La Mordida by Jim Sanderson

Author:Jim Sanderson [Sanderson, Jim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Brash Books, LLC
Published: 2002-02-15T07:00:00+00:00

ELEVEN

Socorro met us at the emergency room of Big Bend Regional Hospital, the only hospital for the entire area. He stared at his boots and spread out his hand and pulled it over the lower half of his face to smooth his mustache over his lips and cheeks. He lifted his eyes to look at me. He held my gaze with his eyes, and for a moment I thought one or the other of us would just start flailing at the other, and then we’d be in the ear-biting, eye-gouging fight we’d been avoiding for several years. After a few moments, I said, “I ain’t gonna hit you. Don’t hit me.”

“Then don’t give me no shoulds or shouldn’t ofs or any of your brand of preaching.”

I nodded, and he started his story. “I just dropped by and found her lying there, breathing heavy. She said to leave her, to let her die. But I ran to my old van, and I drove to the closest house, and I dialed the 911 they just put in, and I drove back, and she was smelling bad. She shit her pants. Lying in her own shit, unable to move, and she wants to stay. And I ain’t about to clean the crazy bitch up, but I wait until an ambulance gets there, and she fights them, won’t let them take her, so they have to drug her, and then I drive with her up here. And so I call you. You, motherfucker. I come up with her, and I call you, and I fuck myself.”

I broke the stare and stormed passed him and through the sliding doors that opened for me. “She’s in intensive care,” I heard Socorro say from behind me.

I whirled around. “So what happened?”

I stepped back as Socorro stepped forward, and the doors opened for him. He paused, and the doors shut. He stepped back from me, and the doors opened. I moved out of his way, and we moved next to a wall. “He beat her, Dolph. The motherfucker beat her. Kidney punched her, man. She’s bruised all the fuck over.”

I dropped my head. “Who’s he?”

“Who the fuck do you think he is?”

“Did he know about her liver?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you know about her liver?”

“Everybody along El Camino del Rio knows about her liver.”

I pulled a finger up in front of his face. “So I’m gonna assume that Reynaldo Luna did it, and I’m gonna remember that you helped him jump my ass.”

“Then you better goddamn remember that I helped you, motherfucker. You got no right threatening me. You know what I done for you and now for her? Huh? Huh?”

“Don’t go anywhere. Wait here.”

I left him to run down the hall, looking for the ICU. I found a nurses’ desk that overlooked a glass-walled row of beds. In one of the beds, in the dark, the only patient in ICU, with her head turned to the side, was Sister Quinn.

A woman in surgical pajamas caught me before I could open the door and push into the room.

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