Timothy Hallinan - The Man With No Time

I'd been a detective for almost five years now, and I'd learned that my parents' clean and comfortable world, so absolute when I was a child, was actually something that existed inside a bubble only while the real world was too busy to burst it and let the horror in. Still, I'd never built up resistance to horror as naked as this. Every time I saw the girl's eyes close, I thought, she could have been Eleanor.

The last time I looked at the clock, it said six-forty-five. At seven-twenty, the kid revealed yet another character flaw by snapping awake, with a yell, no less.

Just what I needed: an early riser.

I wrapped a towel around my middle and went into the living room. My neck ached, my sliced ear burned, and each of my joints was competing to register a complaint of its own. He was sitting up, wearing his black trousers and his Saran Wrap, and looking a little woozy. It had gotten cold during the night, so I let him stew while I threw some kindling into the wood-burner that serves as the house's only heat source and got a fire going. Duty fulfilled, I turned my attention to my patient.

“How you feeling?” I asked, trying for bright.

He glared at me, swore in Vietnamese, and slammed his back against the couch. I didn't have to understand Vietnamese to know he wasn't wishing me many grandchildren. The winter sun was just starting to beat against the east-facing windows, and as the kid thrashed, the couch threw motes of dust that danced mockingly in the air. Presumably there were always motes of dust doing the latest steps at that hour, but I was rarely privileged to see them. It was going to be a long day.

“Let's look at that arm,” I said, adopting the first-person plural of nurses everywhere. He jerked away at my touch, and Florence Nightingale did a fast fade. “Hold still or I'll pull your tongue out,” I snarled. “I'm going to look at your arm.” I looked at his arm.

His arm looked terrible.

It looked ragged and red and rotten and infected. It looked like something I couldn't look at very long. I did what men have done for centuries when faced with something too revolting to stomach. I called a woman.

“Holy smoke, Simeon,” Eleanor said from the couch less than an hour later, “this looks terrible.”

“I know,” I said, staring out the window. “Do something about it.”

Even with a stop at an all-night market to pick up more Bactine and Saran Wrap, she had arrived from her place in Venice only fifty minutes after I'd awakened her with my call. She'd always been a woman who could get dressed fast.

“He needs a doctor,” she observed.

“He's not going to get one. I told you on the phone how it happened. I was there. If we call a doctor, the doctor will call the police, and I'll probably be in jail as an accessory to several murders.”

She ignored the reproach. “That's an ugly cut. I think he's got a fever. How do you know he won't die?”

“Come here,” I said. “Into the kitchen.” She continued to peer at the wound, and I said, “Now.”

She followed me around the single corner that shielded my kitchen from the sight of those in the living room. It was a pitiful privacy, but it was all we were going to get.

“Listen,” I hissed, “It's Horace who's out there chasing these guys, Sir Galahad in his tinfoil armor, and he has no idea -”

“What if the boy dies?”

“He's not going to die. It's his arm, for Christ's sake. People get it in the arm all the time and live. Don't you watch TV?”

“Infection,” she said loudly. From the living room the boy shouted something.

“Shut up,” I yelled. “Listen,” I said to Eleanor, “if I really think he's in trouble I'll push him out of the car in front of Santa Monica Emergency. In the meantime, he's my way in.”

She closed her eyes. “Into what?” she asked at last.

“Into whatever Horace is stalking. Remember Horace?”

“Horace.” Her eyes were still tightly closed. “Poor dumb Horace. This is how he's going to make everything up to Pansy, you know.”

“Pansy's not going to be happy if he's dead,” I said, “and these people have a flair for killing. That's a direct quote.”

She turned to look out the kitchen window at a mountainside waking up to the sun. “I'll need soap,” she said. I turned to the sink to get it. “And water,” she added.

“Thank you,” I said nastily, unloading my anger on her as I had so many times. “I never would have thought of that.”

Dumbo-Ears was sitting upright on the couch, the Saran Wrap rope connecting his ankles and his wrists cut, courtesy of Eleanor the Merciful. After cleaning and disinfecting the shoulder and swabbing the other cuts and scratches, muttering generalities about man's inhumanity to man, she'd gone down to the Fernwood Market to buy a jug of Excedrin and three bottles of red wine. Only after she'd returned, loaded down with wine and unsolicited opinions about someone who'd drink it under such circumstances, did I get to take the shower I wanted so desperately and check out my ear. It looked like something belatedly snatched from a document shredder, but it would stay on. She'd dabbed it dispassionately with Bactine and left again, but not without a concerned backward glance at her homicidal little patient. Talk about wasted motion.

“Pay attention,” I said as he scowled up at me. All the lines on his face went down, and I thought briefly of those frowning faces kids draw that turn into smiling faces when you turn them upside down. “You there?” His eyes narrowed, which I took to mean that he was listening. “Okay, here it is. I really don't care if you die. But the way I figure it, we've got the same enemy.”

“Go hell,” he said.

“Up to you.” I fought down the urge to throw him through the window. “The two who were killed. What were they to you?”

His mouth tightened and relaxed and then tightened again. I figured he was going to spit, and I stepped back. But he surprised me.

“What?” he said.

I replayed what I'd said and found what I thought was the problem. What were they to you? So, unlike Charlie Wah, he wasn't a student of idiom. “Your friend?” I probed. “Your girlfriend?” He said nothing, just looked at me as though he was trying to figure out where we'd met before.

"Relatives? I asked.

The mouth worked again, and I kept my distance, but all he did was repeat, "Go hell"

“Fine,” I said, advancing on him. “Be a hardass.” Idioms be damned. I leaned over and punched him lightly on the arm that Eleanor had so meticulously unwrapped and washed and Bactined and rewrapped.

The scream would probably have pleased Torquemada, but it made me feel like shit. He fell sideways onto the couch, blubbering in the language of his mother and father and his vanquished country, and I stood over him trying to see a murderer and seeing instead a frightened seventeen-year-old.

“That's just the beginning,” I said, but my voice lacked conviction even in my ears. I heard Hammond's voice, saying something about the Vietnamese kids having lost everything. If they had anything left it was dignity, and I knew I couldn't take his.

“Don't you want to get Charlie Wah?” I asked, still leaning over him.

At the sound of Charlie Wah's name the blubbering turned into real weeping: choking, shuddering, gut-deep sobs that overpowered his will, that came from a place inside him where the will was a distant rumor. I silently went into the bedroom and closed the door to leave him alone with his grief.

When I woke up, aching like a hit-and-run victim, and remembered that I'd forgotten to take any aspirin, it was getting dark. I'd slept nine hours, and there was no sound from the living room.

He was out cold on the couch, his mouth partly open, snoring as delicately as a girl. A little more hair, I thought, and a little less ears, and he'd make quite a passable girl. I poked the fire and added some paper and wood, and waited until the coals did their incendiary work. Older than the Parthenon, I limped into the kitchen, turned on the light over the sink, ran some water, and took four Excedrins, gagging as they went down. Then I poured a glass of milk to protect my stomach from the acid and trudged heavily back into the living room to entertain my guest. Once I'd flipped on my one and only floor lamp, the wound looked a little better, despite my shameful and inept attempt at torture: The edges weren't quite so red, and nothing unwholesome seemed to be seeping from them. I tugged the Saran Wrap down to let the wound breathe, and he made a little sound of protest and then sank back into sleep. He looked even younger asleep. It was very hard to hate him, but I was determined to try.