go. Leave me alone.'
He stared at her patiently. At first glance he looked thirtyfive. Then you saw the little fans of wrinkles at the corners of his eyes and mouth and realized he was five more than that, five at least. 'Upstairs, Missus, unless you want to start this with a bullet in the foot. That'd be a painful way to talk bi'ness. There's a lot of bones and tendons in a person's foot.'
'You won't…you don't dare…the noise…' Her voice sounded farther away with each word. It was as if her voice were on a train, and the train was pulling out of the station; her voice was leaning out of its window to bid her a fond farewell. Byebye, little Lisey, voice must leave you now, soon you'll be mute.
'Oh, the noise wouldn't fuss me a bit,' Dooley said, looking amused. 'Your next-door neighbors are gone—off to work, I 'magine—and your pet cop's off on a run.' His smile faded, yet he still managed to look amused. 'You've come all over gray. Reckon you've had quite a shock to the system. Reckon you're gonna pass clean out, Missus. Save me some trouble if you do, maybe.'
'Stop…stop calling me…' Missus was how she wanted to finish, but a series of wings seemed to be enfolding her, wings of darker and darker gray. Before they grew too dark and too thick to see through, she was faintly aware of Dooley shoving the gun into the waistband of his pants (Blow your balls off, Lisey thought dreamily, do the world a favor) and darting forward to catch her. She didn't know if he made it. Before the issue was decided, Lisey had fainted.
4
She became aware of something wet stroking her face and at first thought a dog was licking her—Louise, maybe. Except Lou had been their Collie back in Lisbon Falls, and Lisbon Falls had been a long time ago. She and Scott had never had a dog, maybe because they'd never had kids and the two things just naturally seemed to go together like peanut butter and jelly, or peaches and cr—
Come upstairs, Missus…unless you want to start this with a bullet in the foot.
That brought her back fast. She opened her eyes and saw Dooley squatting before her with a damp washcloth in one hand, watching her: those bright blue eyes. She tried to pull away from them. There was a metallic rattle, then a dull thud of pain in her shoulder as something snubbed tight and stopped her. 'Ow!'
'Don't yank and you won't hurt yourself,' Dooley said, as though this were the most reasonable thing in the world. Lisey supposed that to a nutjob like him, it probably was.
There was music playing through Scott's sound-system for the first time in Christ knew how long, maybe since April or May of 2004, the last time he was in here, writing. 'Waymore's Blues.' Not Ole Hank but someone's cover version—The Crickets, maybe. Not super-loud, not cranked the way Scott used to crank the music, but loud enough. She had a very good idea (I am going to hurt you)
of why Mr. Jim 'Zack McCool' Dooley had turned on the soundsystem. She didn't
(places you didn't let the boys to touch)
want to think about that—what she wanted was to be unconscious again, actually—but she couldn't seem to help it. 'The mind is a monkey,' Scott used to say, and Lisey remembered the source of that one even now, sitting on the floor in the bar alcove with one wrist apparently handcuffed to a waterpipe under the sink: Dog Soldiers, by Robert Stone.
Go to the head of the class, little Lisey! If, that is, you can ever go anywhere, ever again.
'Ain't that just the cutest song?' Dooley said, sitting down in the alcove doorway. He crossed his legs tailor- fashion. His brown paper lunch-sack was in the diamond-shaped hole thus formed by them. The pistol lay on the floor beside his right hand. Dooley looked at her sincerely. 'Lot of truth in it, too. You did yourself a favor, you know, passin out the way you did—I tell you what.' Now she could hear the South in his voice, not all showy, like the chickenshit asshole from Nashville, but just a fact of life: Fayvuh…tail yew whut.
From his sack he took a quart mayonnaise jar with the Hellmann's label still on it. Inside, floating in a puddle of clear liquid, was a crumpled white rag.
'Chloroform,' he said, sounding as proud as Smiley Flanders had been of his moose. 'I was told how to use it by a fella claimed to know, but he also said it was easy to do things wrong. At the very best you would have awoken up with a bad headache, Missus. But I knew you wouldn't want to come up here. I had a tuition about that.'
He cocked a finger at her like a gun, smiling as he did so, and on the sound-system Dwight Yoakam began to sing 'A Thousand Miles from Nowhere.' Dooley must have found one of Scott's homemade honky-tonk CDs.
'May I have a drink of water, Mr. Dooley?'
'Huh? Oh, sure! Mouth a little dry, is it? A person has a shock to the system, that's gonna happen ever' time.' He got up, leaving the gun where it was—probably out of her reach, even if she lunged to the limit of the handcuff chain…and to try for it and come up short would be a bad idea, indeed.
He turned on the tap. The pipes chugged and glugged. After a moment or two she heard the faucet begin to spit water. Yes, the gun was probably out of reach, but Dooley's crotch was almost directly over her head, no more than a foot away. And she had one hand free.
As if reading her mind, Dooley said: 'You could ring my chimes a damn good 'un if you wanted, I guess. But these are Doc Martens I'm wearing on my feet, and you're not wearing anything at all on your hands.' From Dooley, at all came out one word: tall. 'Be smart, Missus, and settle for a nice cool drink. This tap ain't been run much for awhile, but it's clearing out a right smart.'
'Rinse the glass before you fill it,' she said. Her voice sounded hoarse, on the verge of breaking. 'They haven't been used much, either.'
'Roger, wilco.' Just as pleasant as could be. Reminded her of anyone from town. Reminded her of her own Dad, for that matter. Of course, Dooley also reminded her of Gerd Allen Cole, the original 51-50 Kid. For a moment she almost reached up and twisted his balls anyway, just for daring to put her in this position. For a moment she could barely restrain herself.
Then Dooley was bending down, holding out one of the heavy Waterford glasses. It was three-quarters full, and while the water hadn't run entirely clear, it looked clear enough to drink. It looked wonderful. 'Slow and easy does it,' Dooley said in a solicitous tone. 'I'll let you hold the glass, but if you throw it at me, I'm gonna have to snap your ankle. Hit me with it and I'll snap both of em for you, even if you don't draw blood. I mean it, all right?'
She nodded, and sipped her glass of water. On the stereo, Dwight Yoakam gave way to Ole Hank himself, asking the eternal questions: Why don't you love me like you used to do? How come you treat me like a worn-out shoe?
Dooley squatted on his hunkers, his butt almost touching the raised heels of his boots, one arm wrapped around his knees. He could have been a farmer watching a cow drink at a stream in the north forty. She judged he was on alert but not on high alert. He didn't expect her to throw the clunky drinking glass, and of course he was right not to expect it. Lisey didn't want her ankles snapped.
Why, I've never even taken that all-important first in-line skating lesson, she thought, and Tuesday nights are Singles Nights at Oxford Skate Central.
When her thirst was slaked, she held the glass out to him. Dooley took it, examined it. 'You sure you don't want them— those—last two swallows, Missus?' Not even close to swallers, and Lisey had a sudden tuition of her own: Dooley was exaggerating the good-old-boy thing. Maybe on purpose, maybe without even realizing it. When it came to language he corrected up because it would have been pretentious to correct down. Did it matter? Probably not.
'I've had enough.'
Dooley polished the last two swallows off himself, his adam's apple sliding in his skinny throat. Then he asked if she was feeling any better.
