– WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, ROMEO AND JULIET, III, V
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
GABRIEL OPENED HIS EYES. For a few moments, he had no awareness of where he was. There were unfamiliar sounds, and he was surrounded by too much white. This was not home: home was reds and purples and blacks, like the interior of a body, a cocoon of blood and muscle and tendon. Now, that protection had been stripped away, leaving his consciousness vulnerable and isolated in this strange sterile environment.
His responses were so sluggish that it took him time to recognize that he was in pain. It was dull, and it seemed to have no single locus, but it was there. His mouth was very dry. He tried to move his tongue, but it was stuck to his palate. Slowly, he formed spittle to release it, then licked his lips. He could not move his head more than an inch to the right or the left, not at first, and, anyway, it hurt him to do so. Instead, he worked on his arms, his hands, his fingers, his toes. As he did so, he tried to remember how he had come to be here. He had almost no recollection of anything that had happened after he had left Louis in the bar.
No, wait, there was something: a stumble, an old man’s fear of falling, then a burning, like hot coals inserted deep into the core of his being. And sounds, faint but still audible, like the popping of distant balloons. Gunshots.
There were stinging sensations in the back of his left hand and in the crook of his right arm. He saw the drip needle in the soft skin on the right, then took in the green plastic connector at the top of the second needle that had been inserted into a vein in the back of his hand. He thought that he might have vague memories of waking before now, of lights shining in his eyes, of nurses and doctors bustling around him. In the interim, he had dreamed, or perhaps it had all been a dream.
Like most men, Gabriel had heard the myth that one’s life flashed before one’s eyes in the moments before death. In reality, as he had felt the cold rasp of death’s scythe cutting through the air close by his face, its chill in stark contrast to the burning that had followed the impact of the bullets, he had experienced no such visions. Now, as he pieced together what had occurred, he recalled only a vague sense of surprise, as though he had bumped into a stranger on a street and, looking into his face to apologize, had recognized an old acquaintance, his arrival long anticipated.
No, the events of his life had come to him only later as he lay in a drug-induced stupor on the hospital bed, the narcotics causing the real and the imagined to mingle and interweave, so that he saw his now-departed wife surrounded by the children they had never had, an imaginary existence the absence of which brought no sense of regret. He saw young men and women dispatched to end the lives of others, but in his dreams only the dead returned, and they spoke no words of blame, for he felt no guilt at what he had done. For the most part, he had rescued them from lives that might otherwise have finished in prisons or poor men’s bars. Some of them had come to violent ends through Gabriel’s intervention, but that ending had been written for them long before they met him. He had merely altered the place of their termination, and the duration and fulfillment of the life that preceded it. They were his Reapers, his laborers in the field, and he had equipped them to the best of his abilities for the tasks that lay before them.
Only one walked in Gabriel’s dreams as he did in life, and that was Louis. Gabriel had never quite understood the depth of his affection for this troubled man. His dream gave him an answer of sorts.
It was, he thought, because Louis had once been so like himself.
Gabriel heard a chair shift in the corner of the room. He opened his eyes a little wider. Carefully, he turned his head in the direction of the sound, and was pleased to find that he had more movement than before, even if the discomfort that it caused was still great. There was a shape against the window, a disturbance in the symmetry of the horizontal bars of the half-closed blinds. The shape grew larger as the man rose from his chair and approached the bed, and Gabriel recognized him as he drew closer.
“You’re a difficult man to kill,” said Milton.
Gabriel tried to speak, but his mouth and throat were still too dry. He gestured at the jug of water by his bedside, and winced at the pain the movement brought. It was that damned needle in the back of his hand. He could feel it in the vein. Gabriel had been hospitalized twice in the previous ten years: once for the removal of a benign tumor, the second time for a hairline fracture of his right femur, and on both occasions he had been strangely resentful of the connector in his hand. Odd, he thought: the injuries that have brought me to this place are more serious and painful than a thin strip of metal inserted into a blood vessel, and yet it is this upon which I choose to focus. It is because it is small, a nuisance rather than a trauma. It is understandable. Its purpose is known to me. And today, at this moment, it represents the first step in coming to terms with what has happened.
Milton poured a glass of water for him, then held it to Gabriel’s mouth so that he could sip from it, supporting the old man’s head gently with his right hand as he did so. It was a curiously intimate, tender gesture, yet Gabriel was resentful of it. Before, they had been equals, but they would never be so again, not after Milton had seen him reduced to this, not after he had touched his head in that way. Even though there was kindness in the action, Milton could not have been unaware of what it meant to Gabriel and his dignity, his sense of his own place in the complex universe that he inhabited. A little of the liquid dribbled down Gabriel’s chin, and Milton wiped it for him with a tissue, compounding Gabriel’s anger and embarrassment, but he did not show his true feelings, for that would be to surrender entirely to them and humiliate himself still further. Instead, he croaked a thank you and let his head sink back onto the pillows.
“What happened to me?” he asked, the words little more than a whisper.
“You were shot. Three bullets. One missed your heart by about an inch, another nicked your right lung. The third shattered your collarbone. I believe the appropriate thing to say in these situations is that you’re lucky to be alive. Not for the first time, I might add.”
He lowered his head slightly, as though to hide the expression upon his face, but Gabriel’s eyes had briefly closed and he missed the gesture.
“How long?” asked Gabriel.
“Two days, or a little more. They seem to think you’re some kind of medical marvel; that, or God was watching over you.”
The ghost of a smile formed on Gabriel’s lips. “Except God does not believe in men like us,” he said, and was pleased to see a frown appear on Milton’s face. “Why”-he paused to draw a breath-“are you here?”
“Can’t one old friend visit another?”
“We’re not friends.”
“We are as close to friends as either of us have,” said Milton, and Gabriel inclined his head slightly in reluctant agreement. “I’ve been watching over you,” continued Milton. He gestured toward the camera in the corner.
“You’re a little late.”
“We were concerned that someone might try to finish the job.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“It doesn’t matter what you believe.”
“And are you my only visitor?”
“No. There was another.”
“Who?”
“Your favorite.”
Gabriel smiled again.
“He believes this was linked to the earlier attacks,” said Milton. “He’s going after Leehagen.”
The smile faded as Gabriel regarded Milton carefully.
“Why should Leehagen interest you?”
“I never claimed that he did,” said Milton, as he waited to be questioned further. He thought that he saw something flit across Gabriel’s features, a vague awareness of hidden knowledge. Milton leaned in closer to him. “But I have some information for you. You asked me to find out what I could about Leehagen and Hoyle; most of it I suspect you already know. There was an anomaly, though, for want of a better word.”