As soon as we could stop for a few hours in a big enough town, I should arrange to have my hand X-rayed. I could complain about phantom pain from the missing finger, and who would refuse to give me a picture? If only to shut me up. A tracer could be tiny, but big enough to see.
I didn’t say anything out loud about that. Of course this car had to have been bugged by whoever left it for us. We could assume they knew exactly where we were at any time, and could overhear us talking. Kit hummed a folk song from a couple of years ago: “Sittin’ in my home alone / Waitin’ for the god-damn phone… .”
She took the paper tablet and marker out of her bag and wrote HAVE TO DUMP CAR—GREYHOUND IN GULFPORT? in big block letters.
I nodded and scrawled CASH TICKETS TO TWO DIFFERENT PLACES? Keeping my eyes on the road.
It made me nervous, the idea of being separated. But we had agreed that it was a necessary step. There would come a future, I supposed, when every little Podunk bus station and train terminal would have spy-cams with face recognition software. For now, though, you might still travel through the country without Big Brother making sure you stay out of trouble. If you’re careful to stay off the grid.
They would have our description, a man and a woman biking together, out in the middle of the country but without any touring gear. We’d be less conspicuous as individuals just taking bus rides to wherever.
(I don’t think I was unduly paranoid about this—and my controlling metaphor wasn’t Big Brother, actually, but Big Mother, the nanny state. If you really want to keep control of your children, you have to keep them on a leash. The image of the cyber-state as a harried young mother with children going every which way, straining at tethers, seemed pretty accurate.)
We turned on the radio and listened to dreadful Southern nova ska for the benefit of our supposed eavesdroppers. After about ten minutes, though, Kit made a face and slapped the search bar until it delivered some funky bayou jazz on NPR.
We did take an hour and a half to indulge my paranoia. We saw a sign and pulled into a small “urgent care facility” in the middle of nowhere, and I complained to the doctor about sharp pains in my hand, by the stump. He had a young man take an X-ray, and brought the film to me with a perplexed look, and put it up on the wall.
“Never seen anything quite like this,” he said, “but then I don’t get a lot of combat amputees.” Where the bone for the little finger was cut off, there was an opaque perfect cube, maybe a third of an inch on a side. “The medics didn’t say anything to you about it?”
“It was a confusing time.”
“At a guess, I’d say it was something to promote healing. Never seen the like. Maybe you were a guinea pig, and they didn’t follow up.” He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Not allowed to do that, but they do. God… damned… army. You a disabled veteran?”
“Eighty percent,” I said.
“You get home, get the VA on their case. Get a patient advocate and stand your ground. They can call me if you want.” He handed me his business card and a prescription. “This is Tylenol with a little codeine. Don’t drive on it.”
He stood up and shook my hand. “Thank you for your service, son. Wish I could do more.”
“You’ve done plenty.” Kit and I both said good-bye, staring at the little white cube on the film.
We settled the bill in the waiting room and then stood for a minute in the small parking lot before getting in the car. “I don’t feel good about leaving you now,” she said.
“Not that much has changed,” I said. “We figured it was something.” I looked at my hand. “Know any amateur surgeons?”
By the time we got to Gulfport it was dark. The next bus going north didn’t leave till seven in the morning. That didn’t bother either of us; stop at a nice motel and have a decent dinner and a sleep together before we separated.
Not a good decision, it turned out.
The dinner was great, a deep-South crab and shrimp boil with small new potatoes and baby onions cooked in the broth. We tarried over it and had a bottle of wine and a plate of fresh gingersnaps, the house specialty.
Our lives might have been a lot simpler if we’d just picked up some burgers. Driven on.
We got back from the restaurant about eleven and there were no parking spaces in front of our motel room at Traveler’s Rest. I let Kit off to run to the bathroom while I went around back to the auxiliary lot.
We were separated for less than three minutes.
When I opened the door, there was only a line of light coming from under the bathroom door. “Kit?” I called.
She made some noise from the bathroom and I stepped into the darkness. A sharp pain exploded in the back of my head, and I was conscious just long enough to think Stroke?
It had been a stroke, all right; the stroke from a club or a blackjack. At three in the morning, 3:17 by the bedside clock, I sort of woke up, ears ringing, pain radiating in spasms from the base of my skull. A big tender swelling there. No blood. I swallowed back vomit and staggered to the bathroom and drank some water, and managed to keep it down. Splashed cold water on my face and rubbed it with the harsh towel.
There was an insistent buzzing in my ears that I eventually realized was coming from a strange cell phone, centered on the neatly made double bed. I got a tissue from the end table and picked up the phone like a master criminal, or an amateur one.
I pushed the button but didn’t think “hello” would express how I felt. “Fuck you.”
“Now, now,” a familiar female voice said, “what if this was your mother calling?”
“I suppose I would ask her what the fuck was going on. But I guess I’ll have to ask you. Who the fuck are you?”
“We are the people who have your girlfriend. That’s all you need to know.”
“So you’ve upped the stakes to federal crime.”
“Technically, no; I think it was already a federal crime when somebody killed a DHS agent. But yes, the stakes will be higher… for you.”
“How so?”
“It goes like this: we’ll give your girlfriend back. If you cooperate, we’ll give her back all at once. If not, we’ll send you a finger first, and then negotiate the next part.”
I couldn’t speak. It was like my vocal apparatus was glued shut.
“You can reach me at any time by touching the REPLY button. Do not make a recording of the call. If you don’t reply in one hour, or if you call the authorities, we will definitely give you the finger. Registered mail.” She hung up.
I stared dumbly at the phone while it sank in.
They had me pretty well figured out. It might not work with an actual war hero; he would probably make the calculation and, more or less with regret, do what he had to do.
But to me? Killing some stranger, no matter who he might be, was not unthinkable; that had been my business as usual for more than a year, not that long ago. But allowing the woman I love to die—slowly, tortured by amputation? Through my inaction?
The ghost of my missing finger talked quietly all the time, in a language no one else could hear. Now it screamed. You can’t let them do this. Do this to her.
It wasn’t just the pain. The chest pain was worse, when it was bad. But nothing was missing in there.
The muscle below the stump flexed and flexed. The ring finger clawed in sympathy.
As it had done when I woke up in the hospital bed in Germany. The tight swath of bandages that covered the chest was nothing compared to the arm suspended just above eye level, twitching, broadcasting loss more than pain. This will never grow back. Never be better.