Chapter Thirty
The hardest part, for completely understandable reasons, was convincing Brittany to go back with her into the storage room. But it was worth it, just to see the look on the little girl’s face when the door is cracked open by a couple of the guys from Tenth Precinct and Solange is on the other side.
Both Solange and Brittany burst into tears.
Nomi gets a bit choked up, before reminding herself that she has to have her shit vaguely together in front of Felix Balter and her former colleagues—although she does get a solid hug from Irma, still in her civvies, so that kind of helps.
It also helps that Irma assures her she’s following up personally to guarantee Brittany and Solange won’t be separated by social services; Nomi was worried about that.
Brittany is checked over by the EMT, who says she’s completely fine, although he notes that she seems a little underfed, and slightly groggy with shock.
Nomi has to wave both hands to get them to check her over.
The EMT guy says the grains of gunpowder in her cheek will work out on their own, and he examines her finger, finally saying, “Well, it’s broken”—so helpful.
He doesn’t even give her drugs, just suggests she take ibuprofen, before giving her one of those stupid metal finger splints, which she immediately gives back in favor of simply taping her pinkie to her ring finger.
Altogether, the EMT’s a real dud, but Nomi feels pretty proud of herself that she didn’t give the scalpel blades in his medical kit more than a single glance.
Balter wants to question her; then after he’s looked around the warehouse, he wants to question her some more.
But the beauty of being a civilian is that she can simply say, “I’m feeling crummy now, and I want to go home,” and they can’t make her stay.
There isn’t much she has to lie about—apparently, being locked in a storage room for the duration of the incident provides you with a Get Out of Jail Free card—and she’s not doing the cleanup, thank Christ: A job of that magnitude is best left to the professionals.
About an hour after the blues arrive, Irma comes over and says, “Are you sick of being here?”
“Yeah, actually, I am.” Nomi’s feeling that postadrenaline exhaustion now, but she’s still amused by Irma’s T-shirt, which has a big Daffy Duck on it. “Can you give me a ride?”
“Have you been checked by medical?”
“Sure, for whatever that’s worth.”
“All right,” Irma says, “let me just tell them I’m taking you.”
Balter puts up some resistance, but tough shit. The only thing Nomi makes sure to do before she leaves is to wave at Solange and Brittany in the back of the EMT van. Solange gives her a thumbs-up and a mouthed “Thank you,” and Nomi thinks this feeling may actually be better than cutting.
They walk through the drizzling rain to Irma’s shitbox blue Honda Civic, parked a half block away because of all the unit response vehicles, and Nomi pours herself into the front passenger seat. She finally feels like she can exhale. “I really appreciate this, Irm.”
“No problem.” Irma buckles her seat belt.
“Oh, and I heard back about Jeremy Axedale. Gaffney and the other response unit broke into the Perry Street apartment—apparently, the kid was pretty strung out, but he wasn’t hurt.
They put him in an ambulance with a couple uniforms, and his mom was going to meet them at the hospital. ”
“Glad to hear that story had a happy ending.” But Nomi doesn’t actually care much, now Brittany’s safety is assured. It’s over.
Irma starts the car, puts on the wipers, and pulls out. “Pretty crazy scene back there.”
“Uh-huh.” Nomi has her head back on the rest.
“Never seen a mess quite like it.” Irma seems determined to give her a little side-eye. “Nomes, can you level with me? You’re not going rogue on me, are you? Because I know I said you should take Lamonte out if you have a chance, but that was more of a joke—”
“It wasn’t me, Irma.” Nomi can say it with total honesty because it’s pretty much the truth.
“Okay. Then good.” Irma’s face and shoulders soften with relief. She snorts and gives Nomi a grin. “I mean, I never really pegged you as the ‘carve ’em up’ type, you know?”
“Tell you the truth,” Nomi says, “I’m coming around to the idea,” and Irma guffaws.
Nomi almost falls asleep on the way back to Gansevoort, but when Irma pulls up at the tenement, she rouses enough to remember something. “Oh shit, my piece.”
“I’ll get it back to you once ballistics is done with it,” Irma says. “Babe, I’m really glad you’re okay. Please don’t go chasing after mobsters on your own anymore. You nearly gave me a heart attack.”
They hug, and Nomi takes a lot of comfort from Irma’s soft, tobacco-smelling warmth. “Thanks for the cavalry rescue. Give my love to Dez. And, you know—thank you for everything. I couldn’t have worked this one out without you.”
Irma sniffs and smiles. “I’m still your partner in all the ways that count.”
“I know you are. Get out of here.”
Nomi makes a tired wave as Irma drives away. But as soon as the Civic is out of sight, she walks into the tenement, climbs—painfully—upstairs to Simon’s apartment and uses his keys, grabs the things she needs from his place before returning to the lobby area and knocking on Sofia Rosa’s door.
Her landlady answers, wiping her hands on her apron. “No-mee! You are looking very tired today, yes? Do you want coffee?”
“No coffee today,” Nomi says. “But Sofia Rosa, do you still have all the stuff that Simon used to sew me up? Can I maybe borrow it?”
Her landlady puts everything in a big Ziploc bag, and Nomi stuffs it into her jacket pocket before going back outside and limping toward the Riverview.
On the way, a few people ask if she’s okay; Jamie from Florent gives her half a plain bagel.
The drizzle is clearing, a minor miracle.
Nomi chews on the bagel, finishes it as she finally arrives at the hotel on Jane Street.
Cherie is in the lobby and appears to have been waiting for her. “He’s through the ballroom door, in the side bathroom. I already got him a soda, and some hot water and clean towels. He was real fussy about the ‘clean’ part, even though he looks like he’s about to keel over. I said, ‘Sweetie—’”
“Thanks, Cherie, let me go check.”
In the side bathroom—which is much bigger and nicer than the one Nomi used last Friday, with a lot of white tile—Simon is sitting on the countertop, bracing his booted foot against one of the pipes along the wall.
A cigarette, almost ash down to the butt, is eddying smoke from its spot in the corner of his mouth.
He’s shirtless, using a damp towel to wipe blood off his neck and chest; as she arrives, he presses the towel firmly against the shallow slash wound that extends from just under his breastbone over to the ribs on his left.
“That’s not going to stop bleeding until it’s stitched up,” Nomi pronounces. She’s talking from experience.
“Or glued,” Simon agrees. He tosses the rest of the cigarette into the nearest sink, sighs deeply. “You made it.”
“Holy shit, look at you,” Nomi says.
He smiles, wan, clearly exhausted, his eyes ringed by brown circles. Beaten up, but still alive. “Hey—I can drive.”
“Congratulations.” Nomi unpacks her supplies onto the countertop. “This stuff is from Sofia Rosa. I’m going to lay it out here on a towel, and you can tell me what to do.”
Simon looks at her hands, which are still shaking slightly, the right one taped up on one side. “Actually, I think what I’d like you to do is assist.”
“Rude. Okay, fine—let me wash up.” She remembers, scrounges in another pocket. “Oh, and here, I brought you a clean shirt and some Vicodin.”
“Thank you,” he says fervently, and he puts the shirt aside, swallows two pills with a slug from a bottle of Mountain Dew.
He uses the numbing cream again, this time on himself, and sends her out to the drugstore on Jane between Eighth Avenue and Hudson to look for some larger dressings.
But she suspects it’s to get her out of the way while he starts the stitching, and sure enough, by the time she returns, he’s already completed six of the stitches he’ll need.
Nomi walks into the bathroom again just as he’s drawing the needle through for the next one, the top edge of skin stretched and gaping red. She turns her face away, cheeks hot like she’s walked in while he’s getting dressed. “Jesus, Simon.”
“You’re right about this numbing cream. It’s not really adequate.” Sweat is beaded on his forehead. “Talk to me? Distract me.”
Nomi draws over a plastic chair that someone stacked in the corner of the bathroom, takes a seat.
“Okay, so Balter and the guys from Tenth think Lamonte and his men were attacked by a rival mob group. The Westies and the Gambino family both operate in Chelsea and Hell’s Kitchen, and there’s been a lot of shifting alliances. People get killed—it happens.”
“Wow.” He ties off a stitch.
“Yeah.” Her voice echoes strangely in here, with all the tile.
She examines her own face in the bathroom mirror, winces at the streak of gunpowder on her cheek: It looks like bad club makeup.
“Gaffney said, with the amount of damage inflicted on the four bodies, it was probably the work of a few guys. I mean, speaking personally, I heard a couple different voices when I was locked in the storage room with Brittany, but it was hard to clearly identify anyone . . .”
“Uh-huh.” Simon rinses blood off his fingers in a bowl of boiled water, goes back to work. “Did Brittany get home to her mother?”
“Yeah,” Nomi says softly. “That was really good.”
“So it was worth it.”
He looks like he’s in a considerable amount of pain, although his pupils are shrinking, which means the Vicodin’s kicking in.
Nomi wonders how it works, with head-injury amnesia.
Does Simon’s persona from the last five years just float away or go to sleep when his serial-killer side comes out?
Is it a Jekyll-and-Hyde thing? Is there a trick she can employ to call him back, like ringing a bell at the end of a hypnosis session?
Or maybe it’s nothing like that. Maybe they’re a gestalt now, the two halves of him finally joined up: the sociopath in him becoming ascendant whenever it’s needed, fading when the crisis is over.
But aren’t we all like that? She isn’t a stubborn-assed bitch all the time, is she? Geez, maybe she is. Whoops.
However Simon’s psychology works, it served its purpose: Brittany needed rescuing, Simon rescued her.
He even lied through his teeth to Nomi to make it happen.
She’s not thrilled about that part, but she can appreciate why he did it.
And once again, she realizes that she’s decided: She’s not going to turn him in.
She’s not going to say anything. She can’t dredge up any guilt over the murders of a bunch of mafia creeps—not after what she’s lived through today—and she knows from her own experience that sometimes there’s a chasm between justice and the law.
So if Simon is going to restrict his murderous urges to the creeps of the world, then . . .
Then maybe she’s just messed up enough to be okay with that.
She watches Simon snip the ends of another stitch: one more to go.
“Brittany remembers you. She remembers what you did—some of what you did. But while we were in the storage room together, before Balter and his guys arrived, I told her it would be best for you if we didn’t mention anything about you to anyone.
She’s her mother’s daughter, she gets it. ”
“I mean, she’s just a kid. I guess we’ll see if she’s able to stay quiet.” He glances over. “One of these days, I’ll be caught on the radar, though.”
“And that will be a problem, one of these days,” Nomi says. “But not today.”
His hands have a fine tremor as he ties off the final stitch, and he blows out air once it’s all done.
Nomi helps him to get clean and to apply Neosporin and dressings to the stitched cut, plus his torture injuries and the slash on his left inner forearm.
She does, after all, have some personal experience with wound treatment.
Getting Simon’s arms through the sleeves of his black button-up is complicated, but then he can fasten the front himself.
When he slides off the countertop, he sways; Nomi steadies him at his waist, as he puts a warm hand on her shoulder.
He seems vaguely surprised that she’s comfortable enough to get this close.
“Are you still scared of me?” He drops his hand, leans on the edge of the countertop, giving her space. His blue eyes are slightly glassy, slightly wary. “You’ve seen what I am now. You didn’t lie to Lamonte—I’m a killer. It’s in my blood somehow.”
“But when I told you to stop, you did,” Nomi points out. “I don’t think you have a split personality, Simon. There’s no ‘other you’—you’re just you. And you chose to stop.”
“I only stopped when Lamonte was dead.”
“Listen, I was glad you killed Lamonte.” She feels strangely compelled to shake him out of any lingering funk.
“D’you really believe Lamonte, or any of those guys, would’ve given us a single thought after they killed us?
No. And instead, we killed them. We do the things we need to do to survive.
I mean, you know what I do. What I am. Does that revolt you? ”
“No.” His gaze is scanning over her face. “We’re both . . . creatures of appetite.”
“That’s right. And I set rules for my appetite. I exercise control over it. I’ve learned to deal with it. If I can live with myself, so can you.”
His expression goes soft. “Concentrate on being the man I want to become, huh?”
“Yes.” Nomi moves to lean beside him, takes a swig of his soda. “And, I don’t know . . . Keep busy. Work with me.”
“What?”
“Yeah—work with me.” She’s not sure why she’s suggesting this now, but it feels right.
“I mean, still do your other job, obviously. But also, hey, let me exploit some of those skills and freaky insights and whatever that you’ve got, in a way that will actually help people—like you helped Brittany.
Think about it. For the last five years, you didn’t know where all that stuff came from.
Well, now you know. Now you can harness it. ”
He bites his bottom lip. “But . . . what if the me I was starts to reemerge?”
Nomi stands to face him, caps the soda and sets it down. “Like I said, I give advice with provisos. But you want my advice? Don’t overthink it.”
“Don’t overthink it? Okay.” He looks grateful, relieved even, for this strange absolution.
“Yeah.” Nomi hands him his coat. “Now come on. Let’s get you home.”