Kelson ate dinner with Sue Ellen at Taquería Uptown.
As he downed his pollo en mole, his mind buzzed with the threats and craziness of the day. He knew he should keep his stories to himself, but as always when his brain spun and lurched, he spilled them.
When he finished, breathless, Sue Ellen looked at him wide-eyed and said, through a mouthful of carnitas, ‘Holy shit, Dad.’
‘Eleven-year-olds shouldn’t talk that way.’
‘Dads shouldn’t tell eleven-year-olds these things.’
‘Fair enough. You want another taco?’
She wanted two.
‘How’s math?’ he asked, while they waited for them.
‘We’re doing proportions,’ she said. ‘I like proportions.’
‘I was never very good at them,’ he said. ‘Even before I got shot in the head – your mom can tell you.’
‘And unit rates. For example, if I drive a car seventy miles an hour for two hours, where will I go?’
‘I don’t know. Peoria?’
‘Jail. I’m too young to drive.’
‘Is that a sixth-grader joke?’
‘No. Are you going to marry Doreen?’
‘Hell, no.’
‘Mom isn’t going to marry Jason either.’
‘Who’s Jason?’
‘Mom’s boyfriend I’m not supposed to tell you about.’
‘Is he nice?’
‘Old.’
‘How old?’
‘Older than you.’
‘Grandpa old?’
‘No. He’s a dentist – like Mom.’
‘Scary. Two dentists. What do they talk about? Molars?’
‘Sex.’
‘Huh?’
‘When they think I’m sleeping.’
‘I didn’t want to know that.’
‘You tell me things I don’t want to know all the time.’
‘But you ask them,’ he said.
‘Did you or didn’t you ask what they talk about?’
‘Right. Want dessert after all this?’
She wanted the flan and the tres leches.
The next morning, Kelson had an appointment with Dr P at the Rehabilitation Institute. When she asked how he’d been doing since their last appointment, he started to tell her the same stories he’d told Sue Ellen over dinner.
Dr P held up a thin hand. ‘We have only a half hour, Sam.’
‘Right,’ he said. ‘You remind me of my daughter, but she listens better.’
‘Sorry,’ she said.
‘No you aren’t.’
‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m not.’
He said, ‘What does it mean if no matter how hard I try to help others I feel like I’m hurting them?’
Dr P sipped tea from a thermos mug she kept on a table by her chair. During their appointments, she drank from it whenever he said something that demanded thought. Once she drank so much she had to excuse herself to pee. Now she said, ‘It might just mean you’re human. We all do it sometimes. Who did you hurt?’
‘It’s a feeling, is all. I dreamed last night that everyone I know was tangled in balls of string. I picked at the loose ends but that tightened the knots around them.’
‘A strange metaphor, but OK.’
‘They rolled around on a giant floor and got more and more tangled.’
‘Stranger.’
‘Then the balls of string rolled under my bed and made growling sounds.’
‘Ah, a kitten metaphor. How are Payday and Painter’s Lane?’
‘Cute. I think a lot about kittens.’
‘You could have worse fixations. They’re a bright spot.’
‘Why are they tangling everyone I know in string?’
She sipped from her mug. ‘How are the headaches?’
‘I haven’t had a bad one in three days.’
She scribbled a note on a pad she kept in her lap. ‘I want to start weaning you from Percocet.’
‘I like Percocet.’
‘What’s not to like? Except for the constipation, blurred vision, and dry mouth.’
‘I don’t have any of that. You ever work with adults who were abused as kids?’
She laid the pen on the pad. ‘Only if they also suffer from a physical brain injury. I’ve had a couple of patients like that. Why?’
‘What do you make of a woman in her thirties who keeps pictures and videos of her uncle abusing her when she was a kid?’
‘This is someone you know?’
‘A client. One of the people I worry I’m doing more harm than good.’
‘I’d need to talk to her to know. Does she tie her sense of self to the abuse? Did her uncle damage her so badly that she needs these images for sexual pleasure? Is she using the images to gain power over her uncle? All three? Something else? A lot of possibilities.’
‘In my experience, people keep pictures and videos like these because they’re worth money,’ he said. ‘Blackmail. Extortion.’
‘That’s more your professional expertise than mine. Whatever she’s doing, she sounds like she’s in pain. Now, I have a question for you. Why did you change the subject from Percocet?’
‘I like Percocet,’ he said.
‘Yeah, that worries me.’
Kelson drove to his office with a new prescription in his pocket – for half the dosage he’d gotten used to taking. ‘You can pace yourself,’ Dr P had said, as she wrote the order, ‘or you can pop them the way you’re used to and suffer through the rest of the week cold turkey.’
‘Or I can go to a park I know on the westside and buy more off a guy I busted once when I was a narcotics cop,’ Kelson said.
‘Or you can hold a gun to your head and pull the trigger.’
‘One bullet in the head’s enough.’
‘Stay safe,’ she said. ‘Stay clean.’
Now he left his car in the parking garage, rode the elevator to his office, and let himself in.
He sat at his desk, checked his KelTec and Springfield, and returned them to their places. He turned on his laptop and watched the screen as it booted up. Then someone knocked on his door. The knock sounded urgent, and Kelson got the KelTec from the desktop rig and slipped it into the back of his belt.
But when he opened the door, the third lawyer he’d seen in the police station intake room – the woman in the blue skirt – stood in the corridor. She clutched her black briefcase like she might need it as a shield. She looked scared.
He let her in, closed the door, locked it, hesitated – and unlocked it again.
She sat down on one of the client chairs and watched him take his KelTec from his belt and return it to the hidden rig.
‘I need to hire you,’ she said.
‘You and everyone else lately,’ he said. ‘What’s up?’
‘They’re trying to kill him.’ Her blond hair looked grayer in the office light than at the station. ‘The police won’t protect him.’
‘Who is he?’
‘He’ll pay whatever you charge. He needs to stay safe until he can make arrangements.’ She set the briefcase on the desk and opened it. Kelson let his hand dangle by the underside of his desk, close to the KelTec. But she removed an envelope, took a number of bills topped with a hundred from it, and laid the money on the desk.
‘Who?’ Kelson said. ‘Squirt?’
She looked at him like he was missing the obvious. ‘His name is Stanley Javinsky.’
‘Let’s stick with Squirt.’