“The way you talk, you almost sound like you’re jealous of the dude.”
“Jealous? No. If, in all of this, he loses the woman that he loves, he’s gonna be hurting something fierce. That seems to me like way too high a price to pay for what he’s getting in return. But a guy like Shaw? My guess is whatever happens, he’ll accept that it was simply meant to be. God’s plan and all that crap.”
Gio snorted at that last. “Don’t put much truck in God’s plan, do you?”
“And you’re what —surprised? Tell me, Gio, where did God’s plan ever get you?”
“Hey, I can’t complain. I did OK for myself —good job, nice ride, a pretty lady to come home to every night.”
“Dude, do you even hear yourself? You’re on your way to hell.”
“That ain’t God’s fault. I’m man enough to take responsibility for what I done. Ain’t nobody to blame for where I ended up but me.” He squinted appraisingly at me from the passenger seat and shook his head. “But hey, you feel like the big man’s gotta take the fall for your fuck-ups, that’s between you and Him —it ain’t no business a mine.”
“No,” I said. “I chose this path. But if God’s plan hadn’t included killing the woman that I loved, maybe I wouldn’t have had to.”
A pause, long and awkward. Neither of us eager to break it.
Finally, Gio did. “The deal you cut —it was to save your wife?”
I clenched my jaw, gripped the wheel so tight it hurt. “Yeah.”
“I’m sorry, man. I didn’t know.”
“Don’t sweat it,” I said, willing the aching in my chest to cease. “You couldn’t have known.”
“Was she, like, sick or something?”
“Do we have to talk about this?” I snapped.
Gio flushed, fell silent.
I let out a breath and willed the pounding of pulse in my ears to slow. “Tuberculosis,” I said, once the knee-jerk flush of anger had subsided. “Diagnosed at nineteen, if you can believe it. Her whole life ahead of her, and then bam. For a couple years, she got off light. No sign, no symptoms. We started thinking hey, maybe we can make this work —after all, most folks with TB go their whole lives without ever getting past the latent stage. But then the coughing started, and she went downhill quick from there. This was in the days before a cure, mind you, and the two of us were poor as dirt. All we had was each other. I couldn’t afford to give her the kind of care she needed, and if we’d thrown ourselves at the mercy of the medical community, they would’ve locked her ass away —another lunger off the streets, safe to rot within the walls of some decrepit sanitarium. So I did my best to take care of her at home —but of course, it wasn’t enough. And when I got sick of watching her slowly drown in her own blood, I did what I had to do to save her life.”
When Gio spoke, his voice was small, unsure —as if he didn’t know if he should respond. “Did it work?”
The roadway blurred. I raised a hand to my eyes, and wiped away the moisture with my sleeve. “Yes.”
“Hey, that’s somethin’, right? I mean, you two got to live out your happily ever after for a while before you got collected —didn’t you?”
Happily ever after? Yeah, that’s how I thought my deal would play out, too. But it very fucking didn’t —Dumas made sure of that. See, part and parcel of my deal was, I was at his beck and call —required to do his bidding at a moment’s notice, day or night. At the time, I didn’t know he was a demon; Dumas had fashioned himself in the image of a gangster, which made me a gangster’s errand boy. For months, he pushed me and he pushed me toward a life ever more dark and violent and despicable, until finally, I pushed back and killed him. Well, I thought I did, at least —turns out bullets aren’t so effective when it comes to killing demons.
But the fact he couldn’t die doesn’t absolve me of his murder; when I pulled the trigger, I thought I was ending a human life, and that level of moral corruption doesn’t come without a price. The blood I spilled that night served to seal my deal for good. And of course the fucker played dead just long enough for me to tell Elizabeth what I’d done. She couldn’t stand the man that I’d become, and so she left —left me broken, alone, afraid —and took our unborn daughter with her.
I suppose Dumas could’ve had me collected then, as I lay reeling from the loss of the woman I traded everything to save, but he didn’t. Instead, he made sure I stuck around long enough to see Elizabeth find someone else —and to watch our daughter grow inside her, knowing full well that I’d never get to meet her, hold her, know her —before he sent the meanest, most vicious Collector hell had to offer to deliver me to my fate. By then, the pain of death seemed like a respite. Sure beat the pain of a life without Elizabeth.
Or, at least, that’s what I thought at the time.
Now, of course, I know better. Now I know that I’ll be living without Elizabeth for eternity. I’m sure the thought would bring a smile to that shit-bag demon’s face, maybe put a little spring in his step.
So happily ever after?
“Not exactly,” I replied.
20.
“Hey, Sam? I think I got something.”
We’d been at the library maybe twenty minutes. The first five of them I’d spent online searching the local paper’s database for any mention of sulfur or further instances of naked wandering. I spent the next fifteen wrestling with the fucking microfiche machine, because it turns out if you want to read more than a line or two online, you have to pay for it. Gio watched over my shoulder for a while as I cursed and scowled and occasionally rapped the obstinate piece of junk on its side in an effort to get it to work, all to no avail. When he tired of chuckling at my expense, he returned to the bank of computers on the far wall, leaving me to stew in peace.
I craned around in my seat to face him, and in so doing, knocked a spool of microfilm onto the floor, where it dutifully unraveled. I’m pretty sure I heard the old lady making bake-sale flyers at the photocopier snicker. “I swear, Gio, if you’re calling me over there to watch another video of a monkey dancing, I’m going to be pissed.”
“No monkey this time, honest. Stop fucking with that thing and come over here, would you?”
Turns out, Gio had found something: a series of hits about an old hospital nestled in a narrow box canyon a few miles outside of town. Abandoned since the Fifties, its sandstone façade was crumbling and decrepit, and it had been all but reclaimed by the desert that surrounded it. He had enough windows open to make my head hurt —I think people born into the digital age must be wired differently to process so much shit at once —but most of the hits were pretty useless: a piece from the local historical society, too dry to bother reading; a couple hikers’ websites, chock full of photographs of the hospital and the surrounding desert; a video piece from the local NBC affiliate on the perils of teen drinking that highlighted a story of a kid who, several years back, fell to his death from a window of the abandoned structure while he and a bunch of his friends were out partying in the desert. I began to wonder what the hell Gio dragged me over here for.
But as I read, there were others that were more illuminating. The minutes from a city council meeting in which the purchase of the old hospital was discussed. The results of a formal land survey —complete with map —submitted to the city by the developer, who declared his intent to build a resort upon the land in question, to take advantage of the natural sulfur springs that bubbled up from beneath the canyon floor. And the subsequent announcement on the city’s website that all construction of the resort had ceased due to lack of funds.