“I’d prefer not to,” Salazar said.
Their faces were about an inch away from each other. Salazar was trying his best to hide it, but he was just about ready to shit himself. Devlin pushed him back into the room, nodded down at the table. At the little yellow pill.
“You’re going to eat that,” he said. “The question is whether you’re going to eat any of your teeth first.”
Sally shook his head. “You’re drunk, Dennis,” he said. “Or something worse. You should go home and sleep it off. Okay, fine, I’ll take the stuff over to Curie tomorrow morning, but I’m not going to—”
Devlin had changed into civvies to go to the courthouse but he’d put his blacks on again as protective camouflage when he came back into the prison. So he had his nightstick sheathed at his belt. It made a blade-on-silk stropping sound as he brought it out of the holster and lifted it up.
The nightstick was a twenty-inch sidewinder made in McKinney, Texas, the home of take-it-or-fucking-leave-it law enforcement – injection-moulded in impact-resistant polycarbonate, with a lustrous midnight shine to it. It weighed less than two pounds, but that was by the by: you could tell just by looking at it what it could do. You could beat a man to paste with it and it wouldn’t look any different, wouldn’t have a dent or a nick or a splinter.
Sally’s jaw gaped when he saw the baton. He backed away from Devlin, but there wasn’t much space to back into. He came up against the front of a cabinet after the second step. Devlin whipped the nightstick backwards a half-turn, bringing it into strike position against his shoulder.
“Take your pill, Sally,” he suggested. “I’m all over being reasonable with you.”
“It’s Ecstasy!” Sally yelled. “How am I supposed to drive home if I’m off my head?”
Devlin laughed. “Shit, that is a bit of a poser, no denying. Then again, how are you going to drive home if your arms and legs are broken?”
“Dennis, you’ve made your point.”
“Have I? What point is that?”
“I am not taking the—”
Devlin swung the baton, slamming it into the front of the cabinet a couple of inches above Sally’s head. Sally flinched and ducked, but only after it had hit: he would have left his brains all over the door if Devlin’s aim had been off.
At the same time, Devlin let out a bellow from deep in his lungs – not just at Sally, but at everyone who’d ever wasted his time or said no to him or looked at him with a sneer on their mouth because of his thick accent and his bald patch and his spreading gut. It came out of nowhere but it seemed to have been building for a while. It felt good to let it out.
Whatever Salazar read into that scream or saw in Devlin’s eyes, it did the trick. He grabbed up the pill and shoved it in his mouth. His throat bobbed as he swallowed it down. Then he just stood there, staring at Devlin, his chest heaving as though he’d run a mile.
“Good,” Devlin grunted. He slipped the nightstick back into its holster. It had left a deep dent in the cabinet door where it had hit – a ridged groove about six inches long, right up against one edge and close enough to where Salazar’s head had been to raise a doubt.
“If you’ve got any Vicks, you should rub it under your nose,” Devlin said. “Cool you down when the hit comes.” He scooped the bags back into the zip-lock and shoved the zip-lock into Sally’s hands. “Stow these first though, and then fuck off out of it. Stock has got big eyes and an even bigger mouth. The less she sees of you right now, the better.”
The doctor hadn’t moved since he’d swallowed the pill. He was tensed and braced, his shoulders against the cabinet and his knees half bent. He looked like a rugby forward about to block a tackle – as though he thought the drug was going to slam into him with physical force. Devlin had to laugh. Maybe this would even do Sally some good. Make him cheer up a little for once in his life.
“Don’t forget the lights,” he said, and left the way he’d come.
Dr Salazar knew a lot in theory about the way phenethylamines worked. Enough to be aware that he had some lead time, which he put to good use. First, he hid the package underneath the dead files in the bottom drawer of his filing cabinet, where nobody ever had cause to go. Then he tidied the room a little, making good some of the mess that Devlin had made. He stuck up an AIDS awareness poster on the dented cupboard door, hiding the damage as far as he could.
He clocked out, taking care to bid a courteous and level good night to John Donaldson, the guard on gate duty.
Then he got into his car, drove it carefully down to the bottom end of the car park, which was empty at this hour, and waited for the rush to come. It might not be very strong at all. It depended on how much of the active ingredient the little pill had harboured. But it would be stronger for Sally than for a regular user, whose dopamine and norepinephrine receptors would be better used to unusual traffic. Outside of the neurochemistry, he had no idea how it would feel.
The answer was it felt good. Very good. Really quite surprisingly wonderful and uplifting. Sally became purely, uncomplicatedly happy and euphoric for the first time in what felt like years. He sprawled in his seat with his head tilted back against the knobbly beaded top of his orthopaedic backrest, while the beauty and perfection of everything that lived filled him from his toes on up like a thick, sweet liquid.
He was in love with the world. In love with everyone he knew. He summoned their faces one after another so he could tell them how very much he cared for them.
But even in that euphoric haze, when he got to Dennis Devlin’s face, he felt the undercurrent of a different emotion.
“I’m going to kill you,” he murmured, with the tides of hyperactive neurotransmitters drowning his brain and a big lopsided smile slapped across his face. “Oh, I am I am I really am. I’m going to kill you, you bastard.”
49
Jess lay in her bunk, the still centre of a world of hurt.
Loomis and Earnshaw had left her ribs, sides and back monumentally bruised and battered. She couldn’t find a way to lie that didn’t leave her in agony after ten or fifteen minutes – but shifting her position hurt too, sometimes even worse. Every move she made was a desperate sprint across no-man’s-land, looking for cover that wasn’t there.
Sheer exhaustion was pulling her down into sleep, but she couldn’t stay there. She was like one of those drinking bird toys that keeps on dipping and raising its head as the liquid inside it expands and contracts. Every time she dozed off, her muscles relaxed a little. Then some part of her body moved and she woke in a brimming rush of agony.
Sweat cooled on her skin as the night went on, but nothing else seemed to change.
Until it did. Until he came.
You should have called me, Alex Beech said.
Didn’t know how.
Yes, you do. You just think about me and I’m here.
But Jess hadn’t been able to think at all after the beating. Her brain’s higher functions had gone AWOL. What was left had no plan and no horizon, no future or past.
You can get away from it. Look, it’s easy. Take my hand, like this, and… no… No, hold on to me. Step sideways.
His hand was pulling on hers insistently, but she was afraid of what would happen when she moved.
Alex, don’t!
Yes. Come on, Jess.
It was her name that did it. She surrendered to him, and to her instinctive trust in his benevolence. She let him pull her up off the bunk, first by one hand and then by both. He stepped back and she came forward in lockstep, flinching from the recoil of her outraged muscles.
But the pain didn’t come. She looked into the boy’s solemn eyes. Then back over her shoulder at her own body lying there like an abandoned car, eyes closed and mouth slack. The sudden absence of pain was so overwhelming, she wasn’t even scared about what it meant. All she felt was a fizzing sensation of surprise, and then a dead weight of realisation.
I’m dead, then?