The Lola Quartet (22 page)

Y
ou still with me, Gavin?" Daniel asked softly. The air singing with electric blue stars.

T h e r e  w a s 
something wrong with the ceiling. It was mostly white, but the texture of the tiles made constellations of gray that swarmed and changed shape the longer Gavin looked at them. His arm was a frozen, inert thing, pain seeping through the drugs. He was aware of sound: a nurse pulling the curtain around the bed, metal rings jangling; a beeping machine; soft footsteps.

   The room was flickering. He kept falling in and out of sleep, if sleep was what this was. It felt lighter than unconsciousness. Intervals of twilight. Vertigo, a terrible shifting movement, the bed's a boat on rough water, I am going to drown.

 "
W a s I
really shot?" Gavin murmured. "Was that really what happened to my arm?"

   "He panicked," Daniel said. Daniel was an unsteady silhouette beside the bed, a blurred figure wavering. How long had he been there? "He thought you were someone else."

   Gavin's ears were ringing. He closed his eyes again.

"
I
' m  n o t  someone else," Gavin said. He was confused and his voice was a mumble. He wasn't sure how long he'd been talking to Daniel, how long he'd been awake. His throat was dry. The texture of the ceiling above the hospital bed. Dizzy.

   "He thought you were after Anna."

   "I am after Anna. I've been looking for her." The drugs were a weight in his bloodstream, a fog behind his eyes. Antibiotics, the remnants of general anesthesia, whatever they were giving him for his arm. Was this how Jack felt through all the days of his life? He remembered being wheeled into surgery, flashes of sound and light.

   "If you care about her," Daniel said, "I'd suggest you stay away from Deval." Was Gavin dreaming? He had the impression of swimming. Daniel's face wasn't entirely in focus.

   "Or he'll shoot me again?" Gavin murmured. Talking nauseated him. He closed his eyes.

"
L
i s t e n , " D a n i e l said, "I'm here in my official capacity."

   Gavin was awake again. Had he been awake the whole time? Nothing was certain. He'd been dreaming of a trumpet.

   "I don't understand," he said.

   "I'm a detective on the Sebastian police force, and I'm here interviewing the victim of a crime." Daniel was speaking very quietly. "This is what my report will say: you were visiting a friend in the mo tel, but you got the wrong room and the drug fiend on the other side of the door shot you and fled. Do you understand why I'm going to write that?"

   "Not really," Gavin said. "I don't really understand any of it." He hazarded opening his eyes again. The ceiling was still moving so he looked down at the blanket and sheet instead, but the texture of the blanket had a way of telescoping in on itself. He wanted to put his hand over his eyes, to block the light and the queasy motion of everything around him, but his left arm seemed unmovable and the IV was in his right. "To protect Liam Deval?"

   "Not Deval. Anna."

   "Can you please just tell me what happened to her after high school? I know you know, and I'm so goddamned tired of asking." Gavin closed his eyes. "I am so dizzy," he said, to no one in particular.

   "You lost a lot of blood," Daniel said. He was quiet for a few minutes, and Gavin had almost slipped back into sleep before he spoke again. "How did you know he was in the Draker Motel?"

   "I used to be a reporter," Gavin said. "I can follow a story. Do I have to ask the question again?"

   Daniel sighed. "Look, she was pregnant," he said. "Sixteen years old."

   "Yes, I figured that part out already. She was pregnant and sixteen, and then what?"

   "This isn't something I'm proud of. You do stupid things in high school. I made a mistake. But listen, she was pregnant, and she told me the kid was mine."

   Gavin opened his eyes. Daniel's face was dim, hard to make out in the swarm of stars. "So what did you do?" he asked.

   "I drove her to Utah. We were going to live with my aunt until we could get our own place."

   "Why would she go with you? What did you offer her?"

   "What do you think I offered her? A getaway car," Daniel said. "If you'd had a car and a place to take her, she'd have said the kid was yours."

   "I didn't think she was . . ." He couldn't focus his thoughts. "I thought she was different than that."

   "She was desperate. People are capable of anything when they're desperate. Look, I don't flatter myself. She wasn't in love with me. But you must have known what her family was like. I offered her a lifeline and she took it."

   "She never wanted a lifeline," Gavin said. "I was always offering—"

   "No, you were always threatening," Daniel said. "You were always threatening to call the authorities, every time she showed up at school with a bruise. That was your idea of helping her? Calling Family Services? They knew all about that household. She spent a year in foster care when she was a little kid. They were at that house all the time."

   "She never told me that."

   "They could easily have taken her child away from her. She was afraid of being separated from the baby."

   "But she always said she didn't want any help." The whole thing was too much for him. The room was tilting, so he closed his eyes again. His throat was dry.

   "If someone's drowning in front of you and they say they don't want to be saved, do you take them at their word or do you pull them out of the water? The way you stood by and did nothing."

   "I didn't know—"

   "You weren't paying attention."

   "I need some water," Gavin whispered. "My throat . . ."

   There was a plastic cup of water by the bed. Daniel lifted the cup and guided the straw to Gavin's lips. The water was warm.

"You took her to Utah," Gavin said. "What happened then?"

   "The baby wasn't mine. We broke up. She left. She got in some trouble, ended up with Liam Deval."

   "Why do I get the impression you're leaving out details?"

   "Gavin, does it matter? This was all a decade ago."

   "Everything matters, Daniel. Didn't you used to say that in high school?"

   "I don't remember saying that."

   "If you'll just tell me how to find Anna, I'll stay out of your way. I'll even forget who shot me. I don't know what you and Deval are doing, or why you're helping him. I actually don't even really care, so long as no one shoots me again and Anna and Chloe are safe."

   Gavin heard footsteps in the corridor, Eilo's voice. He registered dimly that she'd been here earlier.

   "Hello," she said from the doorway. Gavin smiled as best he could. Daniel turned to look at her, and Gavin saw that she didn't recognize him.

   "I'll just be another minute, ma'am," Daniel said. He leaned over the bed. "Do I have your word?"

   "Yes."

   "Go to the Starlight Diner on Route 77," he said softly. "Her sister works the night shift. Maybe she'll tell you where to find her."

   "I don't want to talk to Sasha. I want to talk to Anna."

   "She switched motels last night. Sasha's the only one who knows where she is."

   "Was she there when I was shot? In the room, with Deval?"

   "No." Daniel was looking at the floor. "I'm sorry about what happened," he said. "All of it." He stood then and turned away from the bed.

. . .

O
n  h i s  first day home from the hospital Gavin lay on the sofa in Eilo's living room looking up at the underside of the freeway across the yard. The bullet had struck the bone between his elbow and his shoulder. His arm was fractured. He would have extravagant scars. A little higher and he would have been crippled. "There's not a surgeon alive who can repair a shattered shoulder socket," a doctor at the hospital had told him. "You're a lucky man." He knew he was lucky but every movement was painful. Eilo came in sometimes to see how he was. He heard the sounds of distant telephones from the office, the soft percussion of Eilo's fists against the heavy bag.

   After two or three hours on the sofa he forced himself to sit up, and in the swampy shadows under the freeway he thought he saw something move. A quick inhuman movement, a lizard perhaps. He was thinking of Nile monitors, of anacondas, of the extremities of nature, William Chandler in the swamps. This place is slipping away from us, Chandler had said. These new animals. This sure as hell isn't the Florida I grew up in.

   "I don't understand what happened," Eilo had said. Speaking cautiously, the way she almost always spoke to him now. The bullet had pushed him into a different world, one she didn't inhabit, and he could see her calculations every time she looked at him: if he had been shot he must be involved in something. If he was involved in something, perhaps it would follow him here. She had taken to double-checking that the doors were locked.

   "It was a mistake," he'd told her. "Someone thought I was someone else and shot me by accident. I just got the wrong room."

   "But why were you there?"

   "I thought a friend from New York was staying at the motel. Did

you see the police report?" But he saw the doubt in her eyes and he knew she was thinking about the
New York Star.
Liar. Liar. "Tell me about my medical expenses," he said.

   "Don't worry about that," she said. "I've made some money."

   "Eilo, you can't . . ."

   "I've always tried to take care of you." Eilo was quiet for a moment, sitting on the edge of the sofa. "Why were you at the motel?"

   "I was looking for her."

   "For Anna?"

   "Anna and the little girl."

   "Did you find them?"

   "No," Gavin said.

   "And it was a coincidence that you were shot?"

   "It had nothing to do with anything. I just got the wrong room."

   She left him alone then, and a few minutes later he heard the muted sounds of her fists hitting the heavy bag.

"Do you know the Starlight Diner?" Gavin asked. " Route 77?"

"Sure," the driver said. "Good pancakes there."

   The Starlight Diner was some distance from Eilo's house, not far from Gavin's apartment. There are certain restaurants meant to be viewed at night and the Starlight was among them. A gleaming chrome-and-red-Naugahyde interior visible from the parking lot, a neon sign shining over a bank of flowers near the front door. It was close to three a.m. when the taxi dropped him off. He opened the door of the diner awkwardly— the sling made everything difficult— and glanced around, but he didn't see anyone who looked like Sasha. Daniel had said she worked the night shift, but perhaps there was more than one night shift, or more than one Starlight Diner on Route 77, or it was her night off.

   "Anywhere you like," a waitress said. She was fiftyish, eyes bright with caffeine, bleached hair piled on top of her head and turquoise eye shadow.

   He chose a booth by the window where he could see the street, ordered a coffee, and realized as he drank it that he wasn't going to sleep again that night. Gavin had brought a newspaper with him, but it was difficult to concentrate. The pain was a dull constant throb from his elbow to his shoulder but when he gave in and took a Vicodin he thought of Jack, so he'd been trying to get by on aspirin. It wasn't working very well. He looked out at the lights of passing cars and his thoughts wandered. He was thinking of the last time he'd seen Deval and Morelli play together at Barbès, the apparent falling-out at the end of the set, Deval stalking out of the room and Morelli glaring after him. Why had Deval come to Sebastian, if not to play his canceled gig at the Lemon Club? He felt that he was on the periphery of some great drama, trapped on the wrong side of the locked stage door while the action transpired just out of sight. He didn't understand the story. He was distracted by the pain. He'd been shot four days ago and it had occurred to him that it was a nice thing, actually, that he'd been halfway unconscious from heat exhaustion and sunstroke when it had happened. He was lucky, he thought, that he had no memory of facing a gun. But even so, he'd noticed that loud noises rattled him. The man slamming a car door in the parking lot, for instance. Gavin tensed but it was just another man, no one he knew, coming in for a doughnut and a cup of coffee to go.