Devereaux waited. He almost never asked questions because the silence makes a better questioner.
“She’s in guarded condition.” He waited for a question but none came.
Devereaux sat, staring at him, not with curiosity or hostility or any emotion on his face.
“There was a lot of damage. She’s lost part of her right lung. That’s what took so long. There was no way to save all of it. When the bullet entered, it exploded. Fortunately for her life, the bullet was not dead-on. It entered below her right breast but exited sharply up, through her shoulder. The shoulder muscles were damaged; I don’t know how great the neurological damage is. While she was under, I tried to get a grasping response from her right hand but she couldn’t manage it. But this can be temporary. I mean, the partial paralysis.”
He was telling Devereaux everything, as calmly as possible. Devereaux’s silence demanded everything.
“The point is, she has a healthy heart, she has good circulation, she was undoubtedly athletic. These are the pluses. The lung. Well, you can live with one lung, let alone only losing part of one… but the trauma of losing it this way and the loss of blood before surgery count against. I’m trying to be as honest as I can.”
Devereaux knew dying was cold, was white. It was still there and he could sense it. “Is she going to die?”
“I don’t know. I hope not.”
Devereaux got up. He saw the surgeon was shorter than he was and that his eyes were very tired. “Is there anything anyone can do?”
“She’s being monitored, I’m on call… there’s nothing to do now.”
“Can I see her?”
“There’s… look, Mr. Devereaux. Her head is bandaged. From the concussion. There’s a lot of healing going on right now, tubes, a sling. I really wish you wouldn’t.”
Devereaux saw her anyway, from the door of the bright-lit room where she lay. Her eyes were closed and her beautiful red hair was capped by a crown of bandages. He saw the machines that measured the course of her life and the green lines that noted she had advanced another heartbeat.
“Oh, goddamn it,” Devereaux said. He let the door close without a sound.
5
Room 803 of the Dupont Plaza Hotel was small and marginally clean. The window overlooked the neighborhood around the Circle. It was just after one in the morning. The city looked seedy and dark at night because of the overgrowth of southern trees on small northern lots and the dangerous shadows of street lamps obscured by the trees. The usual derelicts occupied the park in the middle of Dupont Circle.
It was just after one in the morning and they had given him a bottle of vodka at the liquor store on Wisconsin in Bethesda. In the empty lobby of the hotel, he had dropped a ten-dollar bill on the counter to order a bucket of ice and a large glass brought to his room. The clerk explained that the bar was closed and there was an ice machine on each floor and that the plastic glasses in the room would have to suffice. Even money could not buy service.
Devereaux began to feel all the aches of all the wounds he had received over the years, physical and psychic. The clerk at the front desk watched him limp to the elevator bank and press the button and wait. The clerk thought the gray man must be ill and he hoped he wouldn’t die in his room on his shift.
Devereaux would not sleep. He fetched a bucket of ice from the buzzing machine in the alcove down the hall and brought it back to his room. He unwrapped a plastic glass and filled it with ice and vodka and went to the chair by the window and sat down.
For a long time, he sat at the window and stared out at the darkness, a palpable darkness under the orange glow of the street lamps. Anticrime lights, installed long before the city understood what crime it would have.
They called the capital Murder City now. Anarchy was the rule of law. The Ellipse and the Mall were the same as ever, surrounded by trees and grassy fields and federal buildings of classical splendor and open tour buses full of kids. But beyond, on the narrow neighborhood streets, drug dealers killed each other at the drop of a bag of crack. Drug dealers killed each other and those in between. The trail of drugs reached across the capital into the suburbs. Everyone, it seemed, was drunk or drugged or about to be made a victim.
The Bethesda police detective at the hospital wanted to know if Miss Macklin was into drugs. Devereaux had stared through him for a moment until he repeated his question. Devereaux had turned without a reply and started down the corridor. “I asked you a question,” the detective had said.
Devereaux had said, “I answered it.”
He closed his eyes because he was tired and because he wanted to think about what Rita had been doing, the story about the Outfit in Phoenix. He had to think of concrete things, of reasons to assassinate her, or he could not endure any of the pain. He did not know how to grieve a loss because he had burned out that process from his soul. The vodka was cold and warmed him. He would get a little drunk but he knew he would not sleep until Rita finally recovered or died. And if she died, he thought he would kill the man who hurt her and then he would kill himself quickly and not slowly, the way he was doing it with the alcohol.
He was very close to being out of control and part of him knew it.
He kept himself under a strict control all the time, but every now and then the sheet of calm was cracked and the shards of shattered glass in his soul made him a dangerous beast who does not reason but acts through instinct. Before that, though, before he killed the person who shot Rita Macklin, he would have to find him.
So he needed control.
He opened his eyes. Suddenly, he slammed his fist against the plasterboard wall. He dented it. Pain shot into his wrist. He did it again to feel the pain.
There. It was ebbing. The beast in him growled reluctantly but slunk away into his belly, away from his heart.
He put down the glass of vodka to pick up the ringing telephone.
He held the receiver next to his ear. The voice was familiar and he understood everything in that moment.
“Hello, Dev,” Henry McGee said. As close as the next room. The voice was couched in country accents and belonged to the worst man on earth.
Devereaux waited. His hand stung.
“I shot her. This morning. She gonna make it?”
Never answer.
“It wasn’t nothin’ about her, except she had this connection to you. Remember, I knew about that. So when it comes time to settlin’ scores, I figure the best is to let you hurt a little. I mean, before I kill you. I’m gonna kill you, you know.”
Devereaux said nothing.
“Now, it could of been that she was just a piece of tail for you and you might have felt passing bad about her gettin’ shot, but I sort of guessed it was more than that. You been real good stayin’ away from her but that’s all right, you’re in D.C. now so I know I scored.”
“You going to talk me to death?”
Henry chuckled. “Honest to God, I hardly ever do anything except for money unless it’s a pussy to pass the time but I figured I owed you for the two years in that shithouse in P. A. Also, for gettin’ my trail dirty with the Soviets so I can’t go back to Mother Moscow. I owed you for a lot, Dev, and now I’m paying back. Didn’t you figure I was gonna pay you what I owed you?”
“You’ve been seeing too many old gangster movies.”
Silence.
“Tell me it don’t hurt, Dev.”
Devereaux said nothing.
“I wanted to wound her, not kill her, but what the hell, you can’t always get what you want.”
Devereaux closed his eyes. Was she dead?
“But I called the hospital, they say she’s in ‘guarded’ condition. Fucking hospitals can’t talk English no more. Means they put a guard on you or what?”