CHAPTER 7
NOT ANYMORE
POV: NOEMI
Lonnie comes back at one in the morning with a flashlight and a bottle of Wild Turkey.
He sets the bottle on a steel table. He props the flashlight beside it so the beam hits the ceiling and comes down white on everything, the hooks, the drain, me. Then he pulls Ambrose's stool across the tile with his foot, the way Ambrose did, and sits on it, the way Ambrose did.
He's trying on the chair.
"Boss says don't mark you," he says.
I don't answer.
"Thing is." He holds up the hand in the rag. The blood has dried brown. "Boss says a lot of things. Boss ain't here."
"He'll know."
"Who? Ambrose?" He laughs. "Ambrose don't come down to the cold room. Ambrose has people for the cold room."
"Not Ambrose."
It comes out of me before I can think about it. Quiet. Sure. The way I'd say the Creed.
Lonnie stops laughing.
"Oh, the Deacon." He leans forward, elbows on his knees.
His breath is all bourbon. "You think he's coming?
Sweetheart. You think a man like that crawls through a swamp for a nun?
He's gonna send a number, and Ambrose is gonna take the number, and then some night real soon, you're gonna be right back here in this room with me, and nobody's gonna send nothing. "
He reaches out and takes a handful of my hair.
It's come loose from its braid. He wraps it around his good hand, slowly, like a man winding a rope, and pulls my head back until I'm looking straight up into the white light.
"Say sorry for my hand," he says.
I spit in his face.
He hits me.
It isn't hard, for him. The back of his knuckles across my mouth, and my head snaps sideways, and something inside my lip gives. Copper, again. My own this time.
"That's for my hand." He's breathing hard. He reaches for the top button of my cardigan. "And this is for—"
The radio in the next room stops.
Not turned off. Stopped. Mid-song, like somebody pulled the plug out of the wall.
Lonnie's hand freezes on my button.
For a second there's nothing. Just the drip of the pipes and my own heart.
Then a sound I know from a hundred movies and have never once heard in real life. A flat, heavy cough, like a door slammed far away. Once. Twice. A man shouting a name. The shout cuts off in the middle.
Another cough.
Lonnie lets go of my hair. He's on his feet, knocking the stool over, pulling a knife from his back pocket. He looks at the door. He looks at me.
He puts the knife against my throat.
"Don't you move," he whispers.
I don't. The blade is cold. My blood is running down my chin onto his wrist, and he doesn't notice, and I think very clearly, the way you think during a car crash: that's twice now I've bled on you.
The door opens.
It doesn't burst. It doesn't slam. The handle turns, and the door swings in on its hinges, slow, and he walks through it like a man walking into his own kitchen.
I see him for the first time.
Not a shape in a doorway. Not a thumb in the dark of a sacristy. Him. All of him, in Lonnie's white flashlight beam.
The black coat is gone. His shirt is white, or it was, and the sleeves are rolled to the elbow and dark red from there to his fingertips.
No gloves. His hands are bare, and big, and the knuckles are split.
There's blood on his throat that isn't his, a spray of it, like someone flicked a paintbrush at him.
His face is harder than I thought. Older than the voice. A scar runs straight through his left eyebrow and splits it in two. His eyes are the color of the bourbon on the table, dark and warm, and there isn't anything warm in them at all.
They go to my mouth.
To the blood on my chin.
He stops walking.
He doesn't look at Lonnie. He doesn't look at the knife. He looks at my mouth for a long, long second, and something in his face goes absolutely still, the way the air goes still over the river before a hurricane.
"Back up," Lonnie says. His voice cracks. "Back the fuck up or I open her throat, I swear to God—"
"Which hand," Gideon says.
"What?"
"Which hand did you hit her with?"
Lonnie doesn't understand. I watch him not understand. His knife hand shakes against my neck.
Gideon starts walking again.
"Stop! I'll do it, I'll—"
It happens faster than I can follow. One moment he's across the room.
The next, his hand is around Lonnie's wrist, and the knife is gone from my throat, and there's a sound like a green branch breaking.
Lonnie screams. The knife is in Gideon's hand now, and he turns it around, and he puts it into Lonnie's throat under the jaw, and holds it there.
He holds it there and looks at Lonnie's face the whole time.
He doesn't say anything.
Lonnie makes a sound like the drain in the floor. Then he stops making it.
Gideon lets him go. Lonnie drops, and his head hits the tile beside my bare foot.
Somewhere outside, Ansel is shouting. "Boat! Boss, Boudreaux's on the boat, he's pulling out—"
An engine coughs and catches behind the building. It starts to pull away, whining, down the canal.
Gideon doesn't turn around.
"Let him go," he says.
"Boss—"
"Let him go."
He crouches in front of me.
He cuts the zip tie with Lonnie's knife. My wrists come free, and I can't feel my hands. He takes them in his, one at a time, and rubs them between his palms until the blood comes back and it hurts like a hundred needles, and I make a sound, and he doesn't stop.
Then he looks at my mouth again.
"Did he touch you anywhere else?"
"No."
"Look at me."
I look at him.
"Anywhere else."
"He hit me. That's all."
"That's all," he repeats. Like he's writing it down somewhere he'll read later.
He lifts his hand. Bare. Wet. I watch it come the way he let me watch it come in the sacristy.
His thumb touches the split in my lip.
It hurts. I don't pull away. He drags his thumb slowly across my lower lip, the way he did with the glove on, and it comes away red.
He puts his thumb in his mouth.
He tastes my blood with his eyes on mine, and something low in my stomach turns over, hot and sharp and ashamed, and doesn't turn back.
You're sitting in a room with a dead man.
You're looking at the man who killed him.
And what you want is to taste it back.
I don't. I sit on the crate with my bare feet on the cold tile and my blood in his mouth and I don't move at all.
"Now it's mine too," he says.
***
He puts his coat around me. Someone brought it in from outside. It swallows me to the knees and it's warm, and it smells like him, like gun oil and pepper and that dark, split-fruit sweetness I dreamed about, and I pull it closed at my throat with both hands.
He lifts me off the crate like I weigh nothing.
"I can walk."
"No, you can't."
He's right. I can't feel my feet.
He carries me out of the cold room, down the corridor, past the next room where the radio was, out through the loading dock and down the steps into the night. I don't close my eyes.
I count them.
One in the corridor, face down. Two in the radio room, one still holding a hand of cards. One at the dock door with his head at the wrong angle. One at the bottom of the steps. One by the fence, lying in the marsh grass like he fell asleep there.
Six.
Seven, with Lonnie.
I should be sick. I wait for it, the way I waited at mass this morning.
His coat is warm. His heart is going under my ear, steady and slow, like nothing tonight was difficult. And I'm not.
***
The car is black and enormous and the heat is already running. He puts me in the back and gets in beside me and pulls the door shut, and Ansel pulls out onto the gravel without being told.
For a long time, nobody says anything.
I watch the shrimp plant go small in the back window, the security light swinging.
"Mr. Price," I say.
He doesn't pretend not to understand. "He put his hand on your neck."
"For a second."
"Four."
I turn and look at him. He's looking straight ahead, at the road, his bare red hands resting on his knees.
"Four seconds," he says. "He moved his thumb."
I should be horrified.
I'm warm for the first time all night.
"You let him go," I say. "Boudreaux. Your man said he was on the boat. You could have had him."
"Yes."
"Why didn't you?"
He looks down at his hands on his knees. At the blood drying in the creases of his knuckles, some of it Lonnie's, some of it mine.
"Because you were bleeding."
I stare at him.
"Ambrose will keep," he says. "He'll go home to his house in Chalmette and pour himself a drink and wait for me to call with a number. He'll wait a long time. When I'm ready, I'll know exactly where he's sitting." He turns his head. "You were bleeding now."
Nobody has ever chosen me over anything.
Not my father over a card table. Not the Church over a roof. Not God over whatever it is God does instead of answering.
A man who hangs other men from bridges just let a boat go down a canal because my lip was split.
I look at the window so he won't see my face.
"Take me back to Saint Veronica's," I say.
"Not anymore."
"It's my home."
"It was."
"My things are there. My missal. My—" I stop.
He reaches into the inside pocket of the coat I'm wearing. His hand brushes my ribs through the wool, and I stop breathing. When he draws it out, he's holding a notebook with a cheap black cover and a broken spine.
Mine.
"Ansel's men went through your cell looking for anything that would tell us where you were," he says. "They found this under your mattress."
I can't speak.
Every page. Twenty-nine days. Then take them. I'm not going for the money.
He puts it back in the pocket of the coat, against my heart, and leaves his hand there a moment, flat, over the book and over me.
"Mother Agathe will expect me," I whisper. "The sisters—"
"The sisters will be fine. They'll get their mass and their oatmeal and a new boiler before Christmas."
"You can't know that."
He turns his head and looks at me, finally, and his eyes in the dark of the car are the eyes from the cold room, warm-colored and not warm at all.
"I bought your convent tonight," he says. "Every door in it is mine."