I grabbed her by the arms-as if I were going to shake her. But I didn’t, not physically, anyway.
I looked right into her sweet freckled face and said, “All right, lover. You still want this abortion? Fine. Maybe at this point, I don’t want your goddamn fucking kid, any more than you want mine. I’ll round up Fred and Eliot and we’ll take a powder, and leave you to Lloyd. It might be interesting to see what he’d prescribe for you if you got back up on that table and spread your legs.”
I let go of her, shoving her, just a little.
Staggering back, then planting herself on shaky legs, she swallowed, or tried to; her eyes began to tear up, her lips quivering with fear. “Then… then it’s true?” She pointed toward the front of the clinic. “That… that was the… I was going to be… he could have been…”
I sighed. Nodded.
With a yelping little animal squeal, she threw herself into my arms and held me tight; she began to sob, and I patted her back, saying, “It’s okay, baby, it’s okay,” loving her, hating her, feeling so damn sorry for her, and so goddamn pleased she’d got what she deserved.
“I’m sorry, Nathan, I’m so sorry,” she said, sniffling, tears and snot streaming down her pretty face. “Can you ever forgive me?”
I took her face in my hands and I held her face and looked into the violet eyes and I asked, “Are we having this baby?”
She nodded emphatically. “We’re having it. We’re having it, and we’re going to love it and it’s going to be the best baby that two people ever had.”
“It’s not an ‘it,’ I told her sternly, face still in my hands. “It’s a boy or a girl, understand? Our baby-our child. And no butcher is taking that away from us.”
She hugged me and she kissed me, a sloppy snotty weepy kiss that was the sweetest I ever had.
We were halfway down the hall when Cathy came up to us, looking sheepish.
“I’m sorry, Nate,” Cathy said.
I said, “It’s okay… You were just trying to help out a friend.”
Cathy nodded, chagrined.
“Please take Peg to the hotel,” I said, “and stay with her. I still have things to do, here.”
I handed Peggy into her friend’s care, and walked them out through the waiting room, where Fred was still holding the confused, slumping Dr. Dailey hostage in the doctor’s own waiting room. Seeing me with my arm around Peggy, Fred said, “She’s all right?”
“She’s all right,” I said.
“I’m fine,” she said.
I gave Peggy a quick kiss, stroked her cheek, and she and Cathy slipped out into the hall.
Frustrated, Dr. Dailey asked, “I demand to know what is going on here!”
“Shut up!” Fred and I said simultaneously, and the doctor jumped in his hard chair, and shut up.
I walked back to the operating room and curled a finger at Eliot, who joined me at the doorway. I told him to take Dr. Winter into Dailey’s office and wait for me. I had to talk to Lloyd-alone.
“All right,” Eliot said, taking my orders unquestioningly, “but do me a favor.”
“Don’t kill him?”
He nodded.
I shook my head. “No promises.”
After an “oh well” shrug, Eliot herded the amazon across the hall into the jade-adorned office of Dr. Dailey, and I returned to the blindingly white room with the delicate instruments and the butcher-papered table with stirrups.
Surgical mask dangling around his throat like a loose bandage, Lloyd was leaning with his back against the counter. I shut the door-the loud click was like the cocking of a gun. Speaking of which, my nine-millimeter was tucked away, under my left arm… but my sportjacket was unbuttoned.
“I didn’t know she was your wife,” Lloyd said, raising both hands, palms out. The ice-blue eyes were dancing with fright. “I wasn’t going to hurt her, I swear to God. The name she gave was ‘Smith’!”
“I believe you, Lloyd.”
“You… you do?”
I stood across from him, leaning back against the operating table. “This was a last-minute referral, wasn’t it, Lloyd? A favor you did for a friend.”
Lloyd blinked. “She was just another patient.”
“No-tell me about your friend.”
“What friend?”
“Your very good friend-your best friend… except that he’s not as good a friend as you think. Y’see, he stage-managed this so that I would come in on you, in the act, and most likely blow you to hell and gone.”
Indignation flamed in Lloyd’s face. “What? You’re crazy! He would never do that to me.”
“ ‘He’? Your friend, you mean?”
“No, I… I mean, no friend would do something like that.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Not even your old friend from Cleveland… your St. Clair Avenue ‘apprentice’-Arnold Wilson?”
He swallowed thickly. “I don’t know anybody with that name.”
“Sure you do, Lloyd.” My left hand, leaning against the operating table, reflexively clutched butcher paper and crinkled and tore and wadded it; but my voice remained calm. “After all, it would take a real pal to convince you to leave the head on a torso, like that, right? But your buddy Arnold needed the head left on-needed that smile cut into Beth Short’s face, ’cause he had a message to send. You compensated with other fun-torture, for example. And with your quaint sexual tastes, the fact that her female organs were unformed didn’t bother you, did it? You tied her up and fucked her in the ass and made her suck your dick, didn’t you, Lloyd? Oh, you wonder how I know that? She died with shit in her stomach, you sick fuck!”
Lloyd whirled and grabbed the tray of instruments from the counter and flung it all toward me, an armada of sharp flying objects riding a warm splash of water. I covered my face with my arms, and my hand took a tiny gash and my sleeves were cut, but that was all-the metal instruments bouncing off, clattering to the floor.
Still, it was enough to distract me as, lightning fast, Lloyd moved to a drawer and yanked it open and plucked out a shiny silver instrument, no delicate curette this, but an amputation cleaver, with a wide, wicked blade-just like the one he’d come at me with in that other blindingly white room, the murder lab in his Kingsbury Run basement- and he raised it high, where it caught and distorted my reflection like a Crazy House mirror, ready to swing that blade down and around, to take my head off in his trademark manner.
But I fired the nine-millimeter first, and the bullet at close range caught him alongside the edge of his cleaver-wielding right hand, just above the knuckle of his little finger, blasting through that little finger and into the next and the next and the next, shearing through the digits, which went flying, scattering, tumbling, as if he were so clumsy he had somehow managed to drop his fingers.
The cleaver clanked to the tile floor and Lloyd was screaming, holding on to his wrist, the four stumps where his fingers used to be spurting and spouting blood, a quartet of scarlet streams that-as he gripped his wrist and shook his mangled hand-traced Jackson Pollock patterns on the white counter.
Eliot came charging in, 45 in one hand, his other gripping the arm of Dr. Winter, dragging her in after him. Out in the hallway, an alarmed Fred Rubinski was peeking in.
“Jesus,” Eliot said.
“Christ,” Fred said.
“Oh dear,” Dr. Winter said.
Howling in agony, Lloyd had slid down to the floor and, kneeling like a praying man, was gripping his wrist, blood still squirting, but less so now, nothing arterial. His fingers were littered on the floor like particularly unappetizing sausages spilled from an hors d’oeuvres plate; one of them had ended up on the cleaver, which I thought was kind of poetic.
My voice was high pitched and defensive, a kid denying blame, as I said, “I didn’t kill him,” holding up my hands, one of which still grasped the nine-millimeter. “I didn’t kill him.”
Dr. Winter went to Lloyd and covered the damaged hand with a towel, glancing back at us pointedly. “I have to attend to this.”
