CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE
The bell would come first.
Elijah lay still and waited, eyes closed, counting the half-breath before the almighty roar—the steel chorus of locks letting go, doors on every tier thudding open at once. The sound was a building exhaling. You felt it in your teeth.
He waited for it the way a man waits for his name in a will.
Nothing.
No roar, no shouted insults ricocheting down a corridor, no cabron, no pendejo, no puta. No hyena laugh from the cell two over. The silence had shape: a humming square of it. The light was wrong on his eyelids, too. Not fluorescent-police-station blue, but a thinner, meaner strip of frost.
He opened his eyes.
A low ceiling stared back. Painted once, painted over, painted cheap. A window at the far wall: a letter slot of daylight close to the ceiling, the view a slice of dirt and shoe sole and weeds that had survived on spite alone. Basement. He knew a basement when it breathed on him.
The air smelled of bleach and hand soap and money.
He turned his head and felt a clean, controlled pain bloom along his side. It was not the dull, angry heat he had cultivated in the jail; this had edges and a purpose. He let the pain tell him the news: here, here, not here. He lifted the sheet and inspected the work.
The crude prison sutures—their drunken railroad of catgut and hope—had been replaced.
Unpicked, cleaned, restitched. Somebody with skilled hands had done this.
The skin around the line looked quiet. Cool to the touch, as if someone had laid a coin there.
The self-induced inflammation he had courted like a lover was gone, chased off by whatever good stuff a struck-off doctor stashed under the floorboards.
He let his head fall back. For a moment, he let himself own the trinity.
I am alive.
I am getting better.
I am free.
He moved to sit and the world told him no.
It wasn't dramatic. His arms took the order, his ribs said absolutely not, and his stomach folded like bad scaffolding.
The attempt left a buzzing in his forearms and a taste in his mouth like pennies.
He swallowed it away and breathed until the room stopped tilting.
“Not yet,” he told himself. “Later.”
He made an inventory. White walls. No pictures.
One metal IV stand with its little flag of saline and a second, smaller bag with a label he couldn't read without his glasses; the drip line trembled at his pulse.
A folding chair. A plastic bin with a red lid, biohazard symbol like a cartoon threat.
A rolling cart with instruments that gleamed.
In the corner, a dorm fridge. On the fridge, a sticker advertising a car wash in a neighborhood that no longer existed.
And the window, that stingy slit. A shoe appeared, paused. Someone walking by above him, crossing his borrowed sky.
He touched the bandage again, gave himself the little shock of cold.
He had earned it. Weeks of preparation in a place that took preparation away: how to swell a wound without infection, how to redden without rotting.
Heat. Friction. Eggs. Who knew that that particular childhood blight would prove so useful?
Mysterious ways indeed.
The white-coats had done the rest. Gurney. Ambulance. Siren.
Memory came in short instalments, like cards dealt from a pack: he's in the ambulance, he's not; he's watching the EMT guy, Gus, his slab of a face through a curtain gap, he's not; he’s a bead of sweat travelling down the inside of his elbow, listening to God.
Then they were out, and Cox remembered feeling so high, so out of it, it was like watching it on a tv screen, a long way away.
One, two, three, four… the men fell like toy soldiers.
Walking Valentine through the forest, the sweat pouring off him.
The branch, hard on his cheekbone. He touched it now. Yep. Still hurt.
Her calling him an animal. Dimly, he remembered some twist of playground logic. You’re what you call me so you’re the animal.
The door sighed on its hinges. A man came in without knocking, a mask of blue dangling off one ear, like a lack of conviction. Mid-fifties, parched by cigarettes, hairline on retreat, hands immaculate, like a pianist. The kind of doctor nobody called doctor anymore.
“You’re awake,” the man observed, as if Elijah had somehow cheated him.
“Mostly,” Elijah said. His voice had gravel in it. He liked it that way. “Where am I?”
“Where you were delivered,” the man said.
English flat as a table. He set a tray on the rolling cart: a syringe, a little paper cup with two white pills, a professional indifference.
“You ruptured the work they did in the prison. I’ve repaired it.
Cooling, antibiotics, analgesia, antihistamines. You’ll rest. You’ll mend. You’ll pay.”
Elijah smiled with the part of his mouth that still knew how. “Of course.”
The man glanced at the monitor, at Elijah’s pupils, at the line in his side.
Satisfaction wrinkled him briefly and went away.
“You will not attempt to stand today,” he said, as conversational as the weather.
“Or tomorrow. Forty-eight hours, we’ll talk.
You try now, you tear it, you bleed, you die, and I lose money. Stay supine, rabbi.”
“Did the men who brought me—”
“They left,” the man said.
Elijah offered the smallest nod. The followers who had brokered this had done it with the fervor of teenagers slashing their palms to join a pact. He would have to remember to bless them. And to replace them, in time.
The man watched him swallow the pills. “I’ll be in the next room,” he said. “If you need to vomit, use the yellow bucket. I have a list of things I hate, and puke is tops.”
He left. The door sighed again. Elijah listened to it click softly into place and felt, absurdly, comforted.
He let the drug crawl into him, did not fight it. Waited for the pain to become merely boring. He catalogued what he had and what he owed.
He had breath.
He had time, provided he did not squander it out of pride.
He had a doctor whose license lived in a drawer with old photographs and a gun, who charged in cash and would tell no one anything if the sums were correct.
He owed the likes of Danny and Franko zilch.
Cheap men, human q-tips: one purpose, then dispose.
Jakes? He felt differently about the soldier.
What was it? Just the length of time he’d known him?
That was part of it. But there was something else.
The intensity of the man. The sheer lack of mercy.
He wasn’t a man, he was an instrument. All the weakness and doubt and what-iffery of the modern human male stripped back, to the justice-seeking spark of light that was trapped within.
If he had a glass right now, he’d raise it to Gunnery Sergeant Jakes. Farewell.
And Kate Valentine. What did he owe her?
Her name arrived upon him like weather changing.
A crisp front. He tasted the syllables. Val-en-tine.
The card you send. The shape you cut out of red paper.
He had seen her, really seen her, the ordinary miracle of bone and hair and stubbornness arranged into a person whom other people loved and respected and underestimated in the same breath.
She had looked at him, and had not looked away.
He owed her a conclusion.
Not yet, though. He would let the medicine work and the fever go, he would let the wound knit.
He would keep still, not because he was weak, but because stillness was a valuable tactic.
Prison had taught him that. It had given him all the right tools.
But he had more than tools: he had people, and the people he had were organized.
A truck shifted gears somewhere on the street. Footsteps dragged overhead. A woman laughed into a phone, a high, silly, child’s laugh. The world obeyed its laws.
“Elijah,” he said to the ceiling, to the window, to the God who knew His own. “Patience.”
He would walk out of here. Elijah Cox would walk out of here and into another church or shrine or just a room whose occupants believed they were special, and he would raise his hand and the men would fall quiet and listen and follow.
He would find Kate Valentine.
And he would finish it.