But I wasn't feeling reasonable.
It's so easy to exercise the power of life and death. It doesn't take courage, it doesn't take skill, it doesn't take Confucian virtue. It does, however, take something very special to promise someone she'll live and then break the promise, and what it takes is something that should be eliminated on sight.
So I climbed the stairs and made sure the door could be opened and then went back down again and onto the killing floor, where I ransacked the boxes of garments until I found a jacket with sleeves that would cover a torn arm, and I got Dumbo-Ears to his feet by wrapping the good arm around my shoulders and dragged him up the stairs and took him home. To Topanga.
11
Thank God I'd just bought Saran Wrap.
It was past five by the time I'd hauled him up the steep, rutted driveway and into the house, Bravo growling at him with each step, and he was still dead weight. Charlie Wah's martial-arts expert had underestimated the effect of his rabbit punch. As I propped Dumbo-Ears upright on the couch, I was hoping it was only an underestimate. He'd be a bigger problem dead than alive.
Ransacking my haphazard kitchen for the Saran Wrap, I did an emotional inventory for pity and found none. Except for the arrival of Mrs. Chan and her two umbrellas, he might now be a multiple murderer and Eleanor, Horace, Pansy, and I might be murderees.
On the other hand, I'd recently found someone I hated more, and that meant the kid got a shiny new uniform and number-a spot on the home team.
In my line of work you tend to get hurt a lot. I had two bottles of Bactine and an old scrip for antibiotics in the medicine cabinet, and after I'd dropped the Saran Wrap on the couch, I went to the bathroom and fished out the pills. I dabbed Bactine onto the long, shallow scratch on his chest and the nicks on his chin and nose, postponing the hard part. When I'd assured myself that the minor cuts wouldn't give him any trouble, I held my breath and poured quite a lot of the Bactine into the flap of skin and muscle below his left shoulder. Then, silently reciting the alphabet to distract myself from the task at hand, I moved the flap around to distribute the Bactine and wrapped the upper arm with Saran Wrap. I tried to leave some room for air at the apex of the wound.
Hauling him more or less upright, I pulled his arms behind him and wound a spiral of Saran Wrap first around his right wrist and then around his left. Finally I sheathed both wrists tightly together, mummy-fashion, with about twelve feet of crisscrossed Saran Wrap. Pulling off his boots, I took the handcuffs Charlie Wah had thoughtfully left me and snapped them tight around his delicate ankles and laid him sideways and folded his knees so I could pass a short, twisted Saran Wrap rope between the chain connecting the cuffs and the Saran Wrap that linked his wrists. Every time I moved him, Bravo growled a warning low in his throat.
After I got a couple of Ampicillin and a few aspirin down his throat, I laid him down on the couch on his side, injured shoulder up, covered him with a spare blanket, and then, in the tradition of good homemakers everywhere, I tidied up before going to bed. I made a mental note to buy more Saran Wrap in the morning. It's so useful.
I hadn't slept in what seemed like months, and this night proved to be no exception. I'd given the kid my last two aspirins, I hurt in places I hadn't known possessed nerve endings, and Bravo kept trying to set up camp on my extra pillow. Until this evening I'd been operating on fear that something might happen to Horace, but now I found that the fear had been shouldered aside by rage. The rage centered itself busily in my chest like the old fifties version of the atom, lots of little hornets zipping circles around a walnut. Each of the hornets was a separate rage: rage at the memory of the girl's slashed and terrified face, rage at the fact that Charlie Wah was still alive somewhere in the world, rage that I hadn't snapped the pillar like Samson and eviscerated Charlie and his fractured idioms with a transitive verb or a piece of broken concrete. The girl closed her eyes as the blood flowed from her cheek. The little translator stuck out his foot, and the boy fell again, over and over, like a loop of film.
I'd been a detective for almost five years now, and I'd learned that my parents' clean and comfortable world, so absolute when I was a child, was actually something that existed inside a bubble only while the real world was too busy to burst it and let the horror in. Still, I'd never built up resistance to horror as naked as this. Every time I saw the girl's eyes close, I thought,
The last time I looked at the clock, it said six-forty-five. At seven-twenty, the kid revealed yet another character flaw by snapping awake, with a yell, no less.
Just what I needed: an early riser.
I wrapped a towel around my middle and went into the living room. My neck ached, my sliced ear burned, and each of my joints was competing to register a complaint of its own. He was sitting up, wearing his black trousers and his Saran Wrap, and looking a little woozy. It had gotten cold during the night, so I let him stew while I threw some kindling into the wood-burner that serves as the house's only heat source and got a fire going. Duty fulfilled, I turned my attention to my patient.
“How you feeling?” I asked, trying for bright.
He glared at me, swore in Vietnamese, and slammed his back against the couch. I didn't have to understand Vietnamese to know he wasn't wishing me many grandchildren. The winter sun was just starting to beat against the east-facing windows, and as the kid thrashed, the couch threw motes of dust that danced mockingly in the air. Presumably there were always motes of dust doing the latest steps at that hour, but I was rarely privileged to see them. It was going to be a long day.
“Let's look at that arm,” I said, adopting the first-person plural of nurses everywhere. He jerked away at my touch, and Florence Nightingale did a fast fade. “Hold still or I'll pull your tongue out,” I snarled. “I'm going to look at your arm.” I looked at his arm.
His arm looked terrible.
It looked ragged and red and rotten and infected. It looked like something I couldn't look at very long. I did what men have done for centuries when faced with something too revolting to stomach. I called a woman.
“Holy smoke, Simeon,” Eleanor said from the couch less than an hour later, “this looks terrible.”
“I know,” I said, staring out the window. “Do something about it.”
Even with a stop at an all-night market to pick up more Bactine and Saran Wrap, she had arrived from her place in Venice only fifty minutes after I'd awakened her with my call. She'd always been a woman who could get dressed fast.
“He needs a doctor,” she observed.
“He's not going to get one. I told you on the phone how it happened. I was there. If we call a doctor, the doctor will call the police, and I'll probably be in jail as an accessory to several murders.”
She ignored the reproach. “That's an ugly cut. I think he's got a fever. How do you know he won't die?”
“Come here,” I said. “Into the kitchen.” She continued to peer at the wound, and I said, “Now.”
She followed me around the single corner that shielded my kitchen from the sight of those in the living room. It was a pitiful privacy, but it was all we were going to get.
“Listen,” I hissed, “It's Horace who's out there chasing these guys, Sir Galahad in his tinfoil armor, and he has
“What if the boy dies?”
“He's not going to die. It's his
“Infection,” she said loudly. From the living room the boy shouted something.
“Shut up,” I yelled. “Listen,” I said to Eleanor, “if I really think he's in trouble I'll push him out of the car in front of Santa Monica Emergency. In the meantime, he's my way in.”
She closed her eyes. “Into what?” she asked at last.
“Into whatever Horace is stalking. Remember Horace?”
“Horace.” Her eyes were still tightly closed. “Poor dumb Horace. This is how he's going to make everything up to Pansy, you know.”
“Pansy's not going to be happy if he's dead,” I said, “and these people have a flair for killing. That's a direct
