Jonathan Nasaw - Fear itself

“I don’t know.” Pender sat down on the floor next to Linda, helped her turn over onto her back, and cradled her head on his lap. “I guess you’re our resident snake wrangler,” he told Linda, not so much for information as to give her something to do with her mind, to help keep her present and awake. He didn’t know much about snake bites, but he knew you didn’t want the victim slipping away. “What do you think?”

Although it was getting hard to concentrate on anything besides the pain, and drawing her next breath, Linda tried to piece together what little data she had. The coral had bitten Gloria, and she was dead. Linda herself had been bitten before Childs, and she was still alive. It had only nipped her on the back of her wrist, though-Childs got it in the eye. And he had to have received twice as much venom-the enraged coral had gone for him with a vengeance and hung on for dear life, or rather, grim death. But he also weighed nearly as much as Linda and Gloria combined. And there was that delayed reaction Reilly had mentioned.

“If we’re both alive…when the antivenin…gets here,” she told Dorie between gasps, “I think we’ll both make it.”

“That’s all I wanted to know,” said Dorie, turning toward the revolver she’d seen under the table when she entered the kitchen. But it was no longer there-it was on the floor beside Pender. “Could I see the gun for a second?” she asked.

Pender had probably done Simon a favor, knocking him out like that. Not only had he released Simon from his agony for a few minutes, but while Simon was unconscious his respiration and heart rate had slowed appreciably, thereby retarding the progress of the neurotoxin through his bloodstream.

Alive…antivenin…make it, somebody said. Woman’s voice. He wasn’t sure where he was or what had happened, but somehow, through the fog and the pain, he understood they were talking about him. He pictured a nurse in a crisp white uniform. See, you’re going to make it, he told himself, slipping back into the darkness to get away from the pain. There’s nothing to be afraid of, after all.

Dorie was on her feet, standing over Pender, reaching her hand out for the Colt.

“I think it would be better if I held on to it for a while,” he told her. They both understood what she was asking; they also knew what his answer had been.

“Suit yourself,” she said, picking up the Buck knife from the table.

“What are you planning to do with that?”

“Cut his throat,” said Dorie, matter-of-factly.

“Don’t do it,” Pender said. “Please.”

“Why not?”

“You know why not.”

“No, I don’t,” said Dorie, looking down at the knife in her hand. She was almost certain she could have shot Simon-though she had never fired anything but a twenty-two in her life, and then only at a paper target-but she was far from sure she’d have the nerve to kill him with this. “Why don’t you tell me?”

“Because…I don’t know, because it’s wrong.” Pender was surprised to find himself fumbling for words. “Because it brings us down to his level.”

Dorie cocked her head, listening not to Pender, but to the faint sound of a siren in the distance. It was now or never; she knelt beside Simon, her back turned to Pender. Simon’s face was dark. One eye was a bloody mess, the strangely naked eyelid of the other was at half-mast, but fluttering as if he were struggling to open it.

“Get back,” called Pender, easing himself out from under Linda, edging away so as not to deafen her if he had to fire. “Get away.”

Dorie tilted Simon’s head up, held the point of the blade against his throat. “You’ll have to shoot me first,” she said, without turning around.

As if in answer, the gun barked twice. The body jumped; the sound of the shots reverberated around the kitchen. Dorie still hadn’t moved. Slowly she pulled the knife back-it was still unbloodied; now she’d never know whether she could have done it-and saw a dark, viscous liquid oozing from two holes in the side of Simon’s mustard yellow and dung brown sport shirt, just below the heaving rib cage. As she watched, the heaving slowed, then stopped; so did the trickle of blood and bile and enteric fluid. She turned to Pender, her ears still ringing.

“We have about two minutes to get our stories straight,” he said, as the sound of the sirens grew louder. “Linda, honey, you still with us?”

She raised her head weakly. “You guys work it out.”

“Hang on,” Pender told her. “The ambulance is almost here.”

Hang on? thought Linda, closing her eyes and letting her head fall back to the hard plank floor. I’ve been hanging on for twelve fucking hours-when do I get to let go?

October 31, 1999

The cold, clear weather held for three more days. Dorie finished Sunset: Tinsman’s Lock as the sun dropped behind the raised berm of the canal while Pender, bundled in blankets and medicating his bruised cervical vertebrae with Jim Beam and Vicodin, dozed beside her on a folding lawn chaise. The last touch was a solitary figure on the towpath-just a vertical dab of black against the horizon, with the thinnest penumbra of violet her finest brush could manage, to give it that magical twilight shimmer.

Neither of them felt much like going to Pool’s Halloween party that evening. Like soldiers after a battle, they found they preferred each other’s company, partly because they could talk about what they’d been through with someone who’d been there and would understand, and partly because they didn’t have to. (For the same reason, Pender had put off his meeting with the real Arthur Bellcock for at least another week.) In the end the decision was made by default, one of those, “I’ll go if you want to go; well, I’ll go if you want to go” deals.

* * *

Pool’s roommate met them at the front door of the frame house near Annandale. Slender, late forties, clinging black dress, waist-length gray polyester wig. Pender introduced her as Bunny.

She corrected him. “Tonight it’s Morticia. I’m glad you came, Ed. I’ve never seen her so down. I’ve tried everything-maybe you can talk to her.”

“Where is she?”

“In the bedroom.” Bunny turned to Dorie, who was wearing the same outfit she’d worn the night she and Pender had met, and gave her the once-over. “Hag or drag?”

“Beg pardon?”

“Costume. There’s a gorgeous decollete witch outfit we could stuff those into, or I could loan you a tuxedo like Julie Andrews wore in Victor/Victoria.”

“Tuxedo,” said Dorie.

“Spoilsport,” said Pender.

Pender rapped on the bedroom door.

“Go away.”

“It’s Ed Pender.”

The door opened. The woman who ran the FBI was costumed as Gomez Addams, to Bunny’s Morticia. Tuxedo with absurdly wide lapels, dark hair slicked down and parted in the middle, pencil mustache, penciled in.

Pender gave her a hug. He’d always thought of Pool as an iron woman and was surprised how light and fragile she felt in his arms. “She was the first one, Ed.”

“The first one?” They disengaged, sat on the edge of the bed together.

“The first one I ever lost.”

Pender thought back, realized she was right. It was in 1979 that he had joined Steve McDougal in Washington to help set up the Liaison Support Unit. Pool arrived a year later, and no, the LSU had never lost an agent in the line of duty. “Do you want to hear about it?”

“I read the file. I meant to tell you, I was so sorry to hear about your sister.”

“Thanks,” said Pender. “Finding out about it the way I did, somehow it’s still not real to me. I mean, part of me knows Ida’s dead, but part of me still feels like I could pick up the phone and call her.”