The next thing I remember I was in a car again. My heart thudded to life and I brought my arms up, ready to defend myself. Then I realised I was buckled into the front seat, not in the back. The car smelled different as well, and Malcolm Barker was nowhere to be seen. I shook my head, trying to clear away the pain, but I just got dizzy. A hand came softly to rest on my arm.
“It’s okay,” Stephanie said. “I’m taking you to the hospital.”
I opened and closed my mouth a few times before I figured out speech. “No hospital.”
“Look, little boy—”
“No hospital. That’s trouble for both of us.”
She exhaled. I thought I smelled cigarette smoke. “Fine. Sleep.”
It sounded like a good idea. My eyes closed by themselves.
Sometime later the car stopped. My half-conscious mind registered the lack of noise and vibrations and dragged me back into wakefulness. Someone’s hands were under my arms, lifting me. My broken fingers brushed something and sent pain shooting up my arm again. I groaned and tried to open my eyes.
“Bloody hell, you’re heavier than you look. You’re going to have to put some effort into it, little boy.”
I figured out which leg was which. While Stephanie retrieved my backpack and put her arm around me, I heaved myself out of the car. I was outside, in some sort of fenced-off parking area. I looked up at the small, box-shaped four-storey apartment building in front of us.
“Tell me you have an elevator,” I croaked.
“Sorry.” She was whispering; I guess she didn’t want to wake the neighbours. “But I’m only on the second floor. Come on.”
She half-carried me up the central stairway. My ribs ached with every step. I couldn’t stand up straight, so I shuffled along bent over at the middle like I was looking for a dropped contact lens. I was coated in sweat again by the time we reached the second floor. Stephanie propped me up against the wall while she fished her keys out of her pocket.
“Hey,” I said. “Thanks.”
“Shut up.” She threw her door open and put her arm around me again. Her hair smelled good. “Who’s the shining knight now?”
She dragged me inside. The place wasn’t big, but it was surprisingly nice. There was a small kitchen to my left as I came in the door and a living room area just past that. Two other doors, bathroom and bedroom, I’d guess. The walls were papered in scattered pencil sketches like the one she’d been drawing in the coffee house.
Stephanie lowered me onto a couch, put my bag down, and went back to close the door behind us. I got my first good look at her since she’d picked me up. She was in her usual jacket and jeans. Her hair was messed up. I’d probably woke her up when I called. That made me a little guilty, but not guilty enough to regret it. I didn’t really want to freeze to death out there on that footpath.
“You live here alone?” I asked. Then I cringed. My ribs didn’t like me talking.
She just said, “Yes.” I heard her rummaging around in the kitchen. There were a few beeps as the microwave started. She reappeared with a glass of water. “Lean back.”
I had to grit my teeth and pull my knees up with me, but I did it. Stephanie sat on the couch next to me, one leg folded under the other, and gently trickled water into my mouth. I started coughing almost immediately, which made my chest feel like it was being stabbed with a hundred knives. She stopped pouring and waited until the coughing stopped, then she tried again. I managed to wash the taste of blood out of my mouth and swallow a few sips of water. When I’d had enough, she put the glass down and went back to the kitchen. The microwave beeped again, and she returned with a bowl of tinned vegetable soup.
“I’m not really hungry,” I said.
She held a spoonful to my mouth. “Eat.”
I ate. Turns out I was hungry after all. I finished off the bowl and then let her give me the rest of the water. When a drop of water trickled down the side of my cheek, she wiped it away with her thumb. I tried to ignore how soothing her touch felt. I watched her studying me with the look of someone caring for their injured kitten. I didn’t understand it. Why was she doing all this for me?
“Show me your fingers,” she said.
Reluctantly, I uncovered my mangled hand and showed her. Nothing was pointing the wrong way, but the two broken fingers were purple and I couldn’t move them at all. Both palms were grazed where I’d fallen. She gently prodded one of my broken fingers.
“Ow,” I said.
She looked at me. “You need a hospital.”
“No.”
“You’re annoyingly stubborn, do you know that?”
“I’ll go to a hospital when this is over.”
She sighed and shook her head. “This will never be over for you.” She got up and went to the kitchen. Everything hurt more when she wasn’t talking to me. A couple of seconds later she came back with a bag of frozen peas wrapped in a tea towel.
“Thanks.” I pressed it against the broken fingers. The cold started to soothe the pain almost instantly.
She knelt down in front of me and untied my shoes. “There’s blood on your socks,” she said.
“Yeah.”
I bit my tongue as she peeled off my socks. Stephanie clicked her tongue. “I think there’s glass in your feet. You were walking like this?”
“Yeah. And running. Don’t forget the running.”
She clicked her tongue again, shook her head, and went into the next room. She came back with a pair of tweezers. “Hold still.”
It was easier said than done. She dug a couple of fragments of glass out and put them in a bowl. One time I came pretty close to kicking her in the face. Finally, she sat back on her heels.
“There’s more in there, but I can’t get it out. It’s in pretty deep.”
She glanced up at me and frowned, like something had just occurred to her. She stood up, examined something on my head, then brought her face close to me, looking me in the eye. The personal space invasion unnerved me. “What are you doing?”
“Do you feel okay?”
“I feel like I got trampled by an elephant.”
“Do you feel like you need to puke?” Her gaze darted between each of my eyes.
“No. Not really.”
“Any memory loss?”
“I wish.”
She tapped her nose ring and nodded to herself. “You’ve got a bump on the head, but you seem okay. But I really think—”
“No hospitals.”
She narrowed her eyes at me. “Fine. But don’t you dare die in my house. Wait here.”
“Well, I was going to try and hit the gym for a couple of hours, but since you insist, I guess I’ll stay put.”
She went into the bathroom. I heard water running, smelt the steam in the air. I looked around the room, at the art scattered across the walls. There had to be over a hundred pictures here. How long had she spent doing all this? I leaned back and let myself exhale.
Easy, Spade. Don’t get too comfortable. You still don’t know what her angle is. But she was helping me. If she wanted to kill me, she could’ve just hung up the phone and let me get hypothermia on the street. She wouldn’t have come and saved me and fed me and given me ice for my fingers. Would she?
Stephanie reappeared. She’d ditched the jacket somewhere along the way, so now she was just in her jeans and a slim-fitting black top. I wondered if she ever wore anything with colour.
“Up you get,” she said, putting her arm around me again. I wasn’t too much of a big man to let her take my weight. I’d been beginning to feel almost comfortable sitting down on the couch, but my ribs reminded me just how badly I’d screwed up as soon as I stood. I clutched the peas to my broken fingers like an old lady clutching her purse on a crowded bus.
We hobbled into the bathroom together. There was a combined bath/shower unit along one wall, which Stephanie was filling up. She put me down on the lid of the toilet seat and turned off the water.
“All right,” she said, facing me with her hands on her hips. “Clothes off.”
“What?”
“I’ve seen it all before.”
“You haven’t seen all of me before.”
She smirked. “You’re blushing, little boy.”
“Can I at least get a towel to cover myself up?”
“I’ll see everything when you’re in the bath anyway.”
“I can bathe myself,” I said.
She shook her head. “I’m not leaving you in here alone to pass out and drown yourself in my tub. Arms up.”
Goddamn her. And goddamn my own broken body. I tossed the frozen peas aside and managed to get my arms to horizontal before my ribs started hurting. Stephanie helped, pulling the shirt over my head. She spent a couple of minutes studying the scrapes and bruises that covered my body, some old, some new. I caught a glimpse in the mirror of a big angry bruise forming on the left of my back. I was starting to look like a patchwork quilt. When she was done examining me, I managed to undo my own pants, though even that simple action stung the grazes on my hands.
“Come on,” she said. “Stop being so shy. The water’s going to freeze over by the time you get in there.”
I was too tired and sore to be embarrassed anymore. The steam was making me drowsy. I kicked off my pants, hooked my thumbs around my boxers, and tugged them off. Stephanie was good enough not to stare, but she didn’t turn away either. I realised how stupid I must look, all shaved. Still, I didn’t bother covering myself.
She helped me up again, led me to the bath, helped me get my legs over the lip. The water felt good on my sliced-up feet. She lowered me slowly into the hot water. The aches didn’t disappear completely, but now it felt like they were further away, in some other version of me.
I felt Stephanie’s hand on my back, easing me forward. She got a flannel, dampened it in the bath water, applied some liquid soap. Slowly, gently, she washed my back, cleaning away the dirt and sweat and crusted blood. I hissed whenever the soap touched my scratches. When she was done with my back she pulled me back again, eased my hair under the water, washed the blood out. Then she passed me the soap and flannel.
“Do your front,” she said. “And stick your feet up.”
I was too enchanted by heat and drowsiness to do anything but obey. I slung my feet over the side and she attacked the cuts with tweezers again. The heat seemed to have drawn a few of the smaller bits of glass. I watched her while I cleaned the cuts on my chest, studying the way her eyebrows creased as she concentrated on my feet and the tweezers. The damn girl was confusing the hell out of me, but I didn’t have the strength to work out how or why.
“They got everything,” I said, more to keep me awake than because I expected her to listen. “I hit their studio, and it backfired. They got the hard drive I swiped, and the USB drive too.”
“Uh-huh.”
I was trying to be angry, but I couldn’t. I was too damn tired. “I can’t go home. I can’t go anywhere. I’ve got nothing now.”
She pulled out a sliver of glass and glanced at me. “You went into the lion’s den. You’re lucky you didn’t get eaten.”
She was right, I knew, but I still felt sorry for myself. Why hadn’t Malcolm killed me? Alive, I was a threat to them. They’d killed Ella, they’d all but admitted it. So why leave me alive with nothing worse than a good kicking? Maybe they figured without evidence there was nothing I could do. But I still knew where they operated, their names and faces. That’d be enough to at least get a cop or two sniffing around.
I didn’t know. My brain was turning to mud. Each time I blinked my eyes stayed closed for longer. Stephanie must have noticed, because she abandoned the tweezers and patted my foot.
“Time for bed.” She reached in and pulled the plug. The red-tinted water flowed away. I could barely move now. Stephanie had to do most of the work pulling me up and putting a towel around me. When she put her arm around me and nudged me to get going, I went with it, shuffling like a Romero zombie.
Her bedroom was probably nice and full of interesting art, but all I noticed was that it had a bed. She didn’t even get a chance to pull back the covers before I collapsed onto the mattress and fell into sleep.
~~~
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