"Calm down, calm down," Bookman said. "I said they were responsible, I nevah said I give him up to them. Nicky is down to the creek, fishing with Franklin. You can't talk to him because they ain't back yet." I laid back in the bed, felt relief wash over me. I wiped my forehead on the hospital's ratty cotton bathrobe.
"Oh, Christ, Bookman
"
"No need to get religious. If yaw up in theyah with a gunshot wound, how come I wasn't infommed?"
"It's a long story."
"I 'magine it is," he said. "I look fohwahd to hearing all the details. What'd you do to the Rooskies?"
"One of them went home, and the other one was sleeping like a baby, last time I saw him."
"That so." He took a minute to think about that. "When ah you getting out?"
"I'm leaving tomorrow morning. Gevier's got my van fixed, he's gonna drop it in the parking lot tonight. Where should I meet you?"
"Go on back to Louis's. Call me when you get theyah. I'll call this numbah when the boys get back from the creek, let you talk to yaw son."
* * *
The doctor who came to see me was taller and leaner than Mrs. Johnson, but he had that same black hair, same brown skin and brown eyes. "Mr. Coyote," the guy said, smirking. "How are we feeling today?"
"Terrific," I told him. "How soon can I get out of here?"
He started unwrapping the bandage on my arm. "You in a hurry to leave us? You lost a lot of blood, you know."
"Can't you fill me back up? I got business."
"We already filled you up." He took the last of the bandage off. "Hmm," he said. "Well, I'm afraid the snake on your arm is going to have a scar on his head."
"It hurt me worse than it hurt him."
"I'll bet it did." He glanced at his watch. "It's almost four in the afternoon," he said. "Too late to do any business today. Why don't you stay with us one more night, see how you feel in the morning?"
I didn't want to stay, I wanted to get out right then, but I was feeling pretty shaky. Maybe staying another night was the smart thing. "If I have to. How's my friend Rosario?"
He looked at me. "Let's stop bullshitting one another, okay? You took a bullet in the arm and your associate was severely beaten. I sincerely doubt he'd had anything to eat in days before he was brought in here. There's something worse going on here than someone falling asleep behind the wheel. Mrs. Johnson is a good friend, and she asked me to patch you up and keep my mouth shut, so I did that. But I wouldn't want to think you were going to involve her in something that would put her in jeopardy."
"I wouldn't like that myself, Doc. Rosario and I were both in the wrong place at the wrong time. The sooner I can get him far away from here, the better off we will all be." It was true, I had to get him away from the Russians, and I didn't want Bookman asking him a lot of questions, either.
"That might be so, but it's not going to happen tonight. Your friend had a collapsed lung, and he's going to have to stay right where he is for another four or five days. The best I can tell you is that I'll stop in on you both in the morning, and then we'll talk about what I find. Okay?"
"All right. Thanks, Doc."
* * *
Mrs. Johnson came back in, gathered up her stuff. "I'm going home, Coyote," she said. "Do you think you're going to be all right now?"
"I'll be fine. I don't know how to thank you."
"Don't worry about it," she said. "You did okay in those woods. That was a big son of a whore you carried out. I don't know many men who could have done it."
"Fear makes you strong."
She shook her head. "Fear just makes you afraid. Did you find Nicky?"
"My son? Yeah, I did. I guess I talked about him in my sleep."
She was nodding. "Yes, you did." She looked at me, impassive. You'd have to spend your whole life up in this place to be able to read the faces of the people who lived up here. "You talked about a lot of things. Don't worry, though, no one heard you but me, and I know how to keep quiet. Besides, if you're a coyote, it's no good pretending you're a pussycat." She started to leave, but she paused at the door. "I bet you've got some stories to tell, Coyote. Someday when you got time, I'd love to hear 'em."
There was a hole in the room when she left, it was a colder and meaner place, and I was not so content to lie there. The bathroom was about twelve feet away from the bed. I made it over there okay, I was pretty shaky but not bad, considering. I could feel how empty my stomach was, though, and I could tell that I really needed a shower. I was on my way back to the bed, dragging that rack with the bottle swinging on it behind me, when a nurse came into the room. She was an older lady, gray-haired, all business. In no time at all she got that bottle unhooked from my arm, got me into the shower, got food ordered. She went off to locate Rosario for me. I made it back to the bed, feeling much more human, but weak, for such little exertion.
* * *
Hospital food is what it is, you know, if you're hungry enough, you'll eat it. I was more than hungry enough, and after I got it down, I began to feel better, like I could make it down to Rosario's room and back without incident. Before I finished eating, though, my phone rang. It was Bookman.
"Hold on," he said. I heard the phone passed from one pair of hands to another, heard breathing in the phone.
"Hey, Nicky," I said, trying not to sound guilty, which was what I felt. "Is that you?"
"Hi, Poppy." I could hardly hear him.
"Did you have a good time with Franklin?" There was no answer for a minute, and I could hear a female voice in the background, telling Nicky that I could not see him nodding.
"Yes," he said, in that same quiet voice.
"Are you being a good boy?" I got the same answer, in the same tone. God, this was terrible. I wanted to reach through the phone lines and put my arms around him. "Did you catch a fish?"
"I caught a pickerel!" he said, in the shout he reserved for truly exciting events like horses running away. "Franklin said it was a pickerel, and it was all slimy, and it had big teeth!"
"Did he bite you?"
"No." I could hear him laughing. "Silly."
"Did you eat him for dinner?"
"No. We let him go. Franklin says they got too many bones."
"Oh. Okay. Don't go fishing in the morning, all right? I have to stay here tonight, but I'll see you in the morning. Is that okay?"
"Okay." He was back to that faint voice.
"You be good, now. Bye-bye."
"Bye."
Bookman came back on the line. "All right, Manny," he said. "Call me in the morning, when you get to Louis's house."
"Will do." I had the distinct impression that he wanted to say something else, but he didn't, he just hung up.
* * *
Rosey was lying in bed, pale, watching television. I came in and sat in the chair next to him. He must have been awake longer than me, because I could tell by looking at him that he'd had too much time to think. He looked surprised to see me when I walked through the door, and then immediately resentful and petulant, wounded at heart, suspicious. I suppose I would have felt the same way. It was a bad situation to be in: dependent, unable to move, out of your native habitat, and the crook you used to work with has your money. "How you feeling, Rosey?"
He reached for the remote and turned up the volume on the set so we could talk without being overheard.
"You save my ass," he said, looking at the tube. "I owe you."
"Damn straight you do."
He craned his neck to look past me, make sure nobody was standing in the corridor, listening. "And you owe me, muthafucka. You owe me." I could see him putting on that wounded face again, going back into character. He looked like a woman who'd just caught her husband in bed with her sister. "Why you hadda take my money, Mo? I thought you and me was friends."
I put my hand on my chest. "Rosey. I can't tell you how much it hurts me to hear you talk like that."
"Oh, fuck you, man
." He started to rise from the bed, but his eyes went wide and he grunted in pain and laid back down on the pillows. It took him a minute to recover. "You are a cold son of a bitch, you know that?"
"Hey, Rosey, no bullshit. Did you really expect me to fall for that switch you pulled with the claim tickets? You really thought I was that stupid? Besides, I know what you did to those three guys you picked up. Tell the truth, Rosey. I was gonna get the same. Ain't that right."
"Oh, man, c'mon. I couldn't talk to them, when I met them the next day they got all unreasonable and shit. They wanted a half a mill apiece. I couldn't give them that
. So I gave them something else instead." He had not lost any of that hurt and resentful expression on his face. "How much was there, Mo? Can you leas' tell me that?"
"One point eight million." I had to sting him, at least a little bit.
"You see? You see? I was tryina take care a you, Mo. I give those three guy a half apiece, how much would that leave for you an' me?"
"Rosey, I'm touched, man, really. I never had another friend like you."
"Oh, fuck you, man, you fucking piece of fucking shit." I really thought he was going to cry. "Why you come here, Mo, you come down here to fucking laugh at me, you come to piss in my fucking face, you know I gotta lay up here in this fucking bed like a fucking baby
."
I waited a minute after he stopped. "Rosey, you're a smart guy."
He took a couple of breaths, let go of the jilted-lover act. "Yeah, so what." No false modesty there.
"You see me sitting here. What does that tell you?" He wouldn't answer, he just lay there staring at the television. "Think about it, Rosey. If I wanted to keep your money, I could just walk out of this place and leave your sorry ass stuck in this bed. Why didn't I do that, Rosey?"
He continued to stare at the television, his distrust plain on his face. It was because he'd been ready to do it. I'd had the suspicion before, but now I knew it for sure. There was no way he could have brought himself to split it with me. He'd have had to kill me. "You tell me, Mo. Esplain to me why."
"All right, Rosey. You believe in karma?"
He glared at me. "I'm Catholic, Mo, you know that. I believe God gonna send you and me to hell."
"Maybe he will. But the way I look at it, I got three ways to go here. One, I wait until you're sleeping, okay, and I come down here and put some rat poison in your IV, you die screaming, and God puts you in hell tonight.
Okay?" Rosey was staring at me, wide-eyed, looking, once again, like an outraged housewife. "I coulda done that already, and you know it. Or two, I could just take off, keep it all. But then I gotta go around worrying about you coming up behind me for the rest of my life. That ain't no way to live. Or three, I can give you your cut, and we can both walk away from this. The first two choices got too much bad karma on 'em. So I'm gonna pick number three. All you gotta do is lay up here in this bed and keep your fucking mouth shut."
His face was drawn, haggard with doubt and suspicion in the flickering light of the television. "You wan' go get it for me? Look at us, Mo. I don' gonna trus' you, you don' gonna trus' me. You still don' gonna tell me where my money is at."
"If I did, you couldn't leave it alone. You knew what was going on, it wouldn't make any difference how good it was, you would have to get on the phone and fuck it up. Besides, how long could you hold out if the Russians picked you up again? Or some different ones, maybe? Look at you, man, you ain't going anywhere for a couple of days, anyhow. By the time you're ready to walk out of here I can have everything taken care of. After that, you'll be able to go anywhere you want. As long as you stay the hell out of New York City, you can die a rich man."
He opened his robe and looked down at his chest. He was wrapped from his collarbone all the way down to his waist. He looked at me, considering, nodded once. "What you gonna do?"
"I told you, I'm gonna take care of it. Couple more days, maybe a week, your money will be nice and legal, sitting in your brokerage account."
"Oh, great, you gon' give it to my useless fucking piece of shit broker."
"It will be in your account. He can't do anything with it without your say-so."
He rubbed his face with both hands, grunting with the effort it took him. "Yeah," he said. "All right." He said it with an accusatory tone in his voice, like he knew he was getting screwed somehow, and he was putting up with it because he loved me.
"But I want you gone, you understand? Your money in your pocket, on a beach someplace far away."
"Like Puerto Rico," he said.
"You got relatives there?"
"Yeah."
"Puerto Rico's no good, then. Think about it, Rosey. You got a big dollar sign on your back now. You gotta go where nobody will think to look for you."
