Flamethrower (8 page)

Ruby rode along the Belt Parkway bike path for a few miles then turned off to take the bridge leading to the Rockaways. The guardrail separating the bike path from nothingness was only about waist-high and the wind was strong. She pedaled faster, too nervous about getting knocked off the bridge to enjoy the view of the Rockaway peninsula ahead. When she finally reached the other side of the bridge, she had to get off the bike for a few seconds to recover from the minor terror. She gulped in ocean air until she felt better.

Ruby rode down Rockaway Beach Boulevard into the sketchier parts of the peninsula. Along the water, low buildings gave way to ugly high-rises that were either projects or condos—sometimes it was hard to tell. To the left were tightly packed frame houses and tenements. There wasn’t much life on the street and the area felt ominous. Ruby reached Beach Seventy-ninth Street, got off her bike, and walked it along the sidewalk, looking at the numbers on the squat, malnourished buildings. Two kids were sitting on a stoop just ahead. They didn’t look friendly but Ruby accosted them anyway.

“You guys know where sixteen-seventy is?”

“What?” a little girl snarled at Ruby.

“Sixteen-seventy Beach Seventy-ninth.”

“You’re
on
Beach Seventy-ninth,” a boy said. He was younger than the girl and a little less mean looking. Both the
kids were chubby with pale skin and lank brown hair. The stoop they were sitting on was chipped like a prizefighter’s teeth.

Ruby walked on. There was a tire shop and a few crumbling houses leading up to where the street dead-ended at the water.

None of the buildings seemed to have numbers, but at the very end of the road was a one-story brown house with a sagging roof. An old wooden rowboat roosted on the patchy grass in front. The only other residential building on the block was completely boarded up. Ruby decided the brown house was the one. She knocked. Nothing. She tried the doorknob. It turned but the door didn’t open. There was a lock that didn’t look particularly secure. Ruby fished her bank card from her back pocket then paused and looked over her shoulder. There was nothing there but the empty street and, off to the left, the water lapping at the rocky shoreline. Ruby fussed at the lock with the bank card, got it open, and softly pushed the door open.

“Hello?” she called out. The only sound came from some gulls screaming over the nearby water.

Ruby wheeled her bike inside the house and pulled the door shut behind her.

The place was dark and smelled of mold and stale cigarette smoke. A few slivers of daylight fought their way through curtains drawn loosely over two windows at opposite ends of the place. To her right, Ruby could make out the shape of a sagging couch, near it a low table covered in newspapers. She held her breath, listening for tell-tale creaking sounds. The
little house was silent. To her left was a tiny dining room, a six-person table taking up most of the space. Ahead was a kitchen. Ruby ran her hand along the wall, found a switch, and flipped it. A bare bulb dangled over a filthy electric stove. Dishes were piled in the sink, and she saw several cockroaches. To the left of a brown fridge was a padlocked door.

Ruby’s spine tingled.

She pressed her ear against the padlocked door but heard nothing. There was a key attached to a magnet on the fridge door. She stuck it in the padlock. It worked. She opened the door a few inches then stooped down to feel her way forward. There was nothing but darkness. Then she saw a blur of movement, and there was a whooshing sound as something came toward Ruby. She felt pain over her left eye. She felt herself falling.

R
uby noticed a terrible smell.

“I’m sorry” she heard someone say. She couldn’t see and wasn’t even sure if her
eyes
were open. She put one hand on the side of her head. She felt a sticky warmth and knew it was blood.

“I thought you were someone else,” the voice said.

Ruby grunted.

“I’d get you some ice for that, but unfortunately I’m having trouble getting around.”

As Ruby’s eyes focused, she saw a filthy man hunkered on the floor near her. His face was smudged with grease, and he smelled horrible. Ruby never would have recognized him as Tobias if she hadn’t expected to find him here.

“You’re a patient of Jody’s, aren’t you?” Tobias asked, as if they were running into each other at a cocktail party. “I met you at Belmont.”

“Yes,” Ruby said, finding her voice.

“I’m sorry I hit you on the head. I thought you were Miller coming back to hurt me.”

“Miller?”

“My kidnapper,” Tobias said casually. “What’s your name again:

“Ruby. And why did this Miller kidnap you?”

“I hired him to. Surely Jody figured that out,” Tobias said glibly.

“She wasn’t quite sure. But suspected.”

“Of course he wasn’t supposed to cut my leg off.”

Serves you right
, Ruby thought. Thanks to Tobias’s idiotic scam, Violet was being stripped of her best horse and Jody was flipping out. “You must be in pain,” she said.

“Terrible, yes. Miller did give me some Percocet. Takes the edge off.”

Ruby caught another whiff of Tobias’s body odor. It was vile enough to make her eyes cross.

“Are you all right?” Tobias asked.

“My head’s spinning.”

“You were out cold for a few minutes,” Tobias said. “We should get to a hospital.”

“Where is this Miller person?”

“That I don’t know,” Tobias said.

“I’ll call your wife, and I’ll call us an ambulance.”

“No ambulances,” Tobias said.

“You’re going to get in some legal trouble no matter what. Calling an ambulance won’t make any difference.”

“I want to go to a Manhattan hospital, and an ambulance will only take us nearby. I just don’t trust these outer borough quacks. Miller has already botched me, I’m sure.”

“He cut your leg off himself?”

“Oh yes. He’s a veterinarian. I suppose he lacks the bedside manner and subtlety of a human sawbones. But he seemed to know what he was doing.”

“You watched him cut off your leg?”

“No no.” Tobias waved his hand at the absurdity of the notion. “He blindfolded and anesthetized me. But he gave me a very matter-of-fact report on the proceedings as he went along. Ligated the small arteries, sutured the larger ones. He applied something called thromboplastin to the bone cavities to control oozing.”

Ruby was revulsed, but Tobias seemed to relish the telling.

“He was very thorough,” Tobias said cheerfully, “and he left me that book so I could acquaint myself with postoperative stump management.” Tobias was motioning toward a book on the floor.

Ruby glanced over.
Emergency War Surgery
. A lugubrious-looking burgundy book with gold embossing.

“I haven’t been able to focus my eyes to read it though,” Tobias added.

Ruby was aghast. “Why exactly did he cut your leg off?”

“I was concerned that Jody wouldn’t take the whole thing seriously and wouldn’t pay up. Miller thought that leaving her a piece of my body would be a good convincer. I was unsuccessful in talking him out of that particular course of action.”

Ruby gulped and stole a glance toward Tobias’s leg. Just under the knee, where the leg now ended, Miller had attached some sort of metal device that was pulling the skin over the stump like a sausage casing.

“Now, could we get a car service and go to a hospital, please?” Tobias asked.

“My doctor works out of New York Hospital. Will that do?” Ruby asked.

“That’s fine.”

Ruby felt for her phone in her pocket then realized she’d put it in the little tool pouch attached to her bike seat.

“Do you have a phone in here?”

“No. Miller took my cell, and there isn’t a working phone in the house.”

“I’ll go get mine,” Ruby said.

“Probably won’t get a signal. But try it.”

Ruby slowly got to her feet and took a few steps forward. She could feel the blood drying near her left temple. Her vision was slightly blurred, and she had the worst headache of her life. She walked into the living room, where her bike leaned against the wall. She took her cell phone out, flipped it open, and punched in Jody’s number. No signal. She moved around the dining room. Nothing. She peered out between the filthy curtains, saw that the street was deserted, and stepped outside. The sleepy sounds of the dead-end street seemed loud, the water lapping violently at the shore, the gulls squawking like chickens. She still couldn’t get a signal.

Ruby went back in and turned all the lights on in the kitchen, illuminating the little room where Tobias lay. It was her first good look at him. He was wearing a dirty white button-down shirt and striped boxer shorts. There was a black sock on his lone foot. Ruby wondered where the second sock had gone. It hadn’t been on the foot in Jody’s fish tank.

Tobias was looking at Ruby apologetically, trying to pull his shirttail down over his boxers.

“Don’t worry about it,” Ruby murmured. She couldn’t help but stare at the horrid stump of a leg. For a second, Ruby
thought of her friend Cathy, who had dated a long line of men with missing parts. There was a one-armed guy, a guy with one testicle, and an elderly gentleman with only one kidney. Last Ruby had heard, Cathy had settled with a one-eyed man.

“Ugly, huh?”

“That doesn’t look good,” Ruby conceded. “I can’t get a phone signal. Any suggestions?”

“There’s a car service not too far away. You could walk over and ask them to come.”

“Where?”

Tobias told her. His speech was strained, and as he spoke, he fumbled for something at his side, eventually producing a container of pills.

“Hurts.” He put a tablet in his mouth.

“You want some water for that?”

“No,” he said. “Don’t leave me here too long,” he added, seeming weak and needy for the first time.

“I won’t,” Ruby said. “I’m going to clean up a little,” she motioned to her forehead.

“Bathroom’s just off the living room.”

As Ruby ran water in the sink, she looked at herself in the mirror. There was blood drying around a gash on her forehead, her hair was matted, and the skin around her left eye was beginning to swell and turn blue. She dabbed water onto the wound and saw that it wasn’t particularly deep, just tender. She opened the medicine cabinet. Nothing there but a dead roach and a nasty old toothbrush. Ruby wet her fingers and ran them through her hair. She looked like an extra from the
zombie movie
28 Days Later
. She flicked off the bathroom light, went to the door, and walked outside.

An old Puerto Rican man was standing in front of the tire shop a few doors down. He stared at Ruby, and she realized she still looked like she’d had an argument with a hammer. She smiled at the man. He didn’t smile back.

As she walked, Ruby passed by the pair of kids she’d seen on the way to Tobias’s shack. They were still sitting on the stoop, their moon faces blank.

The car service was in a tiny hole-in-the-wall on a deserted side street. The front office was barely bigger than a phone booth. An old man sat hunched behind a bulletproof partition reading a magazine. His head was tilted down, showing a luminous bald spot with a network of tiny blue veins.

“Hi,” Ruby said.

The man didn’t look up. A phone started ringing. Ruby wondered if the man was even alive.

On the eighth ring, the man reached for the phone, answered, and scribbled something down. He finally glanced up at Ruby and immediately focused on her forehead.

“I need to get a car. Quickly,” Ruby said, sticking her chin in the air, trying to act as if a gashed forehead was the most normal thing in the world.

“Where to?” he said after a long pause.

Ruby told him she was going to New York Hospital, in Manhattan.

“Gotta make a stop first on Beach Seventy-ninth and pick up my friend,” she said.

The man didn’t seem happy about any of it, but he eventually
conceded that if she’d wait outside, a car would be ready in five minutes.

Ruby went to stand outside. She pulled her phone out and finally got a signal. She dialed Jody’s number. It rang then went to voice mail.

“This is Ruby. I’ve found Tobias. At the house in Rockaway. He’s not in very good shape, and neither am I. We’re going to the hospital now. Could you please call me back immediately?” Ruby flipped the phone shut.

A white Lincoln Town Car pulled up to the curb. The driver was a young woman with curly red hair.

“What happened to you?” she asked as Ruby settled into the backseat.

“Fell,” Ruby said.

“That ain’t from no fall. Someone beat you up?”

“Sort of. Thought I was someone else,” Ruby said.

The woman grunted. They drove the few blocks to Tobias’s house in silence.

“I have to go in and help my friend walk out. He’s sick,” Ruby said as the car pulled over. She enjoyed the vast understatement.

The driver grunted again.

Ruby went inside the moldy little house, calling out to Tobias as she opened the door.

There was no answer.

“Hey, Tobias?” Ruby walked back through the kitchen and into the little room where she’d first found him. The room still smelled like him, but he wasn’t there.

“Hello?” Ruby called out.

Nothing.

“Shit,” Ruby said aloud. She went back into the living room and sat on the couch. She put her head in her hands.

Ruby wasn’t sure how many minutes passed, but eventually the driver came in looking for her.

“What’s going on here, lady?”

“Sorry,” Ruby said, “my friend seems to have disappeared.”

“You gonna pay me or what?” the driver asked, folding her arms over her chest.

She was very short, which Ruby hadn’t noticed before.

“I guess I still need to go to the hospital,” Ruby said.

“You guess? Woman, you definitely need a hospital,” the driver said. “What’s the problem? You got no money?”

“No,” Ruby protested, “I have money.”

“I can give you a ride for free.” The driver didn’t seem to believe Ruby.

Ruby was touched by the gesture but also a little concerned. Apparently, she looked a lot worse than she realized.