It was easy to get out. Just push the tyre iron into…
But her father's face appeared through a veil of fire. No. No. No. I'm not going to do it.
The pain was unspeakable. She was knotted with nausea; she was wrung out by the hands of an ice giant.
She drew her arm back slowly and aimed the tyre iron, and struck.
It struck where she'd aimed it: at the side of her dad's head. She tried not to think about what she hoped to get away with…
Her father went down, blood splattering, coursing from the head wound. But he was alive.
She heard someone laugh. Two short monosyllables.
Like, Ha ha. "I'm not stupid, my dear. Do it for real this time. Bend over him…"
There were sirens in the distance. She waited. The man who called himself Michael waited.
The sirens warbled into a lower register, and faded away.
But the sirens had given Ephram pause. Who knew for sure this man hadn't alerted anyone? Perhaps they'd be along any minute. And find a corpse, here. Messy, as always. A problem.
If he killed the girl's father, and if the father had told the cops where he was going, perhaps just before coming in…
Well. They might get a description of Ephram from the Pakistanis. But of course when he'd registered he'd given them a phony license number and they hadn't checked. So that wouldn't be of any help to anyone.
If dad here didn't turn up dead, the cops would be less inclined to search out Ephram. And they wouldn't take the man seriously. After all, he'd seen nothing – he couldn't swear his daughter was in here. Evidently he'd seen her get into the car, though. Even so… she was old enough that the police would regard her as a probable runaway. There'd been no struggle, when she was taken. Not a visible one.
He had some new plans for this girl, after all. He planned to redesign her, with reward and punishment. Instead of killing her, he could make her into a happy and carnal accomplice. For a while. He'd hate to have to give her up now just to make escape more feasible.
Ephram sighed. "I will be magnanimous, girl. Your father will live. We will move him out to his car, and then we'll be going out to our own. I'll need to get rid of the Porsche soon. Bother…"
But, really, this was quite exciting. How much better it was, without the Akishra, diverting him from his divine inspirations.
Where would they go? He wondered, bending to lift the father up, make him look like a drunk supported between Ephram and the girl.
Someplace they could fit right in, he and the girl. Someplace it wouldn't look strange for an older man to have as companion a girl her age. Someplace corrupt enough to provide camouflage.
Wasn't it obvious? Los Angeles.
Alameda
Garner was sitting at his kitchen table by the phone, pressing an ice pack to his throbbing head, waiting for a police detective to call him back. But thinking the cops were probably a waste of time.
With his free hand, he touched the bandage around his head. It felt too tight. And it partly blocked the sight in his right eye.
He tried, once more, to remember the assault. He remembered opening the door. And then, wham. That was all. Next thing he remembered was paramedics bending over him. Someone had found him in the parking lot.
The phone rang and he answered before the first ring had finished. ''Hello."
"Reverend Garner? This is Brent at Alameda General -"
Carrier sighed. He did a lot of counselling for the hospital. They knew him well in the Emergency room. He counselled recovering ODs; sometimes he comforted the AIDS patients. But just now all he wanted to do was start looking for Constance. "I'm really caught up in something now, Brent -"
"I know – I heard. But there's a girl dying here and she keeps asking for you. She's on the verge of a coma. Crack overdose. Some really massive amount. I guess her old man ripped off a dealer and they smoked all night… Girl named Berenson."
"Oh Hell." On the verge of a coma. With crack that probably meant Aleutia was dying…
He heard Aleutia's voice as soon as he stepped into the E.R. Whimpering, pleading.
Garner turned and saw her in one of the alcoves, lying on a hospital bed under heaps of ice.
He knew what the blanket of ice meant. It was a last ditch treatment to lower a soaring body temperature. A killing fever that came with crack overdose.
She was dying. And the baby…
Two nurses and a doctor worked over her. Machinery beeped softly as it monitored her vital signs. She lay there motionless, now. She'd stopped whimpering, stopped squirming.
"We're losing her again," the doctor said, his voice flat.
"Where's the obstetrician?" one of the nurses said, sounding like she was fighting hysteria.
Carrier wanted to go to Aleutia, hold her hand, try to reach her. But it was too late; she was unconscious, babbling in delirium, and he was afraid of getting in the way. He just stood there and prayed.
A slow minute later, as he stood riveted, watching, the heart monitor flatlined. The monitor made a single, empty tone, whistling into forever. A Code Blue. Her heart had stopped.
They tried CPR; they failed. They tried re-starting her heart with electrical jolts from a defibrillator. That hardly ever worked. It didn't work for Aleutia. She was gone.
"What about the caesarian?" a nurse said.
"We've lost the baby too," the surgeon said.
I prayed into a vacuum, Garner thought bitterly.
The cops. Go to the cops. Tell them about Constance. Find her.
Mouth dry, head thumping, Garner walked on wobbly legs to the exit. He just wanted to find Constance. We've lost the baby too.
"So did I," Garner said, aloud. "Lost my baby too…" He said it to no one in particular.
Or maybe he said it to God.
Los Angeles County Juvenile Detention
The visitors' room was painted white, overlit, and furnished with cheap orange plastic chairs, most of which were so bent they were a danger to sit on. There was a single decoration, a retouched photo of an autumn scene in New England. It was cemented to the wall. Some kid had scribbled on it with a ballpoint pen, drawing in a word balloon over the forest lake, which was reflective with sunset orange: Get me out of here! I'm drowning in this orange shit!
Prentice and Jeff sat alone in a corner, waiting for Lonny. The counsellor had said Lonny was Mitch's room-mate, and a friend of his from before the arrest. "A friend of his?" Jeff had said. "It's weird that I never met him."
"No it's not," the counsellor had said.
In the other corner of the room a Chicano boy talked earnestly in Spanish with his mother. The boy was overweight, the skin of his face pocked, his hair puffed up in the sort of pompadour that's stylishly dimpled in the middle. It looked to Prentice like there was a hole going down into his head. The boy had a fake gold chain around his neck.
Jeff shifted uncomfortably in his chair. "You think that doctor was full of shit? Doctor Drandhu?"
"Christ, that name sounds like the villain of a Flash Gordon serial or something." Prentice shrugged. "That's something we can ask Lonny. If that shit was self mutilation."
"That's just not a Mitch thing to do. He might do all kinds of weird shit but Mitch hated pain. Hell, he hated any kind of discomfort, he was not your Spartan type, you know? And if he was into mutilating himself it would've showed up before now. I mean, he was never that fucked up."
"Yeah well. Amy was crazy but I never knew her to mutilate herself either. And she did it…
He broke off, embarrassed, as the Chicano boy and his mother bent their heads and began to pray together in Spanish. The counsellor had said, "Every single kid here is in a gang – for three exceptions, all of them white boys. Mitch was one of the exceptions."
There were tears rolling down the Chicano boy's cheeks as he prayed. This was not how Prentice pictured juvie gang members. But then, the kid's companeros weren't around to see this.