War at Home: A Smokey Dalton Novel (53 page)

She unstrapped me, helped me sit up.
My balance was still gone.

“…the doctor will be here shortly.
I don’t think your eardrum is ruptured. You wouldn’t be able to sit up.
Do you remember…?”

“I heard part of that,” I said.

She smiled at me, wiped a damp cloth over my face.
Moved her lips again.

I shrugged. The sound had gone out
again
, like a bad signal on the radio.
And the ringing.
It wasn’t a better substitute for real sound.
It wasn’t a substitute at all.

A doctor came in, big white man with stubble on his chin, his white coat flowing behind him.
He looked as stressed as I felt.
He spoke to the nurse, and I wished I could hear.
I couldn’t even see their lips.

She gestured toward me, then turned.

“I pulled some wood from my leg,” I said.
“It didn’t seem to bleed much.”

They continued to talk.
He looked in my ears, at my eyes, in my mouth.
She wiped off my left arm, then stuck a needle in my elbow.
I started.
He held me back.

I looked at the arm.
A gash ran from my shoulder to the elbow, over an inch wide.
They were going to give me stitches.

“…and a tetanus shot.
I don’t know if he ever had one, so we may as well do the whole spectrum,” the doctor was saying.
He sounded like he was inside a bottle, his words garbled.

“Just a booster,” I said.

“You heard that?” he asked.

“Barely.
My ears ring. The sound fades in and out.”

“That’s common after a blast like that,” he said. “You have some bleeding, but the drum is fine.
Your other wounds are worse.
We gave you a local so that I can stitch up your arm.
I’m going to look at the rest of you.
I’m afraid of shrapnel.
That blast sounded awful.
We even heard it here.
I think half the city did…”

The ringing grew even more intense and I had trouble concentrating on his words.
He threaded a needle, moved a tray close, set some small metal tools on it.
The nurse was working behind him, getting the booster ready.

He started to stitch.
I looked away.
My shirt was
ripped
. I hadn’t realized that.
I wasn’t wearing a hospital gown, though, and I was still wearing pants and shoes.

That didn’t last long, however.
They helped me strip, examined the rest of me, gave me the booster, which hurt worse than the stitches, and found another long cut in my thigh.
Another local, more stitches.

I closed my eyes, opened them in a hospital room.
A clock in the hall, barely visible above the nurse’s station, read 7:18, the second hand ticking away.

Jimmy. Malcolm.
I had to meet them.
If I didn’t get there, they’d think something had happened to me.

I couldn’t do that to Jimmy, not again.
I’d nearly died on a case in December, and at first I thought he wouldn’t forgive me.
If Malcolm had to drag him to Newark, Jimmy would be terrified.

I had to keep them safe.

I wasn’t keeping them safe here.
If the doctors gave me something for the pain, I might be out for days.

I couldn’t be.
I couldn’t leave Malcolm and Jimmy alone.

Not here.
Not now.

I staggered out of bed, opened the metal cabinet, saw my clothes – including my ripped shirt – neatly folded on a shelf, my shoes beneath them.
An old man slept in the bed near the window.
He snored as if he were congested.
A tube ran from his nose to a machine beside the bed.

I was dizzy, but I managed to get the clothes out of the closet.
My wallet still had money; there was change in my pocket.

I had to sit on the bed to pull up my pants, and I had to wait until another dizzy spell passed before putting on my shoes.

“Mr. Grimshaw,” a nurse said as she hurried into the room.
“You need to lie down. You’ve been through a terrible experience.”

“I have to go home,” I said.
“My son doesn’t know where I am.”

“We’ll call your family,” she said. “We were waiting for you to wake up.”

“There’s no phone.”
The ringing wasn’t as bad, but the dizziness was awful.
“Do I have a concussion?”

She checked my chart.
“No.
But you’re not recommended to leave. The doctor wanted you to stay the night for observation.
After something like that—”

“I need to leave,” I said.
“My son’s only eleven.”

“I’m sure your wife can handle it.”

“I’m not married.”

She frowned.
“Can’t you call a neighbor?”

I shook my head, had to grab the tray table to catch my balance, and had to
choke
back
the
nausea.

“Will it kill me to leave?” I asked.

“Probably not,” she said. “But if you have internal injuries—”

“They’d’ve shown up by now.
Even I know that.
And if there’s more trouble, then I’ll check back in.”

“Mr. Grimshaw, you can’t leave.”

“Can’t a man check himself out in the State of New York?” I asked. “Even if it’s against doctor’s orders?”

“Yes,” she said, and looked helpless. “But it’s not recommended.
You can hardly stand.”

“I have to go,” I said.
“You don’t understand about my son.”

“Maybe we can find someone to go there.”

“No,” I said,
envisioning
the police arriving at the apartment, Jimmy in terror, screaming, afraid they were going to take him away for life.
“I’m leaving.”

I slipped my shirt on, felt for my wallet again, found it, and sighed with relief.
Then I stood, cautiously.
The ringing grew louder.

“Mr. Grimshaw, this isn’t recommended—”

“I know,” I said.
“And believe me, if I had a choice, I’d do something else entirely.”

The door to the room seemed very far away.
I would have asked her to call me a cab, but even I knew that cabs wouldn’t go into Harlem.
Not with white drivers, not at night, and not from here.

She left the room ahead of me and went to the nurse’s station, picking up the phone.
Probably calling the doctor.
But if I wanted to check out, I could.

“Give me a form to sign,” I said.

She looked at me, then sighed, and reached in
to
a drawer, removing a form.
She filled out the top quickly, and I signed it, barely looking at it.

Then I staggered toward the elevators, my walk as uneven as a drunk’s.
My balance was badly off, the ringing was growing worse, and the hearing was subsiding.
Black spots crossed my vision.

I made myself breathe as I pushed the button for the main floor.
That helped the black spots fade.
The wall inside the elevator held me up all the way to the ground floor.
I tried to walk with determination, but people stared at me.
My shirt was ripped and I wondered how much blood and plaster dust still covered my face.

The subway was only a block up, but that block stretched for miles.
Then the stairs went all the way down to hell.
I managed to get to the platform, managed to pull myself onto a train, and remembered to check once I was sitting down to see if I was on the right line.
Miraculously, I was.

People didn’t sit next to me.
The train wasn’t that full, but people got on, looked at me, and moved to the other end of the car.
A few women gave me sideways glances, as if they expected me to hurt them.
Some men cringed when they saw me, their gazes sliding away from my face as if they’d seen something hideous.

I didn’t close my eyes.
I had to struggle to keep them open.
The ringing had gotten worse, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to hear the announcement.

I stared at the door, at the designations, counting the stops to 116
th
S
treet, praying I had enough energy to walk the two blocks south to the apartment.

I barely remember those blocks.
Someone asking if I was all right.
A small boy running in front of me, then looking at my face in horror.
A woman putting her hand to her mouth as she passed me.

I turned onto 114
th
, saw the apartment building, the people who had become familiar in the last few days.
I staggered toward it, so dizzy that the entire world was spinning.
I counted the steps, forced myself to breath with each movement, deep breath, step, deep breath, step, knowing I had to make it, praying I would make it.

As I tripped my way into the building, I realized my keys were gone.
Wallet intact, keys missing.
No local address so they couldn’t do anyone any good.
But no way to get into the apartment, not if Jimmy and Malcolm weren’t here.

I didn’t care.

I fell going up the steps, caught myself, crawled like a child the last few stairs, leaned against the door and closed my eyes.

I’d made it.

And that was all that mattered.

FIFTY-FOUR

When I opened my eyes again, a woman leaned over me.
She seemed vaguely familiar.
Her hair, in a modified bouffant, was shiny and smooth and black, her skin the color of dark chocolate.
She smiled at me.

“Welcome back, Smokey,” she said quietly.
“You scared us.”

I had the wors
t
headache I’d ever had in my life.
My ears still rang, but the sound was fading.
I looked to my left, saw a window with an air
conditioner, and Jimmy
,
sitting in a chair, a book in his lap.

“How come you always get hurt?” he asked me.

“What day is it?” I asked.

“Tuesday,” the woman said.
She put a cool hand on my throbbing head.
“You weren’t out for long.”

“Where’s Malcolm?”

“In the kitchen.” Jimmy stood. His hands were small fists at his side.
“You got hurt again.
You promised you wouldn’t.”

Had I? I didn’t remember.
“This is the apartment, right?”

“Yes,” the woman said.
“And you don’t know who I am.”

I swallowed, looked at Jimmy, saw panic on his face.

“You said he’d know you,” Jimmy said.
“You said—”

“It’s Gwen, Smokey,” the woman said, ignoring Jimmy’s growing tantrum.
“A little older, a little fatter, but it’s Gwen.”

It was Gwen.
Her cheeks had filled out.
She had crow’s
-
feet beside her eyes.
She used to wear her hair long.
She would iron it.
And she’d been tiny.

She wasn’t tiny any more.

“How’d you find us?”

“Not hard,” she said.
“Although the fake name threw me.
I recommended the apartment broker, remember? When he didn’t have a Smokey Dalton, I asked about a man and two boys that he rented to recently.”

“She come here yesterday afternoon, asking for Smokey Dalton,” Jimmy said. “Good thing she talked to me before Malcolm heard.
I told her not to use that name.”

I shouldn’t have called her.
I shouldn’t have used that name.
Now someone could put me together with the apartment broker and this place, and then tie Smokey Dalton to Bill Grimshaw.

So many mistakes.

“But he didn’t tell me why,” she said.
“Are you going to tell me why, Smokey?”

“You’ve been here since last night?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said.
“I got here just in time to see these boys dragging you into the apartment.
They were terrified.
I wanted them to take you to a hospital, but they wouldn’t.
They wanted to leave town.
I convinced them to stay.”

I looked at Jimmy.
He shrugged and looked away.