‘What about my gun? It was stolen.’
‘No, it was Allen’s gun. You wrestled it away from him. Roomful of witnesses saw you do it.’
He nodded slowly. Saw the spray of blood and brains all over again as he shot him. A pretty good shot, he thought. Dark room, stress, a nail in his head, a .38 slug in his chest, bull’s-eye. Pretty damn close to the perfect shot. Then he saw the hook again, up at Jodie’s face, hard steel against the honey of her skin.
‘You OK?’ he asked her.
‘I’m fine,’ she said.
‘You sure? No bad dreams?’
‘No bad dreams. I’m a big girl now.’
He nodded again. Recalled their first night together. A big girl. Seemed like a million years ago.
‘But are you OK?’ she asked him back.
‘The doctor thinks so. He called me Neanderthal man.’
‘No, seriously.’
‘How do I look?’
‘I’ll show you,’ she said.
She ducked away to the bathroom and came back with the mirror from the wall. It was a round thing, framed in plastic. She propped it on his legs and he steadied it with his right hand and looked. He still had a fearsome tan. Blue eyes. White teeth. His head had been shaved. The hair had grown back an eighth of an inch. On the left of his face was a peppering of scars. The nail hole in his forehead was lost among the debris of a long and violent life. He could make it out because it was redder and newer than the rest, but it was no bigger than the mark half an inch away where his brother Joe had caught him with a shard of glass in some long-forgotten childhood dispute over nothing, in the same exact year Hobie’s Huey went down. He tilted the mirror and saw broad strapping over his chest, snowy white against the tan. He figured he had lost maybe thirty pounds. Back to 220, his normal weight. He handed the mirror back to Jodie and tried to sit up. He was suddenly dizzy.
‘I want to get out of here,’ he said.
‘You sure?’ she asked.
He nodded. He was sure, but he felt very sleepy. He put his head back on the pillow, just temporarily. He was warm and the pillow was soft. His head weighed a ton and his neck muscles were powerless to
move it. The room was darkening. He swivelled his eyes upward and saw the IV bags hanging in the far distance above him. He saw the valve the doctor had adjusted. He had clicked it. He remembered the plastic sound. There was writing on the IV bag. The writing was upside down. He focused on it. Concentrated hard. The writing was green. It said morphine.
‘Shit,’ he whispered, and the room spun away into total darkness.
When he opened his eyes again, the sun had moved backward. It was earlier in the day. Morning, not afternoon. Jodie was sitting in her chair by the window, reading. The same book. She was half an inch further through it. Her dress was blue, not yellow.
‘It’s tomorrow,’ he said.
She closed the book and stood up. Stepped over and bent and kissed his lips. He kissed her back and clamped his teeth and pulled the IV needles out of his arm and dropped them over the side of the bed. They started a steady drip on to the floor. He hauled himself upright against the pillows and smoothed a hand over his bristly scalp.
‘How do you feel?’ she asked.
He sat still in the bed and concentrated on a slow survey up his body, starting with his toes and ending with the top of his head.
‘Fine,’ he said.
‘There are people here to see you,’ she said. ‘They heard you’d come around.’
He nodded and stretched. He could feel the chest wound. It was on the left. There was weakness there. He reached up with his left hand to the IV stand. It was a vertical stainless-steel bar with a spiral curl at the top
where the bags slipped on. He put his hand over the curl and squeezed hard. He felt bruising in his elbow where the needles had been and sensitivity in his chest where the bullet had been, but the steel spiral still flattened from round to oval. He smiled.