last time I’d seen Ray, he’d given me three hundred bucks and walked me to the Lovejoy clinic. What I didn’t tell him back then was, I’d already lost his kid. He left me on the corner, bleeding in ways he didn’t know anything about, with a pocketful of cash. Now he was back.
I tipped my beer can upside down over the urine collection tray, then put the can on the floor and crushed it.
On the other side of the door, Ray said, “Bushmills. Excellent stuff.”
Eileen laughed, said, “Blood thinners and painkillers.”
Rebar was a soft murmur at the far wall, saying things I couldn’t hear.
I turned the handle on the second door. The hallway was out there. I could walk out and keep going. I had my coat. We hadn’t gone so far I couldn’t walk home.
I leaned into the mirror, fixed my lipstick. Rebar, on the other side of the door, said, “You think you’re some kind of fucking comedian?”
Now Ray was the murmur I couldn’t hear. If Rebar was drinking Bushmills, let them be Christ crucified. I wasn’t going back.
The ashtray in my purse was like brass knuckles. Solid, hard, and beveled.
There was nothing in the bathroom worth anything unless I needed a plastic yellow pitcher or a roll of toilet paper. I wanted a powder-blue robe. A souvenir. A robe soft and sweet as pot smoke in cold air.
I found a place where the counter opened from the top. I opened the piece of hinged pressed board, and down below was a dark hamper. Linens. There was the peeping corner of a robe. I reached in. I’d take one.
On the other side of the wall Tino said, “Where’d Nessa go?” There was my name.
“She’s here?” Ray said.
I could leave. Leave Ray, the one man I wanted to stay with. Leave Rebar, who I couldn’t get away from. And then there was Tino. There was no place far away enough.
I closed my fingers around a robe in the hamper. When I lifted the cloth, there was the blooming flower of watery bloodstains. Maybe it was Eileen’s blood. Inside the hamper, instead of clean pillowcases and sweet robes, there was a pile of bloodstained sheets, towels, and robes twisted and tangled. The hospital linens were thick as bodies. They were a pool of what’s left after you slice open a brain, arms and legs, hearts and lungs, clamp a vein shut. They were soaked in all that life, intertwined.
I dropped the bloody robes. Washed my hands. I wasn’t getting anything here.
I went back in Eileen’s crowded room. I leaned against the bathroom door. “Ray,” I said.
Ray looked at me. He looked me up and down, took me in with his eyes, and when he did, it was like he was stealing something. Something I didn’t want to give up.
I reached for Tino. I gave him the longest, deepest kiss I could. I let his lips crack against mine, let his blood seep, so full of salt, find its way to my mouth. I ran a hand over his hair. I breathed in Tino, drank his sweat and salt and alcohol, and he gave in. He put a hand to the curve of my back, put a cold beer to the side of my neck.
Because when there’s nothing else, there’s comfort in skin.
I had barely pulled away before there was the crack of Rebar’s fist, Tino’s tooth breaking. Tino fell backwards, hit his head on a steel tray on the way down. It was that car wreck all over again, like metal on metal. Eileen screamed. She screamed, and flung an arm so fast, her IV pulled out. Blood ran from her arm where it tore. It marked the white sheets.
“Now whose the friggin’ asshole!” Rebar yelled. He yelled at Tino on the floor, and at his own shoes. But then his face went white, his knuckles red. He pulled back. He’d lost it. He knew he’d lost. He knew the answer to his own question. And Tino didn’t get up. I kneeled, and called his name.
I said, “Get a doctor.”
Ray was too stoned to move fast.
Eileen hit the buzzer on the wall beside her bed. Tino pooled a slow leak of blood on the floor.
When the cops got there, they’d cleared the room out. Tino was in Emergency. Rebar was in a cop car, on his way back to jail, the psych ward, or Hooper Detox. I didn’t know which. Eileen had gone back into testing, something about blood pressure, busted veins. Only me and Ray stood in the hallway, answering questions.
A cop asked, “What’s the victim’s name?”
I said, “Tino Schmino.”
He said, “Tino Schmino? What’s that, a joke?”
“It’s for real. His folks were Pig Latin, maybe. I never could figure it out.”
He said, “Listen, lady, we’re not playing. If your pal doesn’t come out of that sleep, somebody’ll be looking at murder.”
I said, “That’s the name I knew him by, the name he gave me. If there’s more to it, get one of your gumshoes to sort it out.”
He said, “Tell me what happened.”
I said, “I have no idea. We were all getting along famously. I stepped into the ladies’ for powder.”
Eventually they left me and Ray there, outside Eileen’s room.
I said, “Tino’s a good man.”
Ray said, “You always have been an idealist.”
“What do you mean?”
He said, “A good man? There’s no such thing.”
I shrugged. “It’s just you and me now.”
“Is that what you wanted?” He reached out, ran a calloused hand over my cheek.
I said, “I don’t ask for anything, you know that.”
“But you want something, don’t you?”
Rebar’d be back in the slammer for a good long time. Tino, who could say. I leaned against the doorway. “There’s one thing I want.”
Ray looked at me. I reached out, brushed his hair out of his eyes, let him catch my hand and hold it.
“Come with me, Ray, back to my place.” I wouldn’t have to pack for a good long while, now. “The one thing I want is to not be alone, not again, not tonight.”
COFFEE, BLACK BY BILL CAMERON
Twenty-five years a cop, seven working homicide, and this is what I’ve come to: staking out Starbucks in the middle of the night in the hope of catching a vandal in the act of bricking the windows. Welcome to retirement. I’m parked in the shadows outside the food mart at Seven Corners, a tangled confluence of streets at the southeast edge of Ladd’s Addition. Starbucks is across Division, part of a corner development that includes a day spa, a pasta restaurant, and a cramped parking lot apparently designed in anticipation of the oil bust. Three nights, and the most exciting thing I’ve seen so far is a half-naked couple humping in the cob outside the kitchen shop on the opposite corner. I snapped a few pics, but even with the shutter wide open, it’s going to take someone with more Photoshop voodoo than me to make the shots Internet ready.
Just after midnight, as I’m thinking about taking a piss behind the dumpster next to my car, I catch sight of a figure approaching down 20th. He high-steps across the parking lot, elbows flared, as if he learned his ninja moves off Cartoon Network. Jeans, black hoodie pulled tight around his face, medium height, medium build. Cigarette held behind his back, a smoldering tail light. About what I expected, some nitwit tweaked on vodka-’n- Red Bull who thinks he’s striking a blow against insatiate corporatism.
I slip out of my car and rest the long lens on the roof, sight through the camera’s LCD. The light isn’t good, a silver-jaundiced mix of mercury vapor and sodium streetlights, sky-glow, and the gleam from the quickie mart. It’s adequate. I’m not shooting art photos. I just want to capture an identifiable face.
As I snap the first pic, I hear the scrape of a shoe and turn as a broad, dark shape swoops across the roof of my car. I duck, but not fast enough. Fabric nets my face and shoulders. Hands grab me from behind, shove me
