The Affinities (19 page)

“She needs a hospital.”

“Setting it up right now,” Damian said from across the room.

There were a couple of local physicians on Pender and a small regional hospital not far away on Salt Spring Island, but we needed a better and faster option. Late as it was, it took Damian only three calls to find a Tau who ran a helicopter-commute service out of Tsawwassen. A Sikorsky S76 was in the air twenty minutes later, by which time Damian had located a Tau physician near Ladner with access to a fully equipped clinic. The doctor agreed to assess and treat Amanda without reporting a gunshot wound, as long as she didn't require complex surgery—which Marcy had said she would not.

As that was being arranged one of Gordo's security guys, the one called Nelson, came up the stairs to the rain-sodden deck with the wounded shooter clinging to him. Damian stopped him at the door: “Not in here—we can't have his blood all over everything.” The shooter slid down to the hardwood planks.

When we talked about it later, that was what we called him:
the shooter.
Because we had heard the word on TV and in the movies. But that wasn't how I thought of him at the time. Not when Amanda was still losing blood. I thought of him instead as the son of a bitch who had tried to destroy everything that made my life worth living.

Marcy and Gordo headed for the deck, and I followed them. The shooter was a skinny dude with one of those long faces you sometimes see on very tall people, as if his features had been stretched vertically. His hair was wet and dangled over his forehead in two black wings. His eyes were anxious but unfocused. Marcy's bullet had taken him mid-body, below the ribs and to the left. Blood had clotted on his cotton shirt and discolored his jeans from the waist to the left knee. Marcy looked at him and said in a small voice, “Oh, Christ. Gordo—”

“I know,” Gordo said.

The man was dying, and there was nothing Marcy or anyone else could do to save him. That was what I surmised from their silences.

It made me glad.

Hatred is a purifying emotion. Before that night I would have said I hated a few people. But dislike and disdain aren't hatred. They're pallid, hollow emotions. Real hatred is a bulldozer. It wants to demolish and destroy. It brooks no opposition.

I looked down at this piece of shit in the form of a human being, and he looked back at me through a haze of pain. Furious or frightened tears leaked from his eyes. I knelt down and put my face close to his face. His pig eyes narrowed. His breath stank of cloves and halitosis, mingled with the coppery smell of all the blood he was spilling. I ordered him to tell me his name.

Gordo, behind me, tried to get my attention. “Adam—”

The shooter wasn't saying anything, though I had his complete attention. So I put my hands on his throat. I felt the stubble where he had shaved that morning. I felt his Adam's apple frantically bobbing against my fingers. His lips struggled to form words. I let him take a breath.

“Fuck you,” he whispered.

Gordo pulled me away before I could do any damage. “Adam,
we know who he is.
We've got his wallet. His driver's license. His credit card. His phone.” He looked at the dying man and I realized that the same hatred I felt was running through Gordo, Damian, Marcy, everyone else in the house. It was one big river. Maybe what they felt was a little less white-hot than what I felt, but it was real, visceral hatred.

“This time tomorrow,” Gordo said, “we'll know everything about him. Where he lives, who his friends are, who he's working for. We already know he's an amateur. Carrying his personal shit on him like that.”

The shooter moved his mouth again, seemed to be trying to say something that wouldn't come out.

Marcy fetched her medical kit. After a brief, hushed conference with Gordo and Damian, she produced a syringe and filled it from a small brown bottle.

“Hold him steady,” she said. “I don't want him knocking this out of my hand.”

Gordo leaned across the shooter, pinning his legs and his left arm. I tugged his right arm straight out as Gordo used a pocket knife to slice his shirt sleeve from cuff to shoulder. When Marcy jabbed the needle into the shooter's bicep, he arched his back in a feeble spasm of resistance. I asked Marcy what she was giving him.

“Painkiller,” she said curtly.

“What, to make him feel better?”

“Enough for that,” she said. “Enough for that and more.”

The shooter thrashed and struggled when he heard her. But not for long.

 

CHAPTER 11

Maybe understandably—or maybe not—a couple of days passed before it occurred to me to call Rachel Ragland.

She didn't answer her phone, and I left an apologetic message and asked her to get in touch. Another day passed. Nothing. I drove to Rachel's building, parked, and buzzed her apartment from the lobby. Silence. So I called the local hospitals and found her at Vancouver General. She was in “for observation,” and unless I was family, visiting hours were two to six, at Rachel's discretion.

By my watch that left a window of three hours, and the hospital was only twenty minutes away. It hadn't rained since the weekend. The weather had slipped into an autumn lull, all soft blue skies and crisp breezes, and it was an easy drive. But I felt as if some transparent part of me had become opaque: I looked at the world through a lens of clouded glass.

It turned out that Rachel was in a ward in the hospital's psychiatric wing. A locked ward, though that wasn't as bad as it sounded; all it meant was that patients and visitors needed authorization to pass through the glass-and-mesh doors next to the nurses' station. I waited twenty minutes for someone to find Rachel, give her my name, and find out if she was willing to see me. At last a nurse (a young guy in powder-blue scrubs) waved me in. I followed him to Rachel's bed.

She was dressed in slacks and a plaid flannel shirt. There were slippers on her feet, and she was sitting up, an ancient paperback novel in her hand. She gave me a long, searching look. She was clean and reasonably alert but I could tell by a certain slackness around her eyes that she was back on her meds. Before I could speak she said, “They think I'm suicidal. That's why I'm stuck here. But I was only cutting.” She held out her left arm to show me her bandages, a swatch of cotton and tape that ran from wrist to elbow. “You know about that? People who cut themselves sometimes?”

“I've heard of it,” I said.

“Well, I'm one of them.”

“I'm surprised. I never saw—”

“What—scars? This was the first time I did my arm. I used to just cut my legs. Up high, so I could wear shorts and not show anything. But not a bathing suit. Which was okay because I don't swim. And I was pretty healed up when you saw me without my clothes on. I'd been good. On the mend. But you could have found scars if you'd looked for them.” She put a bookmark in her paperback novel and set it aside. “So why are you here?”

“Suze called me,” I said. “That night.”

“Yeah, I know. I heard all about it. You told her to phone 911.”

“Yeah.”

“Even though she wasn't supposed to do that.”

“She said so, but—”

“Because I trained her that way. You know why? Fucking
social workers,
that's why! There were a couple of incidents back before I got my prescriptions and now I'm on their watch list or whatever. I'm on, like, bad mother probation.”

An orderly passing by with a box of gauze in his hand slowed and cocked his head. Rachel moderated her voice until he was out of sight. “They're like the NSA in here, always watching. This is where they put people who can't be trusted.”

“You were unconscious when Suze called. She couldn't wake you up.”

“I'd been cutting, yeah, and maybe a little too deep, and I was ashamed of myself, so I took a double dose of meds and washed 'em down with orange juice and vodka. Because I really, really wanted to sleep. And hey, it worked. Out like a light, right there on the sofa. Still bleeding a little. I leaked before I clotted. So I guess Suze got scared, which I'm really
really
sorry about. A miscalculation on my part. But would you take away my kid for that?”

“No…”

“No, but you did. That's
exactly
what you did when you told Suze to call 911. Now they're putting her in temporary foster care. Pending an assessment. They won't even let me talk to her. They say we can schedule a visit, but not until the doctors decide I'm up to it.” Her eyes brimmed with tears that were perhaps equal parts loss and anger. “They took away my baby!”

“I'm sorry,” I said.

“I would
absolutely fucking love it
if this were totally your fault. That would make me feel a little better. But, taking Suze's call? Being worried about me? I can't really blame you for that
.
”

“Thank you, Rachel.”

“What I
do
blame you for is—” She hesitated and bit her lip as if debating how to proceed.

“Go ahead. Say it.”

“I don't know exactly
how
to say it, but … I'm here, and Suze is in foster care, and I can't help thinking, none of this would have happened if I was a Tau. If I was a Tau, you wouldn`t have called 911, would you? You would have called some other Tau. Or a bunch of other Taus. Some nice little Tau couple would be looking after Suze, and after I got attention from a Tau clinic, and with a whole tranche to make sure I kept on my meds, I'd have her back right away quick. What do you think, Adam? Is that about right?”

I didn't have to answer. It was absolutely true.

*   *   *

I stayed a few minutes more. A nurse came by with three pills and a paper cup, and Rachel dutifully swallowed the pills and chased them with a gulp of water. She opened her mouth to show the nurse she'd swallowed the meds. I think Rachel wanted me to see this small humiliation. The fate to which I had delivered her.

As I turned to leave she said, “Are you okay? No offense, Adam, but you look like shit.”

“I haven't slept much.”

“Yeah, well.” Her gaze went a little quavery. “Welcome to the club. Oh, I remembered something. Something I meant to tell you. About the guys who came to visit me? The ones you drew a picture of at the beach?”

It seemed like a long time ago. “What about them?”

“The guy who did most of the talking—you asked about his face, and that's what I was trying to remember. But he had another, uh, distinguishing feature. Not his face. His hand. There was a mark on it.”

“A mark?”

“A tattoo. A little one. Actually not his hand but just above the wrist? I saw it when his shirt cuff rode up.”

“What did it look like?”

The medication was beginning to kick in. She smiled dreamily. “A window.”

“I'm sorry—a window?”

“A box. A rectangle. A tall box. With a line across it. Like an old-fashioned window, the kind where you lift the lower pane. Know what I mean? Like a letter H, but with three cross lines, top bottom and middle. Does that mean anything?”

“Yes,” I said. “It does.”

*   *   *

We rolled up our Vancouver operation in November of that year. Which was good, because by then I was desperately homesick. I missed Lisa and Loretta. I missed their big, warm house in Toronto. I wanted to be there when they put up the Christmas tree—usually a huge spruce, decked out with Victorian ball ornaments and spun-glass angels and silver menorahs and any other ecumenical or secular decoration any tranche member felt like attaching to it. I wanted to be home for Christmas, Hannukah, Kwanzaa, Dognzhi, Pancha Ganapati, Shabe Yald
ā
, Saturnalia, and what-have-you. That was what I wanted.

Damian needed to be back in Toronto for another reason. Toronto was where his law offices were, and the war between Tau and InterAlia was being fought with writs and court appointments. That wasn't necessarily a bad thing: InterAlia was in a severely weakened condition, which gave us some leverage. The company's stock had declined to record lows and there were rumors of an impending bankruptcy.

Damian and I went out for an early dinner on our last day in the city. A couple of blocks down Robson there was a restaurant that served good and reasonably affordable schnitzel. The staff had come to recognize us as regulars, and I assumed they also recognized the two Tau security guys who habitually followed us in and kept watch over us from a table of their own. The evening crowd hadn't arrived yet, and we had enough space and privacy to speak freely.

For years Damian and his law firm had been conducting pitched battles with InterAlia over the autonomy of Tau. The corporation was jealous of its intellectual property, and the last thing they wanted was any kind of legal judgment that might recognize the Affinities as quasi-ethnicities, even invented ones. But what had lately crippled InterAlia were the legal challenges from unaffiliated sources: class action suits, discrimination cases. Most of the Affinities—Tau on the vanguard—had created institutions that served their members exclusively. We had established, for example, a network of Tau rehab clinics, staffed by Taus and catering to Taus with substance-abuse problems. The success rate of our clinics was spectacular, with a recidivism rate half that of standard treatment. But we routinely turned away non-Taus. Did that mean our clinics (or our financial services, another area Damian had pioneered) were discriminatory? InterAlia didn't officially sanction these Affinity-specific businesses, which meant Tau had been forced to fend off similar legal attacks; in all of these cases our lawyers had attempted to subpoena InterAlia's sorting protocols; and in every case InterAlia had resisted, which meant costly out-of-court settlements or lengthy legal challenges, several of which were currently wending their way toward Supreme Court decisions.