The Devil in Silver (28 page)

That empathy wasn’t lost on Loochie, either. She pulled the great head and it reared back. She smelled the fur, sour and unwashed, and she recognized the scent. If she shut her eyes, she might believe this was just another patient, trapped on the unit for so long that he’d stopped bathing, stopped caring. Heatmiser was like that. Hadn’t she felt the same at more than one point?

But then the Devil bucked and kicked and Loochie lost her grip.

Her right hand slipped loose from one horn. The Devil thrust its head up in the next moment. Its horn stabbed Loochie’s palm. It burst through her skin and dug in. Then the Devil yanked its head left and the horn
tore
out of Loochie’s flesh. Right away, her blood ran fast, down her forearm.

The sound Loochie made, it wasn’t a yell or a cry, it was more like a honk. And yet she wasn’t actually in pain. She was saved by her acute-stress reaction. The trauma of this moment would hit her later, but right now she just had to stay alive. So she stayed where she was, on the beast’s back. Her left hand gripped its left horn. And when she spoke, it was only to give instructions.

“Grab his legs,” Loochie muttered. The blood from her wounded right hand had soaked her whole shirtsleeve already.

Pepper had only half-recovered from the pain of his tackle, but there wasn’t any more time.

Loochie shouted, “Pepper!
Please!
”

Pepper moved on his hands and knees and dropped all his weight on the backs of the Devil’s spindly legs while Loochie tried to regain control of the head. Her left hand stayed in place and despite the gash in her palm she squeezed her right hand around the right horn again. Loochie held on even tighter than before. She pulled the Devil’s head so far backward that its nose pointed up at the ceiling. Like this, its throat was exposed.

“Now what?” Pepper shouted. “Now what?!”

Kofi had stopped calling for Dorry to give him the nurse’s keys. He wasn’t actually thinking at all in this moment. He was so confused. He’d been sure he had the solution to their collective dilemma, but with each second he felt stupider for having made that phone call. For having faith that someone else would fix everything. How silly he’d been. How naïve. How crazy. A new desperation filled him now. It made Kofi feel powerful in an ugly way. A fierceness fueled by disappointment. Which is why Kofi stopped asking Dorry for the keys to the locked drawers of the nurses’ station. He didn’t need them. In his desperation Kofi found access to that Crazy Strength. He tore each of those locked fucking drawers right out of the desk.

He dumped the contents of each drawer onto the ground as Pepper and Loochie wrestled the Devil. Finally he found the right drawer. Where the staff stored the syringes used on unruly patients. Kofi grabbed the largest ones he could find: 18-gauge Seldinger needles. Coffee tore two of them from their plastic wrapping and moved out of the nurses’ station. It looked like he held a tiny fencing saber in each hand.

He reached Dorry at the lip of Northwest 4. The old woman remained impassive. Mumbling to herself. She’d dropped the keys and they’d landed on her right foot. The keys looked like a small brass spider, about to crawl up her leg. She still clutched the clipboard, but it wouldn’t serve as much of a shield.

“Now what?!” Pepper shouted. “Now what?!”

Kofi raised his hands. Pepper saw the syringes and smiled.

Then there was a new sound, someone rattling the big door on Northwest 1.

“Police!” a man shouted. “We are entering the premises!”

“Hurry, Coffee!” Loochie grunted, straining to hold the Devil’s head up.

Kofi moved past Dorry. Down the hall. “I’m going to stab out its eyes.”

“Do it fast!” Pepper begged from the floor.

The police slammed at the front door, using a two-man Stinger battering ram. The sound like a series of small explosions.

“Hurry now,” Loochie muttered. The blood from her wounded hand had soaked her shirtsleeve and half her back.

And the Devil?

It stopped bucking. It almost seemed to
wilt
. Its legs went limp and the head stopped twisting. The Devil actually whimpered. A quiet little bleat, like a sheep. Not even a sheep. Like a lamb.

Kofi spoke to himself as he approached it. “I came all this way. I came all this way.” He looked at the Devil. “I can go a little farther.”

The front door of the unit thumped even louder now. The strain on the lock could be heard. It
creaked
, almost in tune with the Devil’s
bleating
. Both about to break.

Finally Dorry came out of her slumber. Just as the secure door flew open. She heard the cops—a tactical squad—clomping down Northwest 1. They’d be on the group soon. Dorry looked around, still slightly dazed. What to do? What to do? Dorry had the clipboard. No other weapon in hand.

“Hold them off!” Pepper shouted to her.

“Just another minute!” Loochie said.

The Devil kept bleating, a kind of pleading. Dorry lifted the clipboard over her head. Her best chance of delaying the cops was probably to cause pure confusion. No one was going to shoot an old woman, right?

She saw the black uniforms of the tactical force. They were carrying guns, though she could hardly discern them. They were just figures—phantoms—filling the oval room. The Devil’s cries rose behind her, even louder,
desperate
. Dorry ran. Waving the clipboard. But she wasn’t racing toward the cops.

She moved down Northwest 4. A dozen steps. Until she was behind
Kofi. Then she slammed the clipboard against the back of Kofi’s head.

Dorry hit him once. Twice.

Loochie shrieked.

And Kofi turned toward his attacker. Such confusion on his smooth round face. He held the syringes up but no longer seemed sure of how to use them. Or who to use them on.

“I can’t let you kill him!” Dorry shouted. “I can’t!”

Kofi opened his mouth to ask the question—
Why?
—but she bashed him with the clipboard for a third time.

“He’s mine!” Dorry moaned, desperate and inconsolable.

The Devil bleated again, a babe calling out for protection.

“He’s my
son
.”

By then the tactical force had reached Northwest 4.

And what did they find? Kofi waving two large gauge syringes at Dorry.

An old white woman fighting off an armed black attacker? That’s not a difficult equation to solve. You can do it at home, without a calculator.

Kofi saw it happening. Time moved more slowly for him than for all the rest.

One of the officers ran forward and tackled the old woman out of the way. The rest fired on the crazed man. Him.

Kofi thought,
Why have you forsaken me?

Then the cops fired forty-one shots.

The assailant was hit nineteen times.

Kofi Acholi died of his wounds later that night.

WELL, FUCK
.

The black guy did die first after all.

(Excluding Sam and, possibly, Sammy, yes. Amiable white folks that they were.)

Coffee’s death was reported in the
New York Post
and
Daily News
, only a day after it happened. Small items. Not even a quarter of a page. The day after that, the
Daily News
ran a longer feature that highlighted the poor supervision at New Hyde. There was mention of how the suspect (listed as
Kufi
Acholi) assaulted two staff members before menacing a fellow patient. This second, longer article included a photo of
Kufi
looking absolutely homicidal. Where had they found the picture, buried in an abattoir? It made Coffee (or Kofi or Kufi, poor guy) resemble, at least in spirit, that famous old woodcut of a wild man: on his knees and wearing rags, a baby in his mouth and a woman’s severed head in the background. The woodcut is of a man who believes he’s a werewolf.
That’s
how the photo in the
Daily News
article made Coffee seem. Like something inhuman, too bizarre to be real. The kind of monster any sane person would
hope
to see killed in a thunderstorm of gunfire. Good riddance. Coffee’s photo inspired only one emotion.
Horror
.

Not that Pepper and Loochie and Dorry had the luxury of pondering
such an injustice to their friend’s memory. The direct aftermath of the takeover was arrest. Once Josephine and Scotch Tape were freed, they fingered the other three as coconspirators. While Coffee was wheeled into the emergency room of NHH, the others were handcuffed and placed into three separate cruisers.

Though an NYPD tactical unit had been called in, Loochie, Dorry, and Pepper were held on the New Hyde Hospital campus. The hospital’s security chief was completely ineffective when it came to preventing a mess, but he was better at sweeping up afterward. All he had to do was make sure the trio was driven from Northwest to New Hyde’s main building. There, he handed them over to actual officers employed by the New York City Department of Health and Hospitals Police. (The main building was operated by the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation, a city agency, so it was entitled to a security detail made up of NYPD officers. But Northwest—along with two other units—was operated by a private organization called the
New Hyde
Health and Hospital Corporation. Its security was contracted out to a low-budget security firm that would have trouble guarding a Waffle House.)

When Loochie, Dorry, and Pepper were taken to the main building’s detention “center” (two conference rooms and an out-of-order bathroom), they were officially being handed over to police custody but without—here’s the important part—without having to leave the New Hyde campus. How do you keep a family problem within the family? You don’t let the children out. Only Loochie had a short detour when she was taken away to have her hand cleaned, stitched up, and bandaged. By the next day, all three patients would be returned to the custody of Northwest’s security detail. They’d be driven four minutes across campus and returned to the psychiatric unit. Most systems barely work, but those same systems cover their asses much more successfully.

And Coffee? His body went to the emergency room. Then, briefly, to the Intensive Care Unit. Then, last, to the hospital’s morgue, a place the staff called the “Rose Cottage.”

Loochie and Dorry were originally supposed to spend the night
together in one of the two detention rooms. But if they were in the same room, Loochie made a habit of trying to tear Dorry’s head from her neck. Dorry didn’t fight back, either. So the cops had to separate the pair. Loochie spent the night in one room and Dorry in the other. (Neither room had beds, so they slept in chairs.) Pepper had to spend the night in the out-of-service bathroom. Which actually wasn’t as terrible as it sounds. It had been out of service so long that the place was cleaner than either detention room.

Once alone, Loochie and Dorry fell into fitful sleep.

Kofi was at rest in the Rose Cottage.

Pepper sat on the toilet in that bathroom. He couldn’t get comfortable enough to drift off, so instead, all night, he remembered: Pepper and Loochie had gone flat on the floor when the cops started shooting. They were handcuffed only moments after Kofi fell.

The police left the Devil to itself. They didn’t touch it. They moved around the body. Peeked at it and, just as fast, averted their eyes.

It lay on the floor, facedown. It didn’t move, or even seem to breathe. Pepper and Loochie entertained the wish that it had died somehow. A stray bullet maybe. Could that happen? Could the Devil die? But when Josephine and Scotch Tape appeared, it moved again. It whimpered. Seeming to call out for their help.

The cops watched quietly as Josephine and Scotch Tape checked the Devil for injuries. Scotch Tape and Josephine helped the Devil to its feet and walked it back to its room. Josephine pulled the silver door open and all three shuffled inside. Soon Josephine and Scotch Tape returned to the police, who were grouped by the nurses’ station. Pepper and Loochie sat on the floor, surrounded by them. Pepper’s hands were bound behind him. Loochie held up her torn right hand as if signaling a waitress to bring the check. Dorry had been walked to the other side of the nurses’ station where she’d collapsed. A young cop sat with her and held her hand tenderly because he thought she looked just like his great-aunt.

The cops and the staff milled around, still coming down from the chaos. A tall cop pointed toward the silver door and asked,
What’s wrong with that one?
Scotch Tape frowned and shook his head regretfully.
He said,
That’s the sorriest case we got. Doctors don’t know what to do for him
.

How could Scotch Tape talk about the Devil like that? Pepper wondered. As if it was just another patient and not the
thing
they’d seen. Could anyone work so hard to deny reality that he’d mistake the Devil for a man?

In a way it felt better to focus on such questions than to remember his friend,
Kofi
, being shot to death. A pair of syringes in his hands. What had he really planned to do with them? They weren’t knives or swords. Was he going to poke the Devil into submission?

Pepper had seen Kofi’s face just before the shooting began. A thought seemed to pass across his friend’s eyes. Pepper wished he might know what that thought was. Had it been something ridiculous? Maybe wishing he had one last quarter, even after all that had proved so damn useless. What was that last thought? Sitting on the inoperable toilet, Pepper feared he might fall into a loop. One where he wondered about Coffee’s last thoughts for hours and days and weeks. Until he might drive himself screwy trying to grasp at one last connection with the man he’d come to know. Better to think of anything else. Something concrete, tangible, real.

Kofi’s blood traveled up to the
fluorescent lights
when he was shot.

Now Pepper couldn’t get that image out of his head.

Kofi’s blood, up there, on the ceiling.

The next the morning Loochie and Dorry and Pepper were returned to Northwest, much to the staff’s unhappiness. When the security officers left, the staff put each patient into restraints. Dorry had been in her own room for years. Loochie was moved to a room of her own as well. Loochie’s previous roommate, the Haint, hardly waved good-bye as Loochie took her stuff out. And Pepper was returned to his room.