Black Heart (23 page)

The doctor sticks the needle into a vein in Sam’s arm. He makes a sound that’s half moan and half swallow.

“Do you think she really likes him?” Sam asks. I know who he means. Barron. And I don’t know the answer, not really.

The doctor looks at me, then back at Sam.

“No,” I say. “But maybe you shouldn’t worry about that now.”

“Distracting—” Sam’s eyes roll back in his head, his body going limp. I wonder if he’s dreaming.

“Now you’ve got to hold him down,” the doctor says. “While I dig out the bullet.”

“What?” I say. “Hold him how?”

“Just keep him from moving too much. I need his leg to stay steady.” He looks across the room at Dean Wharton. “You. Come over here. I need someone to hand me forceps and a scalpel when I ask for them. Put on these gloves.”

The dean stands and crosses the room dazedly.

I move to the other side of the desk and put one hand on Sam’s stomach and the other on his thigh, leaning my weight against them. He turns his head and groans, although he remains out of it. I let go immediately, stepping back.

“Hold him.
He won’t remember this,” the doctor says, which doesn’t comfort me even a little. There’s lots of stuff
I don’t remember, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

I put my hands back in place.

Dr. Doctor leans in and presses around the wound. Sam moans again and tries to shift position. I don’t let him. “He’s going to stay semiconscious. It’s safer that way, but it means you’ve really got to stop him from moving. I think the bullet’s still in there.”

“What does that mean?” Dean Wharton asks.

“It means we’ve got to get it out,” says the doctor. “Give me the scalpel.”

I turn my head at the moment the point of the knife sinks into Sam’s skin. He writhes under my hands, squirming blindly, forcing me to put my full weight against him. When I look again, the doctor has cut a deep slice. Blood is welling up out of it.

“Retractor,” the doctor says, and Wharton hands it over.

“Hemostat,” the doctor says.

“What’s that?” Wharton asks.

“The silver thing with the curved tip. Take your time. It’s not my emergency.”

I shoot the doctor my filthiest glare, but he isn’t looking. He’s pushing an instrument into Sam’s leg. Sam moans, low, and jerks slightly.

“Shhh,” I say. “It’s almost over. It’s almost over.”

Blood sprays out of the leg suddenly, hitting my chest and face. I stagger back, shocked, and Sam nearly jerks off the table.

“Hold him, you idiot!” the doctor shouts.

I grab Sam’s leg, slamming myself down onto it. The
blood pulses along with his heart, rising and falling. There is so much blood. It’s in my eyelashes, smeared over my stomach. It’s all I can smell and all I can taste.

“When I say hold him, I’m not joking! Do you want your friend to die?
Hold him.
I have to find the vessel I nicked. Where is that hemostat?”

Sam’s skin looks clammy. His mouth looks bluish. I turn my head away from the surgery, my fingers digging into his muscles, holding him down as firmly as I can. I grit my teeth and try not to watch the doctor tie off the artery or watch him root out the bullet or start stitching up the wound with black string. I hang on and watch the rise and fall of Sam’s chest, reminding myself that so long as he’s breathing and moaning and shifting, so long as he’s in pain, he’s alive.

After, I slump on the floor and listen to the doctor give Dean Wharton instructions. My whole body hurts, my muscles sore from fighting Sam’s.

“He’s going to have to take antibiotics for two weeks. Otherwise he’s at serious risk for infection,” the doctor says, taping the gauze in place and wadding up his bloody poncho. “I can’t write him a prescription, but this is enough for the first week. My answering service will contact whichever one of you called about getting more antibiotics.”

“I understand,” the dean is saying.

I understand too. Dr. Doctor can’t write a prescription because he’s had his license revoked. That’s why he’s acting as a concierge doctor for Zacharov and for us.

“And if you need a cleanup service for in here, I know some very discreet people.”

“That would be very much appreciated.”

They sound like two civilized men, discussing civilized things. They are two men of the world, a man of medicine and a man of letters. They probably don’t think of themselves as criminals, no matter what they’ve done.

As the doctor walks out the door, I take my phone out of my pocket.

“What are you doing?” Dean Wharton demands.

“I’m calling his girlfriend,” I say. “Someone’s going to have to stay with him tonight. It can’t be me, and he wouldn’t want it to be you.”

“You have somewhere more important to be?”

I look up at Wharton. I’m exhausted. And I hate that I can’t stay, when this is all my fault in the first place. My gun. My dumb joke with Mina, the finger in my pocket that made it seem like bringing a gun was the right move.
“It can’t be me.”

“I absolutely forbid you to call another student, Mr. Sharpe. This situation is chaotic enough as it is.”

“Bite me,” I say, my gloved fingers leaving sticky brown marks behind when I tap the keys.

“Did you find him?” Daneca says, instead of “hello.” “Is he all right?”

The connection isn’t very good. She seems scratchy and far away.

“Can you come to Dean Wharton’s office?” I ask. “Because if you can, I think you should come now. Sam could really use you. It would really help if you came right now. But don’t panic. Please just don’t panic and please come now.”

She says she will in a bewildered tone that makes me think I must sound very strange. Everything feels empty.

“You should go,” I tell Dean Wharton.

By the time Daneca arrives, he’s already gone.

She looks around the room, at the blood-soaked carpet, and the lamps on the bookshelves, at Sam lying on Wharton’s massive desk, unconscious. She looks at his leg and at me, sitting on the floor without a shirt on.

“What happened?” she asks, walking over to Sam and touching his cheek lightly with her glove.

“Sam got—he got shot.” She looks scared. “A doctor came and fixed him. When he wakes up, I know he’ll want you there.”

“Are you okay?” she asks. I have no idea what she means. Of course I’m all right. I’m not the one lying on a desk.

I stagger to my feet and pick up my coat.

I nod. “But I have to go, okay? Dean Wharton knows about this.” I gesture vaguely, mostly toward his carpet. “I don’t think we can move Sam until he wakes up. It’s what—about noon now?”

“It’s two in the afternoon.”

“Right,” I say, glancing toward the windows. Dean Wharton drew the blinds, I remember. Not that I would be able to tell the time by the amount of sunlight. “I can’t—”

“Cassel, what’s going on? What happened? Does where you’re going have to do with Sam?”

I start to laugh, and Daneca looks even more worried. “Actually,” I say, “it’s totally unrelated.”

“Cassel—,” she says.

I look at Sam, lying on the desk, and think of my mother in Zacharov’s house, nursing her own gunshot wound. I close my eyes.

At the end of a criminal’s life, it’s always the small mistake, the coincidence, the lark. The time we got too comfortable, the time we slipped up, the time someone aimed a little to the left.

I’ve heard Grandad’s war stories a thousand times. How they finally got Mo. How Mandy almost got away. How Charlie fell.

Birth to grave, we know it’ll be us one day. Our tragedy is that we forget it might be someone else first.

I AM SHAKING WHEN I
walk out of Wharton’s office, trembling with such force that I’m afraid I’ll stumble as I make my way down the stairs. Sam’s blood is staining my skin, soaking through my pants. I force myself to walk across the quad, hunched over so that my coat hides the worst of it. Most students are gone on the weekends, and I am careful not to take any of the paths, and to veer away if I see anyone. I stick to the shadows of trees and darkness.

Once I make it to my dorm hall, I head straight for the communal bathroom. I see myself in the mirror. There is a smear of red across my jaw, and for a moment, as I try to wipe it and only smear it wider, I feel like I am looking at a
stranger, someone older with hollow cheekbones and lips curled in a mean scowl. A madman fresh from a murder. A sicko. A killer.

I don’t think he likes me much.

Despite the scowl on his face, his eyes are black and wet, as if he’s about to start crying.

I don’t like him much either.

My stomach lurches. I have barely enough time to make it into one of the stalls before I start to retch. I haven’t eaten anything, so it’s mostly sour bile. On my knees on the cold tile, choking, the wave of anger and self-loathing that sweeps over me is so towering and vast, I cannot imagine how there will be anything of me that’s not carried away with it. I feel like there’s nothing left. No fight in me.

I have to focus. Yulikova will be here in a couple more hours, and there’s stuff I need to take care of, things that need to happen before I can go with her. Arrangements. Last details and instructions.

But I’m frozen with horror at everything that has happened and everything in front of me. All I can think of is blood and the guttural, raw sound of Sam moaning in agony.

I better get used to it.

I take a shower so hot that my skin feels sunburned when I get out. Then I dress for my date with the Feds—crappy T-shirt that got chewed up by one of the dryers, my leather jacket, and a new pair of gloves. The bloody clothes I run
under the tap until they’re less foul, then wrap them in a plastic bag. Even though it’s a risk, I keep my phone, turning off the ringer and tucking it into my sock.

I shove a bunch of other things into my jacket—things I plan on transferring to the duffel I left in the car. Index cards and a pen. Styling gel and a comb. A few pictures of Patton that I print out with Sam’s crappy ink-jet and then fold. A beaten-up detective paperback.

Then I walk to the corner store, dumping the plastic bag of bloody clothes into the garbage can outside. Mr. Gazonas smiles at me, like he always does.

“How’s your little blond girlfriend?” he asks. “I hope you’re taking her someplace nice on a Saturday night.”

I grin and get myself a cup of coffee and a ham and cheese sandwich. “I’ll tell her it was your idea.”

“You do that,” he says as he gives me my change.

I hope I get to take Lila out some Saturday night. I hope I get a chance to see her again.

Trying not to think about that, I go back to the parking lot and force down my food, sitting in my parked car. Everything tastes like ashes and dust.

I listen to the radio, flipping through channels. I can’t concentrate on what I’m listening to, and after a while I can’t keep my eyes open either.

I wake to a tapping on the window. Agent Yulikova is standing beside the car, with Agent Jones and another woman I don’t recognize beside them.

For a moment I wonder what would happen if I refused to get out. I wonder if they’d have to leave eventually. I
wonder if they’d get one of those jaws of life and pop the top off my Benz like it was a tin can.

I open the car door and grab for my duffel.

“Have a nice rest?” Yulikova asks me. She’s smiling sweetly, like she’s the den mother of my Boy Scout troop instead of the lady who wants to send me up the river. She looks healthier than she did in the hospital. The cold has made her cheeks rosy.

I force a yawn. “You know me,” I say. “Lazy as a bedbug.”

“Well, come on. You can sleep in our car if you want.”

“Sure,” I say, locking the Benz.

Their car is predictably black—one of those huge Lincolns that you can spread out in. I do. And while I’m getting comfortable, I lean down to put my key into my bag and surreptitiously lift out my cell. Then, leaning back, I palm my phone into the pocket of the car door.

The last place anyone is going to look for contraband is in their own vehicle.

“So, you have something to turn in?” Yulikova says. She’s in the back with me. The other two agents are up front.

The gun. Oh, no, the gun. I left it in Wharton’s office, under the desk.

She must see it in my face, the flash of horror.

“Did something happen?” she asks.

“I forgot it,” I say. “I’m so sorry. If you let me out, I’ll go get it.”

“No,” she says, exchanging a look with the other female agent. “No, that’s all right, Cassel. We can get it when we bring you back. Why don’t you tell us where it is.”

“If you want me to get it—,” I say.

She sighs. “No, that’s fine.”

“Are you going to tell me what’s going on now?” I ask. “I’d really feel a lot more comfortable if I was in on the plan.”

“We’re going to tell you everything. Honest,” she says. “It’s very simple and straightforward. Governor Patton is going to give a press conference, and when it’s over, we’d like you to use your gift to change him into—well, into a living thing that can be contained.”

“Do you have a preference?”

She gives me a look, like she’s trying to gauge whether or not I’m testing her. “We’ll leave that up to you and whatever is going to be easier, but it’s imperative that he doesn’t get away.”

“If it’s all the same, I’ll turn him into a big dog, I guess. Maybe one of those fancy hounds with the pointy faces—salukis, right? No,
borzois
. Some guy my mother used to know had those.” His name was Clyde Austin. He hit me in the head with a bottle. I leave those details out. “Or maybe a big beetle. You could keep him in a jar. Just remember to put in the airholes.”

There is a sudden flicker of fear in Yulikova’s eyes.

“You’re upset. I can see that,” she says, reaching out and touching her gloved hand to mine. It’s an intimate, motherly gesture, and I have to force myself not to flinch. “You’re always sarcastic when you’re nervous. And I know this isn’t easy for you, not knowing details, but you have to trust us. Being a government operative means always feeling a little bit in the dark. It’s how we keep one another safe.”