Т Паркер - The Room of White Fire

Clay worked harder and faster, but the seconds seemed to drag more and more slowly as Roshaan’s body shook and his head jerked with every push, and then Vazz descended for another exhale.

One eternal minute.

Clay hit the pause command and the screen froze on Roshaan’s white-blue face. No more screaming man. No snarling dog. Just the car traffic on Pacific Coast Highway, Oceanside, California, six thousand six hundred miles away from where an eleven-year-old Afghani boy had died and a nineteen-year-old American boy had helped kill him.

“I worked on him for almost seven minutes, total,” said Clay. “No response.”

The monitor came back to frantic life around Roshaan’s peaceful lifelessness. Clay continued the chest compressions. Spencer got up from beside the boy and strode off-screen. Vazz stood, too, and they argued, but I couldn’t make out the words.

Then Clay and Vazquez lifted Roshaan’s upper body from the floor and tugged off his jacket and underclothes.

I hoped the shock of cold might bring him back,” said Clay. “Or maybe, I’d see that I’d been off on the compression site and I’d find a better place to press. I was desperate. I was willing to try anything. I started compressing again. I did the best, deepest compressions I knew how. Vazz went back to mouth-to-mouth breathing. Nothing. He was gone. Later we laid him on the waterboard and covered him with a blanket. By then everything was a blur.”

The video froze on Roshaan on his father’s waterboard, and Clay and Vazz spreading the blanket.

“Later I lifted the blanket and looked at Roshaan. Then at his father. I saw my soul fly away. It looked like a bat. I haven’t felt or seen it since, Mr. Wills.”

Cars on the highway. A distant siren. If I’d had any doubt about Clay Hickman’s need to tell his story, it was gone. “It looked like an accident to me, Clay. Choke holds like that have killed before. That’s why most cops don’t use them anymore.”

“What I think happened? Roshaan had a weak heart. Like mine when I was born. He couldn’t have an operation. Or maybe he didn’t even know.”

He looked at me, then to the mirror taped to the wall, then out through the front-window curtain.

“Do you have more video, Clay?”

He glanced at me, then looked down, nodding. “Dr. Spencer ordered us to get rid of the body. He swore us all to silence. Penalty of death or worse, he said. Moe the ’terp disappeared the very next day. I don’t know what Dr. Spencer did to him. Me and Vazz and Don decided to wrap Roshaan up and pack him in this wood-and-leather trunk we found in the basement. It was a heavy old thing. Like from another century. I can’t play that video now. It’s the hardest part to watch. But I’ll play it for Nell and Dr. Spencer. I’m hoping Nell will want to show it up close. In slow motion. Maybe more than once. It was the end of the end, and the beginning of the beginning.”

And so,” Clay said quietly. “That’s who I am and why I’m doing what I’m doing.”

I thought about that. I’d just witnessed Clay Hickman’s moral injury. His soul wound. I heard Paige Hulet’s voice: It is caused by something you do. Not by something done to you.

In this stark new light, Clay wasn’t quite the menace I’d thought he was. Victim? Not quite that, either. How about collateral damage? I felt old anger and fresh shame, like two snakes swallowing each other by their tails. I hadn’t wanted to see what Clay had shown me, even though I had known the larger, more distant truth of it — like most Americans — for the better part of a decade. But Clay had restored my unwilling eyesight. He had called my bluff and drafted me in. Made me a partner. As Spencer had done to him. And others had done to Spencer and Tritt and many like them.

“You’re me,” I said finally.

“Not by a long shot.”

“What I mean is, the story is about you and a lot of other people, too. A whole country full of us who sent you in to do that.”

Which is why the idea of Spencer pocketing twenty million dollars for his days at White Fire — for doing the hideous shit I’d just watched — brought Rage, Wrath & Fury running. That Spencer would now promote himself to hero in Hard Truth was the worst corruption of all. Truths hidden, lies magnified. For profit. Again.

“So what do you think? Is Nell going to want it?”

I knew if I was honest with Clay I might not see him again. But if I stayed in character, I could arrange one more meeting with him. By promising a meeting with Nell, I could deliver him instead to his parents. And they could get him out of Arcadia and away from Spencer. In my hands I felt the weight of Clay Hickman’s precarious fate, and in my heart the sick fear of betraying his attempt at redemption.

“I think she’ll want to interview you.”

He turned to me slowly, hazel and blue eyes boring in. “If she doesn’t, I can edit and narrate and post this on the Internet and the world can judge it. I can force Dr. Spencer to observe and comment, on camera. I understand there may be consequences for me. I will face the consequences, but not alone. Dr. Spencer must participate. I am not a terrorist or a traitor.”

“I see that.”

“I want my soul back.”

“You’ve earned it.”

He stood abruptly and went into the bathroom, looked out the window to the alley behind the room. He took out his phone, punched some numbers, then turned to me. “We don’t have a lot of time now. They have found us. Company men. After White Fire, I can always spot them. They’ve probably bugged the GPS on your phone — feds can do it without a warrant. Patriot Act. They’re twice as fast as cops, and sneakier.”

Which meant the company had Clay’s phone number, too. It had no GPS to track him by, but they would be able to communicate with him, and maybe find a way to fool and manipulate him, as I had.

Clay hustled back to the desk. He swept the first flash drive from the desk drawer and pocketed it. Then yanked the power cord from the wall and slapped the computer closed. Headlights came down the alley toward us.

“Take the dolls if you want them,” he said. “I’ll be in touch.”

Through the cracked front-room curtain I saw movement in the dark, not the cars steady on the Coast Highway but human shapes coming our direction.

“I want that show with Nell, Mr. Wills. I gave you my truth and now it’s up to you.”

I heard a vehicle stop outside the bathroom window and a moment later a familiar voice hissed, “Clay! I’m here! They’re coming!”

He hoisted himself up into the window opening, wriggled his shoulders through, and fell out, one arm leading the way, the other sheltering the computer against his flank. I heard him hit, grunt, and roll. I pulled myself up in time to see Sequoia Blain heading away in her little silver pickup truck, driving not fast but assertively, just another motorist with things to do.

The knock at the front door was loud. I pulled my burner, dialed 911, hit speaker, and set it on the desk where the computer had been.

“Clay? Open up! It’s me, Don Tice!”

“One moment please.” I knew he wasn’t Tice. I’d talked to him long enough at Arcadia to remember his voice.

“I don’t have all night, Clay!”

“Hang on, Morpheus.”

“Hurry.”

“Oceanside Police Department. Your name?”

“David Wills.”

“Is this an emergency?”

“My motel room is being broken into. The Harbor Palms on PCH, room fourteen. I believe the men are armed.”

“Are you inside the room?”

“Hey, Clay! Let me in. We have to talk.”

“Yes, I’m in the room.”