“You don’t clobber people with ice picks.”
“Fine! Gouge. Eviscerate. Dismember. And if you have to know, I think you did great, but he was a giant crackhead. I was going for his heart.”
“You can’t do that!”
“If it was him or you? Why not? You deserve to live, and he deserved to die—what’s wrong with that?”
“I already had him on the ground.”
“You saved me and then I helped save you. Can we please figure out what to do next?”
He’s quiet. It looks like he fell asleep with his eyes open. “I take you home and you change how you look while I get rid of the car.”
“I know the drill.” He has no idea how well I know the drill. If we broke into this Chevron’s padlocked restroom, I could come out looking different in no time flat. “What about you? You’re going to have black eyes and, wait a minute—”
I reach over and push on the bridge of his nose.
“Stop!” He’s all but yelling at me.
“Noses have a very small window to get pushed back into shape. Do you want to hit an ER, or do you want to let me touch it?”
“You know this how?”
“Brawling boyfriend and YouTube.”
He sighs.
I say, “You’ll look kind of normal in maybe a week.” This is highly optimistic, but I don’t want him any more freaked out. If cops are out looking for a bruised white guy, he’d better call in sick. “I could do makeup for you.”
J looks miserable. I’ve come up with a Boy Scout who doesn’t like to brawl. Even though he’s good at it. Even though he saved me.
I say, “He was coming at me. Not that I think going to the police would be the best idea. But if they believed the truth, they’d hang a medal on you.”
He puts his arm around my shoulders and kisses my head with his split lip. Romantic. No, really. His arm feels heavy and warm. The fact that it just beat the crap out of some armed guy who was going to hurt me isn’t lost on me.
I hug him back. “Lucky for you, I was loaded for bear.”
“Lucky for us, you missed his heart.”
“Lucky for him.”
Before he drops me off, he leans across and kisses me again. It’s a there’s-no-tomorrow, soldier-off-to-fight-intergalactic-war, train-leaving-the-station-in-the-rain-and-everybody’s-crying kiss.
He says, “I’ll be back. Don’t go anywhere.”
“You won’t recognize me.”
“I’ll recognize you fine. And I’m sorry. This was my fault.”
“I told you, it was his fault.”
“It was stupid. I shouldn’t have let you get out of the car.”
“You’re not in charge of me! You don’t let me do things and not let me do things and push me around! Who do you think you are?”
“The ass who took you to the scene of the crime and committed the crime.”
“So we shouldn’t have gone there. I get it. You shouldn’t have picked it, and I should have said, ‘What the hell?’ and we shouldn’t have opened our doors. But after that, it was totally him. He got what he deserved. That makes it self-defense. That makes it fine.”
45
Jack
I had him down, and she stabbed him through the arm. There wasn’t a qualm, not a shred of hesitation. I had him on the ground, I had his knife arm secured. For all practical purposes, she was saved. It was over. Then she stabbed him.
Maybe she couldn’t tell it was done.
He was big and more than drunk. He could have been dusted. Don likes to sample any mind-altering thing anyone hands him. I’ve seen him try to walk through walls when someone gave him PCP.
I’m the one who beat the drunk guy to a bloody pulp, not her, all but sitting on the guy, whaling on him without brakes.
Maybe she’s right, and he was going to drag her off and rape her. Maybe he would have carved me up, and I wouldn’t have been alive to hear that her body turned up half naked in a field in Crothers.
Either way, I did the job. And then she stabbed him. Damn. She’s who I should have known she was all along, but I wasn’t expecting to see her in action.
I wait to blend into the morning’s highway traffic and ditch the car in San Jose. I pull off the license plates, wipe it down, and leave the keys under the seat. Then I buy an old Chevy with a FOR SALE sign in the window and a price that says it’s scrap. I look under the hood—Gerhard built a car from a kit while Calvin and I, age thirteen and in awe, stood there and handed him the parts—and it’s better than expected. I claim I’m going to the bank, walk around for twenty minutes, come back and slap some Manx cash into the owner’s hand.