Jonathan Kellerman - Blood Test

“At Madronas?”

She took another drink.

“Fuck yeah. Las Fucking Madronas Home for Bad Little Fucking Girls. In Mexi-fucking-O.” Her head lolled. She reached for the bottle. “Big fat fucking beaner dykes running the place. Screaming in beaner. Pinching and poking. Telling us we were trash. Sluts.”

Maimon had remembered vividly the morning she’d left town. Had described her waiting with her suitcase in the middle of the road. A scared little girl with all the mischief knocked out of her. About to be banished for the sins of another.

She’d come back different, he’d noted. Quieter, more subdued. Angry.

She was talking now, softly, drunkenly.

“It hurt so bad to push that baby boy out. I screamed and they covered my mouth. I thought I was coming apart. When it was over, they wouldn’t let me hold him. Took him away from me. My baby, and they took him away! I forced myself to sit up to get a look at him. It near killed me. He had red hair, just like me.”

She shook her head, baffled.

“I thought I could keep him after I got home. But he said no way. Told me I was nothing. Just a vessel. Just a fucking vessel. Fancy word for cunt. Good for nothing but fucking. Told me I wasn’t really the momma. She’d already started being his momma. I was the cunt. All used up and tossed in the trash. Time to let the grownups take over.”

She dropped her head on the table and whimpered.

I rubbed the back of her neck, said comforting things. Even in that state she reacted reflexively to the touch of a male, lifting her face and flashing me an intoxicated, come-hither smile, leaning forward to expose the tops of her breasts.

I shook my head and she turned away shame-faced.

I had so much sympathy for her it ached. There were therapeutic things I could have said. But now was the time to manipulate her. The boy in the back room needed help. I was prepared to take him out of there against her will but preferred to avoid another abduction. For both their sakes.

“It wasn’t you who took him out of the hospital, was it? You loved him too much to endanger him like that.”

“It’s true,” she said, wet-eyed. “They did it. To stop me from being his momma. All these years I’d let them treat me like garbage. Stayed out of the way while they raised him. Not saying anything to him about it cause I was afraid it would freak him out. Too much for a little kid to handle. Dying inside all the time.” She raised one slender hand to her heart, reached down with the other and drained her glass.

“But when he got sick something tugged on me. Like a hook in my guts with someone reeling in the line. I had to reclaim my rights. I stewed about it, sitting with him in that plastic room, watching him sleep. My baby. Finally I decided to do it. Sat them down in the motel one night, told them the lies had gone on too long. That my time had come. To take care of my baby.

“They — he laughed at me. Put me down, told me I was unfit, a piece of shit. A fucking vessel. I should get the hell out and make it better for everyone. But this time I didn’t take it. The pain in my guts was too strong. I gave it all back to them, told them they were evil. Sinners. That the ca — the sickness was God’s punishment for what they’d done. They were the ones who were unfit. And I was gonna tell everyone about it. The doctors, the nurses. They’d kick them out and hand my baby over to his rightful momma when they found out.”

Her hands trembled violently around her glass. I walked behind her and steadied them with mine.

“It was my right!” she cried out, whipping her head around and begging confirmation. I nodded and she slumped against my chest.

During Baron and Delilah’s hospital visit, Emma Swope had complained the cancer treatment was dividing the family. The cultists had construed it as anxiety about the physical separation imposed by the Laminar Airflow room. But the woman had been worrying out loud about a far more serious rupture, one that threatened to rend the family as irreparably as a guillotine on neck-flesh.

Perhaps she’d known, then, that the wound was too deep to heal. But she and her husband had attempted to patch it anyway. To prevent the leakage of the ugly secret by taking the child and running...

“They snuck him out behind my back,” Nona was saying, squeezing my hand, digging in with the green nails. The anger was percolating within her once again. A thin film of sweat mustached the rich, wide mouth. “Like fucking thieves. She dressed up as an x-ray technician. In a mask and gown they swiped from the laundry bin. Took him down to the basement on a service elevator and out a side exit. Thieves.

“I came back to the motel and all three of them were there. My baby was lying on the bed, so small and helpless. They were packing and joking about getting away with it so easy. How nobody had recognized her behind the mask because none of them had ever looked her in the eye. Putting down the hospital. Him going on about smog and shit. Trying to justify what they’d done.”

She’d given me an opening. It was time to renew my pitch. To convince her to come with me peaceably as I carried her son out of there.

But before I could say anything the door burst open.

Doug Carmichael crouched in the doorway like a commando in a martial arts movie. The arm that extended into the room held a rifle. The other hefted a double-edged axe as if it were balsa. He wore a black mesh tank top that exposed lots of hypertrophied muscle. His legs were thick and corded, carpeted with curly blond hair and encased in tight white swim trunks. His knees were misshapen and lumpy — surfer’s knots. Rubber beach sandals cushioned large rough feet. The reddish-blond beard was neatly cropped, the thick layered hair precisely blow-dried.

Only the eyes had changed from the day I’d met him. That afternoon in Venice they’d been the color of a cloudless sky. Now I looked into a pair of bottomless black holes: dilated pupils surrounded by thin rings of ice. Mad eyes that scanned the trailer, shifting from the Southern Comfort bottle to the drowsy girl to me.

“I ought to kill you right now for giving her that poison.”

“I didn’t. She took it herself.”

“Shut up!”

Nona tried to straighten up. She swayed groggily.

Carmichael pointed the rifle at me.

“Sit down on the floor. Up against the wall, with your hands under you. Good. Now stay put or I’ll have to hurt you.”

To Nona: “C’mere, Sis.”

She went to his side and leaned against his bulk. One massive arm went around her protectively. The one with the axe.

“Did he hurt you, babe?”

She looked at me, knew she was my jury, considered her answer, and shook her head woozily.

“Naw, he’s been okay. Just talking. Wants to take Woody to the hospital.”

“I’ll bet he does,” sneered Carmichael. “That’s the party line. Pour more poison in and rake in the bucks.”

She looked up at him.

“I dunno, Doug, the fever’s no better.”

“Did you give him the C?”

“Yeah, just like you said.”

“What about the apple?”

“He wouldn’t eat it. Been too sleepy.”

“Try again. If he doesn’t like the apple there are pears and plums, too. And oranges.” He tilted his head at the shopping bags on the counter. “That stuff is super fresh. Just picked, totally organic. Get some fruit and fluid down him along with more C and he’ll cool off.”

“The boy’s in danger,” I said. “He needs more than vitamins.”

“I said shut up! You want me to finish you off right here?”

“I don’t think he means any harm,” said the girl, meekly.