The Sound of Broken Ribs(21)

“Okay, so other than some fellow guards and maybe a supervisor or two wondering why Paul didn’t show for work, there shouldn’t be anyone else looking for him. Is that what you’re saying?”

“Yessir.”

Belinda thought that Fat Tom hadn’t said that at all. Fat Tom had said maybe no one outside of the prison would be looking for Paul. Maybe…

Belinda didn’t like maybes.

“Good,” Tony said. “Let’s burn this fucker.”

*

After a shot of Ensure down her NG tube and Harry’s breakfast of what he said were tasteless eggs the texture of rubber, cold toast, and coffee the color of tea, Harry helped Lei on her writing.

Later, she was happy to see his lunch tray come. She needed the break. Her foot was starting to cramp from over exertion and doing deeds it wasn’t used to doing.

After lunch, sore foot or no sore foot, Lei went back to work. Harry stood at the end of the bed and held up the dry-erase board while she pinched a black washable marker between her big toe and whatever the toe equivalent to an index finger was. She wrote the word “pain” and marveled at how terrible a job she’d done. She was having a problem writing anything with a loop in it. Her foot decided that all letters with curves should be angled. Her Ps looked like boxes standing on one leg, and her lowercase As looked like a cardboard box with a flap open laying on its side.

“Doing good, lady.” Harry smiled over the dry erase board. He glanced over and looked at what she’d written. “Oh. Pain?” He met her eyes. “Are you in pain?”

She nodded slow enough as not to hurt her jaw. Her ribs hurt enough already. She didn’t need to add her face to the agony.

Paul pressed the call button on the bedrail. Less than a minute later, a black woman with gold braids came in, smiling to break the bank. Lei thought the woman was very pretty, which meant Lei watched Harry to see how he reacted to her. He smiled and nodded but seemed otherwise unaffected by the nurse’s beauty. His eyes didn’t linger anywhere untoward.

“My name’s Amanda. I’m the tech this morning.” Amanda’s personality was even more attractive than her physical form. Lei watched Harry harder.





“Hello, Amanda.” Harry smiled, but not too much. Just enough. There was no sign of “What I wouldn’t do to you” in his eyes.

Where were all these thoughts coming from? She’d never been a jealous wife, nor had she been a jealous girlfriend. All these feelings of insecurity felt foreign to her. But, of course, she knew exactly from where her sudden worry stemmed.

She was a broken person now, armless and ugly. Her new body the way it was, could really she blame Harry if he ever strayed from their marriage bed to someone else’s? Damn right she would blame him. If she ever found that he’d cheated on her, she’d cut off his fucking dick and mount the goddamn thing in her library. Right over her computer so she could look up from writing. Just a limp cock nailed to a piece of plywood to remember him by.

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.

Lei hunted the voice.

Four long black fingers with yellow nails gripped the tech’s shoulder. They slid away the moment Lei locked eyes on them, caressing Amanda’s neck as they disappeared into the woman’s hair. Lei would have thought she was imagining things if she hadn’t seen the material of the tech’s scrubs folded in three places where they had been, seconds before, pinched between the black thing’s fingers.

What the hell was wrong with her? Was it the pain that had driven her crazy? Possible, but Lei didn’t think that was the case. She stared at the three folds in the fabric of the tech’s scrub top, barely registering Harry’s voice as he said, “She’s in pain. Can something be done about it, or is it too early?”

“Let’s see.” Amanda moved past Harry, disappearing behind him for only a second before walking around him. In the brief moment she was gone from view, the three folds were gone from the shoulder of her scrub top. Of course they were gone, Lei thought. They’d hadn’t been there to begin with. You’re a writer with an overactive imagination who’s just suffered a horrific trauma. Of course your mind is playing tricks on you. Of course it is…

But a part of Lei knew—simply knew—that the folds were gone because Amanda had moved, and that her movement had smoothed the fabric.

Amanda pressed the button on Lei’s pain pump and the machine beeped. Clock gears cycled. Lei awaited the flood of warmth in her toes.

“That should do it. Call again in fifteen minutes if she’s still in pain. Maybe her nurse can give her something for breakthrough pain.”

“Good deal. Thanks, Amanda.”

“No problem.” Amanda patted the handrail and winked at Lei. “You got a good one here. You two make a lovely couple.”

Eat a dick, bitch.

Lei gazed in terror at the yellow eyeball peeking through the woman’s golden braids.

It winked.

And then Amanda moved and her braids swung over the eye, blocking it from view. Lei continued to look for the impossibly disembodied eye as Amanda headed for the door and left the room.

*

Carrying the Paul-and-bedclothes burrito outside and then the mattress took a good hour. Tony wasn’t content with simply dropping everything behind the large barn at the rear of the property. He wanted to take the corpse and bed deep into Marietta Wood, the woods that stretched the forty miles between Bay’s End and its closest neighbor, Chestnut. Frank and Carl carried Paul, one man at each end of the burrito, while Belinda and Tony managed the gory, soapy mattress.