The Last Hot Time (18 page)

You know, if I was gonna be stuck in a wheelchair. . . . if I lost my eyes . . . my right hand. . . my nuts . . .

Somehow it never got to the last word, the action verb. Now and then somebody'd say "Save th' last bullet for yerself," in a John Wayne drawl. Every ambulance, and most of the fire trucks, had a pistol, against regulations. They were always generic name-brand

revolvers, the kind everybody had in a bedroom drawer. Easy to drop in a creek, no hard questions.

"It's like this," Doc said at last. "If we do nothing, they'll die. If we move them, most of them will die anyway. If somehow we manage to patch one or two together—what'll be left of them?"

Quietly, just above the rumble of the dying, Mr. Patrise said, "I asked you what you could do, and I accept your answer."

"Okay." Doc ran a hand over his bag. "Morphine would work, but we'd be wasting it. I don't think they'll even feel bullets."

"You heard, Lincoln?"

"Sir." McCain handed the Tommy gun to Mr. Patrise and drew one of his .45s.

"I can do it, sir," Doc said, and immediately wondered if it sounded as stupid to the others as it did to himself.

"It is not your job to do so," Patrise said, with a lack of intensity that seemed somehow kind. "And you work for me. Go home now." His eyes were just black in the unholy light. "I will see you out. Lincoln, you will wait for me."

Doc followed the small man into the iron-framed street. Patrise said, "You are not to go home alone. Do you understand that? Take Cloudhunter with you."

Doc nodded. "He's hurt a little. I should fix that."

"Very good. Lincoln is slightly hurt as well; if you will wait at your car, I will send him out."

"Sure. I'm not—oh. We left Ginny at the theater—I mean, it wasn't too far from her place, but—"

"If you wish to visit her, by all means do."

"No. No, I'd be—I just—"

"My people are under my protection, Hallow. But I will make certain." He turned, stood silhouetted in the red doorway. "I appreciate the difficulty of what you had to do tonight. You understand that I won't apologize for it."

Quicker than he could think, Doc said, "Will you tell them I'm sorry?"

"I will," Patrise said, and was gone.

Doc forced himself to turn around and walk to the car. It was a relief to patch up Cloud's cheek. McCain had a shallow gash almost the whole length of his left thigh. Doc cut away his trouser

leg, dressed and bandaged it with McCain sitting in the Triumph's passenger seat. McCain held a pistol ready all through the operation, then said thanks and went back to the building.

Doc and Cloud piled into the car, drove into the dark.

"Cloud ... what was that place? What was it fori"

"They were drawing power for magic. A great deal of power."

"From the people?"

"Life is a great source."

Doc was quiet a moment. "Do you know who they were?"

"A gang of humans. Whisper would not have dared do such a thing to Ellyllon."

"Whisper?"

"His name is Whisper Who Dares the Word of Words in Darkness. He is quite insane . . . though perhaps that is obvious. I do not say it to separate him from my kind. We are not human, but. . . we are not all like him."

"I know that, Cloud."

Doc drove into the garage. Jesse shook his head over the state of the Triumph's ragtop, and pointed out a spattering of shot scars in the trunk lid. Doc hadn't noticed.

Lisa, in the telephone room, told Doc that Ginny had called, wanting to be called back no matter how late. "I'll put it through to your room," she said.

The phone was ringing when he got there. "Hello."

"Are you all right, Doc? There was a rumor about some big shooting."

"Yeah. W'e're all okay. Lincoln and Cloud got scratched, but they're fine."

"You're sure?"

"All the noise was over when we got there." He found suddenly that he really did want to see her, hold her close; wanted to—

Then he wondered if he would ever be able to want anything again. "Look, I'm probably going to have to Stay in the rest of the weekend, but—could I see you next Friday?"

"Yes."

"We'll do something. Think about what you'd like to do."

She didn't answer at once. Doe wondered how he sounded to her. Finally she said, "I will. Doe. Good night."

He went downstairs and had the kitchen make him a plain hot eggnog—no brandy, no sleeping powder. He didn't want to wake up abruptly, sometime in the dark small hours. He got a book from the library, a Rafael Sabatini swashbuckler with brave, kind heroes and the certain promise of a happy ending.

Sometime after midnight the lights flared and died. He wasn't sleepy yet, so lit the hurricanes and kept reading. Sometime after three he jerked awake from a doze, doused the lights and crawled into bed; it didn't work. He lit a lamp again, picked up the book.

At five-thirty, still as dark as midnight, he went downstairs again in his robe and slippers to get some food. The dining room was candlelit. A silver coffee service was on the table, a blue flame keeping it hot. Fay was there, sitting back with a cup cradled in her hands, her feet propped up on the seat of another chair.

She turned, saw him, started to sit up straight. Doc raised his hands. "No," he said, "it's all right, stay right there," and tried to put it into gestures.

She smiled, resumed her position, pointed at the coffee, an empty chair nearby. He poured, sat.

Fay pointed at him. She held up her index fingers, brought them together, made a cradle-rocking motion with her arms, pointed at him again. Doc thought. She knew who his girlfriend was, certainly—then he got it. Do you have a family?

He held up the parent fingers, brought them together, pointed at himself, spread his empty hands. She nodded, tapped her chest. Same with me. Then she held up the fingers again, slowly folded them over.

"I'm sorry," Doc said, and shut his mouth.

She shook her head, opened her lips, made a rolling-on motion with her hands.

So he talked: he told her about planting and haying, and silly stuff he'd done with Robin, and the time the twister barely missed the house. He gestured a lot at first, but Fay seemed more interested in just hearing the sound of his voice. So he just talked, with illustrative movements now and then, until he noticed that the sun was up. The poached egg and toast that the butler had brought him more than an hour ago were dead cold, untouched.

He turned away from the window, back to Phasia, and his eye-

lids dropped like fire curtains. She laughed then. It was a sound somewhere between a baby's laugh, wind chimes, and a silver piccolo. She stood up, put her hands on his cheeks, and kissed him on the forehead. Then she pressed her palms together, put her head down-to-sleep on them, and tapped Doc on the head.

"Yeah, I think you're right," he said, and went upstairs to sleep all day.

I he house was quiet that weekend. Everyone seemed to be keeping in. Doc ate in his room, finishing the Sabatini adventure and starting another, then shuttling down to the infirmary to read on shock and trauma.

He passed Stagger Lee once in the dining room. Stagger was staring at a half-eaten roast beef sandwich as if it were a chess problem. "Want to play some poker?" Doc said.

Stagger looked up, his expression lightening. "That's . . . well. . . not now, thank you."

"Give me a call if you change your mind."

"Sure."

"Stagger. . . did any of them make it?"

"None of them."

Doc could nearly convince himself that he couldn't have made any real difference to his patients' survival—not even touching what surviving might have meant. He kept catching himself staring emptily at the wall, the book idle in his lap, thinking, thinking.

Part of it was his old job. People didn't die in the ambulance. Often enough they were dead when you got to the scene, and all you did was haul goods; that was unhappy, but it wasn't bad. If the patient was alive, he stayed alive until you got him to the emergency room. His heart might stop, but you just maintained the compressions and ventilation. The declaration, the time check, the paperwork, were in somebody else's hands.

None of them. Damn.

Sunday evening he picked up the phone three times to call Ginevra. But he didn't.

On Monday Patrise announced early in the day that everyone was to meet for dinner at La Mirada. Doe packed up and went

early, just after opening. As he had hoped, Lucius was there, sitting alone.

"Good evening, Doc. Buy a member of the free and unbribable press a drink? Or here's a better one: Tell me what tomorrow's column is about and I'll buy yours."

"You heard about what happened Friday night?" Doc said cautiously.

"Ah. Not an ideal topic, Doc. Meddle not with the preconceptions of audiences, for they are obtuse and quick to switch channels."

"Channels?"

"Newspapers, I should have said. My, how hard some habits die."

"It's—"

"It's Whisper. And yes, Doc, the incident is news. It isn't features. Mark the difference."

"You know about him, then. Whisper."

"I know about Whisper Who Dares. We aren't acquainted."

Doc waited. Lucius didn't say any more. Doc said, "What do you think he was trying to do?"

Lucius said slowly, "You really want to talk about it, don't you?"

Doc pressed his hands on the table.

"Well, you can't," Lucius said, more coldly than Doc had ever heard him speak. "I keep telling you, confidences aren't my beat. Just the opposite."

"Who do you suggest I do talk to?"

"Birdsong on trust in one paragraph: Nobody. You do not live among such people, good people though they are. You do not, in fact, live in such a world, good world though it is. . . . On second thought, you do know someone who can keep a secret."

"Who?"

"Phasia."

"Thanks," Doc said unpleasantly, and then suddenly he began to understand. Something was horribly wrong, locked up inside Lucius, and he couldn't speak it directly; he was telling Doc the only way he could. Doc felt angry with himself for not hearing it sooner.

"Would you mind telling me something, then?"

"Within the bounds of time, knowledge, and the language."

"What do you know about Mr. Patrise? How he got started, I mean."

Lucius looked sad, but no longer cold and angry. "I guess you're buying the drinks, huh."

"Sure."

"There are a lot of stories. I came late to him, so stories are all I know, kapeesh? For something closer you'll have to talk to someone who was there earlier—Stagger Lee, maybe, Cloudhunter. McCain goes the farthest back, but, well. So are stories all right?"

"Yes."

"He was a South Side kid, that's pretty certain. There's a story that when he was, oh, nine, ten, he carried books everywhere he went. If you laughed at the bookworm, you found out how neatly a signature binding could hide a stiletto. I'm not sure I believe that one. Or if it's true, I think Patrise has put it a long way behind himself.

"A reliable tale is that he put together a gang to turn over rare coin shops. Pure burglary, no bodily harm anyone's heard of, though it's your call to believe that part. They were very selective: gold and silver, none of the alloy coins that came later. Some stamps, apparently. And some pennies were made out of shellcase metal after World War Two: they always got those.

"Later, so spools the yarn, they quit that and went on to plumbing suppliers and salvage yards—copper and zinc and lead in quantity."

"Lead?"

"This is a what story, not a why story. Eventually, as most of the smarter gangsters did, he moved legitimate. Like them, he was providing what people wanted, not necessarily what they needed— places like this, the coffee trade."

"I see."

"You say that like you know what it all means. It wasn't Patrise who decided the returning elves were Cuban commies from Mars, and saved Miami from a fate worse than death by turning it into a radioactive lagoon.

"Patrise was made in refiner's tire, out of true metal," Lucius said. "Whereas the Great Spirit made me of sawdust and printer's ink and cheap scotch, and was working under deadline."

"Oh, Lucius, stop it."

"I know what you want to know about." Lucius's voice had a rough edge, partly whiskey. "And I can't help you. If it were a simple matter of betraying a confidence, that would be no trouble at all, just as I say. But it's beyond that. I wish I could help you, Doc, you're a good guy, but I can't."

Patrise came in then, and at once the evening had organization and direction.

McCain and Stagger Lee had come with Patrise, Carmen, and Phasia, but not Ginny or Cloudhunter. Doc wondered if Ginny was alone. He wondered what he would do about it if she were.

Carmen came onstage, in a tight gold blouse that showed one shoulder and a triangle of midriff, a trailing black skirt.