PEPPER WOKE UP with the sun. He hadn’t forgotten where he was, but even in here, with an ache in his neck from the thin pillow, having slept in his street clothes, and even through sheets of shatterproof plastic, the sunlight sure felt pleasant. He practically purred in his bed, a great cat rousing.
But who the hell had drawn the curtains? Pepper thought of his roommate. He pictured himself sleeping deep and that guy standing over him long enough to tug the curtains. It just made him feel so vulnerable.
“Wake up! Wake up!” a woman’s voice sang. It wasn’t his roommate looming at his bedside, and not Dorry, either. A different older woman moved to the head of his bed and snatched his top sheet off. Didn’t even pause to check if Pepper had his pants on or off. (Thankfully, for all involved, they were still on.)
“I don’t plan to run a bath for you,” she explained tersely. She had a Caribbean accent. “It’s seven in the morning. Wake up! And get out of your bed.”
The woman’s actions screamed “Staff Member” but her wardrobe cooed “Casual Grandma.” A beige blanket sweater and shapeless jeans, comfortable black sneakers, and hair cut short. She had a batch of keys hanging from a plastic cord around her wrist. They jangled as she tugged the top sheet one more time, all the way off him.
“You’ll make your bed when I leave, hear?”
Those keys, that tone, the direct but disinterested stare, that’s how Pepper knew she was an employee and not a patient.
And Pepper nodded at her as he sat up. He almost said, Yes, ma’am.
“Now you take this,” the woman said. She opened a clenched hand. Two pills sat in her palm: a light green pill and a little white gelcap.
He looked at them with horror. As if she’d offered him poisoned Flavor Aid.
Remember who you are! he thought.
Pepper unfurled himself and stood, knowing he was a big old banner of a man. People tended to crane their necks and read the sign: STEP BACK.
But not this time.
The woman didn’t move. The pills in her palm didn’t even tremble as his body took up so much space. She simply tilted her head back and cut her eyes at him. She was old but her face still remarkably smooth. She had that power. You could see it in the way her lips drew down now, her lower jaw jutting out like the Don Corleone of the West Indies. Her eyes went from mildly cloudy to suddenly, strikingly clear.
“You going to give Miss Chris the business, heh? Trust me, you a big man but a small potato! And if I have to leave here and get a doctor, I promise you I coming back to make mash potato.”
What was it about that accent and that set of the chin? That aura of threat and premonition? Miss Chris had struck fear into badder men than Pepper, he felt sure of that.
What was Pepper going to do anyway? He’d had a grandmother of his own. Different color, different country of origin, different personality, but just as fearsome. Nearly everyone could be undone by an old woman’s displeasure.
Miss Chris held her hand above her head, so the pills hovered just below Pepper’s chin. “I won’t make another request.”
Pepper plucked both pills and Miss Chris dropped her arm.
“At least tell me what these are,” he said.
“I’m your psychiatrist or your nurse? Because if I’m you’re psychiatrist I’m due a better paycheck.”
The light green pill was Haldol. The white gelcap was lithium. Miss Chris actually knew this, but was too vexed by the big man’s attitude to explain.
Pepper said, “I need to make a phone call.”
Miss Chris raised her eyebrows. “That’s a phone in your hand or two pills? Deal with what’s in front of you first. Then if you want to make a phone call, you go make your phone call. I’m here to dial the numbers for you? No! No!”
Miss Chris continued talking but she wasn’t actually addressing Pepper, so he stopped listening. He brought his lips down to his hand and slurped up both pills. They sat on his tongue. His mouth hung open as if the pills were scalding hot.
“I’m a Verizon employee?” Miss Chris continued. “Put your eyes to my ID and it will tell you different.”
He wasn’t getting past Miss Chris, out of this room, toward that phone call, if he didn’t swallow the pills.
Pepper finally closed his mouth and gulped. He felt the dry taste of the pills at the back of his tongue as Miss Chris wound down her rant.
Once Miss Chris had seen him swallow the meds, her job was done. She turned and left the room without even a wave.
Pepper didn’t want to run out right after her. He didn’t want to follow behind her down the hall. So he went into the bathroom where he found two sets of towels and washcloths on a rack by the shower. One set looked used, the other set clean. Pepper undressed and took a warm shower. There was a soap dispenser on the wall here, just like the one by the sink. Pepper squeezed out a few dollops of Pepto-Bismol-pink soap. He tried to wash off the moment with Miss Chris. He stood under the showerhead with his eyes closed and wondered what effect those two little pills would have. They’d been so small.
He dried off, dressed again, and left his room.
The hallway gave the feeling of a community college. Institutional. Low-budget. But now he noticed the wooden railing running alongside either wall. It ran about waist height. Unbalanced patients could cling to these wooden rails and pull themselves down any hall.
Parallel to the railing hung a strip of wallpaper, like trim just beneath the ceiling. A series of five repeating images. Lighthouses. A lighthouse at night, under a full sun, at dawn, in the evening, overlooking the sea during a storm. The painted lighthouses ran all the way down Northwest 2.
Pepper followed their lights.
He reached the nurses’ station, the room at the hub of the unit. Four staff members worked at the station, all seated. Pepper noticed Miss Chris moving down Northwest 1. She stomped toward the secure door in her practical shoes, still speaking out loud. But to whom?
The nurses’ station was a rectangular desk area, with two tiers. The outer tier stood as tall as a bar top. Behind that top tier was a second one, lower, where staff members could sit and work at desk height. Pepper saw the tops of four heads. He didn’t recognize any of these people from the intake team last night. Two nurses, an orderly, and a social worker were all in there, hunched over, heads down, filling out forms in the natural posture of the public-hospital worker.
Pepper wanted to walk over and ask about that phone call. But first he had to make his mind understand what his eyes were seeing. The image wasn’t blurry—four staff members worked inside the nurses’ station—but the meaning of that image made less sense. He could’ve been looking at a giant terra-cotta pot, the tops of the four heads like four plants just breaking the surface of the soil. He was swaying and didn’t even realize Dorry had grabbed his hand until she yanked on his pinky.
She looked up at him, unsmiling. “You better hurry if you want breakfast. They’re about to shut down. Are you hungry?”
Pepper was hungry. In fact, ravenous. Huey, Dewey, and Louie sure hadn’t taken him out to dinner before they dropped him at New Hyde last night. He hadn’t eaten since yesterday’s lunch.
“I have to make a call first,” he said.
But whose voice was that who said it? His, but not his. Distant. Slow.
“It’s eight twenty-five,” Dorry told him, and to Pepper her voice sounded faster, a bit daffier, than it had the night before. “They shut breakfast down at eight thirty and don’t serve food again until lunch. You want to wait that long?”
He didn’t. He couldn’t. His naturally big appetite had been enhanced.
“Wait,” Pepper said. “How can it be past half past eight?”
Dorry pointed at a wall where no clock hung. She kept her finger pointed there as if he just couldn’t see it. Miss Chris had given Pepper those pills at seven a.m. He’d lost almost an hour and a half since then? Those two little pills had walloped his ass.
Now Dorry pulled at his pinky again. “You can eat or you can talk, but you can’t do both in five minutes. The phones will be there when you’re done. I promise.”
Pepper nodded at her, or at least he hoped he did. He had a hard time feeling his body. For instance, he was already walking now and he’d hardly noticed. Dorry led Pepper around the nurses’ station and held on to him. Not one staff member looked up at them. All he heard when passing them was the skritching of their pens.
Dorry pulled Pepper down another hallway. One she hadn’t showed him the night before. “This is Northwest Five,” she said. “You remember the wagon wheel?”
Pepper did but he couldn’t say yes and nod his head and walk simultaneously. So he just looked down at his feet in their gray thermal socks. He hadn’t even put on his boots. Left, right. Left, right. Left, right.
Much like Northwest 1 and 2 the hall here was lined with closed doors. They barely registered in Pepper’s periphery. Left then right. So when they reached the end of Northwest 5, Pepper didn’t expect the room to be so big and bright. It was filled with chairs and tables and surprisingly natural light. It was twice the size of the room at the hub of the ward.
“This,” Dorry said, sweeping her free hand and speaking in a theatrical whisper, “is the television lounge.”
There were six round wooden tables. Each could fit four or five people. They were spread out in a crescent shape, running along two adjacent walls that were entirely made up of ceiling-to-floor windows. These windows even looked like glass without chicken-wire veins.
Dorry seemed to read his thoughts. “Pretty, aren’t they? But don’t get too excited. They’re glass coated with shatterproof plastic. They’re actually even tougher than the windows in our rooms, they just don’t look as industrial. It’s expensive stuff! Which is why New Hyde only paid for it here, in the lounge.”
This lounge was the closest the psych unit had to a showroom. A place where photos were taken on the rare occasions when the psych unit made it into the hospital’s brochures. (Four times in forty years.) More important, the lounge was where families sat with patients during visiting hours. It had to offer a better view than the bedrooms.
And what could Pepper see through those floor-to-ceiling shatterproof glass windows? A decrepit old basketball court. Half-court, actually. With one tired-ass basket. The rim oxidized from orange to a sickly brown. The once-white backboard had gone gray. Even the pole tilted forward about ten degrees. It wouldn’t be hard to dunk on a hoop like that, but then patients weren’t ever taken out there to play basketball.
Dorry said, “There’s five smoke breaks a day. They let patients stand out there to puff.”
Dorry brought Pepper to a tall wheeled cart, like the kind used in school cafeterias. Gray as a gunship, with large black wheels at the base. An orderly stood there, but didn’t seem like he wanted to linger. It wasn’t Scotch Tape, but a different black guy, tall and skinny and disinterested. The orderly removed the last full tray and almost handed it to Pepper, but Pepper couldn’t get his hands raised. His arms just stayed there at his sides even though the fingers did wiggle. Dorry took the tray for him. And with that, the orderly checked his watch—8:32—and pushed the cafeteria cart out of the television lounge and down Northwest 5.
Dorry moved toward an empty table, farthest from the other patients. The tables and chairs were the kind of dining sets you might buy from a defense contractor. They lacked any beauty and weren’t even comfortable. But neither the people who sold it—in bulk—nor the people who purchased it—in bulk—were ever going to sit at these tables, so what the hell did they care?
Dorry settled down at the far end of the crescent. Pepper took fifteen minutes to catch up. No joke. A walk of no more than ten feet took him a quarter of an hour. He regretted waiting to make the phone call more and more. Having breakfast in this place only seemed like he meant to stay.
Sitting down gave Pepper trouble, too. He had to coordinate pulling the chair out without being in its way. He had to aim his butt at the chair cushion and not smack into the armrest instead. And he had to scoot forward in his chair, which meant working up some traction between his thermal socks and the tiled floor. The man had sweat on his forehead when he finally picked up his fork.
Dorry smiled widely. “Those meds are murder, aren’t they?”
There were other patients gathered at the tables on the other end, by the TV mounted to the wall. Some sat with their breakfast trays in their laps and their heads cocked back so they could see the thirty-two-inch flat screen.
Eight patients stared at it, men and women, pawing blindly at their breakfast trays. Their mouths hung open and their eyes looked heavy in post-dosage stupor. What else could they do to ride the dosage out but watch television? Pepper couldn’t even manage that.
The news played, though what was on hardly seemed to matter. The patients watched commercials and weather reports as intently as “breaking news” when they were in this state. Pepper heard the anchor’s voice. “Thousands packed Cairo’s Tahrir Square for a ‘Day of Victory’ to celebrate the one-week anniversary of the ouster of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.”
Pepper tried to focus on his breakfast tray. A small box of cereal, a green apple, an eight-ounce carton of milk, a four-ounce juice cup, two pieces of white toast, and a set of plastic utensils. Very little of this stuff actually qualified as food. Foodlike, maybe. Pepper looked away from his tray, slowly raising his eyes, if not his entire head, to peek at the half-court out there. But what he saw, just beyond the court, was that same chain-link fence topped by barbed wire. The door to the half-court had three locks.
How am I here? Pepper wanted to ask.
But he couldn’t form the words. Not only was his body still working at sludge speeds, but now his mouth was so dry he could feel the bumps of his tongue against the roof of his mouth. He needed a sip of that juice. The most appetizing item on the tray. He meant to move his arms, to grab the tiny cup, but couldn’t. His fingers didn’t work, either.
Dorry watched him struggle without offering help. It wasn’t that she was being cruel. It was that she was on meds, too. Pepper recognized it on her face. She smiled widely again. Had he said something funny or was she reacting on delay to something she’d heard minutes ago?
He stared into her mouth. Dorry had tombstone teeth, bent at all angles and going gray. Her giant glasses showed streaks, like a window that’s been wet but not wiped clean. She wore the same blue nightdress from the night before. She was the kind of person Pepper might’ve given change to on a subway and never thought about again. Not a good thing to admit, but it was true. And now here he was, looking to her for help with his meager breakfast. His thirst overwhelmed him.
“Dorry,” he whispered.
Speaking, just that one word, and barely a whisper, made his parched throat burn. He puckered his lips, he opened and closed them. He stared down at the breakfast tray, at the juice carton, and hoped she understood.
Dorry said, “Do you know much about the American buffalo?”
It took Pepper a moment to register how mind-bogglingly random Dorry’s question was. If he’d been in control of himself, he might’ve chucked his table at her out of frustration. But he couldn’t do much of anything. He watched the little juice cup with an almost romantic longing.
Dorry rose from her chair.
She shuffled around the table.
“Two hundred years ago, or something like that, the American buffalo dominated the West. There were millions of the great beasts, running in herds so big it sounded like thunder rolling toward you. A population of five million. Ten million. Maybe more.”
Pepper couldn’t quite focus on her words. By now his mind seemed to be floating. Or sinking. Either way, his brain was an untethered balloon. If he hadn’t been able to see the tabletop right in front of him, see his arms balanced on the chair’s armrests, he would’ve thought he’d been let loose to float into the sky.
His throat felt so dry.
“When the settlers started crossing the country in droves, the American buffalo met its match. People wanted the skins for warmth, they ate the meat, they used the horns and the bones and all the rest. Those Native Americans used even more of the animal, but they hunted it all out of proportion, too. Used it for themselves and sold it to the settlers. The American buffalo became big business. Nothing stands in the way of that. In no time, maybe three years, those beautiful beasts were almost extinct.”
Dorry stood by his side now. She reached across his tray for the four-ounce juice cup. But she couldn’t pull the foil top off the thing. Even though she’d been on the unit for much, much, much longer than Pepper, she, too, had been walloped by her morning dose. What she took would’ve put Pepper into a coma.
“People used to go out and hunt them with rifles. Hell, they even leaned out of moving trains and picked the buffalo off with potshots. They also call the American buffalo a bison. Same animal, two names. Don’t know why that happened.”
Dorry finally opened the juice. Like Pepper used to do when he was a kid enjoying a quarter water after school. She popped two holes with her teeth then jabbed one finger inside to make a kind of spout. She tilted back Pepper’s head and opened his mouth.
“But the worst way to kill them, in mass numbers, was to drive a herd toward the edge of a cliff and just make all those big dumb things jump right off. It was messy. Some people think the men did it just for fun. Or maybe it was more efficient. Didn’t use any bullets and you had all of them right there at the bottom of the cliff. The sight, from above, must have been something truly hellish. Just thousands of bison, broken into pieces. Heads and hooves and tails and guts. Blood everywhere. Some of them didn’t die right away. They might be down there snorting and wheezing and slowly drifting off toward death. But it hardly counted as a loss for anyone but the buffalo. Even though it sounds wasteful, the profits were so big it didn’t matter.”
Dorry finished by slowly pouring the apple juice into Pepper’s mouth.
Pepper’s arms shivered and his tongue expanded in his mouth like a sponge. His eyes focused on the old woman standing over him. He smiled at her: a mama bird feeding its chick.
After drinking two ounces, he regained some control of his body. He raised one hand and took the juice from Dorry, sat up straighter, and slurped the rest himself.
And Dorry returned to her chair, snatched both pieces of toast off his tray, and winked. The price of partnership.
Pepper grabbed the green apple and bit it once. A chomp so huge it exposed the core. Smaller bites, Pepper. After he finished chewing he asked, “Dorry, why did you tell me that story about the buffalo? It’s horrible.”
They laughed and the mood seemed to lighten.
Then Dorry said, “I want you to understand where you’ve found yourself, big boy. In here we’re the buffalo. And New Hyde is the cliff.”
Pepper wasn’t any goddamn buffalo, or bison, or whatever. He was a man and he’d be leaving soon after he made his phone call. Of course, Pepper couldn’t say those things to Dorry. Instead he spent forty-five minutes finishing his apple while she calmly watched him, as if she knew exactly what he was thinking.
“We’ll have to go back to the nurses’ station if you want to make that phone call,” she said. “You remember where it is?”
How could Pepper be expected to forget? What kind of dimwits was Dorry used to dealing with? But then Pepper remembered he’d been unable to walk half an hour ago, so maybe he shouldn’t be too smug.
“Down that hall.” Pepper gestured with his head.
Dorry grabbed the cereal box off his tray and held it up. She raised her eyebrows and Pepper consented to let her take it. Dorry marched over to the gaggle of patients by the television. She skirted around one table, closer to the windows, and stopped beside an old black woman wearing a purple pantsuit and matching little church hat. Dorry leaned close and spoke into the woman’s ear, then set the cereal box in her lap.
Pepper and Dorry turned their walk back to the nurses’ station into a funny kind of race. Dorry held on to the wooden railing running along the right wall, and Pepper held on to the one on the left. They used the railings for balance, and to drag themselves forward. Eating breakfast had spiked Pepper’s blood sugar enough to put a dent in his paralysis, but he still needed a little help. And Dorry did, too. Clinging to their respective rails, they lumbered in harmony.
When they reached the nurses’ station again, the same tops of the same four heads were still bent over the same paperwork. The staff members hadn’t shifted. Just as Dorry and Pepper reached the oval room, a phone rang behind the nurses’ station and one of the staff, a woman, picked up.
“Northwest,” she answered, as if this was her name. She listened for a moment. “The doctor is not on the unit just now. Let me put you through to his voice mail. All right?” She asked without waiting for a reply. A faint click could be heard as the nurse pressed the transfer button. Then a clunk as the plastic phone went back into its cradle. The woman went back to paperwork. At New Hyde the term for this was charting.
Pepper found he could best move through the room if he focused on its discrete little details. If he spent too much time planning his phone call to Mari, everything he needed to explain and to ask of her, then he got tripped up. Stick to the basic motor functions, Pepper! Footsteps, and hands held tight to the railing, and keeping pace with Dorry as she led him forward.
But then he lost himself by counting hallways. They’d just left Northwest 5 and as they veered to the left, making a circuit around the nurses’ station, holding to the curved railing, they reached Northwest 1. As they crossed the mouth of that hallway, Pepper turned and recognized the secure door. Miss Chris stood in the open doorway. A delivery man held a white bag, food from a place nearby called Sal’s. Miss Chris counted out her money. Pepper couldn’t even consider escaping just then, he could barely stay upright. Then they passed Northwest 1 and Pepper clung to the railing again. Up ahead was Northwest 2, the men’s hallway, where his room lay. He looked over and saw Northwest 3, the women’s. There he saw a pair of middle-aged women walking together, dressed nearly identically, and laughing over some impossibly funny joke. Really happy, at least in that moment. Were they patients? How could they be smiling if they were in here? He couldn’t stop watching the women as he moved.
And that’s how he bumped right into Dorry, nearly knocking her over. But he caught himself and her. The wooden railing groaned as the two of them held to it.
“Sorry,” Pepper said.
Dorry said, “My son was the same way. Never looked where he was going.”
Two of the staff members at the nurses’ station rose from their seats, just high enough to peek over the desktop at Dorry and Pepper. One of them was Scotch Tape, who recognized Pepper from last night and didn’t feel like being bothered this early. No one being hurt, no one attempting to escape, no one refusing treatment. As far as the staff’s checklist went, there were no problems then. He returned to his charting.
Dorry and Pepper had stopped midway on the wheel, between Northwest 2 and Northwest 3. Between the two halls there was a little alcove.
“Pay phones,” Dorry said.
“I can make as many calls as I want?” Pepper asked. Surprised that prisoners were limited to just one, but mental patients had unlimited access.
“As long as you’ve got the money,” she said.
He had the change right in the pocket of the slacks he’d slept in. Pepper reached into the pocket and pulled out the coins. Only then did he realize the act of balance he’d just achieved. A minor feat for anyone over two years old, agreed, but you’d be surprised how that medication makes you feel like a wobbly infant. It had been two hours since he’d swallowed the meds and he still didn’t feel clearheaded, but maybe they had lost their worst effects.
The change in his palm looked like shiny communion wafers.
The alcove wasn’t terribly big. There were two pay phones. Both were in use. By the same guy.
Pepper’s roommate.
Mr. Malt Ball held one receiver to his right ear. The other was balanced on his left shoulder. He looked like an old-time receptionist, putting through calls. He didn’t notice Pepper, even in that cramped space. This guy had admirable powers of concentration. Either that or he was just ignoring the big man.
The roommate spoke into the phone by his right ear. “Yes, I will hold.”
Then he set that phone onto his right shoulder and lifted the other one to his left ear and said, “Hello? Hello? Come on!” But he’d already been put on hold on that phone, too.
Dorry peeked in. She said, “That’s Coffee.”
At least Pepper had a name for his enemy.
“I should warn you,” she said. “I wouldn’t go around flashing my change like that.” She pointed at Pepper’s open hand and he closed his fingers. “Coffee’s going to ask for money if he sees that.”
“He already did. He’s my roommate.”
Dorry winced like someone who’s just touched an open flame. “For the first time since we’ve met, I actually feel sorry for you.”
Dorry meant this as a joke, but why did it make Pepper flinch?
He walked right up to the still oblivious Coffee, who had returned to the phone at his right ear. His eyes were tilted upward as he listened to the hold message play for the fifth time in a row. That’s why he didn’t understand what was happening when Pepper snatched the other receiver out of his left hand to hang up the line.
“I’m using this phone now,” Pepper said.
Pepper stood half a foot taller than Coffee but, more important, Pepper outweighed Coffee by at least eighty pounds. And Pepper’s face, with its high, flared nostrils and bared teeth, looked about as pleasant as an etching of a Chinese demon. The sensible reaction for Coffee would have been to make peace. Or even to get his ass out of the alcove. But let’s say this for Coffee: the man was out of his mind.
Coffee squared right up to Pepper, chest to belly.
Then he spat in Pepper’s face.
The saliva struck the big man’s chin, slid down, and hung there like a chrysalis for a full three seconds before Pepper hit the man.
Actually he crushed him. The alcove didn’t have enough room for real blows to get thrown, so instead Pepper threw himself. The smaller man got caught between a wall and two hundred seventy-one pounds of medicated murderousness. Coffee might as well have been ground into a fine powder. Ready for the French press. (Sorry!)
Coffee howled and went down to the floor. The other receiver slipped out of his right hand, striking against one wall like a gavel. A recorded announcement played from the receiver, repeating what it had already been saying for many minutes:
“Thank you for calling 311 in New York City. We’re here to help.…”
Coffee was curled on the ground, hands over his face. Pepper stooped over him. Pepper wanted to thump this guy for spitting on him. Really one of the most cowardly and disgusting moves a person can pull in a fight. But before he could do more, Pepper felt that saliva dripping down onto his neck and he panicked. What if this dude’s spit had passed through his lips, even just a little bit, and gone down his throat? AIDS? Hepatitis C? Who knew what could happen? The moment the thought came up, it was impossible to put down. He stuck his tongue out and pressed it to the sleeve of his shirt. Licking his arm to clean his tongue. Coughing loudly.
Try to imagine what Scotch Tape and the other staff members saw when they entered the alcove, drawn in by Coffee’s screams and Pepper’s wretching. The staff found a very large man standing over a smaller one, menacing the smaller man who was, even now, scrambling to get hold of the dangling pay-phone receiver to try his call again. And the big man was—what the hell else could you say?—licking himself.
Crazy-balls. The scene was absolutely crazy-balls.
Scotch Tape sucked his teeth. He stared up at Pepper with distaste. “Damn, my man.”
Pepper stopped applying his tongue to the fabric of his shirt and turned toward Scotch Tape. Below them both, Coffee spoke urgently into the phone.
“Hello?” he whimpered. “Please. I’ve seen it. I know where it lives.”
“Thank you for calling 311.…”
Two nurses poked their heads into the alcove, but with Coffee, Pepper, and Scotch Tape already inside, there was no more room. From farther outside the alcove Miss Chris shouted, “What’s this foolishness?!”
Scotch Tape called out, “New admit attacked Coffee.”
Hearing it like that, from a staff member, made Pepper understand what he’d just done. Hadn’t he resolved to control himself? To make the best impression possible? But getting spat on had to count as a mitigating circumstance. Pepper wanted to explain.
“I needed to make a phone call,” he began.
Scotch Tape waved the words away. “I’m taking you back to your room now, and you’re going to stay in there for the rest of the day. You hear?”
Coffee rose to his feet now, pushing himself up with his back against the wall. He shook the receiver of the phone Pepper had hung up. “Now you owe me a quarter, Joe! An American quarter!”
Pepper said, “This guy was using both phones and I just …”
Scotch Tape stepped closer to Pepper. They were squared up just like Pepper and Coffee had been, but Scotch Tape wouldn’t have to spit on anyone to make his point. That was clear.
“Save that shit,” Scotch Tape said. “You can explain all this to Dr. Anand.”
The way Scotch Tape said it, the name sounded like “AndAnd.”
From outside the alcove Miss Chris added, “Oh-ho, it’s Charlie Big Potato causing the fuss? I already told him to be easy.”
In defiance, desperation, and drugged-out confusion, Pepper grabbed the phone on the left, lifting the receiver out of its cradle. He’d make his phone call.
But Scotch Tape wouldn’t let that happen. He pressed two fingers down on the cradle, and the dial tone choked before Pepper even got the phone to his ear.
Then, another quick flash of temper, Pepper half-raised the receiver like he’d bring it down on Scotch Tape’s head. But he stopped himself from making a bad day terrible and put the phone back in the cradle.
Scotch Tape grinned.
“That’s smart, big boy. First smart move you’ve made since you got here.”
Oh, how Pepper would’ve loved to pick up Coffee and use him to bludgeon Scotch Tape to death. Would that count as black-on-black crime?
Scotch Tape misread Pepper’s contemplative look. He spoke with a mix of compassion and condescension. “You calm now? All right, then. Let’s go. You and me. Back to your room.”
As Pepper followed Scotch Tape out of the alcove, Coffee still clung to the pay phone like a man adrift, trying to stay afloat. The receiver was tucked against his ear.
The automated voice on the other end thanked him, once again, for calling.
“It’s here,” Coffee said quietly.