Benighted (33 page)

He falls back onto the straw with a groan, his arms and legs still stiff and frozen into place. If he leaves them for a few minutes, they’ll loosen, he’ll be able to unfold them. He doesn’t wait, though. His face convulses as he bends one arm at the elbow, then the other. He closes his fingers one at a time, biting his lip as the stretched and abused muscles resist. It doesn’t stop him; he starts to work his face, too, clenching and unclenching his eyes, opening his mouth wide, pulling his lips over his teeth. It should look ugly, lying on the floor grimacing, but it doesn’t. It’s almost graceful, like a child. As the red fades from his skin, I see I was right. The bruises have healed up as he ricked back, he’s pristine again.

The straw crackles as he pushes himself into a sitting position, rubs his hands over his face, gives a sigh like a tired runner. After a moment he shakes himself, covers his arms, and I realize how cold it is down here. No one heats the cells, and it’s winter. Paul grabs one of the bars and pulls himself to his feet, reaches up onto a shelf to take his clothes down. He shakes them, examines them and holds them to his face. They’re dirty. As he dresses, I see the others are also getting to their feet, shivering in the morning air. This is the coldest time of day.

Carla walks to the edge of her cell, reaches through. Albin touches her hand, a brief greeting like a kiss of peace given during Mass. Then he crosses to the other side, touches Sarah’s hand, and Sarah crosses to Paul to touch him. I stand up, but he doesn’t see me behind the mirror. Letting go of her hand, he glances over his shoulder to where Ellaway is sitting against the wall, head in his hands as if hungover. Paul shrugs. I think I see dislike on his face before he turns away, sits back down without passing the greeting along.

“What’s to remember?” he says. He’s a little hoarse, but it’s the right voice now, I recognize it. “Still, not much else to do.”

“Wait for them to come round and have another little chat with us,” says Sarah. She sits down as Paul has, cross-legged against the wall.

“They won’t,” Paul says. “Not for today, at least. I don’t think so. They’ll have been up all night. Lola was always in pieces on the first day, I doubt she could have hit a cushion.”

He said
was.

“Did I dream it,” says Albin, “or does anyone else have the feeling Paul’s girlfriend was down here last night?”

I stiffen as Carla shrugs, Sarah pulls a face.

“Maybe,” Paul says. “I don’t—maybe she was.” It’s almost a sigh. He closes his eyes, and they all follow suit. They just sit, cross-legged, for ten minutes, silent, absorbed. They’re so contained. I almost bang on the glass to disturb them.

Ellaway sits silent, scowling. After ten minutes, he breaks in, saying, “For God’s sake, what are you all playing at?”

“Remembering.” Paul opens his eyes and gives Ellaway a look. His voice is sharp. “You remember better if you do this just after sunrise. Remember? We taught you. Oh wait, you didn’t stick around to try it.”

“Paul.” Albin speaks, and Paul looks around. “It’s too early for this.”

“I’m sorry.” Paul doesn’t sound very sorry. “Just—stop him talking. I don’t want to listen to him talk.”

“Please don’t,” Carla says. Her voice is almost inaudible. “Let’s not have bad feelings so soon after.”

“Fine.” Paul drops his hands into his lap. “Sorry, Carlie.”

“Do you think they’ll leave us alone today?” Carla says.

He looks at his hands. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Do you suppose when they were hunting they—”

“Anyway,” Albin interrupts, giving her a serious look. He doesn’t finish the sentence.

They sit in silence.

I retreat to my office, smooth the blankets over the floor. It’s a hard surface to sleep on, but I’m better provided for than anyone else in this building. Carla was right to wonder; it’s possible that there are others of them out there. Tonight’s catchers may have collared more of their friends.

It’s a long time before I fall asleep.

There are dozens of reports, scores. Underage children trapped in alleyways. Junkies trying to devour the bark off trees. Regular loiterers caught for the fifth, sixth, tenth time, out in their favorite places, howling at the moon. That’s the thing about lunes. Lycos are cautious, they can link one thing to another and avoid stupid decisions, but lunes don’t remember what they’ve learned, not all of it, not all of them. In the daytime, they’d know better than to re-offend in the same spot over and over, but when night comes, they forget fine details like that. They go back to their old haunts.

So when I find a report of a man collared who was running on three legs, I’m not really surprised to see it was in Spiritus Sanctus that they caught him. The report hasn’t put the facts together yet, but the details are all there. It was even in the same section of the woods where Marty got torn up.

This man was in a bad way. The best part of his right front leg was useless. Nobody could get near enough to investigate. He was crazy with it. In the morning they found a big scar on his arm, on what was left of it. The necrosis was rampant. Already most of his fingers were beyond help. He cursed and raved at the shelter workers, spat and kicked at the nurse who tried to examine him. That’s why they kept him in; they thought they’d better hospitalize him for his own good.

It’s only afternoon. I pick up the telephone and call the shelter.

“Hello?” My spirit sinks a little as I recognize Nick’s voice. This would have been easier with someone I didn’t know.

“Nick, this is Lola Galley speaking.”

“Hello, Lola.” Even this early in the morning, there’s a little warmth in his voice. I guess he likes me.

“Listen, I’ve been reading a report of a lune you had in your shelter last night, a—David Harper?”

“Bad lune.” There’s hours of fatigue in his voice.

“Is he still there?”

“No. Ambulance came for him half an hour ago.”

Half an hour. There’s still time. “Okay, listen, Nick, this is important. It’s very urgent that you get in touch with the hospital. Call the police as well, and we’d better send over some DORLA guards, too, seeing what happened when we trusted hospital security with Seligmann.”

“Slow down, Lo,” he says. “What do I tell the police?”

“He’s a major suspect in the Marcos and Jensen case. At the very least, we can probably charge him with attempted murder. Sean Martin and I can witness that. We need to arrest him before he leaves the hospital.”

“Free-ranger?” he asks. The story must be all over the country by now.

“Yeah. Yeah, I think so.”

Nick’s good. He doesn’t waste time with questions; he gets straight off the line and starts making arrangements. I make other calls. It only takes ten minutes to find the man.

Necrotic arm, a wound that wouldn’t heal when he ricked. Only silver does that. This man was in Spiritus Sanctus. There was a deep, rotten wound in his right front leg. I think he got it from a silver bullet. I think Marty put it there.

THIRTY-ONE

“I
’ve got a proposition to make.” I say this before any of them can say a word. All of them but Ellaway have risen to their feet as I come in, and they stand back a little. Their eyes are on Paul.

He looks at me. Already there are fresh bruises around his eyes. “Lola,” he says. I don’t move. He grips one of the bars, searching for words. “I’ve been asking to see you.”

I’ve never seen him look like this, this pinched, desperate expression. It’s how all our prisoners look after a while, it’s how we look on moon nights. I thought that Paul was free of it. “You look bad,” I say.

He tilts his head. “You look a little peaky yourself.”

I tense at the word. My mother always called me peaky. “I haven’t been sleeping that much,” I say. “It happens when you find out you’ve been used.”

“What? Lola, I wasn’t using you…” His voice is hasty. I raise my hand to cut him off.

“Anyway, I’ve got a proposition for you. A change in the terms of your captivity. And I’d advise you here and now to take it; I had to do a lot of fast talking to get my boss to agree.”

“Are you going to help us?” Albin says.

“That’s not my priority.” I press my hands together for a moment, then make them lie still at my sides. “We’ve arrested another man. We have good evidence that he’s one of you. Now, he isn’t admitting to anything.” He’s cursing his captors and cursing the doctors worse for letting them stand guard. They say that he pulled the drip right out of his arm. That was before the doctors decided there was no saving it and amputated above the elbow. “We want you to identify him as part of your conspiracy. If you do that, then DORLA will assign you a lawyer. You’ll be represented as a group. Some of your rights will be restored. You’ll be provided with blankets and mattresses. If you don’t identify him, we’ll simply throw him into the mix and keep waiting for confessions, yours and his.”

“A DORLA lawyer or an outside one?” Albin asks, as Sarah says, “You’re holding out for confession because you don’t have evidence, aren’t you?” and Paul says, “Would it be you?”

“A DORLA lawyer. Possibly me. That decision will be taken after you’ve identified him.”

“If we don’t confess, you can’t convict us. There isn’t any evidence.”

“We can wait a while for your confessions, Miss Sanderson.”

“Supposing we plead guilty to a lesser charge?” says Albin. “We’ll all admit to moon loitering. We really didn’t hurt anyone.”

I look at him. “Did you ever meet Johnny Marcos?”

“That’s Ellaway’s fault,” Paul says. “You can fry him, go right ahead.”

“Paul!”

“That’s all right, Mr. Albin, I’m listening to everyone’s opinions,” I say. Ellaway mutters in a corner. Paul gives him a look that would split a log. I swallow. That’s Ellaway’s fault, he said. That’s all he has to say about it. “You can plead guilty to those if you like. Only I had the impression that you confessed to those charges pretty much as soon as I arrested you. It’s not much of a bargaining chip.”

“It’s the truth. Please be our lawyer, Ms. Galley. I swear, you can make a really good case for us.”

Ellaway comes up to the bars. “Don’t tell her fucking anything, Lewis. You can’t do this.”

“I wouldn’t bother, Mr. Ellaway. We’ve got all we want to know about your mauling Johnny.” I mean to say Johnny Marcos, but the name gets mangled in my mouth. “That’s attempted murder at the least. You’re going down whatever happens.”

“Well, that’s one good thing to come out of this.”

“Paul.” Albin’s voice is soft.

“Paul, nothing, Lew.” Distantly I recognize the name. The first night we met he told me about a friend who tried to get him to eat bananas. Lou. Lew. He made me laugh, at the time. “You think we’d be in this if it wasn’t for that man?” Paul turns to look at me. “You never told me you were defending him, Lola.”

My face won’t move. “But you knew anyway.”

“You didn’t tell me anything about him. If you’d told me what you thought, I could have told you what happened.”

I try to take a deep breath, but I can’t—my chest has stiffened and I can’t get any air in. “I don’t—You’re a murder suspect, Paul. I told you someone shot my colleague. I told you I couldn’t go home, and you—I can’t even go home now, you know. Were you planning to kill me all along?”

Paul’s hands come off the bars and he draws them back into his cell. “You were living with me, Lola. We were never more than five feet apart. If I’d wanted you dead I could have snapped your neck then and there and been done with it.”

He used to hold my face between his hands. We’d make love sitting up and he’d cradle me, take the weight of it, my head fitting into his palms. Did he think of it then? Or has he thought of it since, lying here in his straw? One good wrench. That’s all it would have taken.

“Nicely put, Casanova,” says Albin.

“Jesus, Paul,” Sarah says from her heap of straw. There’s a hysterical note to her voice; her eyes don’t focus on me. “How did you get her into bed in the first place?”

I turn to leave.

“Wait—Lola!” Paul shakes the door of his cage. “Don’t go, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that the way it sounded—wait, come back!”

I turn, my pulse beating in my ears. I’m angry with them now, I’ve shown them my pale face and broken heart and let Paul humiliate me in front of them all. But I know fear when I hear it. Sarah calls after me too, and I see, quite suddenly, what I am to them. A link, a hope, a fragile, touchy, brittle link that they’re wheedling with desperate care, playing for their lives with glass cards.

“I’ll bring him in,” I tell them. “You should identify him. It’ll get you all some legal counsel, him included. He’ll be down later in the day.”

They’re surprised that we bring Harper back in a group, two guards besides me, which makes me wonder about them—anyone who can hate us enough to shoot silver bullets at us and yet expect a dangerous prisoner to be escorted to the cells by a lone woman less than five and a half feet tall must have a skewed view of the world. It’s an almost mythical view of us. The absolute enemy, a force of evil, yet with no actual police techniques to make things happen. Though I suppose if you only ever see us through luning eyes, you might get some simplistic ideas.

Harper struggles hard between his two escorts, both of them interrogators with wounds that don’t show. I walk ahead, not touching him. When we bring him down to the free-rangers’ cell block, he stops struggling, stares around him, glaring at the prisoners.

“Jesus, what happened to his arm?” says Paul. The bandages are still fresh. It hangs by his side like a wing on a plucked chicken.

Does he think we did that? “Silver wound that he didn’t get properly treated. He’d be fine if he’d gone to a hospital.”

Harper struggles behind me. Apart from damning us all to the flames, he hasn’t spoken a word since we arrested him.

“So.” I look at the prisoners, who are glancing one to another, restless. “Are you going to identify him for me?”

They stand in silence. Paul bites his fingers.

“You remember the terms. This is your only chance to take them up. I won’t be able to make the offer more than once.”

“No,” says Albin. His voice is heavy.

“Yeah. Yeah, he’s one of us,” Sarah cuts in, a little shrill.

“He isn’t, Ms. Galley. I wish I could ID him, but I’ve really never seen him before.”

“Come on, Lew, they’ve got him now. They’ll give him a lawyer, won’t they? He is one of us, Miss Galley. Lewis is just trying to cover up.”

“We can’t make a case if we have to include a stranger, Sarah.” Albin’s voice is cold, somehow hushing everything in the room.

“Paul.” I step forward a little, lower my voice.

He looks at me. “Please get me out of here, Lola. I can’t take much more of this.” His voice is as low as mine. I flinch at the sound of my easygoing Paul pleading.

“Do you know this man, Paul?” My voice shakes with strain.

Paul looks at Albin, at Sarah, at Harper standing mute behind me with a guard’s shock prod held against his chest. For a moment, Paul covers his face, and it’s quiet, there are no sounds. Then he lowers his hands and shakes his head. “No,” he says. “No, I don’t know him.”

I could have made the offer stand. They would have talked to me. All the things I could have given them are out of reach now, days without interrogation and legal counsel and blankets slip out of my grasp. My head hangs down under its own weight.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I can’t—give you anything, then.”

“He is one of us, Miss Galley! Don’t listen to them, don’t listen to them!” Sarah’s voice rises and rises, the echoes shatter around her, screaming off the walls.

“He looks familiar,” Carla mutters.

I turn. “Familiar?” Is she trying to compromise—has the incarceration rocked her brain so badly she thinks she might reach a halfway point? Did he go out with them once a long time ago? “What do you mean?”

She’s hunched in a ball in the corner of her cell, her arms wrapped around her knees. It’s the same position she’s been in ever since we locked her up. Her fingers cover her mouth as she speaks. “I—I don’t know. I just think he looks familiar. Maybe I know his face.”

“Carla?” Albin walks up to the bars that divide their cells, but I interrupt him.

“Thank you, Mr. Albin, please don’t talk to the suspect.”

“Suspect?” His voice is soft with anger as he turns on me.

“Dr. Stein, if this is just a man you ride on the same bus to work with, that’s not going to help you very much. Can you tell me what you’re talking about?”

Her shoulders rise to cover her as she shrugs, like a bird fluffing its feathers against the wind. She lays her head on her knees, her arms around it, and goes quiet.

There’s a long pause.

“Mr. Ellaway? Do you have anything to contribute?”

Ellaway glowers at me through the bars. “Yeah. I know him. We all do.”

“Do you? Tell me his name, please.”

He glares, his face almost hot with fury.

I sigh. “So the majority view is that you don’t know him? Guys, take him to block C, please.” Harper is dragged out. I hear him try to break out of their grip as they push him through the door, but weeks of silver poisoning have taken their toll. He’s a sick man now.

I turn to look at the prisoners left behind.

“Please be our counsel,” says Albin. “We really didn’t know that guy.”

“Yes we did, yes we did,” Sarah whispers. She’s collapsed in a corner, and she’s weeping. I’ve heard tears like that before, after interrogations, exhausted, confused tears. She’s losing herself.

I spread my hands. “You have to give me something,” I say. “I can’t just take you on. You have to give me something I can use.”

“We can tell you all about the night John Marcos was mauled,” says Albin. “You were right about it, you know. I tried to stop him, but he got over the wall. It was the first time he’d been with us, you see. This thing, it just started out with Paul and Sarah and me, we’d meet people from time to time and start including them. Dick was interested, we thought he might work out. Usually—usually I can make them back down. I—I didn’t think he’d turn out the way he did.”

“How did you start out?” I say. All of a sudden, our voices are calm, reasonable.

“It was the three of us. Paul and I, we’re cousins, more or less, four times removed or something but we knew each other when we were kids, we’d been in the same lock-up room sometimes when we were little. And Sarah and I went out with each other when we were about fifteen. We knew each other pretty well. We started out just sharing a lock-up room.” I wrinkle my nose. Three mixed friends together is a bit peculiar, if not scandalous. Most people wouldn’t do it. “But we figured—Paul got us into remembering. You can, you know, better than most people bother to, if you do some mental exercises, sort of meditations, right after. And after we were eighteen, things changed. Sarah got locked outside one night, with a lot of other people—it was an accident, nobody’s fault.” He looks at me, forestalling accusations.

“I know.”

“How do you know?”

“I’ve seen your records. That night is famous.”

Albin sighs, glances at Sarah. “Well, it was an accident. But Sarah remembered, you see, she remembered quite a lot of it. And she was outside, with other people; she said it was quite different. And we figured, after a while, that we’d be okay if we were outdoors. And it was different, it was so completely different. It was—
right,
you know? You shouldn’t be indoors when you’re like that. The walls, the heat—We’re meant to be outside. And it’s a great life experience you’re missing, locking yourself in a little room.”

“A life experience,” I say. That’s what it means to them. Not blood soaking into the ground, scars in flesh that can’t rick and heal, damage that never goes away.

“Paul, you should be telling her this,” Albin says. It isn’t until he says it that I realize it’s true. These are the things Paul never told me.

“I—” Paul looks at me, grips his hands together. “I thought you’d hate this.”

“Yeah?” My voice is flat.

“The way you talk about lunes, I didn’t think you’d get any of this. And there’s no reason why you should. I mean, I don’t know what it’s like from your view, and there’s no way you could see it from mine.”

“Thanks for reminding me.” My voice is almost a whisper, but it’s still too loud, loud enough to be heard.

“Lola?”

“And while we’re talking about life experiences, I don’t suppose you’ve ever had the primal danger experience. Having your hand ripped off, that’s an experience you’ll never forget.”

Ellaway sits in his corner, his back to us.

“I didn’t do that,” Paul says. His voice is hoarse, pleading.

I look at his battered face. “All the time you’ve been down here, I haven’t raised a hand to you. I don’t suppose it excuses me in your eyes.”

“I love you,” says Paul. “I wish you’d believe me.”

“It’s the Stockholm syndrome,” I say. “You have to love me in here, I’m your best hope of salvation. Once you get out, you’ll start thinking it over, and you won’t need me anymore, and then you’ll start hating me for everything I’ve done.”