“Tell me where the fucking bell is,” she said. “Tell me right now or that hand injury is going to seem like a paper cut.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.
She approached Harley and with her free hand patted her down, feeling all over the outside of her clothes: her arms, breasts, stomach, inside her waistband. Outside her clothes she felt Harley’s thighs, her crotch, her calves. “Take off your shoes.”
Harley obeyed. Ellen felt inside each shoe. “Don’t move,” she repeated. “And don’t test me.” Then she turned to me. “Stand up.”
No way could I stand up.
She grabbed the afghan and yanked it away from my body. “I said stand up!”
I tried. The room spun hard. I instinctively pressed my hands against the loveseat to steady myself, and my left hand screamed in pain and everything started to go black. I tried again to get up, turning my body until my feet were on the carpet. Then, slowly, I lifted myself off the loveseat. The moment I was standing, Ellen reached out and dug her hands into one of my pants pockets, then the other.
“You’re acting crazy,” I said, still believing that playing dumb was my best and only option. “I don’t understand.”
She started running her hand along my body, same as she’d done with Harley—my shoulders, my chest—but then she stopped. She was eyeing my bandaged hand. Trying, maybe, to imagine the lengths a person might go in the name of misdirection. In the name of stealing something so valuable. And once she went down that road her conclusion came fast. She reached out and removed the dish towel. Stared some more at the mountain of gauze.
“Unwrap that,” she said to Harley.
“What?” Harley said.
“You know what. Take all that off.”
“No,” I said. Gravity was pulling me back toward the loveseat but I remained standing. “I don’t know what’s happening, but you have to leave. Go. Get out. I’m going to call the police if you don’t—”
She reached out with the gun and whacked the fingers of my hurt hand. My universe exploded.
I didn’t think anything could be worse than the cutting itself, or the water Harley had sprayed over the wound, but I was wrong. I heard myself scream, and the birds started beating their wings again and the dog upstairs started barking again, and I teetered and fell hard against the wall, the windowsill jabbing into my hip.
Through the window, my eyes met Calvin’s. He was standing in the snow at the far curb. Gone was the shovel. He was carrying something else, but I didn’t know what.
“Unwrap it,” Ellen told Harley. “Now.”
Harley looked at me, and when I didn’t protest—there was no protest left in me—she came over and slowly, carefully, began to undo the gauze wrapping. Around the wrist, around the hand, around the space where my fingers had been. Even with the gun trained on us she was a careful technician. Her animals were lucky. Her fingers did their slow, delicate work, as one layer came undone, then another. I felt unbelievably sad. Ellen would have the bell, and assuming she didn’t kill me and Harley both, I would have nothing to show for any of this except for my wet, sickening crab’s claw.
The next layer of the gauze came away blood-soaked, and Ellen looked away. I’ll never know for sure what exactly caused her to divert her attention at that exact moment: the gore, or the sudden burst of light outside.
Ellen’s car was on fire.
“My god,” Harley said.
Gray smoke pumped itself into the air as the flames quickly overtook the hood. Ellen glanced back at my hand, the blood-soaked gauze partly unwound and dangling down. Maybe my willingness to let Harley unwrap it—gun notwithstanding—had satisfied her. Maybe she never fully believed I was hiding the bell behind all that wrapping, and in her heart of hearts she still believed it lay somewhere in the snow on Victor’s lawn. And if she had any hope of making it back there, she had to be gone before the first responders arrived. And she needed a car.
“Give me your keys,” she said.
This was the easiest request I’d ever granted. My key chain hung on a hook by the door. “There,” I said, and she slid the key chain off the hook and gave my apartment a last fleeting glance.
“You breathe a word about any of this to the police,” she said, “and you’re gonna die.”
The sweet parting words of a friend.
She ran from the apartment, made a wide arc around her car, which was engulfed in flames, and unlocked my door. From where she stood it must have been an oven. Much hotter than the spot where Calvin stood across the street, carrying what I now saw was a red plastic gas can.
Ellen got into my car and the headlights came on. Calvin had shoveled well. Ellen pulled my car away from the curb with no trouble at all, and then the BITCH car turned right at the corner and was gone.
I was still on my feet and desperate for the cold air. But not until Harley had unwrapped enough of the gauze to get the bell. She gave it a quick rinse in the kitchen sink and hung it in the birdcage beside the disco ball.
Then she rewrapped the gauze, and the two of us shuffled to the doorway. From the entryway I felt the heat from Ellen’s burning car warm my face, but I also felt the cold, and the mix of temperatures reminded me of what a campfire had felt like on the one occasion, many ages ago, when my family had stayed at the beach long past sunset because you can’t see many stars in Plainfield.
What for a moment felt like a cleansing mix of cold and heat quickly became a shivering sweat. I knew I couldn’t stay standing any longer. “Calvin!” I
