Mortal Sin (30 page)

He opened the car door, managed somehow to fold his battered body into the driver’s seat. When the dizziness passed, he took stock. Ignition, brake pedal, accelerator, steering wheel. Taking comfort from the knowledge that everything was here, and in its rightful place, he cranked the ignition and backed the car around. He drove by instinct, grateful the Saturn was an automatic. No clutching, no shifting. All he had to do was steer. Steering was a relatively simple feat, even for a man holding a wad of tissue paper to his nostrils to keep what was left of his brains from leaking out.

The trip was a blur. Traffic was light, but still it seemed to take forever to get to Revere, probably because he was driving somewhere in the proximity of the speed limit. He pulled into her driveway and sat there with his window open, watching the dark, slumbering house. Through his open win-dow, the rain carried the rich scent of lilacs, overlaid with the metallic tang of his own blood. He opened the door and hauled himself, inch by painful inch, out of the car, took his time crossing the lawn, took longer to work up the strength to climb those three steps to the porch.

He leaned heavily on the bell, his forehead propped against the door frame. Above him, the porch light came on. He heard footsteps on the stairs, and a moment later, she flung open the door. “Lord in heaven,” she grumbled, “you could at least give me time to—” she saw his face and gasped, her hand fluttering to her mouth as her eyes went wide with horror “—sweet Jesus. What—oh, sweet Jesus.”

Her skin wore a soft, slumberous glow that said she’d been asleep. Her hair fell in a loose tangle of burnished golden curls around her shoulders, and she was wearing a Tweety Bird nightshirt. Her legs were spectacular. It wasn’t the first time he’d noticed. She was still looking at him as though he were something conjured up from a Vincent Price movie, and he wondered if he really looked that bad. He opened his mouth to speak, realized his lip was split. He found it with his tongue, dampened it. Thickly, he said, “It’s not as bad as it looks.”

“Dear God. Tell me you didn’t drive here in this condition.”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I did.” And he might add, if he were so inclined, that he’d done a rather fine job of it. He hadn’t hit so much as a guardrail along the way. As far as he could remember.

“You idiot. It’s a wonder you didn’t pass out behind the wheel and kill yourself. Or somebody else. Get in here.”

He stepped inside and she closed the door. “Bathroom,” she ordered, and like an obedient child, he followed her instructions. She pointed to the commode. “Sit.”

Because she wasn’t the kind of woman a man argued with, he sat.

She stood before him in the tiny bathroom with her hands pressed to her mouth, fingers clasped together so tight the knuckles were white. “All right, Sarah,” she said with a distinct tremor in her voice. “Think. Calm down and think. Take a deep breath—” She inhaled, held it for several seconds, then exhaled. Did it again. “You can handle this. You’ve handled worse, you can handle this. You just have to figure out where to start.”

Maybe it was a trick of the light, but he could have sworn he saw the glimmer of a tear in her eye. “Ice,” she said. “We need ice. I’ll be right back. You move an inch and I’ll skin you alive. What’s left of you to skin.”

She returned with ice cubes wrapped in a dish towel. “Your nose is bleeding like somebody opened the gates to hell. Put your head between your knees. It’ll help.”

He did what she said, accepted the cool, damp cloth she offered, allowed her to rest the makeshift ice pack against the nape of his neck. She knelt before him, touched soft fingers to his face. “Look at you,” she said, her voice rising into a register he’d never heard her use before, one that bordered on hysteria. “You’re a wreck. Some of these cuts should have stitches. Why’d you come here instead of going to the hospital?”

He raised his head, wet terry cloth still pressed against his face, and said, “I don’t know.” He had his suspicions, but he wasn’t about to admit them to her. Not when he hadn’t even admitted them to himself.

Still holding the ice pack against the curve of his neck, she said brokenly, “Put your head back between your knees, sugar. Who did this to you?”

“Cheech and Chong,” he said to the floor.

“‘scuse me?”

“Cheech and Chong. They had boots. The kind with the pointed toes.”

“Lord in heaven, you’re delusional. How many fingers am I holding up?”

“I don’t have a concussion.” Which may or may not have been the truth, since the drive out from Southie wasn’t exactly permanently fixed in his memory. He thought he remembered some of it. “Cheech and Chong are—”

“How many ringers?”

“Two. Sarah, listen to me—”

“I think you should see a doctor. I can call an ambu—”

“
Sarah
.” With his free hand, he caught her wrist in a tight grip. “It was the same two clowns who dropped by before. This time, they didn’t bother with small talk.”

She sat back on her heels, and he released her wrist. “Oh, hell,” she said.

He’d been right about the tears, “I can’t believe they did this to you,” she said. “Lord in heaven, your face. Your poor, beautiful face.”

“It’ll heal.” He sat back up, waited until the room stopped spinning, and removed the washcloth from his nose. Was she really that fond of his face? He thought there might be some significance to that, but he couldn’t quite wrap his mind far enough around the concept to figure out what it might mean. He looked at the washcloth. The bleeding had stopped, but the cloth was ruined. “I’ll pay you for this,” he said.

“That makes twice in one night you’ve been an idiot. Better you should keep your mouth shut, before you say something really stupid and I pitch you out on your ass.” She got up, tossed the bloody cloth into the bathtub, opened the medicine cabinet and rummaged around. She came back with bandages and iodine and a tube of ointment, set it all down on the toilet tank, then filled the lavatory with warm water. She dunked a fresh washcloth into it, wrung it out. Kneeling between his outspread legs, she applied it to the gash at his temple.

He flinched. “I’m sorry, sugar,” she said tenderly. “I have to do it.”

“I’m tougher than I look.”

“Oh, really? So that’s what you call it. I’d be more likely to call it crazy, but what do I know?”

Her words might have been sharp, but her hands were gentle, more gentle than anything he’d ever felt as she began to wash away the blood that seemed to be everywhere. “My second ex-husband, Jackson,” she said conversationally, warm wet cloth gliding along his bruised and battered skin, “he used to go out drinking and brawling all the time. There wasn’t much of anything Jackie liked better than a good fight.” She dipped the cloth into the sink, wrung it out again. “He’d get drunk as a skunk, and some yahoo’d look at him the wrong way, and they’d smear each other all over the barroom floor. Turn your head.” He turned. “No, the other way. That’s better.”

She applied iodine to the gash along his cheek, and he nearly went through the roof. “Hold still,” she said as she taped a butterfly bandage to his face to keep it from falling off. “We’ll get through this a whole lot quicker if you do.” He gritted his teeth when she parted his hair to examine the crater they’d carved in his skull. “This one’s pretty bad. I’ll clean it, but there’s not much else I can do.” Wielding the washcloth with a featherlight touch, she continued, “Seems like I was always getting called downtown to drag him home and patch him up. Believe it or not, sometimes he actually looked worse than you do right now.”

“Is my nose broken?”

“Whoa. Is that a trace of vanity I see rearing its ugly head? Does it feel broken?”

“It feels like an elephant stepped on it.”

“I don’t think it’s broken, but if it is, it’ll just give your face a little more character. Take your shirt off. I want to get a look at those ribs. You need any help with it?”

It had been a long time since any woman had offered to help him undress, but he decided that under the circumstances, it would be wiser not to share that information. He unbuttoned the shirt, wincing as he tried to lift his arm to shrug it off. Without being asked, she helped him, easing it down off his shoulders and tossing it onto the floor. “How bad is it?” he said.

Her sharp intake of breath gave him his answer. “Those bastards,” she said, her voice rising again. “Those low-life, rotten sons-of-bitches.” He held his breath as with the gentlest of touches, she explored his rib cage, fingers testing for tender spots, up and down and side to side. The tips of her hair tickled his bare skin. To distract himself, he said. “With me, it was my mother.”

“Hurts right here, does it, sugar? What about your mother?”

“She used to get shitfaced on a regular basis down at Rafferty’s bar. Around midnight, I’d get a call to come down and fetch her. I’d drag her into a taxi, take her home, and pour her into bed.”

“Shitfaced.” she said, still prodding. “That’s pretty colorful language for a priest.”

“I haven’t always been a priest.” She prodded hard enough to send a white-hot poker of pain shooting through his chest and into his shoulder. “Christ almighty, Sarah!”

“I’m sorry. I don’t think anything’s broken, just bruised all to hell. Jesus, they got you all around the back, too, didn’t they? Those little bastards kicked the shit out of you.”

The odor of sleep still clung to her, a musky Sarah-scent that reached into his chest and plucked at his heart. Her hair smelled of some subtle floral fragrance, and her left breast, soft and unfettered beneath the Tweety Bird nightshirt, pressed agonizingly against his arm as she examined the welts on his back. Goose bumps popped out all over him, from stem to stern, and sweat gathered in his armpits. He swallowed hard and fought the desire to reach out and take.

“Right here,” she said, tracing a tender spot with her fingertip. “It must hurt something awful.”

“Everything hurts something awful.” And some things, he realized, were worse than physical pain.

“The way they went at it, you could have kidney damage. Listen, sugar, the next time you go pee, you check to make sure there’s no blood. If there is, I want you to promise to go right to the hospital.”

She rocked back on her heels and looked up at him, soft curls tumbling about her shoulders, enormous eyes the color of the sky on a perfect day in June. For a single, tenuous instant, the earth stopped revolving. Inside him, something shifted, some monumental rearranging of his universe took place as he tumbled headfirst off the edge of the precipice where he’d been teetering for so long.

It was an odd time to fall in love with a woman, in the middle of a discussion about his bladder functions. But then, he’d never done anything the way other people did. And everything about tonight had been bizarre, so why should this be any different? He had no business falling in love with her, anyway. He had no business falling in love with anyone, and he didn’t know whether he should take her in his arms and kiss her senseless or run for his life in the opposite direction.

“Clancy?” she said. “Are you listening to me?”

He reached out and lifted a single strand of her hair. “Yes,” he said. “I’m listening.”

“I think you should report this to the police.”

Her hair was thick and glossy, soft between his thumb and forefinger. Not quite brown, not quite blond, but a stunning amalgamation of both. An hour ago, he’d planned to walk away from her. An hour ago, he’d planned to push Rio as far and as hard as he could. It was remarkable how a single hour could turn a man’s life upside down.

He dropped the strand of hair. “I can’t go to the police,” he said.

“Why?” she demanded. “This isn’t some silly game. This is real. These people hurt you.”

He sighed, ran a hand through his own hair, and winced. Everything hurt. His head, his body, his heart. And the pain was about to get worse. “I can’t go to the police,” he said. “Cheech said that if I did, they’d kill Kit.”