Gregg Hurwitz: Do No Harm

"Get your confession," Dalton murmured to Jenkins. He tossed him the. 25 and Jenkins crouched, holding the handle out to Jesse. A line of drool found its way down Jesse's throat, staining his white undershirt a dark red. His breath was coming in gasps. "I didn't… I didn't… What happened to Nance? What happened to her?"

He leaned forward, palms on the cracked asphalt, and bounced up and down like a Muslim praying. More blood leaked from his mouth.

Jenkins stood and unsnapped the button on his holster. "What happened to her? You threw lye in her face this morning, you motherfucker."

Jesse looked up, his broken face suddenly mournful. "Is she… will she be…?"

Dalton turned to guard the back door, but Terry, the blond construction worker, had already stepped through, arms raised. Jenkins unholstered his gun, but Dalton stepped quickly between him and Terry.

"Yo," Dalton said. "Seems you walked into a bit of a situation here."

Terry's voice wavered slightly, but it drew some strength from an undercurrent of righteousness. "He couldn't have hurt Nance this morning," he said. He reached for his back pocket, and Jenkins shouldered Dalton aside, pistol aimed at Terry's head. Terry whipped his hands back up in the air, chest heaving beneath his denim jacket. Dalton reached around to Terry's back pocket and pulled out two Southwest Airlines ticket stubs.

"We just got back from Vegas a few hours ago," Terry continued. His head was drawn back from the direction of Jenkins's Beretta, as if the pistol were emitting heat. "We stayed at the Hard Rock. A ton of people saw us there." He lowered his arms slowly. Jenkins kept his gun raised, both hands on the stock.

Jesse was rocking on his knees. "What happened to Nance?" he wailed. "Is she alive?"

Dalton crouched over Jesse and took him by the wrist. A stamp was smeared across the back of his hand. Cheetah's. A Vegas strip club.

Dalton stood and walked back inside the bar, his shoulder brushing Terry's. After a moment, Jenkins lowered his pistol. He reached out a hand and rested it on Jesse's matted hair. Jesse continued to rock and wail. "Is Nance all right?" he sobbed. "Did someone kill Nance?"

"No," Jenkins said quietly. "She's still alive."

Jesse collapsed, crying with relief. Jenkins holstered his weapon, touched Jesse gently on the head again, and left him crying on the asphalt.

Hunched over the pocked wooden table so his broad shoulders arched into a hump, Clyde studied the plastic bottle of DrainEze with flat, unblinking eyes. A filthy window screen filtered the breeze into dusty gasps of air that swirled among the scattered papers on the floor before dying in the room's stench. Half-drunk cans of Yoo-Hoo dotted the countertop in the adjacent kitchen, amid pots filled with congealed macaroni and cheese, and pans caked with the burnt remains of refried beans.

Perched on his knees, his hands were oddly swollen, gathering thickness around his knuckles and hairy wrists. They raised to the tabletop and rested nervously at the edge, twitching. His pitted fingernails scraped along the wood. A twisted metal lamp cast a cone of light before him. He seized a syringe and turned it a half rotation before testing the needle with the tip of a finger. The bezel broke the puffy skin and he yelped, pulling the needle away. He closed his eyes reflexively, murmuring to himself. "Three, two, one. Stand back from the door. Back from the door." The mantra seemed to calm him. When he opened his eyes, the anxiety on his face had dissipated.

Working the meat of his injured fingertip between the thumb and forefinger of his other hand, Clyde produced a bead of blood, which he lapped up.

He wore faded blue hospital scrubs. Physician's scrubs. A beatup navy-blue corduroy baseball cap sat low across his wide crown, his balding scalp visible through the netting in the back. It bore no emblem. Both his cheeks were marred with acne scars, deep irregular indentations that held the shadows of the room. A high thin scar above his right ear notched his hair, which he kept short on the sides and back but long and stringy on top, perhaps to disguise his hair loss. Though he was not grossly obese, his extra weight hung on him loose and flaccid. A single key dangled from a thin ball-chain necklace, which disappeared into the folds of his neck.

His tongue darted from his mouth, tensed, the tip poking at his upper lip. Beneath the table, his feet seemed to move independently, pushing into each other, flopping and scratching like two dogs at play. His Adidas sneakers had yellowed with age and grown brittle along the soft middle soles.

He swallowed the orange tablet he'd been sucking on, then spooned another helping of instant coffee from the jar directly into his mouth. A grimace twisted his face momentarily, then faded. He chewed slowly, some of the grains gumming at the corners of his lips. His mouth pulsed a few times, then he swallowed hard, tilting back his head as though gulping down a vitamin.

A rat scurried unseen through the mound of unwashed clothes that curled around the base of his twin bed. The bedside lamp, a yellow porcelain number bearing a Motel 6 sticker, had been draped with a thin purple scarf. It provided meager, diffuse light.

His pupils twitched twice to the left. He grunted through his nose and turned back to the work at hand. Pushing the needle into the gray DrainEze bottle, he withdrew the plunger, filling the syringe with the vivid blue liquid. With a jerk of his thumb, he pushed the syringe down, sending a thin spurt of alkali across the tabletop. The liquid pooled in minuscule drops, eating slowly into the tabletop. His wide mouth split in a grin, the corners curving back toward his low-set ears.

Two other DrainEze bottles sat on the table, industrial-sized with juglike handles. Two glasses of cloudy water waited near his right hand, beside a small surgeon's tray that contained syringes, needles, and a scalpel. His right shin nudged an open metal footlocker holding a host of medical tools and devices.

Across the thigh of his scrub bottoms, a series of tiny holes in the fabric revealed glossy spots of scarred skin. Cautiously lowering the needle, Clyde positioned it just past the last hole in the scrubs. He sank the plunger slowly, allowing several drops of liquid to dribble from the needle. The liquid ate quickly through the thin scrubs, and he shrieked and jerked his leg as it began to attack his flesh.

Grabbing the glass of water, he poured it over the wound. The water darkened his scrubs in a flame pattern, with licks reaching down his calf. Holding his leg still with his other hand, he poured the second glass of water over his thigh. Then he placed both hands flat on the table and sat perfectly still, whimpering softly as the last drops of alkali continued to burn in his flesh. His face grew shiny with sweat.

After a while, Clyde stood and headed into the kitchen. He filled a glass with water from the tap and drank it, three times successively, before placing the glass back in the cluttered sink. Opening a can of wet cat food, he dumped the contents on top of the mound of cylinder-shaped servings already overflowing the small bowl. Twitching his fingers, he made a kissing noise, but no cat came.

The skull tattoo on the outside of his flabby biceps caught his attention, and he returned to the footlocker, produced a cotton ball, and doused it with rubbing alcohol. The skull lifted easily from his skin, blackening the moist side of the cotton. Continuing to rub at his biceps, he lumbered to the clothes mound at the base of his bed, unearthed a stained mirror, and propped it against a wall. With a raspy groan, he slid from his scrub bottoms, then stood and stared at his reflection. A series of alkali burns dotted his right thigh, like the marks of small, burrowing insects. Most of them were scarred over, gnarled knots of fire-red flesh. The freshest wound wept a clear, viscous fluid, which caked on the thick black hairs of his leg.