“Is that why you’re fuzzy, baby? Maybe I can’t give you form because I’m not sure you’ll ever have one.”
Baby stays silent. I moan in my dream, and my eyes fly open. I wake up to the black, and then I force myself to fall back asleep.
Unreality is a better world than here.
One more day passes before he appears again. The lights blind me, and he stuns and drugs me. I fall into nothing and wake up facing Dali. The table, it seems, can be upended to a vertical position. Dali regards me, wearing his ski mask and jacket and hiking boots.
“It seems you were right, after all. They keep hunting me, number 35. They’re very tenacious.”
I don’t say anything. I’m too afraid.
“You’re becoming a liability to my operation. I’m going to need to get rid of you.”
“No, please,” I croak. My throat has almost closed in terror.
“I’m not going to perform the procedure on you, number 35.”
The relief I feel is so deep, so physical, that I almost lose control of my bladder. I’d rather die than have my baby in that state, I realize. Leo was right.
“You’re going to kill me?” I ask.
“No. I’m going to release you.”
Confusion. As with Heather Hollister, this is a deviation. I’m grateful for it, but it makes no sense. “Why?”
“I’m going to take one thing to remember you by, number 35,” he continues, ignoring my question. “It won’t prevent you from doing what you do, but it will serve as a last example to you and others: Hunt me, and I punish.”
He’d had his hands behind his back. He brings them into view now. They are gloved, and the right one holds a knife. He says nothing else. He moves to the side and cuts off the little finger of my right hand, below the first knuckle, in a single motion.
I scream instantly and do not stop. I begin to faint, no help necessary this time, and I see it again, that physical feature I had noted days ago but was unable to articulate. I realize what it is just before unconsciousness claims me again, a welcome brother.
“Someone call 911.”
“What happened to her?”
“God, did you see her face?”
“Forget her face—what happened to her finger?”
The voices rise and fall, as the drugs inside me rise and fall, as the pain in my finger rises and falls, as the ocean pounds the shore on that Hawaiian beach somewhere, rise and fall, rise and fall. The permanencies of this world carry on regardless of what happens to humanity. The sun shines, the moon glows, the world turns.
I am on concrete. My mouth is so dry it feels filled with dust. I am surrounded by strangers with cell phones and worried eyes.
I find a woman who looks like my mother, and I reach my arms out to her.
“Please.” It’s all I can manage.
She hesitates and then comes to me and pulls me close. She’s not my mother, but then again, no one is.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Bonnie bursts into the hospital room. That’s the only way to describe it. The door bursts open and she seems to fly across the room into my arms. She’s sobbing. “Mama-Smoky!”
Her whole body shakes. I draw her close to me, inhaling the scent of her hair as I press my lips to the top of her head. “I’m okay, honey. I’m okay.”
And I was, for what that was worth. Dali had dropped me nude on a sidewalk near Hollywood Boulevard. The woman who looked like my mother turned me over to the paramedics, and the ambulance screamed as I drifted in and out of consciousness. My finger needed surgery, but I refused general anesthesia because of my baby, despite of the doctor’s assurances. The work on the bone was painful, but I took it. The doctors thought I was insane, but they couldn’t budge me, and in the end, when Tommy saw that I was never going to give in, he stood with me against them.
The baby, I was assured, was still there, still alive. I hadn’t been worried, not really. I had the sense of it inside me, that faint consciousness, now silent, that I’d spoken to so often. I knew all that was delusion and dream, but still, I was convinced I would have known if my baby was gone.
Strangely, the thing that’s left me feeling most violated is not the loss of part of my finger or the few new scars on my back. It’s that Dali shaved my head before depositing me on the sidewalk at noon.
Well, aside from Leo, of course. But I’m not ready to think about that. No, sir. That’s a deep, dark ocean, waiting to suck me in and drag me down.
“I’m sorry you had to wait, baby,” I whisper to Bonnie. “I wasn’t ready to be seen.”
She nods into my chest. She understands. Of course she does. Tommy takes a seat by the bed and stares out the window at the early April sky. He’s been very, very quiet since my return. I can’t seem to get a sense of him.
The FBI and the LAPD had turned the city upside down looking for me. There were no turf wars, no complaints about overtime. Everyone pitched in because every cop knows the truth: It could always be you. Dali had been right about that, even if he’d been wrong about the response.
My own team, I’m told, barely slept. They were run by a grim AD Jones, who’d had a short fuse and yelled more than he spoke.
They found nothing. I don’t blame them for this, but it doesn’t help my nightmares. The same thought keeps coming to me when I’m alone: If Dali hadn’t let me go, I’d still be there.
In the dark.
A week after being found, I leave the hospital. It’s against doctors’ advice, but they’re not too pushy about it. I get the idea that it’s more a cover-your-ass kind of thing than actual medical concern. I was a high-profile pregnant FBI agent who’d been the victim of torture and amputation. They’d probably thought they’d hang high if something went wrong.
“You sure about this?” Tommy asks, after helping me into the car. Bonnie sits in the back, watchful and silent.
“I have to start doing something, Tommy, or I’m going to lose it. Take me home, and then take me to work.”
Leo had been the final straw. I visited him yesterday. He lay on his bed, eyes staring at nothing. He was being fed by a tube. Various automated indignities dealt with his bodily functions. I met his girlfriend. “Hi,” she said to me. “I’m Christa.”
I didn’t know what to say, but I recognized what she needed. I opened my arms and took her in.
She let me have some time by myself with Leo. I stared down at him, crushed by numbness and self-loathing and a sense of being filthy, which I couldn’t seem to get rid of. “I’m so sorry, Leo,” I said. It was all I could come up with. What was I supposed to say? I’d traded him for myself and my child, and he’d never even known it. He’d probably gone to his oblivion still thinking I was a friend to be trusted. I leaned over to kiss his forehead. It was warm and dry, like living paper. “I’m going to find him and I’m going to kill him, Leo. I promise.”
I walked out remembering the other promise too, the one Leo had dragged from me.
We get home and enter. It feels surreal. No, that’s not right. It feels unreal. The cell is still more palpable to me than this. It renews my hatred.
“Want some coffee?” Bonnie asks, watching me. I recognize this kind of behavior from the time after my assault by Sands. She’s worried that I’ll fall apart right in front of her. Who knows? Maybe I will.
“That’d be wonderful, babe. I haven’t had coffee in a month.”
Her eyes darken a bit at this reference, and I regret it immediately. She braves a smile of assent and goes off to brew the pot. Tommy stands by a window again. Staring off at something I can’t see.