Jon Talton - The Pain Nurse

“It wasn’t really true was it?”

“What?” She hesitated just long enough.

“I didn’t think so,” Will said.

She twitched and huddled into herself. “He told me he’d kill me if I told you the truth.”

Will told her she would be safe, and that moment he thought he could leap up and dance along the Serpentine Wall. She had come right out and said it.

“I had to cover for him, don’t you understand?” She hugged herself tightly, staring down at the sidewalk. “He got me my stuff. I woulda died without it. He said he had a dealer under his thumb, that’s just how he said it. And if I didn’t do what he said, he wouldn’t bring me my fix. Then when you guys called, he said he’d kill me if I didn’t say things happened his way.”

“So he wasn’t with you that night?”

She shook her head.

Will asked her again and she nearly shouted “No!” then reached back in her coat pocket, pulled out the pack, and lit another cigarette. She was crying now. “Are you gonna arrest me? Take me to jail? I’m clean now. I got a baby now, Detective Will, please, God, don’t…”

“Just tell me the truth, Darlene.”

“It’s going to be all right,” Cheryl Beth said.

Darlene rubbed her nose and scrunched her face. “Who are you, girl? You don’t have a cop face.”

Will intervened. “What if I told you she was a witness.”

Suddenly Darlene seemed to age another ten years and her face turned bright red before losing its color entirely. Even the veiny damage from her boyfriend’s fist seemed to drain of blood. “Wha…? How is that possible? Oh, fuck. Bud said nobody could…” Her words became an unintelligible blubber with the occasional “they’re gonna take my baby” coming through. Will put his hand on her arm and she fell into his shoulder bawling. He fought not to tilt sideways into Cheryl Beth.

“Tell me how it happened, Darlene. This doesn’t have to go badly for you if you tell the truth.”

“He just told me to tell you that he was with me. He said the bosses were after him, trying to fire him. I never knew anything about his wife being killed…”

“So you covered for him.”

She nodded, kept crying. She was shivering and her teeth chattered from the cold. “But he said nobody would know, nobody would see us. I didn’t know what he was going to do. I swear to God, I swear to God…”

Every nerve tensed in Will’s body. He had used the word “witness” to describe Cheryl Beth. It had opened all the doors. He said, “So you didn’t think anybody would see. Don’t you want to tell your side of the story?”

She sat back up, miraculously avoiding leaving cigarette burns in Will’s overcoat. She leaned out again to stare at Cheryl Beth.

“Bud brought that boy home. Bud was a kinky one, you know? We did some weird stuff, you know? He really liked it. But no way was I goin’ to fuck some street nigger, much less a retard. Poor thing, looked scared as hell. Bud could do that to you. But he told us what to do.” She gently touched her black eye. “I’m cold, Detective Will.”

“Just tell it the way you remember it, Darlene.”

She spoke slowly, the mist from her breath and cigarette smoke wreathing her head. “Bud told me to take off my clothes and get in bed and play with myself. ‘Put on a show for him,’ he said. And he had that boy sit in a chair and watch me.” She hesitated, then continued. “Bud told him to jerk off in this plastic bottle he gave him. That’s what we did. That’s all we did. And Bud let the boy go. I just thought it was weird shit, you know? I said, ‘Why you keeping his come in that bottle?’ He didn’t answer. Nobody was gonna get hurt.”

She had pulled him through a door he didn’t even know existed. He had a dozen questions, but didn’t dare ask them. She believed Cheryl Beth had seen this. Will couldn’t let her think otherwise.

Suddenly Darlene was talking rapidly, trying to purge it from her memory. “I never knew what Bud was going to do. I swear to God. That morning, he come by, all agitated. He said he found her body, Theresa. He swore to me that he didn’t kill her, but he said he had to put that boy’s come on her body because the other cops would frame him, say he done it because he was the husband and she had a restraining order against him and all. He told me what to say. God, I was scared! Fuck, it was hard keeping my head straight.”

“So,” Will said, “just to be clear, did you know who Bud brought home that night?”

“I never seen him before. Just said his name was Craig.”

“The one we arrested for murder, right?”

“Yes sir.”

“And when did Bud bring him home to you, when did you do this?”

“It was two nights before the killing.”

“How do you remember that, what with the meth and all?”

She smiled, sniffled loudly. “It was my birthday.”

Will stared into the opaque river and said nothing. The day was cold and dying. At last he spoke through the chill, “Darlene, you’re going to have to give a statement. Are you willing to do that?”

“Yes. Yes, I am…just let me keep my baby.”

He patted her arm and told her she could go. She stubbed out the last Camel, tossed it into the growing pile of cigarette filters on the sidewalk, and stood. She walked two steps and turned.

“I always liked you, Detective Will. Always thought you were fair. I never believed what Bud said about you.”

It was a moment of premonition, the nanosecond where the bullet leaves the rifle and strikes a target even before its sound is heard. But Will asked, “What did Bud say?”

“That you killed Theresa.”

Cheryl Beth was relieved for the physical effort of folding the wheelchair and lifting it into the back of her car. When she almost lost control of it, nearly tossing it into the air, she knew the level of her emotions. Yet she could say nothing once she was in the car. Will was on his cell phone, obviously talking to Detective Dodds. She could only hear his end of the conversation.

“Darlene gave it all up…calm down…never mind why I’m not in the hospital…”

She could hear the angry percussions of Dodds’ voice coming through Will’s phone, interrupting nearly every sentence, but she couldn’t make out the words.

“Are you done now? She admits he wasn’t with her the night Theresa died, and she explained how he planted the DNA evidence…of course, I Mirandized her…She’s got a kid now, so you’ve got leverage…He turned her into a tweaker but she says she’s clean now…She’s in the same crappy little house, yes, she’s there…You’ve got to get over there now and take her statement, get her protected, and get a warrant out on him. Pull him in for anything, just get him and hold him…I’m not trying to tell you how to do your job…Because somebody had to…You know where to find me.”

She listened to Will talk, such enthusiasm in his voice. Her emotions were lava under pressure.

“Will Borders, you’d better the hell tell me what’s going on because there’s nothing I hate more than being lied to.” She turned in the seat to face him, refusing to break eye contact, talking as adamantly with her hands as with her voice. “I’ve watched you these weeks as you’ve struggled and worked, and I’ve admired you. I never would have let you hurt as long as you did if I’d known and I stopped it. And then I got you out today, you go and get a damned gun, and this trailer girl talks about this man saying you killed that woman, and, God, you’d better stop lying to me right now! I’m sick of people lying to me! You’d better tell me what’s going on right now!”

She threw it out as the words boiled out of her mind. One of the docs used to make gentle fun of her when she was that intense, the exclamation points shooting out of her, calling it “running hot.” She was running hot. She stared at Will as he meekly put his phone away and reached down to rearrange his left leg. His eyes were wide.