9

A nurse in a permanent state of rage took me at quick-march tempo down a corridor lined with ancient men and women in wheelchairs. Some of them were mumbling to themselves and plucking at their thin cotton robes. They were the lively ones. The air smelled of urine and disinfectant, and a gleaming skin of water had seeped halfway out into the corridor, occasionally swelling into puddles that reached the opposite wall. The nurse flew over the puddles without explaining, apologizing, or looking down. They had been there a long time.

Unasked, Mangelotti had refused to leave the car and told me that I had fifteen minutes, tops. It had taken about seven minutes to get someone to tell me where Alan was being kept and another five of jogging along behind the nurse through miles of corridors to get this far. She rounded another corner, squeezed past a gurney on which an unconscious old woman lay covered to the neck by a stained white sheet, and came to a halt by the entrance to a dim open ward that looked like a homeless shelter for the aged. Rows of beds no more than three feet apart stood in ranks along each wall. Dirty windows at the far end admitted a tired substance more like fog than light.

In a robot voice, the nurse said, "Bed twenty-three." She dismissed me with her eyes and about-faced to disappear back around the corner.

The old men in the beds were as identical as clones, so institutionalized as to be without any individuality—white hair on white pillows, wrinkled, sagging faces, dull eyes and open mouths. Then the details of an arched, beaky nose, a crusty bald head, a protruding tongue, began to emerge. The mumbles of the few old men not asleep or permanently stupefied sounded like mistakes. I saw the numeral 16 on the bed in front of me and moved down the row to 23.

Flyaway white hair surrounded a shrunken face and a working mouth. I would have walked right past him if I hadn't looked first at the number. Alan's thrusting eyebrows had flourished at the expense of the rest of his body. I supposed he had always possessed those branchy, tangled eyebrows, but everything else about him had kept me from noticing them. Even his extraordinary voice had shrunk, and whatever he was saying vanished into a barely audible whisper. "Alan," I said, "this is Tim. Can you hear me?"

His mouth went slack, and for a second I saw something like awareness in his eyes. Then his lips began moving again. I bent down to hear what he was saying.

"… standing on the corner and my brother had a toothpick in his mouth because he thought it made him look tough. All it did was make him look like a fool, and I told him so. I said, you know why those fools hang around in front of Armistead's with toothpicks in their mouths? So people will think they just ate a big dinner there. I guess everybody can recognize a fool except one of its own kind. And my aunt came out and said, You're making your brother cry, when are you ever going to learn to control that mouth of yours?"

I straightened up and rested my left hand on his shoulder. "Alan, talk to me. It's Tim Underhill. I want to say good-bye to you."

He turned his head very slightly in my direction. "Do you remember me?" I asked.

Recognition flared in his eyes. "You old son of a gun. Aren't you dead? I shot the hell out of you."

I knelt beside him, the sheer weight of my relief pushing me close to tears. "Alan, you only hit me in the shoulder."

"He's dead." Alan's voice recovered a tiny portion of its original strength. Absolute triumph widened his eyes. "I got him."

"You can't stay in this dump," I said. "We have to get you out of here."

"Listen, kiddo." A smile stretched the loose mouth, and the shrunken face and enormous eyebrows summoned me nearer. "All I have to do is get out of this bed. There's a place I once showed my brother, over by the river. If I can watch my big motormouth, uh…" He blinked. Fluid wobbled in the red wells of his eyelids. "Curse of my life. Talk first, think later." Alan closed his eyes and sank into the pillow.

I said, "Alan?" Tears leaked from his closed eyelids and slipped into the gauze of his whiskers. After a second, I realized that he had fallen asleep.

When I let myself back into the car, Mangelotti glowered at me. "I guess you don't have a watch."

I said, "If you bitch one more time, I'll ram your teeth down your throat with this cast."