“Will you pay me enough to rebuild my church, sir?”
Newsome studied him. Now there were small beads of sweat just below his receding hairline. Kat would give him his pills soon, whether he asked for them or not. The pain was real enough, it wasn’t as though he were faking or anything, it was just…
“Would you agree not to ask for more? Gentleman’s agreement. We don’t need to sign anything.”
“Yes.” Rideout said it with no hesitation.
“Although if you’re able to remove the pain—expel the pain — I might well make a contribution of some size. Some considerable size. What I believe you people call a love offering.”
“That would be your business, sir. Shall we begin?”
“No time like the present. Do you want everyone to leave?”
Rideout shook his head again: left to right, right to left, back to center. “I will need assistance.”
Magicians always do, Kat thought. It’s part of the show.
Outside, the wind shrieked, rested, then shrieked again. The lights flickered. Behind the house, the generator (also state-of-the-art) burped to life, then stilled.
Rideout sat on the edge of the bed. “Mr. Jensen there, I think. He looks strong and quick.”
“He’s both,” Newsome said. “Played football in college. Running back. Hasn’t lost a step since.”
“Well… a few,” Jensen said modestly.
Rideout leaned toward Newsome. His dark, deeply socketed eyes studied the billionaire’s scarred face solemnly. “Answer a question for me, sir. What color is your pain?”
“Green,” Newsome replied. He was looking back at the preacher with fascination. “My pain is green.”
Rideout nodded: up, down, up, down, back to center. Eye-contact never lost. Kat was sure he would have nodded with exactly the same look of grave confirmation if Newsome had said his pain was blue, or as purple as the fabled Purple People-Eater. She thought, with a combination of dismay and real amusement: I could lose my temper here. I really could. It would be the most expensive tantrum of my life, but still — I could.
“And where is it?”
“Everywhere.” It was almost a moan. Melissa took a step forward, giving Jensen a look of concern. Kat saw him shake his head a little and motion her back to the doorway.
“Yes, it likes to give that impression,” Rideout said, “but it’s not so. Close your eyes, sir, and concentrate. Look for the pain. Look past the false shouts it gives — ignore the cheap ventriloquism — and locate it. You can do this. You must do it, if we’re to have any success.”
Newsome closed his eyes. For a space of ninety seconds there was no sound but the wind and the rain spattering against the windows like handfuls of fine gravel. Kat’s watch was the old-fashioned wind-up kind, a nursing school graduation present from her father many years ago, and when the wind lulled, the room was quiet enough for her to hear its self-important ticking. And something else: at the far end of the big house, elderly Tonya Andrews singing softly as she neatened up the kitchen at the end of another day: Froggy went a-courtin’ and he did ride, mmm-hm.
At last Newsome said, “It’s in my chest. High in my chest. Or at the bottom of my throat, just below the windpipe.”
“Can you see it? Concentrate!”
Vertical lines appeared on Newsome’s forehead. Scars from the skin that had been flayed open during the accident wavered through these grooves of concentration. “I see it. It’s pulsing in time to my heartbeat.” His lips pulled down in an expression of distaste. “It’s nasty.”
Rideout leaned closer. “Is it a ball? It is, isn’t it? A green ball.”
“Yes. Yes! A little green ball that breathes!”
Like the rigged-up tennis ball you undoubtedly have either up your sleeve or in that big black lunchbox of yours, Rev, she thought.
And, as if she were controlling him with her mind (instead of just deducing where this sloppy little playlet would go next), Rideout said: “Mr. Jensen, sir. There’s a lunchbox under the chair I was sitting in. Get it and open it and stand next to me. You need to do no more than that for the moment. Just—”
Kat MacDonald snapped. It was a snap she actually heard in her head. It sounded like Roger Miller snapping his fingers during the intro to ‘King of the Road’.
She stepped up beside Rideout and shouldered him aside. It was easy. He was taller, but she had been turning and lifting patients for nearly half her life, and she was stronger. “Open your eyes, Andy. Open them right now. Look at me.”
Startled, Newsome did as she said. Melissa and Jensen (now with the lunchbox in his hands) looked alarmed. One of the facts of their working lives — and Kat’s own, at least until now — was that you didn’t command the boss. The boss commanded you. You most certainly did not startle him.
But she’d had quite enough, thank you. In another twenty minutes she might be crawling after her headlights along stormy roads to the only motel in the vicinity, a place that looked like the avatar of all roach-traps, but it didn’t matter. She simply couldn’t do this any longer.
“This is bullshit, Andy,” she said. “Are you hearing me? Bullshit.”
“I think you better stop right there,” Newsome said, beginning to smile — he had several smiles, and this wasn’t one of the good ones. “If you want to keep your job, that is. There are plenty of other nurses in Vermont who specialise in pain therapy.”
She might have stopped there, but Rideout said, “Let her speak, sir.” It was the gentleness in his tone that drove her over the edge.
She leaned forward, into his space, and the words spilled out in a torrent.
“For the last sixteen months — ever since your respiratory system improved enough to allow meaningful physiotherapy — I’ve watched you lie in this goddamned expensive bed and insult your own body. It makes me sick. Do you know how lucky you are to be alive, when everyone else on that airplane was killed? What a miracle it is that your spine wasn’t severed, or your skull crushed into your brain, or your body burned — no, baked, baked like an apple — from head to toe? You would have lived four days, maybe even two weeks, in hellish agony. Instead you were thrown clear. You’re not a vegetable. You’re not a quadriplegic, although you choose to act like one. You won’t do the work. You look for some easier way. You want to pay your way out of your situation. If you died and went to Hell, the first thing you’d do is look for a tollgate.”
Jensen and Melissa were staring at her in horror. Newsome’s mouth hung open. If he had ever been talked to in such a fashion, it had been long ago. Only Rideout looked at ease. He was the one smiling now. The way a father would smile at his wayward four year old. It drove her crazy.
“You could have been walking by now. God knows I’ve tried to make you understand that, and God knows I’ve told you — over and over — the kind of work it would take to get you up out of that bed and back on your feet. Dr. Dilawar in San Francisco had the guts to tell you — he was the only one — and you rewarded him by calling him a faggot.”
“He was a faggot,” Newsome said pettishly. His scarred hands had balled themselves into fists.
“You’re in pain, yes. Of course you are. It’s manageable, though. I’ve seen it managed, not once but many times. But not by a lazy rich man who tries to substitute his sense of entitlement for the plain old hard work and tears it takes to get better. You refuse. I’ve seen that, too, and I know what always happens next. The quacks and confidence men come, the way leeches come when a man with a cut leg wades into a stagnant pond. Sometimes the quacks have magic creams. Sometimes they have magic pills. The healers come with trumped-up claims about God’s power, the way this one has. Usually the marks get partial relief. Why wouldn’t they, when half the pain is in their heads, manufactured by lazy minds that only understand it will hurt to get better?”