Kelly has that pallid hue of sickness, a combination of inactivity and artificial light. Her hand is skinny and frail as I hold it, but her eyes are alert. Life crept back into her. For that I am eternally grateful.
With her free hand, she picks up her soup and sips it like hot coffee.
“I know this is awful,” she says “but right now hospital food is haute cuisine.”
“Beats a tube down your throat, for sure.”
“Rocky told me you’ve been busy while I’ve been out of it.”
I nod.
“Tell me. All of it.” She has an iron in her gaze that betrays the frailty of her body. She needs to know. So I tell her. I tell her of walking into Luìs’s backroom and the events that lead to his death, about the fights with Lenny and Tank Daddy, about getting shot in the ass, about Bebe and how I still don’t know what happened to her. I tell her about hunting down Bulldog. I tell her about shooting and killing Muerto in her hospital room under her bed. Through it all, stares straight at me.
“That’s about where you came back in and I left for a while,” I say.
She takes her hand from mine. Her eyes fix on a place near the muted television. “And…you think you did this for me?”
“That’s how it started. I know there was something else going on with me, too.”
Kelly keeps looking at the spot near the TV. “You hurt people.”
My shoulders are tight, my spine stiff. “They were bad people, Kelly. Lenny killed Jerry Gold. Luìs was blackmailing Symphony into prostitution.”
“And Bebe?”
“I…” I start to say that she had a gun on me, but I don’t. That had been the line for her. For me, too. I can’t swallow away the lump in my throat.
“I never wanted any of this,” she says, looking back to me. “You started this for me. It’s like I had a hand in hurting these people. And the damage they did to you—” It’s all coming out of her now in a rush, everything she’s been sorting out. “Rocky told me that if you had been anywhere else but in a hospital when you fought Muerto, you’d be dead now.”
I’m aware of how much I’m not meeting her gaze.
“What sort of man does this?” I finish for her.
She nods. Tears sneak out of her eyes, running down either side of her reddening face. She looks like someone who’s been caught in an artic blast. I look at her fully. I’m scowling hard, trying to hold back everything, trying to find air and a way to talk. If I can only find a way to say something else…but I can’t. I’ve nothing left to say.
I stand. I take one last look at her, memorize the details, soften them into the memory I want, and limp out of the room.
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