Free The Long-Legged Fly by James Sallis Page B

thirsty. The air reeked of alcohol, vitamin capsules and fresh urine. Red hair floated above me somewhere.
    “I wou’n’t be t r ying to move about too much, si r ,” a voice said, each r a tiny engine turning over, almost catching.
    “Where am I?” I asked.
    “You’ r e in Tou r o Infi r ma r y, si r .” Again, those r ’s. “The police b r ought you he r e. Welcome back. T r y to r est.”
    Everything kind of floated away then, and for a long time there were just snapshots. Some kid about nineteen who said he was a doctor, holding the garden hose he said he was going to “run” down my nose. He didn’t. Dozens of lab people with Mason jars they needed to fill with blood. A guy in a three-piece suit who sat as far away from me as he could get and wanted to know how I was handling all this.
    Gradually days fell into place. Labwork before breakfast, a perfunctory visit from your doctor about ten, group at eleven, lunch, kitchen duty, thirty-year-old travel films, TV, evening medications, lights out at ten.
    After three or four weeks I said, “There was a woman.”
    “Lots of them.”
    “She took care of me in the beginning, when I was really in bad shape. Scottish, I think.”
    “That’d be Vicky. She’s over at Hotel Dieu, I hear.” This one was short, Latin, hair in a thick braid. “I never did understand why those British nurses are all so damned good. But if I was sick, that’s who I’d want taking care of me, bet money on it. You need anything else, Mr. Griffin?”
    “No. But thanks, Donna.”
    “Por nada.”
    This went on for some time. I remember my father sitting beside the bed for a week or two. Verne came in a few times and told me if there was anything she could do … Corene Davis bent down and whispered something in my ear, which later Earl Long tried to bite off. One night Martin Luther King was there, but nobody else saw him. I asked.
    “Lew?” someone said. “Lew? You okay?”
    It was Don. He looked a lot older than I remembered him, a lot tireder. “You need anything, you better let me know.” He told me his wife had finally left, taking the kids with her. He said one of his people had picked me up and they’d kept it quiet.
    “What do you feel about all this?” he said.
    “Jesus, Don, you sound like one of the shrinks around here. I feel fucking embarrassed, is how I feel. Mortified , as Daffy Duck used to say.”
    “You were pretty far gone, Lew. Ever since you and Janie got back together and it went bad again. I guess you know I was sending jobs your way.”
    “I knew.”
    “But finally I had to stop. I couldn’t answer the questions those people came back to me with. You remember much of how it was the last few months, Lew?”
    I shook my head.
    “My men had standing orders. Every night they’d find you about twelve or so and see that you got home. You didn’t want to go home, but you did. Sometimes they’d take you home three or four times a night.”
    He paused and I said, “That bad.”
    “One morning the captain wanted to see me. ‘Who the fuck is this Lew Griffin’, he said. ‘He a dealer, a stooge, what?’ I told him you were a friend. ‘They don’t pay us to take care of friends, Walsh’, he said, they pay us to scrape the bad guys off the streets, keep a little order out there. I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. I said, ‘Yessir’. He said, ‘I’m not going to hear this name anymore now, am I?’ I said, ‘Nosir’. But my men still had that standing order.”
    I started to say thanks, but Don said, “Just shut the fuck up, Lew, all right?” I did. “Then a night or two later I get this call from Thibodeaux. I’d promised Maria we’d have that night together, it was our anniversary or some damn thing, and between the second drink and salad the beeper lets loose. It seems the waitress at Joe’s had called. For about an hour you’d been methodically walking into one of the walls there, saying you were trying to