Plugged - Eoin Colfer [13]
It’s strange, all this melodrama in one afternoon. But it doesn’t seem real or wrong in the heat. My brain sizzles inside the gourd of its skull and the walls sizzle and crack.
Bloody flies are huge.
Two women in floral head wraps argue over a Madonna article.
‘Sorry, miss,’ says Tommy. ‘We’re on a schedule.’
Things happen quickly then, and when I try to piece it together, images jump and flicker like an old VHS that’s been taped over one too many times.
The nurse comes out of her seat and she does indeed have a large handgun in her tiny fingers. Suddenly the gun is in my hands. I must have twisted it away from her. Don’t recall really. Training took over. Tommy’s gone down the corridor and I remember thinking: Okay, enough is enough. I don’t know what this is, but I need to extricate myself. Hell, I could bash my way out into the street through one of these walls.
But I don’t go anywhere except after my sergeant.
The corridor is lined with posters, faded in the sun. I remember seeing ET and one of the Connery Bonds, then we’re at a door. Someone has written DOCTOR in thick marker.
‘Oh Jaysus,’ says Tommy. ‘Isn’t that handy now?’
And in he goes, with me at his elbow and the nurse close behind cursing us both for sons of bitches. Inside the door we see a rudimentary surgery with plastic on the floor and a man in a white coat sticking a large needle of reddish gunk into another man’s dick.
I’m suddenly no longer curious, and Tommy throws up on the covered floor, sending rivulets running along the polythene.
‘Bloody bastards,’ says the doctor guy. ‘This is a sterile environment.’
And that was how I met Zebulon Kronski.
More later.
Once upon a time, I could have driven the Lexus to Newark airport and abandoned it in the long-term. Now with Homeland Security they’d be shoving mirrors under it in a New York minute, so I pick the local bus station instead and park the SUV by the dumpsters. I should get ten days’ grace before the blues are called. With any luck some kid will jack the vehicle, dump the body and screw up the chain of events for anyone trying to follow it.
I walk half a dozen blocks from the station, then pay for a cab with one of Barrett’s fifties. Guilt free.
Screw him, he tried to stick me.
I can’t say this aloud, even mutter it, because I have never killed anyone outside a combat zone and I am shaken to my core.
You don’t think that was a combat zone? What would you call it then?
In the taxi, I give myself brain ache trying to wrap my head around the morning’s events. Zeb has a good phrase for this kind of situation. A poor hand of poker or bad luck with a woman could set him off.
A total donkey’s cock, this is, Dan. Donkey’s fucking cock.
I don’t know what that phrase means exactly, but somehow it catches the mood.
My friend has something that Irish Mike Madden wants. Something so important that Macey Barrett was cleared to stick any witnesses without even calling it in. If Zeb were alive, there’d be no need to toss his place; he’d give the something up. No doubt about it, zero pain tolerance. I once took him to emergency for a heart attack that turned out to be a trapped nerve. A trapped bloody nerve. Shit, I got a dozen of those a week in the army.
So this means that Zeb is probably gone. And if he’s not, what am I supposed to do about it?
Nothing. Head down and pray the storm passes over. Grieve quietly and wish it away. All that movie soldier crap about never leaving a man behind is just that. Movie soldier crap. A man goes down behind enemy lines and he’s gone. First rule of combat.
CHAPTER 4
I spend an hour and a half over a ten-minute lunch in Chequer’s Diner by the park. I expect the turkey club to taste like ash, but it doesn’t. Sweetest sandwich I’ve ever had in this place, and I’ve had plenty.
I’m alive, I realise. And food tastes good.
I remember now. You make it home from reconnaissance, and gritty water from the neck of an oil can tastes