Godchild (20 page)

Chapter 53

It’s hours before she realizes he’s gone.

No.

That’s not right either.

It’s hours before she actually misses him.

She knew he was gone from the moment he left. From the very second he claimed he saw the Bald Man on the television, then grabbed his jacket and his pistol and left the room, locking the dead bolt behind him.

What is it, this obsession with a bald man?

She is nearly done with the manuscript. Just a few fleeting pages away from the ending of her story. Charlie’s life-and-death story.

Just in time too, because she hears footsteps now, coming down the exterior hall. More than one set of footsteps. It’s two in the morning. It’s got to be Keeper. But who else could be with him? At this hour? She knows she should get up from the desk, walk over to the window, pull back the curtain just enough to get a glimpse at them. But she’s got only a page to go.

One more page.

The page on which Charlie dies.

All over again
.

Chapter 54

This time when I woke up, I was in a completely different room.

This room colder than the last.

Smelly.

Like a pile of rain-soaked worms.

A big narrow room full of beds, like an infirmary.

The head of my bed was pressed up against a wide window. A sunbeam shone in through the uncovered glass, making a bright yellow parallelogram on the floor between my bed and the one directly to my right. In the near distance, the voice of a man begging for a cigarette. “Gimme a cigarette,” the man repeated over and over. “Gimme a cigarette.”

My head wasn’t hurting anymore.

It just felt heavy, like my brains had been replaced with wet cement.

But no real pain to speak of.

I moved my hands, my feet, my legs. I breathed in and swallowed. When I sat up and turned to look out the window, the bright sun stung my eyes. But then my eyes adjusted and I could make out a wide piece of glass reinforced with chicken wire. I also made out the vertical iron bars that covered the window on the outside. Because I’d been placed on the top floor of the building, I saw only the highest level of the concrete parking garage directly across from the lot and what I immediately recognized as New Scotland Avenue, the main north-south artery that ran smack-dab down the middle of what had to be the capital district Psychiatric Center campus.

The bastards must have transferred me overnight while I was passed out.

I knew that they kept us here under lock and key and constant observation.

House arrest.

In the loony bin.

“Excuse me, sir,” came a voice from beside my bed. A meek, mousy voice.

I turned back around. The man to my right was sitting up. “Do you know what time it is?” A middle-aged man with a round clean-shaven face, thin lips, and a hooked nose. His hair was thin if not balding, cut over stick-out ears, parted with precision on the left-hand side of his round skull. He was rubbing his left wrist where a wrist-watch should have been.

I went to look at my own watch.

The watch was gone.

All my things were gone —clothes, watch, jacket, shoes.

All of it.

The only thing I had left was my boxer shorts and a white dressing gown that tied down the front. I remembered Tony taking my gun and my license. But what I had no recollection of was him taking the clothes off my back.

“Time,” the man said again. “Do you know what time it is?”

I turned back to him. “No, pal,” I said, “I don’t.”

“What would you say then?” he asked. “If you had to guess. The time, I mean.”

A slight sickness bubbling up from my stomach.

A distinct nausea that went with waking up in a nuthouse.

I had to breathe and get my bearings.

I tried to turn off the Mickey Mouse voice of the little man and concentrate on the dozen beds pushed up against the hospital-white wall directly across from me, the half dozen or so beds to my left, and the equal number to my right. Dozens of men laid out either on their backs, snoring away, or curled up in fetal position. All of them still caught up in the midst of some drug-fed sleep.

“Please,” the mouse said again. “The time.”

I turned to him. “For all I know,” I said, “it could be four in the afternoon.” But I knew it had to be early morning.

“Oh my,” said the man, “I have to be getting to work.” He swung the sheets and covers off his bed, revealing a pair of skinny white legs peppered with curly black hair. “You’re new here,” he said. “But where are my manners?” He reached inside the opening of his gown. He pulled his hand back out, his little fingers pressed together, as if pretending to hold something in them. “Edward Pukas,” he said. “That’s P-U-K-A-S. My card.”

Poor bastard. With a name like that, no wonder he went nuts.

I pretended to take the pretend card in hand and stuff it into the pretend pocket of my pretend suit jacket.

“I’m a stockbroker,” Pukas said, lifting a pair of eyeglasses set in heavy black frames from the table between our beds. He slipped them on.

“What’s yours?” he asked, the muscles in his face doing all sorts of contortions, constrictions, and contractions, as though to get used to the weight of those glasses.

“What’s my what?” I said, now searching the entrance and exit ways for who might be manning them. As far as I could see, no one. But mounted to the walls, in the corners, video surveillance cameras.

“What’s your game? You know, what do you do?”

Suddenly the four televisions mounted high up on the opposite wall, set between the video cameras, spontaneously turned on to the
Today
show. The bright face of the manikin pretty broadcaster beamed live, directly to the psycho ward. “I’m self-employed,” I went on, trying to shrug him off. “Securities.”

“Securities,” he said, “as in stocks and bonds?”

“Securities as in life and death,” I said.

“Oh, that sort of securities,” he said, bobbing his head, half smiling, half frowning, not at all sure which emotion he wanted to go with. “Great business. Wave of the future. Going to be ten billion people in the world in the next ten years. Ten billion, my friend. Do you have any idea what that means? Do you have any idea the amount of security each individual is going to require as his personal space becomes more and more confined? Do you have any clue as to the demands all those people will have on the food supplies of this nation, of the world? Not to mention the pestilence and the disease, the infestations that will attack the starving little children in the night, eating their eyes out like maggots. Yes sir, securities is the business to be in.”

I felt like slapping Mr. Pukas.

But then the double doors crashed open to a small gang of men and women dressed in white, pushing carts and carrying black plastic trays, shouting, “Good morning, people!”

As they approached us with their carts, I had to wonder how
I’d
gotten here in the first place. I figured that Ryan must have ordered it. But then, had Barnes gone ahead and pressed charges? Whatever the case, I knew that it would take Tony at least a day for him to counter the order, get me released on bail or my own recognizance or whatever they do inside the nuthouse. In the meantime, I had to wait it out. I had to hope and pray that Renata stayed put. I had to hope and pray that no one, save Tony, found her.

Two orderlies —the first a short white man with a goatee and long sideburns, the second a very large black man with tattoos running down the length of his right arm —stood at the foot of my bed.

“Nice to have you with us, Mr. Marconi,” Short Goatee said, approaching me with a little paper cup in his hand. The kind used for dispensing meds. “Will you be breakfasting in or out today, sir?”

Funny.

“How about breakfast in bed?” Goatee went on, handing me the cup with an identical set of red pills to the ones the nurse had given me the night before. He bent just slightly at the knees, brought his lips to my right ear. “Now, you listen to me, motherfucker,” he said. “I know who you are and I know why you’re here and if you fuck up for even a second, even for one split second of time…if you so much as spit, fart, or cough, I’ll bust your ass and toss you into the rubber room. Do I make myself perfectly clear, Mr. Marconi? Because, if I don’t, my pal Leon has ways of making the blind see.” He stood up. “Don’t you, Leon baby?”

Leon smiled and flexed the biceps on his right arm. It nearly popped out of the white T-shirt. Nice bedside manner, these two orderlies.

“Everybody understand one another?” Short Goatee said, straightening back up.

“Cozy,” I said, tipping the contents of the paper cup into my mouth, chasing it with the cup of water Leon handed me.

I smiled at Short Goatee, winked at Leon.

As they approached Mr. Pukas with the med carts, I rolled over, turned my back to them.

“But I have to be back at work in less than an hour,” I heard Mr. Pukas say.

“Sure you do, Eddy,” Short Goatee responded, as I stuck my left index finger in my mouth, scooped out the meds, stuffed them in between the mattress and the box spring, just like I’d seen someone do in a movie once.

“Please, don’t do this,” I heard Mr. Pukas say as I rolled over onto my back to get a better look. Out of the corner of my right eye, I saw Leon walk to the head of the bed, saw him hold Mr. Pukas down flat on his back while Short Goatee undid the zipper on his white pants and pulled out his sex. I saw him stuff it into Pukas’s mouth.

“And if you bite me, Mr. Pukey Eddy Pukas,” he said, not even bothering to muffle his voice, “there’ll be no milk or cookies for dessert. Do we understand each other?”

“Gimme a cigarette,” came the voice of a crazy old bastard.

“Suck it,” came the voice of Short Goatee.

Chapter 55

For almost three hours I pretended to pass in and out of sleep.

I snored a couple of times when Leon and his little buddy passed by.

For the sake of realism.

As for Mr. Pukas, he passed out not long after his interlude with Short Goatee. He lay on his side, curled up under his blue hospital blanket, the thumb of his right hand stuffed inside his mouth like the perpetual four-year-old these sadistic bastards had reduced him to.

On more than one occasion, I thought about just taking my chances. Getting up, heading for the double doors, walking out. But I knew that when those video monitors caught me in their lenses, those men in white would come running. I’d be dragged down, thrown in restraints, tossed into some kind of lockdown.

The rubber room.

Sedation city.

The house doctor made his rounds at a little past noon. Just as the morning meds were wearing off and the orderlies had begun to assist the patients to a small dining area at the far end of the corridor for lunch.

The ones who could walk, anyway.

He was a tall, thin man in his late fifties, with a high forehead and slicked-back gray hair and wide blue eyes. Like most doctors, he wore a long white overcoat. The overcoat had a chest pocket that housed a couple of ballpoint pens.

He took one of the pens from his pocket, pulled the chart that had been hanging on the end of my bed. Depressing the back of the pen, he quickly jotted something down on the chart, then set it back on its hook.

He approached me, a bright smile plastered on his narrow face, introducing himself as “Dr. Matthew Pearl.”

“How’s your head this afternoon, Mr. Marconi?” he said, voice calm, soft, singsongy.

“Why am I here?” I asked.

He fake-laughed. “You’re here to get better,” he said.

I sat up fast.

“Let me use a phone,” I said.

“I’m afraid that’s just not possible,” he said.

I grabbed his shirt collar. “You can’t keep me here,” I said.

“We have a c-c-court order.” Pearl, struggling to form his words. “I’d be h-h-happy to show you.”

Leon and Short Goatee came running.

“Drop him, asshole,” Short Goatee shouted.

Leon grabbed me by the hair. He yanked so hard I thought he tore the scalp right off my skull.

I let go of Pearl.

He jumped away from the bed, brushed back his gray hair with open hands, ran them down the front of his white overcoat. He breathed in.

“You want I should shoot him up, doc?” Goatee suggested.

Beside my bed, Edward Pukas mumbled something indiscernible in his sleep.

“Just bring him to my office,” Pearl whispered. “No sedation.”

He turned and walked away.

Leon grabbed hold of my smock, pulled me out of bed.

I went down on the floor, hard, onto my side. When he bent over to pick me up, I made a fist with my right hand and clocked him in the mouth.

His lower lip exploded in a haze of red blood.

“You little freak!” he screamed, grabbing on to my throat, picking me up by my neck.

Short Goatee came running.

“Leon,” he shouted, gripping the big man’s right arm. “Let him down.”

Leon tightened his grip. He was breathing in and out with fat, pursed lips, blood and spit spraying in my face. I felt the initial burst of pain. Then I felt my Adam’s apple get set to pop. I started to black out.

But just like that, Leon released his hold.

I fell back down to the floor. Leon kicked me in the kidney. The pain shot through my side, through my back. I tried to swallow. My throat felt like it had been scraped with a pipe cleaner. My head was on fire. I vowed never to fight the big man again. Not without a gun.

“You ready to go now?” Goatee said, grabbing my arm, pulling me up off the floor.

I struggled to my feet, still doubled over. “Yeah,” I whispered.

“Good,” he said. “Because I ain’t got all day to screw around with nutcases.”

Through the corner of my eyes I could see Leon wiping blood from his nose with the back of his hand. “You whack me again, little man,” he said, as I started hobbling past the rows of beds, “I don’t stop till you’re dead.”

“Ain’t gonna be a next time, Leon,” I said.