She knew which eye wouldn’t open. Someone had worked the entire left side of his face into a bulging purple mass. The right side looked better, but only in comparison. The eye was bruised, but it probably had some leeway to open.
He looked asleep. She hoped that he was. It would make things easier for him, and Tillotson might excuse her from her task.
Yeah, right, she thought.
She made herself take the man’s hand.
His right eye flickered. The lids parted painfully. She felt a stinging behind her own eyes.
Tears. When had she cried last? She blinked several times and told herself to concentrate on the job.
His weakness wouldn’t allow him to turn his head. She leaned over to let him see her. His swollen and shredded lips moved, and something raspy happened in his throat. Diana looked around the room. On a wheeled cart sat a water bottle. A bent plastic straw stuck out of its lid. She tried to free her right hand, but he gripped it with surprising strength. Unwilling to wrestle with him, she stretched and just reached the straw with two fingers of her left hand. She rested the bottle on the bed, changed her grip, and gently inserted the straw between his lips.
She watched to make sure that he didn’t drown himself, but he lacked the strength to take that much water. She pulled the bottle away, waited for him to swallow, and gave him the straw again.
He lay still. Diana thought she had lost him to exhaustion, but then he spoke in a thread of a voice. “I knew you would come.”
She thought about saying something vague but decided to keep quiet. Her voice might spoil the illusion.
“It was worth it. I’d do it again. Whatever it takes.”
Diana thought she understood. She fought the urge to pull her hand away. She had to make sure she was right.
“I can do anything, knowing you’ll be there,” he said. “I knew you didn’t mean those things you said. I knew you would love me sooner or later.”
This time she did jerk her hand away from him. She turned and ran for the door. It opened to meet her, and Tillotson caught her before she collided with him.
“Whoa,” he said. “What happened? Did you get anything?”
She nodded and paused to calm herself.
“I got enough,” she said.
He gave her a skeptical look.
“What I wish you would do,” she said, “is go in there and lean on his chest until he stops breathing. Save the world a lot of trouble.”
In three years this was the first time she had shocked him.
“But what I think you’ll do is go through the local restraining orders and see if anybody is missing a stalker. That woman in the picture you have is getting a breather. From him. And I have a feeling it’s not going to last. And you’re probably going to end up arresting her father, or her boyfriend, or her brother, while he walks.”
Tillotson nodded toward the room. “Sounds like you know something about this kind of thing.”
“I picked up a stalker a while back. Occupational hazard. No matter what I did, he just took it as a test that he had to pass. Pass enough of them, and we would live happily ever after. The problem was, if he saw me with anybody else, it took him about a tenth of a second to go all psycho on me.”
“Is he still a problem?”
“No,” said Diana. “Not for a couple of years.”
She met Tillotson’s eyes. “Since then I have another client who gets freebies for as long as he wants them.”
“I didn’t hear that.”
She shrugged.
“Thanks for coming out,” he said.
She left him alone with his problem.
Two days later she opened the Newark Star-Ledger. She was about to skip to the Olympic news from Barcelona, when she noticed a story about a man who had died in Morristown Memorial Hospital. The man had a name now, but it meant nothing to her. The doctors suspected a blood clot resulting from injuries that he had suffered in a severe beating. They would have to conduct an autopsy.
Police were questioning a young woman and her two brothers.
She called Tillotson at his office. He was in. He sounded as if he wanted to be somewhere else.
“They’re not talking,” he said. “At all. Not many suspects are that smart.”
In other words, she thought, I can keep hoping.
“I owe you,” he said.
“Not this time.”
Bullets and Fire by Joe R. Lansdale
I had hit the little girl pretty hard, knocking her out and maybe breaking something, messing her nose up for sure. But for me, it was worth it.
I sat at the table in the bar and smelled the sour beer and watched some drunks dance in the thin blue light from behind the bar. I was sitting with Juan and Billy, and Juan said to me, “You see our reasoning. You gonna get in with us, you got to show what you got. And fighting a guy, that shows you’re some kind of tough, but hitting a girl like that…her what? Twelve or thirteen? Way you smoked her, now that shows you don’t give a damn. That you ain’t gonna back up. If we say what needs to be done, you’ll just do it. That’s the way you get in with us, bro.”
“Yeah,” Billy said, “it makes you tough to fight a guy, brave maybe. But to hit someone like that you don’t know, just someone we pick on the street and to savage her up like that? My man, that’s where the real stones is, ’cause it goes against…What is it I’m looking for here, Juan?”
“What Mommy and Daddy taught?” Juan said.
“Shit,” Billy said, “my daddy hit me so much, I thought that was how you started and ended the day.”
“Hell,” Juan said. “I don’t know. You guys want some more beers?”
I sat there and thought about what I had done. Just got out of the car when they told me, and there was this young girl on the sidewalk, a backpack on. I could still see how she looked at me. I was just going to hit her once, you know? To knock her out, a good blow behind the ear. Nothing too savage, and then I got to thinking, These guys are going to take me in, they want to see something good. I did what had to be done. I beat her up pretty good and then I took her wallet. I started to take the backpack, but I couldn’t figure on there being anything in there that I’d want. But she had a little wallet that was on a wrist strap. She ought not to have been wearing it like that, where it could be seen. Someone should have told her better.
Juan came back with some beers and a bowl of peanuts and we sat and drank some beer and ate the peanuts. I like peanuts.
I touched my shirt and felt something wet. I started to wipe it, but then realized it was sticky. The girl’s blood. I wiped it on my pants. It was dark in there and you couldn’t see much of anything.
I watched some more couples get up and start dancing to the music on the jukebox, moving around in that blue light to a Smokey Robinson tune. My dad had always liked that song, about seconding and emotion. Billy said, “You know, even being a black man myself, I don’t like it when they play that old nigger music. How about you, Tray, you like that old nigger shit?”
I did, and I didn’t lie about it. “Yeah, I like soul fine. I like it a lot.”
Billy shook his head. “I don’t know. It’s all kind of mellow and shit. I like a nigger can talk some shit, you know? Rap it out.”
“All sounds like a hammer beating on tin to me,” I said. “This stuff, it’s got some meat to it, cooked up good. Plenty of steak, not just a bunch of fucking sizzle.”
“He told you,” Juan said. “One nigger to another. He told you good.”
“Yeah, well, I guess nothing says we got to like the same stuff, but that’s all Uncle Tom jive shit to me. A little too educated, not street enough.”
I remembered what my brother Tim said to me once, “Don’t let these neighborhood losers talk you down. Education hasn’t got a color. Money, it’s all green-and education, it gets you the money. It gets you something better than a long list of stickups and stolen money. You got to have pride, brother. Real pride. Like Daddy had.”