I finished my tumble and lay on my back, hands pressed to my shirt, sobbing in shock and to get back my wind. K moved in on short quick legs. He snatched up Rob’s package and glared at the huntress with cold irritation. His eyes went dark.
The shooter ran down the steps from a shake-shingled house not ten yards away, a black .45 in one hand, the other bracing, ready to squeeze off a third shot. He wore red shorts and a white T-shirt that had tugged loose on his middle-aged paunch. His arms and legs were thick and hairy and his fat hands looked soft and pink. He stared at the dogs with a wrinkled brow and made sad noises. “Ah, Jesus. I’m sorry.”
The slugs from the .45 had struck the streamlined chests square, just behind their front shoulders. Good swift kills.
The woman’s small breasts rose and fell under her thick black turtleneck. Skinny and ghostly, she belonged in a café filled with poets and cigarette smoke, not out siccing her dogs on strangers. She drew herself up with a toss of her short black hair and flung aside the leash reels. They raced over the asphalt, reclaiming their cords, tangled and spinning, until they clattered to a stop about a yard from where the Dobermans lay in parallel on the bloody sidewalk.
“Ah, Jesus,” the shooter repeated, and knelt by the dogs. I felt my stomach clench and bile rise in my throat, tainted by the Scotch I had drunk in the bar.
“We have no further business here, none at all,” K assured me. He helped me to my feet. “They’ll come to their senses in a bit, and there’ll be more hell to pay.”
The huntress started to cry. Her cry inflated to a wail, then a shriek.
Only then did I notice a stench in the air. I thought it might have been the dogs. But I remembered Dave Press in the plastic sphere at the bottom of the sea.
It was the skinny woman in the turtleneck. She stank like a rotting jungle.
K tucked Rob’s envelope back into his jacket, then wrapped my hand in his handkerchief, tying a deft knot around my wrist.
We ran.
To this day, I am surprised nobody followed. The woman became the center of attention. She laid into the man who had probably saved my life, beating at him with bony fists.
K jogged me, then walked me, and finally half carried me to an old brown Plymouth. I got in, feeling very woozy, and he drove me to the Alta Bates Hospital. As we pushed through the glass doors into the emergency room, I was white with shock and barely able to stand.
The receptionist performed her necessary rites of triage and asked about insurance.
“How long have you lived here?” K asked me as I fumbled for my wallet.
“I’m not badly hurt,” I insisted, then felt the blood on my neck.
“Don’t touch that,” the receptionist said, grimacing as she wrote.
“How long have you been here?” K repeated.
“Just a few minutes. No insurance.”
“Not the hospital,” K said. “In Berkeley.” He thrust a wad of bills on the counter, well over a thousand dollars. “Is that enough? Get my friend to a doctor.”
K was full of surprises.
“Two months,” I said. Another nurse pushed me through a light but judgmental crowd of sniffles and bruises and sprained ankles. My shirt was soaked with blood. Someone was pushing a wheelchair in my direction.
Just after I noticed how much blood, I got down on my knees, grabbed the arm of the chair, and toppled over in the hallway and felt the cold gritty press of linoleum on my cheek.
I worry about germs. I hate hospitals and their germs.
21
SAN FRANCISCO
“I believe you now,” K said as we rode across the Oakland bridge. I wore K’s threadbare suit coat over a green scrub shirt given to me at Alta Bates. My hand had been punctured in several places, but nothing had been torn, and there was no bone or nerve damage. My throat had been nipped, not ripped. I was lucky.
Rob’s envelope pressed against my side. I leaned my head against the car window, queasy from pain—the Demerol was fading—and from my first intravenous dose of Integumycin.
“Thank you,” I said. “But why should that matter?”
“You haven’t been tagged,” he said. “Or if you have, it hasn’t taken.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“The woman with the dogs, and whoever set the fire, they were tagged.”
“Tag, you’re it,” I said.
K gave this crack more than it deserved, a smirk and a wan smile. “Nothing funny about it. If you were tagged, you could be a grave danger to yourself, to me, and perhaps to others.”
“All right,” I conceded. “What is it, a psychotropic chemical? They spray the fruits and vegetables and the whole neighborhood goes crazy?”
Saying that took most of my energy, and I felt faint.
“As I said, I’m not a biologist. Your brother was beginning to understand when they tagged him. He fought back as best he could.” K stared grimly across the aisle of the half-empty bus. “He offered me an explanation for my difficulties. He said I must have been tagged ten years ago. And now I’m very small potatoes. It’s a truly paranoid vision.”
“Silk?” I asked.
He nodded.
“Sounds sinister,” I said. “Like being strangled with a scarf.”
