“What can I do?” Mia asked, staring at Keisha with horror.
“Call Drew and tell him we have a severe acid burn, a facial burn. Tell him we’re going to need an ophthalmologist as well.”
“What else?”
“Get Tim over here to cover us. This might not be the end of it.”
Four blocks from Washington Street, Wilma Deen opened the door of a Toyota club cab pickup and climbed into the backseat. Alois Engel hit the gas before she even got the door closed, which told her he was overly keyed up by the proximity to violence, as usual.
“Did you get her?” he asked, glancing back over the seat.
“Watch where you’re going!”
“Goddamn it, did you get her?”
Wilma thought back to the confusion in the young girl’s face when the acid hit her, before she realized how much pain and suffering had been flung from that go-cup. “I got her, all right. She’ll never be the belle of the ball again.”
“Holy shit.”
Wilma felt the truck speed up as they moved toward Canal Street, which would take them to the Louisiana bridge.
“Slow down, Alois. I don’t want to spend ten years in Parchman.”
“I hear you, don’t sweat it. Gimme some details, though. I didn’t get to see shit.”
Wilma slid down until her face was below window level and closed her eyes. She wasn’t thinking about Keisha Harvin, but her own brother, Glenn. How he had looked when he realized his sister had sided with Snake and the Double Eagles over her own kin. That decision had been a revelation to Wilma, too, but she hadn’t regretted it. Not often, anyhow.
She’d spent nearly three months in hiding, and truth be told, she’d gotten cabin fever. Living on the run was Shitsville, as her daddy used to say. One of the few things he’d been right about.
“FBI’s gonna go batshit over this,” said Alois. “The mayor, too.”
“Good. I’m tired of hiding every goddamn day. I needed some action.”
Alois nodded and took a long, gradual right turn, which meant he must be following the ramp down to the twin bridges over the Mississippi.
“We’re about to get all the action we can handle,” he said. “It’s about damned time, too.”
Wilma settled back in the seat and closed her eyes, but she didn’t see darkness. She saw the colored girl’s mouth fly open in shock as the acid hit her. By now she was suffering the torments of hell. Deep in her chest Wilma felt a twinge of something she’d thought was dead. It was empathy. But she gritted her teeth against it when she remembered her brother’s eyes while she helped Snake and Sonny inject him with a lethal dose of fentanyl. Once you’d gone that far . . . there was no going back. You could only go forward.
What had most appealed to her about the acid attack was that by carrying it out, she would earn the respect of the VK club, who’d been handling their concealment from the FBI. And not only of the mamas—who were catty, slutty bitches—but the bikers themselves. The leader of the VK, a tough old Vietnam vet named Lars Dempsey, reminded Wilma a little of Frank Knox, or what she remembered of Frank, anyway. She wasn’t sure how Snake kept Lars doing his bidding. In that world, the big ones ate the little ones, and she couldn’t see a man of Snake’s age surviving for long. But she had to give him his due: it had been almost three months since Forrest died, and the VK were following Snake’s orders like an obedient army.
I guess the Knoxes are just born leaders, she thought, half resentfully. And I reckon that’s a good thing, ’cause without Snake I’d be in jail or dead in a ditch right now.
Chapter 7
“You did well, washing her face and eyes so thoroughly,” says Drew Elliott, holding a penlight to Keisha Harvin’s cheek. “You mitigated some of the external damage.”
My father’s younger partner has been working over Keisha for half an hour, but he only let me into the St. Catherine’s ER treatment room two minutes ago. He’s been applying a solution of something called calcium gluconate to every affected surface of Keisha’s skin. To my relief, he’s given her an IV narcotic for pain, and she appears to be unconscious, which makes it easier for me to remain calm while he examines her facial skin under the light.
“Will she suffer any permanent vision loss?” I ask.
Drew looks up at me, apparently confused. Then softly he says, “She’ll probably lose her sight, Penn. Forever. We won’t know for a few hours yet. I’ve called in Pat Crosby for an ophthalmological consult. But her corneas are already cloudy. It doesn’t look good.”
This recalibration of my worst-case scenario starts my heart thumping again. “How bad will the facial scarring be? She’s a pretty young girl.”
Drew moves the beam of light down to her neck. “That’s not my main concern. The question is, will she survive?”
This jars me to the core. “What? She’s twenty-five years old. I realize she’ll never be on the cover of Vogue after this, but . . . you’re saying it could kill her? Was there poison in the acid or something?”
“No, but there doesn’t have to be. The acid in that cup wasn’t hydrochloric or sulfuric—which would have been bad enough, but mostly limited to skin and eye damage. It was hydrofluoric. Hydrofluoric acid bonds with calcium ions, which means it passes through the skin and goes deep into the body, all the way to the bones.”
My face feels cold. “What happens then?”
“The resulting reaction releases a flood of calcium into the bloodstream. And if you get enough calcium in your blood, it stops your heart. Permanently.”
“But . . . surely you can do something to counteract that?”
Drew bends to get a better view of Keisha’s neck. “Not enough, I’m afraid. It comes down to how much acid got into her. I just read about a case where a guy in a college laboratory spilled about a cup of hydrofluoric acid onto his lap. He jumped into a nearby swimming pool and stayed there for thirty minutes trying to wash himself. They initially thought he was okay, but a few days later they had to amputate both legs.”
“Oh, God.”
Drew clicks off the light and sets it on the instrument tray. “Ultimately he died. Heart damage.”
I turn away and walk over to a sink, trying to wrap my mind around what Drew has said. Standing in the cold air of the ER, I remember the message Snake Knox sent to my father three weeks ago: Wives and children have no immunity. A wave of nausea rolls through my belly, and I’m thinking of darting into the toilet when Drew removes his gloves with a pop, drops them in the trash can, then lays his hand on my shoulder.
“Who would do that to this girl? The Double Eagles?”
Wives and children have no immunity. “Had to be. Keisha’s been pretty hard on them in the newspaper.”
“Penn . . . what if that had been Annie?”
“Don’t even say that, man.”