Stopping beside a small metal rack that held jelly, peanut butter, mustard, crackers, and bread, Samael asked, “Is Wonder Bread considered a snack?”
She laughed politely. “Oh, anything you can eat is. Just not the Heet or the oil or antifreeze, stuff like that.”
He nodded and lifted the loaf of white bread, surprised at how light and limp it was. The fluorescent lights crazed across the package. He moved to the bank of refrigerators and gazed at the clean, orderly rows of juice and soft drinks. “What’s good?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“The drinks. What’s good?”
“I never had anyone ask. I like diet anything, but mostly Diet Dr Pepper.”
He nodded and opened the case, pulling out four cans. They felt good against his bandaged arm, the cold seeping through. “What about meat?”
“What about it?”
“What’s good?”
“I’ll give you a deal on these hot dogs,” she pointed to three wieners rolling greasily on sets of aluminum cylinders. “All three for a buck.”
“All right.”
She took a pair of tongs, fished some buns from a steamer, and began putting the hot dogs into them.
“Mustard, ketchup, relish, onions?”
“Everything,” Samael said distractedly. He pulled a few plastic-wrapped jerky sticks from a canister on the counter.
The woman was wrapping the dogs in paper and sliding them into a white sack. “Any cigs? Any booze?”
Samael had to think on that a bit. “Yes. Cigs and booze.”
“What kind?”
“What’s good?”
She looked at him wonderingly. “You sure are new.”
“Yes.”
“Most of the guys smoke Marlboros. Ted smokes them without filters. You look more like a filtered Camel man. And how about a fifth of light rum. Everybody likes light rum.”
“Yeah.”
She retrieved the items and bagged them. “Anything else? A paper? There’s a whole story about that ‘Son of Sam’ wacko from Wisconsin. They say the Cheeseheads lost him and think he’s come down here.”
“A paper sounds good.”
“I’ll give you the Sun Times. It’s a little more interesting, if you know what I mean. Any gas?”
“No gas.”
She punched the items in and told him the total. He gave her the crumpled fifty he’d gotten from Blake Gaines – the first money he’d ever earned.
“Oh, I almost forgot. Do you have any first aid stuff?
Bandages? Tape? Alcohol?”
“We’ve got Band-Aids and some medications and stuff. No alcohol, but you could use the rum.” She pointed toward an old wall rack. “Help yourself. I’ll rering this stuff. Are you hurt?”
“No. A friend of mine. A prisoner, really.”
“Right.” She laughed again politely. “Don’t let him get away.”
He returned the laugh. “Oh, no. You’re right about that. He won’t get away.”
TWENTY-ONE
“Hello, Officer,” said the desk clerk. He was whitehaired and beer-bellied. His unbuttoned plaid shirt had been washed so many times it was translucent. Judging by the pencil jutting up behind one ear and the BandAids crossing two adjacent fingertips, he was both the owner and handyman of the Silent Night Motel. This time Samael was ready. “Hello. I need a room.”
“A single?” the man asked. His eyes were shaped like inverted mushrooms behind his thick bifocals.
“A double.”
“Your wife?”
“A prisoner – convict. I’m extraditing him.”
A titanium sheen stole across the man’s gaze. “No handcuffs on the headboard. It’ll scar if it holds, and more likely just break loose.”
“No. No handcuffs on the headboard.”
His gaze withdrew as if he were deciding something. Samael blurted, “That no-handcuffs on the headboard rule – is that just for cops?”
“Hm?” the man said, distracted. “No. For anybody.”
He pulled out the motel register. “Sign here. How many nights?”
“One, for now.”
“Pay for two – security deposit.”
Signing John Michaels, Samael nodded, “How much?”
“Thirty-eight fifty.”
Samael handed over two twenties from the priest’s wallet.
The desk clerk clapped a key down on the counter, took the bills, and made change from a shallow wooden drawer that held a fat, dangling combination lock.
“Around the corner, the room on the end. You’ll be away from the others. I’ll lock up at eleven. Don’t expect me to open for anything until eight tomorrow.”
Nodding one last time, Samael walked from the small office into the dark night. He’d left the priest’s minivan running. His shoes crackled on the gravel. He looked within the van. The priest lay sleeping beneath a drycleaned vestment. Samael climbed in and pulled the van around to the room on the end.
The motel was a long, single-story building, the width of a trailer home. Its clapboards were feathered with loose paint. Its windows hung with gold-beaded curtains that had been new when Kennedy was killed. On the corner, starlings nested inside a broken security light.
Samael parked. He propped open the screen door, unlocked the wooden door, and nudged its moisture-swollen base with his foot. Cracked veneer made a chittering sound as the door scraped in. He flicked the light on. It shone on six-inch-by-six-inch avocado-colored tiles. The room had two single beds, side by side, a few landscape prints on the walls, and a bathroom with a plastic shower stall and matching avocado stool and lav. Samael nodded and returned to the minivan. To the rear of the building stood a scraggly line of elms, which seeped light from a superlit auto dealership behind them. To the front of the building was a wall of whitewashed decorative block, screening the place from the six-lane anonymity of the road.
Samael opened the passenger door, stooped, and lifted the cold, quietly breathing form of the priest. He carried the man like a bride across the threshold, beneath the bald light bulb at the center of the ceiling, and to the far bed, the one near the bathroom. He retrieved his groceries and then closed and locked the van, the screen, the wooden door, and the windows. He drew the drapes.
The priest looked small and boyish in sleep. His bloodstained hands curled in his belly, and his legs were drawn up. Samael pulled the dry-cleaned frock from the man and hung it on a curtain rod. Then, ever so carefully, he began shucking the man’s blood-stiffened jacket from his arms and shoulders. The fabric resisted. Some of it was scabbed to the gunshot wound. Samael took out the priest’s keys and the small penknife that hung on the ring with them. He cautiously cut at the jacket, working his way from knuckles to shoulder, and from shoulder to lapel. He did the same on the other side, and then cut away the man’s shirt. There was much blood, and something else, a white bubbly discharge. As Samael pulled the last strips of cloth away, he saw how large the wound was – a hole the size of a nickel. The bullet had entered just below the rib cage on his left side and cut through skin, fat, and a thin muscular wall where most of the blood seemed to have come from. Beneath the muscle was a dark cavity in which was something that looked like wet mushrooms. A septic smell came up out of the seeping darkness.
Samael stood back from the bed. The penknife quivered in his bloody hand. How like those other scenes this is, he thought, me and bare, dying flesh, a gun, and a knife.
He turned to the grocery sack. Its thin white plastic glowed with the reds and greens and grays within it. His sanguine hands darted in, clasping rolls of gauze, a bag of cotton balls, and the fifth of Mr Boston rum. Samael set his provisions down on a small side table made of two-by-fours.
There was red wicking into the sheet beneath the priest. Samael gently rolled the man to one side and looked at his back. The exit wound was wide, a funnel of flesh above the left hip. There. That would be the place to start.
Tearing open the bag of cotton balls, Samael grabbed a bundle in one hand. He held the rum bottle between his knees and opened it. His fingers left streaks of brownish red on the cap. He wadded the cotton around the bottle’s mouth and up-ended it. Withdrawing the dripping mass, he took a stinging swallow, set the bottle down, braced the shoulder of the priest, and applied the alcohol to the red funnel of muscle.