The Inn(22)

A woman was lying on her side under a small table. Rick Craft, apparently asleep, was sitting on the floor with his back against a wall, a blanket around his shoulders like a big, stained coat.

“The children,” I whispered to Nick. “The ones who died. They weren’t living here, were they?” He shrugged. I looked at the woman on the floor. Her greasy hair fell across her brow, and as I bent to get a better look, I noticed white foam at the corner of her mouth. I put two fingers on the side of her neck. Her pulse was faint.

“Hey, asshole.” Nick put a boot into Craft’s side. “Rise and shine.”

Craft opened his eyes and looked at Nick, then scratched at the sores on his badly shaved neck. Nick dragged the waking man to his feet and then slammed him against a wall as if he were banging an old television set to get the picture to clear.

“What—what the fuck do you want?” Rick seized Nick’s arms, his eyes wide now. “I ain’t seen the guy! He was never here!”

“You don’t even know who I’m looking for,” Nick snapped. I went to the table by the sleeping men and found exactly what I’d expected—two colored capsules. One was the yellow smiley identical to the one I had confiscated from Winley Minnow; the other was bright red, the face frowning.

“Where are these coming from?” I showed Craft the capsules. He took a moment to focus, then tried to pry Nick’s hands off him.

“You’re those fucks who were at the bar with Mayburn,” Craft snarled.

“We weren’t with Mayburn,” I said. “We just find you as repulsive as he does.”

“The man asked you a question.” Nick gave Craft a shake so hard that his oversize head jiggled on his scrawny neck. “You the one who’s been handing those pills out to schoolkids?”

“Fuck off!” Craft yelled. I glanced at the men on the couches, but they were down for the count. “You’re not cops. I’m not giving you shit. Get out of my house! Get your hands off me! Get—”

I took Craft from Nick and pushed him down the narrow hall out of the sailors’ mess. I knew what I was looking for, having sensed its presence by the faint reek in the room. The toilet was at the head of the boat, beyond the upper freezer hold. I marched Craft through reeking water to the toilet cubicle and kicked open the door. Exactly as I’d expected—the junkies had no plumbing, so they’d simply pretended that they had. Craft saw what I planned to do and braced himself in the tiny doorway before I could force his head into the bowl heaped inches high with human waste.

“Oh God, no.” He twisted in my hands. “No, no, no.”

“You and your pals need a cleanup crew to come through here,” I said. “A man’s home is supposed to be his castle, isn’t it?” I realized I was biting into Craft’s flesh with my fingers.

“Let me go!”

I tried to force Craft into the cubicle, putting all my weight behind him, my hand on the back of his neck. I got him bent above the pile of feces. The smell was eye-watering.

“Tell me where those pills came from.”

“No!”

“Tell me where they came from or you’ll be picking shit out of your nostrils for the next year and a half.”

“His name’s Cline!” Craft howled, sinking to his knees. The arms that slipped through my grip were reed thin and covered in scabbed sores. Craft was sobbing on the wet rubber floor. “Mitchell Cline. He lives in town. Don’t tell him I gave him up, man.”

“You mix with violent people, you get violence,” I said. “If Cline wants to hurt you for snitching on him, I’m not going to intervene. You signed that deal yourself.”

“I don’t care if he hurts me.” Craft sniffled, rubbing his nose on his arm. “I just don’t want him to cut me off his list. He can ban whoever he wants. I need the gear, man, and Cline’s got all the dealers wrapped up around here.” Craft looked up at me, his red eyes full of tears. “Please,” he said. “I need him.”

I left Craft sniveling and feeling sorry for himself in the wet, reeking hall outside the head and walked back up to Nick. He had lifted the woman from the floor and was holding her in his arms like a baby, her head against his shoulder.

“You get a name?” he said when he saw me.

“Yeah.”

“Good, because we gotta get out of here.” He turned toward the door. “This woman ain’t right.”





CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE





NICK SAT IN the back of the car with the woman from the boatyard, her head in his lap, and monitored her pulse, his fingers on her carotid. We exchanged worried glances in the rearview mirror all the way to Addison Gilbert.

The nurse behind the ER triage desk, an African-American woman whose name tag said BESS, took one look at Nick and the woman in his arms and pulled a microphone sticking up from the counter toward her mouth. Her fingers sported bright yellow nails that were two inches long and pointed like claws.

“Code Orange in the ER, please, Code Orange,” Bess announced. She spotted me and ran her eyes up and down my form.

“Can I have the patient’s name, please?” Bess said.

“We don’t know,” I said. “We found her like this. I believe she’s probably had—”