Crook Manifesto (Ray Carney, #2)(87)

Carney and Elizabeth whisper-argued in the hall.

“I don’t know that he wants to go to a hospital.”

“What? Look at him—he needs a hospital.”

“He doesn’t like doctors. You know he’s a big baby underneath.”

“I know what kind of man he is, Ray. Don’t try that.”

“He made it here—it’s where he wants to be.”

Pepper closed his eyes again. It was still dark when he next woke. Curled on his side. Bath towel under his head. A rubber bag of melted ice had slid off his face. He tried to move and it felt like his blood had turned to broken glass and shot around inside him. He counted to ten and shuffled into the kitchen, where the radio was on low. News station. Gas prices out of control.

Elizabeth was up reading a big hardcover book—Centennial. She observed his slow progress into the kitchen with pursed lips. The yellow paint job was new, he thought. She held her hand out, indicating the seat across from her at the breakfast table. She rose to aid him when he tottered, but he made it to the chair. The Felix the Cat clock over the sink said it was past three.

Bleary as he was, Pepper had no trouble discerning his host’s sour mood.

“I got jumped,” he said.

“Jumped! By what, a Mack truck?” She mumbled something.

“What?”

“I said you better not get blood all over my goddamn couch.” She rose. “Let me get more ice for that pack.”

She twisted the ice tray. They say these new plastic ones were better than the metal ones with the lever, but he wasn’t buying it. Elizabeth refilled the ice bag and told him she was going to bed. His room was made upstairs if he wanted to sleep in. “Otherwise the kids are going to wake you. And they’ll have questions about ‘Mack trucks.’?”

His room. He had only stayed there once, on Carney’s birthday. It had been a swell evening. He’d been moved to make more of an effort to understand other people and it had made for a good time. At different points during dinner he took in the family’s faces and puzzled at why he felt so comfortable. “What’s this cake?” “Betty Crocker.” The rain really started coming down, he was tired, and when Elizabeth told him she’d had the kids make up the bed upstairs, he didn’t put up his usual fight. He had wondered what it’d be like to wake up in a house like that, see the light coming in. Uncle Pepper. Don’t call him that, but he had a room upstairs with a thick, red oval rug, a pine bookcase full of Carney’s business-school textbooks, a rocking chair, and a bed that only he slept in, as far as he knew.

Pepper hurt pretty bad when Carney came in the next morning. He had awakened multiple times, waiting for sunlight. Sunlight meant that the white man hadn’t killed him yet.

Carney held up Bad Cologne’s pistol. “I got it before Elizabeth saw it,” he said.

Pepper reached over and tucked the gun under his pillow. “I’ll tell you later” was all he felt like saying when Carney asked what happened. He recited a phone number and asked him to call his doctor.

Elizabeth checked in on him. She was less irritated than she’d been last night. “You sure you’re okay?” She left eggs and bacon and a glass of Tropicana. John and May stopped in to say hi, skittish and worried. Like they were little kids again. Carney or Elizabeth had told them not to pry so they acted like this was a normal visit. He told them he’d be better in no time. They gently closed the door. Pepper turned to the wall. He thought, Reece Brown, Reece Brown.

Dr. Rostropovich knocked on the door to his room two hours later. No effete practitioner, he appeared to have attended medical school among mountain men and rowdies; his neck was a tree trunk and his hands were made for mangling, not healing. The doctor was not much of a talker. His idea of bedside manner was pretending he’d never seen you before. As far as Pepper knew, his practice consisted entirely of the jammed-up, gutshot, and otherwise fucked over. You crawl away from a rip-off, bleeding out on the gravel, Dr. Rostropovich was your guy. He probed where the bat had collided. He eavesdropped on Pepper’s insides with a taped-up stethoscope. He sensed where Pepper had hurt his back without being told, and poked it with a cold metal instrument. The cut above Pepper’s eyes had closed up, he observed. He left pills.

Carney came in soon after with chicken soup. He closed the door behind him and sat on the desk. “I told her you got into an argument in a bar and the guy’s friends joined in.”

“That’s ridiculous, some dipshits taking me in a bar brawl. A salesman who can’t even lie right.”

“Where’s that doctor from?”

“You call him up, he comes around.”

“What did he say—do you have a concussion? Need X-rays?”

“I got to take it easy.”

“That’s his diagnosis?”

“He’s not that kind of doctor.”

“Not what kind of doctor?”

“Not the kind who believes in all that stuff. You call him, he comes.” Pepper pointed to Dr. Rostropovich’s glass jar of pills. “You got a glass of water?”



* * *



***

Three days later Pepper and Carney were parked four doors down from Optimo on 107th, waiting for Dan Hickey to come out. The wind overnight had swept out the humidity and the clouds made the city seem like it was wrapped in a bum’s dingy overcoat. Carney read The New York Times he’d draped over the steering wheel while Pepper tapped the outside of the passenger door, brow knit, considering different combinations of violence.