The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [159]
The truth was, he needed her to save him.
“Oh my God!” the cook said into a dish towel. “You’re here to save her from us!”
The old man comforted her, told her that was nonsense. They did what they were told, he said. They were doing their job. They were doing it well.
“Goddammit!” the kid said. “I’m bleeding everywhere!”
On the little TV, the helicopter followed a looter running alongside Lake Shore Drive, a large painted canvas in his hands. The cook pulled down an unmarked ceramic canister from a cupboard and opened it, revealing a white powder inside. “I did what they told me. Oh the poor girl. She got so sick! The seizures!” The sobs came between each word now. “I should have to eat it myself!”
Wayne stepped over and put a little bit of the stuff on his pinkie finger and dabbed it to his tongue. It tasted chalky, but it stung his tongue a little, like bad garlic. “How much did you give her?”
“Enough to make her think she was sick.” The old man thought about that and maybe he heard something sincere in Wayne’s concern for Nada, or maybe the guilt he was feeling was interfering with his judgment. “Her room is upstairs. Third floor. Something was going to happen tonight.”
“What was going to happen?” Wayne asked.
Instead of answering, the man said, “You’ll be killed if you leave this kitchen.” He was the butler, Wayne decided. “Open either door, you’ll be shot. And the cops aren’t your biggest worry.”
Wayne could hear footsteps beyond the kitchen walls. He looked at the looter, whose life was probably on the minute hand now. “You need to get him out of here.” He pointed to flashing lights on the little TV. “But I can’t be here when you do it.”
The man opened a cabinet above the counter, revealing a large cavity, a chute, maybe as wide as a dorm-room fridge. “Most of them are on the second floor. In the chapel, unless they’ve gone somewhere else to hide. There used to be a dumbwaiter here. If you could wedge yourself in the shaft, you might be able to climb past them. There’s still a rope in there somewhere.”
Wayne grabbed his bad knees. “I’m so tired,” he said out loud, with nothing remaining of murderer Wayne in his voice.
The butler ignored him. “There could be a man on her door. Dr. Russo might be in with her. And I don’t know where Jameson and the others are.”
Wayne looked up the square opening. “I’ll never fit.”
“Stay here, then. See if I care.”
Even as he folded himself into the shaft, the rip in his side stretching and bleeding and screaming, Wayne still suspected it was a trap, an ambush, that he would get stuck between floors or that the guards would be waiting to yank him through the sliding second-floor door. He had accepted it was probably a trap right up until the point, as Wayne strained to push his own moon weight even a few inches up the shaft, that the old man helped him cut the rope away from the pulley and said, “My name is Hugh. Tell her we’re sorry.” And he closed the door.
The pain was incredible, worse now than it ever had been, but proximity to her was an analgesic, and by the time he could hear the paramedics and the cop back in the kitchen shouting, “Where’d he go? Where’d he go?” Wayne had advanced far up into the darkness, not quite to the second-floor opening yet, but he figured he had to be close.
Wayne straightened his legs as much as he could, pressing his back against the plaster, and rested for a moment he couldn’t afford. Only seconds maybe.
Then, with his nearly three hundred pounds suspended in a painful wedge between his giant feet and his big ass, Wayne gripped the thin cord, barely a thread cutting into his bleeding hands, a rope that for a century or more had lifted modest meals prepared by nuns to busy priests in their ascetic quarters, and wondered how long it could continue to lift him. How long before five days’ worth of exhaustion and the infected wound in his side and the tremors in his head and arm and his bad knees and this old rope all conspired against him at once and he tumbled down with a crash