David Corbett - The Devil’s Redhead

Security team, Shel thought. The euphemism reminded her of watching newscasts from Vietnam as a girl. Damage assessments. Tactical repositionings. Advantageous weather. The doctor had the thermos lid removed. He poured a clear fluid into the cap and offered it to Shel.

“Water,” he said.

“I’m not thirsty,” she told him.

The doctor sighed, as if she’d hurt his feelings. “If it was anyone’s plan to kill you, you’d already be dead.”

It was the first crack in the courtly veneer. His eyes were hard. As though to bring his point home, he glanced about the room. Blood spatters smeared the floor and wall where Dayball’s interrogation had grown especially rough. One stain in particular looked like he’d tried to drag himself away from the ball bat coming down.

The doctor held out the cup again. The man has a point, Shel realized. These guys aren’t the sort to waste time when it comes to death. She took the cup, sniffed, and drank. Something inside her melted. She downed the full amount to slake her thirst and reached out with the cup and he refilled it and she drank again. Closing her eyes, she waited for the first signs of cramping nausea to hit.

“You see,” the doctor said after a moment. “Water.”

He placed the thermos on the floor beside him. Resting his hands on his knees, he said, “I would like to examine you briefly, if I may.”

Shel flashed on Danny rousting her throughout the night, checking for concussion. No hospitals, she’d said. People die in hospitals. She remembered, too, the dream she’d had on waking, the abandoned foundry, the sense that It was about to happen, and saw in a glance how everything in this room had been foretold.

“What for?” Shel said, still holding the cup. “If I keel over and retch or flat out die on you, what possible difference could that make given what’s in store for me?”

“It will not take long,” he said, reaching down to unsnap the small black bag. “And how do you know what’s in store for you?”

“I’m a quick study.”

“Did Cesar say anything to you?”

“I don’t need Cesar to figure this thing out. Come on. Be serious.”

“I could not possibly,” the doctor responded, “be more serious.”

He pulled from the small black bag a zippered leather case the size of a book. Her hands started shaking so badly she dropped the cup. As she reached down to pick it up a thunderbolt slashed through her head and she pulled back her hand. Tears ran down her face from behind her closed eyelids. God help me, she thought.

“The pain,” the doctor asked, “which side is it on?”

She scuttled back from him on the mattress, churning with her legs, but there was nowhere to go. She pressed herself against the wall.

“Come now,” he said. “This is childish.”

“I don’t like doctors,” she said. It sounded childish.

The doctor sighed, turned to Humberto, and nodded. Humberto lumbered over and grabbed Shel by the arm. She struggled, but lacked strength to do anything more than make him laugh. He dragged her within arm’s reach of the doctor, who licked the back of his hand and held it up to her mouth. “Exhale, please,” he said.

She averted her face, shook her head. Humberto grabbed her hair and forced her face front again. She exhaled.

“Very good,” the doctor said.

Next he fingered her jaw and throat and forehead. His fingers were soft and warm. Lifting her chin, he said, “Open both your eyes at once please.” He glanced quickly from one side of her face to the other.

“Your pupils,” he said, “they’re both the same size. That’s good.”

“If they weren’t?”

“It might indicate stroke.”

He searched her nostrils and ears, remarking, “No blood, no cerebral fluid.” He felt for her carotid pulse, counted, felt for the pulse in each wrist, counted.

“Your saliva,” he asked. “Does it taste sweet to you?”

“No.”

“Be truthful, please.”

“No,” she said again.

He sat back, folded his hands. “What examination I can conduct here is limited, obviously. But you have a concussion, I believe. Basically, you need to rest. Allow the bruising of your brain to heal.” He gestured with his hand to his head, rotating the open palm slowly about his ear. Healing. “And I understand you tried to commit suicide. With pills. Is that correct?”

“I don’t see where that much matters.”

“Do you remember which pills?”

Shel rattled off the names of the medications she could remember swallowing.

“No narcotics or barbiturates?”

“You tell me,” Shel said.

He smiled again, a little less kindly. “You’re absolutely certain that Cesar said nothing to you.”

“We watched the squatter kids pelting each other with acorns,” she said. “We talked about oak trees.”

The doctor nodded, looked to Humberto and offered a little shrug. Turning back to Shel, he said, “Let’s take care of the pain, shall we?”

He reached for the leather-bound case and unzipped it. Inside lay a collection of medical instruments, including a syringe, a vial of alcohol, cotton balls, a sterile needle. Reaching down into his case, he retrieved a small medicine vial filled with clear fluid.

It was all just a setup, Shel thought. Quiet you down. They were going to kill you all along.

She tried to swat the medicinal bottle out of his hand but missed. The force of the lunge toppled her over onto her side. “Humberto,” the doctor said, his voice now betraying disgust and impatience. In one movement Humberto flipped Shel onto her stomach, put his knee in the small of her back and with one hard jerk pulled her jeans down below her hips. She kicked and flailed and screamed like a four-year-old but the needle broke skin and shortly a debilitating warmth spread through her, like drowsy smoke. Resistance faded. She felt utterly, rapturously wonderful until the sudden heaving of her stomach forced her to her knees. Humberto pulled her by the hair again, this time to the side of the mattress where she vomited a stew of bile and water onto the concrete floor. Humberto let go of her hair. Her face struck the concrete.

Humberto and the doctor murmured things to each other in Spanish as they collected the campaign chair and the small black bag, disappearing in a rainbow through the low wood door.

Abatangelo sat on a wooden chair in Waxman’s kitchen, watching as the reporter stood at the stove, nursing soup. Waxman’s cats, snub-tailed and obese, purred angrily, sniffing the air and slithering about his calves. Frank was in the bathroom alone. Abatangelo had left him there for a moment, after gathering everything sharp and checking that the window was painted shut.

“You might as well have just killed him at the table,” Waxman said. “Sat down and asked for a menu.”

“I apologize for leaving you there like that.”

Waxman laughed. “You apologize?”

“For the trouble.”

“The trouble,” Waxman said, nodding. “Just so you’re clear, I doled out tips and ass-kissing bullshit to every person who bothered to confront me. And although I welcome your apology, I don’t believe you’ve quite gotten the drift of my objections here.” One of his cats jumped up onto the top of the stove. Waxman gently picked it up and returned it to the floor. “You’ve made me a party to a kidnapping and assault.”

“He wants to talk to you,” Abatangelo said.

Waxman rubbed the back of his neck. “Lovely. A coerced confession. Made for television.”

“No, Wax. Remember, he was the one who ran.”

“Don’t insult me.”

“Look, Wax. I admit, yes, things went haywire. But all I intended to do was show up, sit down.”

Waxman laughed. “Oh, really? That hardly explains the expression on your face as you came toward the table.”