It’s been an hour just since I came to sit out here, he thought finally—and then he heard a deliberate scuffing on the sidewalk behind him.
His first thought as he hopped off the hydrant and turned around was that he didn’t have his gun—but it was Elizalde and the boy who were walking toward him from the cul-de-sac at the seaward end of Twenty-first. The boy was carrying a big white bag with KFC in red on the side of it.
“You stopped for food?” Sullivan demanded, glancing around even as he stepped forward; he had meant it to sound angry, but he found that he was laughing, and he hugged Elizalde. She returned the hug at first, but then pulled away.
“Sorry,” he said, stepping back himself.
“It’s not you,” she said. “Just use your left arm.”
He clasped his left arm around her shoulders and pulled her close to himself, her head under his chin.
When they turned to walk across the street to the old apartment building, she nodded toward the white plaster hand that Sullivan was holding in his right hand. “I just don’t like strangers’ hands on me,” she said.
“I don’t like people with the wrong number of hands,” said the boy.
Sullivan looked dubiously at the boy, and then at the Kentucky Fried Chicken bag the boy was carrying, and he tried to think of some pun about finger-lickin' good; he couldn’t, and made do with saying, “Let’s get in out of the rain,” though of course it wasn’t raining.
WHEN THEY had got inside the apartment and dead-bolted the door and propped the Houdini hands against it, the boy set the bag on the painted wooden floor and said, “Has either of you two got any medical experience?”
“I’m a doctor,” said Elizalde cautiously. “A real one, an M.D.”
“Excellent.” The boy shrugged carefully out of his torn denim jacket and began stiffly pulling his filthy polo shirt off over his head.
Sullivan raised his eyebrows and glanced at Elizalde. Under the shirt, against his skin, the boy was wearing some kind of belt made of wire cables, with a glowing light at the front.
“What are your names?” came his voice from inside the shirt.
Sullivan was grinning and frowning at the same time. “Peter Sullivan, Your Honor,” he said, sitting down in the corner beside his boxes. He had opened all the windows when he had carried the things in here earlier, but the heat was still turned on full, and the air above about shoulder height was wittingly hot.
“Angelica Elizalde.”
“This kid is—I’m called Koot Hoomie Parganas.” The boy had got the shirt off, and Sullivan could see a bloodstained bandage taped over his ribs on the right side, just above the grotesque belt. “A man cut us with a knife yesterday afternoon. We treated it with high-proof rum, and it doesn’t seem to be infected, but the bleeding won’t quite stop.”
Elizalde knelt in front of him and pulled back the edge of the bandage—the boy’s mouth tightened, but he stood still.
“Well,” said Elizalde in a voice that sounded irritated, even embarrassed, “you ought to have had some stitches. Too late now, you’ll have a dueling scar. But it looks clean enough. We should use something besides liquor to prevent infection, though.”
“Well, fix it right,” Koot Hoomie said. “This is a good little fellow, my boy is, and he’s been put through a lot.”
“‘Fix it right,’” echoed Elizalde, still on her knees beside the boy. She sighed. “Fix it right.” After a pause she shot a hostile glance at Sullivan, and then said, “Peter, would you fetch me a—damn it, an unbroken egg from my grocery bag?”
Wordlessly Sullivan leaned over from where he was sitting and hooked the bag closer to himself, dug around among the herb packets and oil bottles until he found the opened carton of eggs, and lifted one out. He got to his hands and knees to hand it across to her, then sat back down.
“Thank you. Lie down on the floor, please, Kootie.”
Kootie sat down on the wooden floor and then gingerly, stretched out on his back. “Should I take off the belt?”
‘What’s it for?” asked Sullivan quietly.
‘Degaussing,” said Elizalde.
“No,” said Sullivan. “Leave it on.”
Elizalde leaned over the boy and rolled the egg gently over his stomach, around the wound and over the bandage, and in a soft voice she recited, “Sana, sana, cola de rana, tira un pedito para ahora y mañana.” She spoke the words with fastidious precision, like a society hostess picking up fouled ashtrays.
Sullivan shifted uneasily and pushed away the bullet-dented field frequency modulator so that he could lean back against the wall. “You’re sure this isn’t a job for an emergency room?”
Elizalde gave him an opaque stare. “La cura es peor que la enfermedad—the cure would be worse than the injury, he wouldn’t be safe half an hour in any kind of public hospital. Kootie is staying with us. Donde comen dos, comen tres.”
Sullivan was able to work out that that one meant something like “Three can live as cheaply as two.” He thought it was a bad idea, but he shrugged and struggled to his feet, up into the hot air layer, and walked into the open kitchen.
“There you go, Kootie,” he heard Elizalde say. “You can get up now. We’ll bury the egg outside, after the sun goes down.”
Elizalde and the boy were both standing again, and Kootie was experimentally stretching his right arm and wincing.
“Voodoo,” said the boy gruffly. “As useless as the hodgepodge of old radio parts Petey bought.”
Sullivan turned away to open the refrigerator. “Kootie,” he said, pulling a Coors Light out of the depleted twelve-pack carton, “I notice that you refer to yourself in the first person singular, the third person, and the first person plural. Is there a—” He popped the tab and took a deep sip of the beer, raising his eyebrows at, the boy over the top of the can. “—reason for that?”
“That’s beer, isn’t it?” said Kootie, pressing his side and wincing. “Which costs a dollar a can? Aren’t you going to offer any to the lady and me?”
“Angelica,” said Sullivan, “would you like a beer?”
“Just a Coke, please,” she said.
“A Coke for you too, sonny,” Sullivan told Kootie, turning back toward the refrigerator. “You’re too young for beer.”
“I’ll start to answer your question,” said Kootie sternly, “by telling you that one of us is eighty-four years old.”
Sullivan had put down his beer and taken out two cans of Coke. “Well it’s not me, and it’s not you, and I doubt if it’s Angelica. Anyway, you can’t divvy it up among people socialistically that way. You gotta accumulate the age yourself.”
Kootie slapped his bare chest and grinned at him. “I meant one of us. First person plural.”
A knock sounded at the door then, and all three of them jumped. Sullivan had dropped the cans and spun toward the door, but he looked back toward Elizalde when he heard the fast snap-clank of the .45 being chambered. An ejected bullet clicked off the wall, for she hadn’t needed to cock it, but it was ready to fire and her thumbs were out of the way of the slide.
He sidled to the window, ready to drop to the floor to give her a clear field of fire, and pushed down one slat of the Venetian blinds.
And he sighed, sagging with relief. “It’s just the landlord,” he whispered, for the window beyond the blinds was open. He wondered if Shadroe had heard the gun being chambered.
Elizalde engaged the safety before shoving the gun back into the fanny-pack holster and zipping it shut.