knew it wasn’t going to be that easy.
There was a drawer in my bedside table, and I opened it and dumped the cassettes inside. Maybe, I thought, someone would save me a lot of trouble and just steal them.
FORTY SEVEN
It was not long after Karsarkis left before the drugs took me again. This time I fell into a sleep so fitful and shallow that I drifted in and out of it with every blink. I dreamed in disconnected bursts, like a man flipping through cable television channels with which he was unfamiliar.
Around nine a young girl in a nurse’s uniform woke me with a cup of very weak tea. Smiling, she pointed to a plastic tumbler of water on the table next to my bed, placed a small paper cup half full of pills next to it, and then slipped quietly out of my room. I sipped the tea and swallowed the pills and looked out the window.
For a while I wondered if my early morning conversation with Plato Karsarkis had been just another episode in my parade of pharmaceutically enhanced visions, or if it was something that had actually happened. Then I put my hand on the drawer in my bedside table and pulled it open. The three microcassettes with the silver and red labels lay inside exactly where I had put them. That seemed to settle that.
I leaned back against the pillows and was thinking about what Karsarkis had told me when I felt rather than heard the door to my room opening.
“Man, you look like you been rode hard and put up wet,” CW bellowed. He walked over to the bed and patted me awkwardly on the shoulder. “How you feelin’?”
“Fine,” I replied automatically, then thought about it. “Actually, I feel like shit to tell you the truth.”
CW nodded slowly as if he was thinking about that, then suddenly he thrust a hand toward me and held out a stack of magazines. “This was all they had downstairs,” he said. “Couldn’t find a Playboy.”
Taking the stack from him, I put it down on my bedside table.
“Who is Marcus York?” I asked him.
My question caught CW off balance and he tried for a moment to look vague, but he was the worst actor I’ve ever seen, except of course for Sylvester Stallone.
“What do you mean?” he finally mumbled when I said nothing to take him off the hook.
“It’s a simple enough question. Who the hell is Marcus York? And don’t bother claiming that he’s a United States marshal. We’re way past that now.”
CW hitched up his pants and coughed unnecessarily, then he threw me a baleful stare. “He’s one sorry-assed motherfucker who thinks he’s slicker ‘en owl shit.”
“But
CW looked down and kicked at the floor with the toe of his boot like he was playing with gravel in the dirt.
“You may not believe me, Slick, but I got no goddamned idea. None. When this operation started, they told me I had to take this sorry sack of shit along and give him cover as a marshal. The bastard might be…”
CW stopped talking and his head bobbed around as if it had momentarily become detached from his shoulders.
“What?”
“Maybe CIA,” CW said. “I just don’t know.”
“It was York’s email the NIA gave me, wasn’t it?”
CW consulted a spot on the floor. “Yeah, I think it probably was.”
“Do you know where York is now?”
CW said nothing.
“You don’t know what’s happened to him?”
“I got no idea.”
“I do,” I said.
That got CW’s attention. “You do?”
“Yeah,” I said, “I killed him.”
“What the fuck you talking about?”
“He was one of the two hitters who attacked the car. York was the one I shot.”
“Ah, stop pulling my pecker, Slick.” CW cocked his head at me and I saw something like a half-smile on his face. “I saw those two myself. They was just local boys. Shit, I thought you were serious there for a minute.”
“I
CW opened and closed his mouth. He looked as if he was experiencing a change of cabin pressure in an airplane. But he didn’t say anything.
It started to rain just then. CW and I watched in silence as fat drops slapped against the windows, joined together into little streams, and ran down the glass. Even from inside the room I felt like I could smell the dense aroma of wet trees and damp earth that always accompanied rainfall in the tropics. I remembered the ring I’d seen around the moon at dawn and I wondered how long the rain would last.
When the door from the hallway opened again, CW and I looked around at the same time. Kate took a step into the room and stopped. She obviously knew CW and she didn’t seem particularly happy to find him in my hospital room.
But then I caught something else in her expression, too, and I knew she had something to tell me, something that was about to change everything.
I raised my eyebrows, waiting.
“He’s dead,” she said.
I said nothin'›Ig. I didn’t even need to ask Kate who she was talking about.
“He was leaving Phuket this morning,” she went on. “His plane exploded just after takeoff.”
While I thought about that, CW walked over to the windows and peered out as if he might be able to see the crash site just by looking hard enough through the rain.
“Now ain’t that a hell of a thing?” he said after a few moments, his voice subdued.
After a few moments of silence, I pushed myself into a sitting position and swung my feet over the side of the bed.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Kate asked.
“I want to have a look at the crash site.”
“What on earth for, Jack?”
“I don’t see why I have to have a reason.”
“They just took two bullets out of you. You can’t go anywhere.”
“How are you planning on stopping me?” I asked.
I stood up and started toward the closet, my hospital gown flapping open over my bare ass. As my feet hit the floor, each impact traveled straight to the stitches in my side. I tried not to wince.
“I could always steal your pants,” Kate smiled.
“You could.”
“But that isn’t really necessary.”
When I opened the closet, I saw what Kate meant. It was completely empty.
“Would somebody get me some goddamned clothes?” I asked.
Kate said nothing. She just looked at me.
“Please?” I asked.
“Are you sure about this?” Kate asked.
“Absolutely sure,” I said.
A few minutes later I was wearing a blue scrub suit and a dirty pair of green flip-flops Kate had scrounged from somewhere. We were all out in the hallway before I remembered the cassette tapes lying in the drawer in my bedside table. My previous desire to have someone steal them had evaporated.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “I forgot my watch.”
