. “You and I have been together for a long time, Coco. I would hate to see you lose your reason now.”
“It is your own business,” Coco persisted, “why you don’t want me to know about this man, who he is. I don’t care about that. But this is a question of doing what I have set out to do. If there is something I should know…”
Torreno flung the rest of the food into the water with an impatient snap of his wrist. He paused, stared at Coco as if assessing him. Coco felt his shoulders squaring themselves.
Finally, Torreno began to nod. “All right, Coco. You have me.” A penitent’s expression had transformed his normally chiseled features. “This man is not what he seems to be.” He gave a wave of his hand. “Though he has adopted the guise of a fool, he is, in reality, a formidable opponent.” Torreno gave a sigh, as if ridding himself of guilt. “In your terms, he is a kind of sorcerer.”
Coco felt a tremor pass over him. Not fear, but the thrill of recognition, of something important about to make itself known. He had sensed this all along. “Fire does not burn him,” he murmured.
“Steel will not pierce his flesh,” Torreno answered solemnly.
Coco faced his employer squarely. “And you did not tell me this before.”
Torreno hooded his eyes in apology. “I was not certain.”
Coco drew himself up. “But still he is our enemy.”
Torreno nodded.
“Then we must find another way.”
“I rely upon you, Coco.”
“Not upon me,” Coco said. “Upon stronger magic.” The fish were quiet now, gone as quickly as they had come.
“Upon stronger magic, then.”
“Good,” Coco said, and answered his employer’s smile with a grimace of his own.
Whose hands are these
? Deal found himself wondering. He was standing at a tall window on one of the hospital’s top floors, waiting for the doctor, chafing in his own, unfamiliar clothes after nearly a week in hospital gowns. He could see for a mile or more, across the tops of the trees the hurricane hadn’t flattened, across all the newly tiled rooftops, past the beachfront hotels, all the way to the Atlantic. It was sunny. Windy enough for whitecaps. Sailboats. Bright sails of surfboarders. People out there having fun.
He turned away. The hands were his, of course. Right there at the ends of his shirtsleeves where they belonged, gripping a red rail that divided the floor-to-ceiling windows. But for a moment there they hadn’t seemed like his, not even a little.
Down below an EMS van raced toward the emergency entrance, flashers bright even in daylight. Its siren was thin, more mournful than alarming at this distance. He cut his glance away. The hair gone from his knuckles, from the back of his hands. The skin all smooth and shiny, streaks of pink here and there. He ran his hand across his face. Stubble where his eyebrows had been, nothing by way of eyelashes. He caught sight of himself in the glass. What had been a medium-cut, if untidy, mop of brown hair, bleached out by the sun, was now a colorless flattop. The best they could do under the circumstances, an orderly told him. He shouldn’t feel so bad. Flattops were back in style. It was happening. It was “fly.”
Fly
, Deal thought. He massaged the taut skin of his cheekbones. His fingertips seemed smooth, tractionless. He drew a weary breath. Whatever “fly” was, he didn’t feel it. He felt wrong, as if his body had been fitted with a new sheath, a skin that hadn’t broken in yet. What was that old movie he’d seen? Some folks find this corpse that turns out not to be a corpse at all. Some creature hatched out of an egg from outer space, not quite formed when the people found it. A blank, they called it. Carolyn Jones. Kevin McCarthy. He’d get the title in a minute.
Meantime, his unfamiliar reflection stared back at him, the face still puffy, the eyes haunted. Maybe it was Kevin McCarthy, just out of the home, ready to call for help at the first false move.
“Mr. Deal?”
He turned from the window to see a tall man in a white coat approaching him.
“I’m Dr. Constantine.” Deal stared at him. Stethoscope, clipboard, a couple of pens and a penlight in his shirt pocket, all that checked out. But instead of a reassuring Marcus Welby type, chiseled countenance, gray head of hair, here was this kid who had come to stand in front of him.
Fine features, rosy cheeks, a scrim of dark hair falling over his forehead. Faded silk button-down with a matching vest and stonewashed jeans under the lab coat. He looked like he’d been outfitted at Banana Republic on his way in, maybe had a razor cut and style, too.
The kid checked his clipboard. “You’re a lucky man, Mr. Deal.”
Deal glanced out the window. They were ten stories up, maybe more, just a thin pane of glass between them and a hundred-foot drop to a cement-lined canal at the edge of the hospital property.
“I don’t feel very lucky,” he said. Maybe he would kick the glass panel into pieces, hold Dr. Constantine out there in the breeze until he revised his concept of luck.
“Well, you should,” Constantine said. “We’re sending you home.”
All that false cheer, that mindless energy. Deal felt it smack up against him like a wave.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
, that was the title of the movie. Pods. People grow out of pods and replace the ones you know. Clearly Constantine was one of them and Deal could do the world a favor, send him hurtling out into space. He took a deep breath. “I want to know about my wife,” he said finally. “Can you give me some information? Or is there someone else I can talk to?”
Constantine glanced up from his clipboard. He seemed to sense something ominous near him. Deal wondered if he’d been grinding his teeth.
“You can talk to me,” Constantine said. “Or with Dr. Plattner, if you’d rather.”
He pushed a lock of hair from his forehead, but it tumbled back. He looked neutrally at Deal, his smooth and rosy face a proper subject for Botticelli, if Botticelli had been a pod too.
Deal thought of Janice. Her face swathed in bandages, her brain and body numb under the drip of morphine. He looked at Constantine, a model waiting for the shutter to snap.
“Tell you what,” Deal said, realizing his new hands had turned into fists. “Maybe it ought to be Dr. Plattner after all.”
***
Plattner turned out to be a bluff man who looked like he might have exchanged a few shots in the ring in an earlier life. There were a couple of prints of hunting dogs on the walls of his office, a fisherman’s vest on a coatrack, a battered copy of
From Here to Eternity
on his desk. Plattner noticed Deal looking at the book.
“He used to live here, you know that?”
Deal turned, surprised. “James Jones?” He’d seen the film. He’d grown up idolizing Burt Lancaster.
“Yeah, toward the end of his life, right after he came back from Paris.” Plattner was finishing a sandwich wrapped in white paper. “I ran into him at a fish camp out in the Everglades.” He made a gesture with one of his sizable hands. “I’m not much of a reader, but I read
that
book.” Plattner nodded. “He signed it, too.”
Deal reached for the book, opened the cover. Pages yellowing, crumbling around the edges. It gave off a smell like the libraries of his youth. On the title page was a florid scrawl in bleeding dark ink.
To Doc P. Miami’s for me.Jim
.
“They had him up on an airboat, taking pictures for some tourist campaign,” Plattner said. He wadded up the sandwich paper, tossed it into a waste can across the room. “One of the photographers leaned against the engine exhaust, fried a nice chunk of his shoulder, I happened to be there to fix him up.”
Plattner shrugged, leaned back in his desk chair, smiled. “Anyway, Jim and I did some fishing, had a couple of drinks together. He really liked it down here.”
Plattner stared off a moment, lost in thought, then turned back to Deal, apologetic. “But that’s not what you wanted to talk about, was it?”
Deal put the book back on Plattner’s desk. He remembered how upset he’d been with Dr. Constantine, realized how comfortable he was with this man, someone tuned into life as he knew it. “In a way, Dr. Plattner,” Deal said. “In a way, it was.”
Plattner stared at him a moment, then nodded. Finally he leaned forward in his chair, tented his fingers over the clutter of papers on his desk. “Your wife is in serious shape, I’m not going to kid you.”
Deal felt his breath suck in, his stomach tighten. He couldn’t find anything to say.
“She’s going to make it,” Plattner continued. “That’s not what I’m talking about.”
“What, then?” Deal stared at him, feeling helpless, desperate for any shard of hope or comfort.
“We’re looking at a long process of healing,” Plattner said. “Some intricate surgeries, a number of them, a fair amount of pain, a great deal of expense.”
Deal shook his head. “The money doesn’t matter.”
“Most difficult may be the psychological effects,” Plattner said.
Deal glanced at him. “You’re talking about Janice?”
Plattner nodded.
“Janice is tough, Doctor. She’s the toughest person I know.”
“And she’s also a woman. A wife. A person who’s received serious trauma to her features.”
Deal stared at him, shaking his head slowly. “You think I’d care about that? Something like that?” Anger was beginning to build in him again.
“I think
she
is going to care about that, Mr. Deal. More than you may imagine. And you’re going to have to be prepared to help her.”
Deal felt the anger evaporate, felt the fear rush in to take its place. He glanced at the book on Plattner’s desk, found his thoughts skittering off to that movie again. Maybe the pods had the right idea after all. All these feelings, cluttering up what might otherwise be a clean and simple life. What was love but something that led inevitably to pain?
He looked up at Plattner finally, feeling numb. “Okay, Doc. I’ll do my best.” He was finding it hard to breathe, finding it hard to get the words out of his throat. “If you have any suggestions, I’ll be glad to have them. I could use a little help.”
The doctor was nodding at him then. Deal was fairly sure of that, at least. It had gotten a little hard to see through all his tears.