One Kind Favor I Ask of You (Kit Tolliver #8) (The Kit Tolliver Stories) by Lawrence Block Page B

come?”
    “To see your brother.”
    “Thinking maybe y’all could have a life together? Only life he’s got’s gonna be in that trailer. Only life I got’s taking care of him. They was sure he was gonna die but I’m making sure he lives.”
    “I see.”
    “Few months ago I’d of said he’d be getting better. Well, that can’t happen. I know that now. All he can do is stay alive, and all I can do is keep him alive. So whatever you had in mind—”
    “I don’t know what I had in mind.”
    “Thing is, maybe you want to turn around and go right now. Oh, that sounded cold. I didn’t mean it that way. What I’m saying is you might want to spare yourself the pain of looking at him, and he’ll never know you were here. That’d be what I would do, I was you.”
    “I came all this way,” she said.
    “You want to see him.”
    “I do.”
    “Well,” Joanne said, and glanced at her wristwatch. “Time I woke him, anyway. If I let him sleep too much during the day I’m just dooming him to a restless night.”

    Worse than she’d expected.
    She thought she’d prepared herself, but the reality was worse than the images she’d conjured up on the way back to the trailer. She wouldn’t have recognized him as the young corporal she’d slept with in New York. She could barely recognize him as human.
    So much of him was gone. One leg ended below the knee, the other at mid-thigh. One arm was off at the shoulder. The other stopped between the elbow and the wrist.
    Vivid pink scar tissue covered half his face. His eyes were a clear blue, but only one of them looked at her. The other, she realized, was glass, which struck her as a curiously futile cosmetic touch, like spray-painting a car after a head-on collision.
    “This is Pam,” Joanne said. “You and her knew each other in—”
    “In New York,” she supplied.
    She met his stare, unable to tell if he recognized her. Now that she’d seen him, she wanted to push back the clock five minutes; then, when Joanne gave her an out, she could agree that slipping away was the best course for all concerned. Then retrace her steps to the convenience store, and either catch the next bus or take a shot at hitching a ride, and get the hell away from Hedgemont as quickly as she possibly could.
    Because there was no work for her here. It sometimes seemed to her as if she had an important piece of herself missing, in that the rightness or wrongness of killing her lovers didn’t seem to carry any weight with her. Killing was fun, there was no getting around it, and killing men she’d slept with felt appropriate, and that was as much as she had to know.
    But to kill this man, this poor maimed creature, could not possibly be appropriate in any way. She’d put him on a list that existed solely in her own mind, and rather than cross him off she could hang a gold star next to his name, or a Congressional Medal of Honor.
    She didn’t want to kill him. Quite on the contrary, she wanted to do something for him.
    But what? Cook him a meal? Joanne prepared his meals, if you could call them that, and fed them to him through an IV line.
    Give him a massage? Joanne performed that function, she’d confided, because it was necessary for his circulation, but he couldn’t feel it, because he couldn’t feel anything below the neck. The blast that took his limbs and his eye had severed his spinal cord. So he couldn’t move anything, not that he had much to move, and couldn’t feel anything, either.
    She should leave, she thought. Say hello, say goodbye, and get the hell out.
    But somehow she couldn’t.

    “ Paaaam. ”
    Her name, or at least the name she’d given him. His voice was low in pitch, raspy, as if dragged abrasively through his scarred throat.
    “Yes, she’s right here, Bubba.”
    “ Paaaam. ”
    “I’m here, Alan.”
    “ You came. ” He had breath enough for a single phrase, then had to gather himself for the next one. “ ’S really you. ”
    “Yes.”
    And,