Stephen King - Duma Key

I shook my head.

“‘Corn in the field, deal soon sealed.’ I remember it perfectly! Then I walked away. Except I was almost skipping. Walking was too slow for Wireman. I pulled two all-nighters. The third night, the security guard escorted me, protesting, from the premises. I informed him that a rigid penis has a million capillaries but not one scruple. I also told him he was a dandy in aspic, and that his father hated him.” Wireman brooded down at his folder briefly. “The thing about his father got to him, I think. Actually I know it did.” He tapped his scarred temple. “Weird radio, amigo . Weird radio.

“The next day I was called in to see Jack Fineham, the grand high rajah of our kingdom. I was ordered to take a leave of absence. Not asked, ordered. Jack opined that I’d come back too soon after ‘my unfortunate family reversals.’ I told him that was silly, I’d had no family reversals. ‘Say only that my wife and child et a rotten apple,’ I told him. ‘Say that, thou white-haired syndic, for it did be mortal full of bugs.’ That was when the roaches started to come out of his eyes and nose. And a couple from under his tongue, spilling white scum down his chin when they crawled over his lower lip.

“I started to scream. And I went for him. If not for the panic button on his desk — I didn’t even know the paranoid old geezer had one — I might have killed him. Also, he could run surprisingly fast. I mean he sped around that office, Edgar. Must have been all those years of tennis and golf.” He mulled this for a moment. “Still, I had both madness and youth on my side. I had laid hands on him by the time the posse burst in. It took half a dozen lawyers to haul me off him, and I tore his Paul Stuart suit-coat in half. Straight down the back.” He shook his head slowly back and forth. “You should have heard that hijo de puta holler. And you should have heard me . The maddest shit you can imagine, including accusations — shouted at the top of my lungs — about his preference for ladies’ underwear. And like the thing about the security guard’s father, I think that may well have been true. Funny, no? And, crazy or not, valued legal mind or not, that was the end of my career at Findum, Fuckum, and Forgettum.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“ De nada, all for the best,” he said in a businesslike tone. “As the lawyers were wrestling me out of his office — which was trashed — I pitched a fit. The grandest of grand mals . If there hadn’t been a legal aide handy with some medical training, I might have died right there. As it was, I was out cold for three days. And hey, I needed the sleep. So now…”

He opened the folder and handed me three X-rays. They weren’t as good as the cortical slices produced by an MRI, but I had an informed layman’s understanding of what I was looking at, thanks to my own experience.

“There it is, Edgar, a thing many claim does not exist: the brain of a lawyer. Have any pictures like these yourself?”

“Let’s put it this way: if I’d wanted to fill a scrapbook…”

He grinned. “But who’d want a scrapbook of shots like these. Do you see the slug?”

“Yes. You must have been holding the gun…” I held up my hand, tilting the finger at a pretty severe downward angle.

“That’s about right. And it had to’ve been a partial misfire. There was enough bang to drive it through my skull-case and deflect the bullet downward at an even steeper angle. It burrowed into my brain and came to rest. But before it did, it created a kind of… I don’t know…”

“Bow-wave?”

His eyes lit up. “Exactly! Only the texture of brain-matter is more like calves’ liver than water.”

“Euuuu. Nice.”

“I know. Wireman can be eloquent, he admits it. The slug created a downward bow-wave that caused edema and pressure on the optic chiasm. That’s the brain’s visual switching-point. Are you getting the richness of this? I shot myself in the temple and not only did I end up still alive, I ended up with the bullet causing problems in the equipment located back here .” He tapped the ridge of bone above his right ear. “And the problems are getting worse because the slug’s moving. It’s at least a quarter-inch deeper in than two years ago. Probably more. I didn’t need Hadlock or Principe to give me that information; I can see it in these pictures for myself.”

“So let them operate on you, Wireman, and take it out. Jack and I will make sure Elizabeth’s okay until you’re back on your…” He was shaking his head. “No? Why no?”

“It’s too deep for surgery, amigo. That’s why I didn’t let them admit me. Did you think it was because I’ve got a Marlboro Man complex? No way. My days of wanting to be dead are over. I still miss my wife and my daughter, but now I’ve got Miss Eastlake to take care of, and I’ve come to love the Key. And there’s you, Edgar. I want to know how your story comes out. Do I regret what I did? Sometimes sí, sometimes no . When it’s sí, I remind myself I wasn’t the same man then that I am now, and that I have to cut the old me some slack. That man was so hurt and lost he really wasn’t responsible. This is my other life, and I try to look at my problems in it as… well… birth defects.”

“Wireman, that’s bizarre.”

“Is it? Think of your own situation.”

I thought of my situation. I was a man who had choked his own wife and then forgot about it. A man who now slept with a doll in the other half of the bed. I decided to keep my opinions to myself.

“Dr. Principe only wants to admit me because I’m an interesting case.”

“You don’t know that.”

“But I do !” Wireman spoke with suppressed passion. “I’ve met at least four Principes since I did this to myself. They’re terrifyingly similar: brilliant but disassociative, incapable of empathy, really only one or two doors down from the sociopaths John D. MacDonald used to write about. Principe can’t operate on me any more than he could on a patient who presents with a malignant tumor in that same location. With a tumor they could at least try radiation. A lead slug isn’t amenable to that. Principe knows it, but he’s fascinated. And sees nothing wrong with giving me a little false hope if it’ll get me in a hospital bed where he can ask me if it hurts when he does… this . And later, when I’m dead, perhaps there’d be a paper in it for him. He can go to Cancún and drink wine coolers on the beach.”

“That’s harsh.”

“Ain’t in the same league as those Principe eyes — those are harsh. I get one look at em and want to run the other way while I still can. Which is pretty much what I did.”

I shook my head and let it go. “So what’s the outlook?”

“Why don’t you get rolling? This place is starting to give me the willies. I just realized it’s where that freako grabbed the little girl.”

“I could have told you that when we drove in.”

“Probably just as well you kept it to yourself.” He yawned. “God, I’m tired.”

“It’s stress.” I looked both ways, then turned back onto the Tamiami Trail. I still couldn’t believe I was driving, but I was starting to like it.

“The outlook is not exactly rosy. I’m taking enough Doxepin and Zonegran now to choke a horse — those’re anti-seizure drugs, and they’ve been working pretty well, but I knew I was in trouble that night we had dinner at Zoria’s. I tried to deny it, but you know what they say: denial drowned Pharaoh and Moses led the Children of Israel free.”

“Uh… I think that was the Red Sea. Are there other drugs you can take? Stronger ones?”