Flamethrower - Maggie Estep [24]
Ruby went back in and turned all the lights on in the kitchen, illuminating the little room where Tobias lay. It was her first good look at him. He was wearing a dirty white button-down shirt and striped boxer shorts. There was a black sock on his lone foot. Ruby wondered where the second sock had gone. It hadn’t been on the foot in Jody’s fish tank.
Tobias was looking at Ruby apologetically, trying to pull his shirttail down over his boxers.
“Don’t worry about it,” Ruby murmured. She couldn’t help but stare at the horrid stump of a leg. For a second, Ruby thought of her friend Cathy, who had dated a long line of men with missing parts. There was a one-armed guy, a guy with one testicle, and an elderly gentleman with only one kidney. Last Ruby had heard, Cathy had settled with a one-eyed man.
“Ugly, huh?”
“That doesn’t look good,” Ruby conceded. “I can’t get a phone signal. Any suggestions?”
“There’s a car service not too far away. You could walk over and ask them to come.”
“Where?”
Tobias told her. His speech was strained, and as he spoke, he fumbled for something at his side, eventually producing a container of pills.
“Hurts.” He put a tablet in his mouth.
“You want some water for that?”
“No,” he said. “Don’t leave me here too long,” he added, seeming weak and needy for the first time.
“I won’t,” Ruby said. “I’m going to clean up a little,” she motioned to her forehead.
“Bathroom’s just off the living room.”
As Ruby ran water in the sink, she looked at herself in the mirror. There was blood drying around a gash on her forehead, her hair was matted, and the skin around her left eye was beginning to swell and turn blue. She dabbed water onto the wound and saw that it wasn’t particularly deep, just tender. She opened the medicine cabinet. Nothing there but a dead roach and a nasty old toothbrush. Ruby wet her fingers and ran them through her hair. She looked like an extra from the zombie movie 28 Days Later. She flicked off the bathroom light, went to the door, and walked outside.
An old Puerto Rican man was standing in front of the tire shop a few doors down. He stared at Ruby, and she realized she still looked like she’d had an argument with a hammer. She smiled at the man. He didn’t smile back.
As she walked, Ruby passed by the pair of kids she’d seen on the way to Tobias’s shack. They were still sitting on the stoop, their moon faces blank.
The car service was in a tiny hole-in-the-wall on a deserted side street. The front office was barely bigger than a phone booth. An old man sat hunched behind a bulletproof partition reading a magazine. His head was tilted down, showing a luminous bald spot with a network of tiny blue veins.
“Hi,” Ruby said.
The man didn’t look up. A phone started ringing. Ruby wondered if the man was even alive.
On the eighth ring, the man reached for the phone, answered, and scribbled something down. He finally glanced up at Ruby and immediately focused on her forehead.
“I need to get a car. Quickly,” Ruby said, sticking her chin in the air, trying to act as if a gashed forehead was the most normal thing in the world.
“Where to?” he said after a long pause.
Ruby told him she was going to New York Hospital, in Manhattan.
“Gotta make a stop first on Beach Seventy-ninth and pick up my friend,” she said.
The man didn’t seem happy about any of it, but he eventually conceded that if she’d wait outside, a car would be ready in five minutes.
Ruby went to stand outside. She pulled her phone out and finally got a signal. She dialed Jody’s number. It rang then went to voice mail.
“This is Ruby. I’ve found Tobias. At the house in Rockaway. He’s not in very good shape, and neither am I. We’re going to the hospital now. Could you please call me back immediately?” Ruby flipped the phone shut.
A white Lincoln Town Car pulled up to the curb. The driver was a young woman with curly red hair.
“What happened to you?” she asked as Ruby settled into