Dead and Gone

“How come?”

“For billing,” he said, a thin smile on his face.

I worked the needle out … slow and careful; it would have to go back in the same place. I hit the morphine pump. A tiny bit of liquid came out of the needle’s tip. All right.

Nothing on TV. Nothing about me. Nothing about a shootout. Nothing about a kidnapping, a killing, nothing. Plenty of news about crime. Most of the news was about crime, like always. But no picture of me; no “Do You Know This Man?” stuff.

I hit the morphine pump again, watching the liquid spray its lie into the computer’s bank ledger.

The cops were down to nothing. I was brain-damaged and didn’t know who I was … or I did, and was waiting to make a break for it. If they thought I still needed the morphine six times an hour, they’d think I was much further away from making a move.

I could walk by then. Even with the pump attached, I could move pretty good. And I could lift the whole thing off the ground with one hand, too. No way to test my legs, not really.

At some point, I realized I didn’t want a cigarette. I wondered if this was a chemical change, or just me getting used to being in solitary again.

Every time the cops came back, I’d let them see I was a little stronger—it would have made them suspicious if I wasn’t—

but I acted even more anxious about who I was. When was I going to find out? How come my picture wasn’t on the news? Wasn’t anybody looking for me?

“We already know who you are, pal,” one of them told me. “So we’re not looking for you. I was you, though, I’d be worried about who is.”

“That’s enough,” his partner said, a thread of disgust in his voice.

“Hey! I was just telling my man Burke here—”

“Yeah. You told him. Come on. We got other things to do.”

I couldn’t tell if this was another variation of the good-cop/bad-cop routine. Either way, they were wasting their time. Where I come from, “bad cop” is the same word, said twice.

And if they thought they could keep me here with their little games, they were crazier than the people who had padded cells for return addresses on the postcards they wrote in crayon to the radio shows they picked up from the fillings in their teeth.

As if calling me by some stranger’s name was supposed to ring my bell. “Baby Boy Burke” is what they put on my birth certificate, after the teenage whore who dropped me out of her womb disappeared. I guess Burke was the name she gave the hospital, so they passed it along to me. Probably wrapped my low-birth-weight body in yellow crime-scene tape instead of a baby blanket.

Born bad.

I know how it works. They could follow me around, put a guard outside my room, crap like that. But that was a major commitment of manpower. So all I needed was the one card that’s never out of my deck: Patience.

I know all about waiting. It’s my greatest skill. Sooner or later, they’d pull off the guards. Sooner or later, there’s always an opening.

Besides, I was safe where I was. Like the nasty-voiced cop said, they knew who I was, so they didn’t need to ask the public. I was logged in as a John Doe. And whoever had tried to take me off the count probably thought they’d gotten the job done.

I wasn’t worried about my place going to hell while I was in the hospital, either. I live in an abandoned building. Off the books, under the radar. The only reason I ever had to go there was to make sure Pansy was …

No! I couldn’t let that part in—it was more pain than the morphine could ever hope to touch. But I had something I could let in, welcome back home. Hate. It filled my veins, building with every circulation my heart pumped, giving me all I needed.

They killed my dog. Killed Pansy.

I don’t know how that would sound to a citizen. But since I’ll never be one, why would I care? I’d never needed a jury to tell me I’d been judged at birth. I was back to where I was as a young man, that “don’t mind dying” train I rode until I got lucky and landed in prison instead of Potter’s Field.

But I wanted to die like my partner had … with the blood of my enemies in my mouth.

So, every day, every way, I got stronger.

And waited.

A guy came up to my room. He said there was a Rehabilitation Institute attached to the hospital. If I kept improving like they expected, I’d be transferred down there soon.

He gave me a few tests to see how my strength was coming along. I deliberately held back, but he told me I was doing great. Another week or so, I’d be transferred.

I asked him a lot of questions, all wrapped around the only ones I cared about. When he told me that there were no private rooms in the Institute, that they had one of the highest staff-patient ratios in the country, and that the entire day was “activity-scheduled,” I knew I couldn’t make a break from there as easy as I could from where I was.

Time was tightening. But still nobody came for me.

A few days later, Rich told me my lungs were perfectly clear.

“You did a great job,” he said, smiling approval. “You must have worked very hard.”

“I’ve been working just as hard in my head,” I told him. “Trying to bring it back …”

His face turned sad. “Don’t worry about it. That part, it has to come on its own. And it will, as soon as it’s ready.”

“You’re sure?”