Drum crossed his arms and sat back on the crate. “You know, I’m not really sure anymore, Sharon. At first, I just wanted a little amusement while I killed some time. It’d seem I’ve been unmasked as the Phobia Killer. I’m guessing the transsexual has made a miraculous recovery. Hooray for her.”
“Hooray for trans-who?”
“Don’t strain yourself, solider,” Drum said. “And don’t interrupt me again.”
She looked at him.
“Sharon? If I asked you to bite off one of your own fingers in exchange for a pills, you’d do it, wouldn’t you?” Drum inhaled her quick rush of panic stained at the endges with dieseased hope. “Interrupt me again and you’ll only be able to count to nine.”
Sharon looked at the floor. Her urine was almost completely evaporated now.
“You see,” he said. “I’m not really sure what to do at this point. There’s every reason to believe that my life as Dr. Drummond Fine is over. So, I’ve either got to run or be caught. I don’t want to run, Sharon, and I don’t want to be caught.”
“You say ‘I’ a lot.”
Drum reached behind him and brought the pill bottle into view. He didn’t need his empathic ability to know Sharon’s need. She sobbed, once, rasping in the still air of the warehouse. He considered the bottle, shook it for good measure. “I think the pinky on your left hand will do it.”
“Okay.”
It was out of her mouth like a betrayal. And now that it was said, she couldn’t take it back. She couldn’t tell him to fuck off, or to just crawl into the corner and die as so many other things had in this place. As she knew she would. Her mouth just wouldn’t make the sounds. Instead it moistened, the dry tissues swelling with the saliva, smoothing the way.
Staring at HIM, eyes burning into HIM, eyes searing tracks across HIS flesh, she put the tip of her pinky in her mouth, past her front teeth. The NEED cheered her, a chorus of angelic voices rising along her nerve endings. She could do this. She could do this, get a pill, get her head together and think of something. She could do this. She felt the pressure of her incisors and closed her eyes.
“Second knuckle, Sharon.”
Tears squeezed from the corners of her eyes as she slid the finger in another inch. She probed with the blade of her teeth and found the joint. She bore down and the pain seared. Tissue ground against bone and she groaned. The chorus grew loud with the increasing pressure. She could feel the bones begin to push apart and the first taste of hot iron ran over her tongue. Her jaw ached. Something popped. She was screaming now, shouting through nearly clenched teeth—a war cry of terrible determination. Sharon Dimke remembered the birth of her children and gave a final wrench. Her throat filled with heat and everything behind her eyes was white light.
Sharon’s head smacked the concrete floor with a crack as she passed out, yanking Drum from the feast of her roiling emotions. He reeled back on the crate and caught his balance just before going over himself. Drum got up and stood over Sharon. He reached down and plucked the top two thirds of her left pinky from her mouth. Wouldn’t want her to choke to death. He held the finger up close to his bad eye. The nail was bitten down to the quick and there was a small scar on the pad. An accident with a chopping knife or a pair of scissors? He tossed the finger over his shoulder. Maybe he’d ask her when she woke up.
Drum sat down on the floor next to Sharon but facing away from her. He gently moved her so that she was stretched taut at the end of the hand-cuffs’ range. Drum reached into his pocket and pulled out Sharon’s cigarette lighter. He grabbed her wrist and braced her subtracted, dripping hand against his side. He flicked the spark wheel once, twice, and got a high flame. Her flesh sizzled as he cauterized her wound, the smell reminding him of cheap barbecue. His stomach growled.
Sharon moaned as the pain yanked her up from the depths of unconsciousness. She broke the surface and belted a peeling screech, reflexively trying to snatch her hand away. Drum held it until he was satisfied the blood had stopped seeping. She was strong, whipping her body and thrashing against him, but he’d positioned her well. She couldn’t get enough of an angle to pull her arm away, and Drummond Fine was a calm, strong man. He flicked the lighter off and stood in one fluid motion.
Sharon collapsed into herself, cradling her arm against her chest and panting. Sweat stung her eyes and the taste of her own blood fouled her mouth. Her entire left hand was a ball of aching electricity. After a moment, she got control of her breath and without opening her eyes said, “My pill. You said you’d give me a pill.”
Drum pulled the bottle out of his pocket and looked at the clutch of pink oblongs it held. He shook his head and sighed.
“Actually, Sharon, all I did was ask you if you would bite off one of your own fingers in exchange for one of your pills. I then threatened to tell you to do so if you interrupted me again. Which you did. I never put the two together in an agreed upon statement. You made an assumption.”
She pulled herself into a sitting position and leaned against the pipe she was cuffed to. A slow certainty asserted itself into the forefront of her mind: He was never going to give her a pill. He would keep torturing her because he knew that she would talk herself into believing him every time he offered. That’s what junkies did, they made deals. The next time, when he told her to eat her own foot or something, the NEED would convince her that this time he was telling the truth and that she would get her pill, but she wouldn’t. It would go on like that until she was in pieces, and as she lay dying from blood loss, her last action would be to beg. Not for her life, but for the drug.
Sharon got it then. The fight wasn’t just with Fine, it was with herself. She sat up a little straighter and decided not to die today. Sharon Dimke looked into the eyes of the Devil and told him, “Keep your silver, you bastard.”
Drum felt her strength buffet up against him like hot wind from a huge oven. He wrinkled his nose and stood, placing the pill bottle on the crate. Without a word he turned and walked out of the warehouse. His receding footsteps crunched on gravel and then swished through what sounded like tall summer grass. Sharon didn’t start weeping until she was sure he was gone.
~~~~~~~~
Chapter 20
CHARLIE’S NAKED CHEST glistened in the streetlight streaming through his apartment window. It heaved in post-love-making exhaustion. Love making. Bullshit, that had been an honest-to-goodness fuck. Emily had been almost violent. He exhaled long and slow, getting his breathing under control, and looked over at the woman sprawled in the sheets next to him. Her breasts, slicked in sweat, the nipples dark and taut, rolled up and down.
“That was,” he said. “That was intense.”
“Yeah,” she panted. “It was.” Emily rolled over on her stomach and crossed her arms in a makeshift pillow. Charlie took in the view of her ass as it swept into her thighs and the lower rise of her calves. She smiled at him.
He frowned.
“What is it?” Emily asked.
“You’re living in that hotel off your dad’s insurance and police pension, right?”
“Yeah.”
“I get that police benefits can be pretty hefty, but this is Manhattan. That’s not going to last you all that long.”
She reached out and ran the pad of her index finger along his fine brow. She tasted the sweat on her finger. “Uh-huh.”
Charlie got up on one elbow and turned to the side. Emily ran a lascivious scan along his body. “Quit lookin’ at me that way and listen for a second.”
She matched his posture, stretching out along him. “Okay.”
“What’re your plans when the money runs out?”
“What’re you afraid of, babe?”
“Are you going to back to Wisconsin, or what?”
“Ah,” she said. “You want to know how long we have this.”
“Yes.”
Emily got quiet for a minute. “‘Til it’s over. That’s how long.”
“Ah, fuck that.” Charlie swung his legs off the sid
e of the bed and sat with his back to her. “That’s not an answer.”
“Has to be, I’m afraid.”
He looked into the room, noticed the lack of books. “Sure.”
She placed her hand flat on his back.
He turned around and grabbed her hand, maybe a little too roughly. “I’m so head over heels for you it’s sick. I mean, not really like stalker-sick or anything, but I’m just nuts for you.”
“I know, babe.”
“Like when you call me ‘babe’ like that? That kills me. One word from you can kill me.”
One thought from me could kill you, too, she thought. Jesus, where the hell did that come from?
“You get me that way, too, Charlie. I’m just saying that I don’t know what’s going to happen. It’s not like my life is making a lot of sense to me right now.” She stared out the window. “Not like it ever really has for that matter.” She sat up. “A week ago I was promising myself a bullet in the head from my daddy’s gun if I couldn’t get the other emotions out of my head. I didn’t think I’d be alive right now.”
Charlie darkened. “How’s that, uh, how’s that been working out?”
She smiled. “Fine. It’s still just a big old block of white noise. I can feel ‘em all out there, but they’re on the outside of my skull instead of inside. I was actually thinking I might try to reach out and feel someone again just to see if I could still do it.”
“Really?”
“No. Not really. I’m scared that if I do that it’ll all come crashing back in. Can’t handle that. Won’t handle that again.”
“And the other thing? The telekinoodle stuff?”
She chortled. “Telekinesis.”
“Don’t go getting all technical with me, missy. I’m a nurse.”
Emily smirked and focused.
Charlie reddened and looked into his lap. “Hey!”
“I’m getting’ good at it.”
“Hey, cut it out. That’s kind of freaking me out.”
She let him go.
“Your hand’s not shaking anymore?”
“Nope,” she lied. She’d just used her power to still it as she had in the bar. It felt like someone was running current through her hand, but that it was trapped in amber—an insect in the last still throes of life. Something was still going on there, but she wasn’t going to let Charlie see it. This was hers. She had to explore it. You couldn’t give a person wings and then tell her not to fly. “Seems to have stopped.”
“I still don’t like it.”
She focused again on the air around his cock and his member roused instantly. “Sure about that?”
“Um.”
They fell together, a tangle of emotion and skin and bone, blood and muscle. Emily came twice more, crying with the force of it and shouting his name. It was the last night they would ever spend in his bed.
~~~~~~~~
Chapter 21
HARLAN HAD A CIGARETTE in his mouth before the clinic door was even closed behind him. He’d seen the inside of countless smokers’ lungs and the broods of dark children born mad and ravenous within them, but it wasn’t enough to make him to stop. He’d kicked pharmaceutical grade morphine, he got to keep the fucking cigarettes. He bent into a warm breeze (trash from the alley across the street, a businessman’s expensive cologne as he clocked by on expensive shoes, asphalt shedding the day’s heat) and put flame to the cancer stick. He pulled in a deep drag and started walking toward his apartment.
During the beginning of his recovery Harlan learned that habit was safety. He replaced one bad habit with another not-quite-as-bad habit and surrounded his rickety life in an exoskeleton of repetition. You couldn’t screw up if your schedule was ironclad, but you had to fill that schedule with something you loved. By the time Harlan was three weeks out from under the dope he realized the addiction had eaten everything he’d ever loved except books. They were both forms of escape, one just killed you.
He created a schedule of reading and dove in with the obsession of, well, an addict. He’d been sucking up poets of the 19th Century for the past two weeks and tonight was Edgar Allan Poe. He was jazzed. The Bells was the only poem he’d ever memorized as a kid that still stuck with him. Something about Edgar’s ability to weave dream feelings with the lockstep of regimented verse and rhyme resonated in his head like nothing else from the period. Dickinson was good at that, too, but all her shit could be sung to The Yellow Rose of Texas and that made him nuts. Poe had also had a bit of a dependency on the milk of the poppy. Harlan found he could sympathize a bit more easily with a fellow junkie than with a shut-in.
He muttered to himself between puffs as he rolled down the street.
“Hear the tolling of the bells-
Iron Bells!
What a world of solemn thought their monody compels!
In the silence of the night,
How we shiver with affright
At the melancholy menace of their tone!
For every sound that floats
From the rust within their throats
Is a groan.”
He caught up to the businessman with the expensive cologne and strolled on by, muttering the poem and puffing smoke like a choo-choo. Business-Boy’s right eyebrow rose at the lyrics. Fucking crazies were everywhere. Thank God the Republicans were still in office.
“And the people–ah, the people-
They that dwell up in the steeple,
All Alone.”
A young woman, wide hips in tight pinstriped pants, clumped along next to a young man in a sleeveless t-shirt lisping away on a cell phone. “No! No, Heather. I thought we were friends, too, but since you felt it necessary to…”
The woman glanced at Harlan. Cute in that nerdy kinda’ way, like Harry Potter as a twenty-five year old. Donnie would probably hate him. Not his type. Too unhip. Those shoes were so totally tennis shoes? And not even like the right kind of tennis shoes? Not even close? Still though…cute.
“They are neither man nor woman-
They are neither brute nor human-
They are Ghouls.”
A flurry of dogs, all shapes and sizes and sprouting a tangle of leashes, dragged an older African American woman behind them like a clutch of panting balloons in a high wind. An Irish setter shoved its nose into Harlan’s palm as they passed. It felt like a plum right out of the fridge and then it was gone. The woman’s hearing wasn’t as great as it had been, but she was pretty sure she’d caught that young man reciting verse four of The Bells. Nice to see that not all of the youngsters had forgotten the classics. Ah, Poe. Poor thing with his morbidity and weakness for opium. Good, sure, but nothing like Emily D.
A moment later, Harlan stubbed out his smoke and climbed the front steps of his apartment building. He pushed through into the foyer and squinted. The chandelier was out again. Ah, hell. Not like he wasn’t already almost blind. Climbing up to his flat would be an adventure. He hoped the kids from 1B hadn’t left their Tonka Trucks on the stairs again. He made it up on faith and touch, but it was pitch dark at the top of the landing. He fumbled out his keys and probed the air, listening for the scrape of metal as they found the lock. They pushed into something soft instead. The hell? Harlan dug his lighter out and flicked the wheel.
* * *
LONG HOURS PASSED before she heard him coming back. The sun had fallen and the grace of the cool night had flowed into the warehouse. His approach was different, laden with a low scraping. The sound reached under her chin and lifted Sharon from a delirium of withdrawal, dehydration and exhaustion. Her eyes cleared as he wrestled a large sack through the door. It glided along the concrete floor as Fine dragged it up to their little tableaux of hostage, crate and pills. He wore a new shirt and slacks and an absurd Mets baseball cap, but was soaked in sweat. Fine dropped the end of the sack in front of Sharon with a grunt and plopped down on the crate.
She managed a smile and croaked, “Have I been a good girl this year, Santa?”
Fine wrinkled
his nose again, like he was smelling something even fouler than himself or this place, and bent to the long sack. It was almost as big as a sleeping bag. Sharon squinted in the low light and recognized an insignia on the side: United States Postal Service. “Stealing mail’s a felony,” she said. “I’m going to have to ask you to come with me, sir.” Fine ignored her and unzipped about a foot of the seam that ran from the top along the full length of the bag. He reached in and pulled out three large bottles of water.
Sharon ran a dead tongue over dry lips. Her thirst for water was almost as bad as her thirst for pills. Would this be his next torture device? But no, he unscrewed one of the bottles and pushed it to her with the toe of his shoe. Sharon grabbed it, but was careful not to drink more than a quarter and that in small, almost masochistic sips. Too fast and she would hurl it all back up anyway. Besides, she might need this to last a while. The difference she felt in her body was instant and amazing. The water, with no calories or nutritional content, seemed to fill her with energy and light. God, she could imagine what a cheeseburger would do…or a pill.
Fine watched her drink, her throat moving up and down. He wondered for a moment if she could still taste her own blood.
A low moan drifted from the mail bag like gas from a corpse.
Sharon’s eyes grew into plates.
“You seemed lonely, officer, so I brought you a friend.” Fine unzipped the rest of the bag and pushed it aside from the face of a gaunt man, his mouth sealed with electrical tape. The eyes behind his heavy tortoise shell glasses rolled just below flickering lids, not yet fully conscious.
“Sharon meet Harlan. Harlan meet Sharon. You’re going to die together.”
“That the mailman?” she grunted.
“Radiological technologist actually,” Drum said and pulled a manila folder out of the mailbag. It was moist with Harlan’s sweat. “He took some pictures for me. Through me.” Drum tossed the folder to her and it half-spilled a couple of glossy print outs.
Sharon picked up a head shot and glanced at the full body view on the floor. The ghost of her missing pinky was throbbing like a motherfucker but she wasn’t about to let him see that. “Looks like an MRI.”