7.

7.

Trent has a caring heart, because after he spends half an hour ugly-crying on a park bench while listening to David Bowie on his phone, he heads to the hospital to visit his dear, injured uncle.

We’ve been deprived of good music. The ringing of a cash register as a harried restaurant owner slapped out a couple hundred dollars, the begging of a bodega staffer for a little more time to pay up—that was the only music for dear Bill, who always liked to play sports radio while making his rounds. If Trent spins classics cut two decades before he was born, we consider that a big step up.

Still humming “Heroes” under his breath, Trent uses his last ten dollars to buy flowers from a kiosk in the hospital lobby.

Soon enough Bill is out of surgery and bedded in the ICU, in a bright and featureless room with no art on the walls, the window-shade pulled down, the television blaring from its perch on the wall. He lies in the depths of a medically induced coma, wrapped in a cocoon of tubes and wiring, as the bedside machines beep and thump. In the hospital’s antiseptic lighting he looks absolutely terrible, purple and pocked and hairy, and we suppose it’s a wonder he’s survived all the trauma of the day. We wonder if the bits of us in his gut are still alive, if anything managed to endure the scalpels and drugs and radiation and horrific tests. The absence of humans in biohazard suits suggests we’ve been overlooked in the rush to save Bill’s life.

Trent hands the flowers to a nurse, who hustles away for a vase, and plops into the seat beside the bed. The television hisses that a cop has been killed. We want Trent to turn toward the screen, so we can catch the visuals, but he keeps his gaze locked on Bill.

While we wait, we send a few tendrils deeper into Trent’s meat, exploring our real estate. It’s all prime, the nerve bundles humming with enough electricity to power a city. We plug into one near the base of his skull, and the energy lights up our cells. From this new position, we can hear Trent thinking, although it’s like hearing someone in the next room, a dull murmur, with no words we can discern. Through a tendril, we try to send a signal into his cortex, a subtle command to move his left foot.

No movement.

Well, Rome wasn’t built in a day.

As we weave our way deeper, we mull over the body of Frank’s mother in the Cadillac trunk. Frank shooting her over a big drug deal is a detail the cops will want to keep hidden. Or maybe they’ll try to pin the whole thing on Trent. Crazy teen goes on murderous rampage, that’s a hip story these days.

Trent needs to leave this hospital room as fast as possible, because sooner or later the cops will appear, but we can’t move his toe, much less speak to him. Before we can formulate a solution, the door opens, and in walks a man in an off-the-rack brown suit, a gold shield clipped to his belt. His gray hair suggests middle age, but he is a square block of muscle, like he spends all his free time deadlifting cattle. He looks at Trent and says: “Mister Montague?”

“Yes?” Trent’s heart thunders, sweat drenching his armpits.

“You’re Bill’s nephew?” The man nods toward the lump of bruised flesh on the bed.

“Yes?”

“Great.” The man tries to smile, to extend warmth, but the gesture resembles a shark opening its mouth to bite. “No big deal, but you fled the scene of a crime, son. Did the officers say you could leave?”

Trent’s pulse edges into heart-attack territory. “No? I mean, yes? Not really? Um . . . ”

“Son.” The man raises a hand. “It’s okay, whatever happened. I’m here now. We can talk.”

“Who . . . who are you?”

“I’m Detective Russell Mott. My partner, who’ll be along in a minute, is Detective Melinda Banks. We just want to ask you a few questions about what happened out there. As you may know, we lost one of our own.”

We don’t need to penetrate Trent’s thoughts to know he’s envisioning Officers Tweedledum and Tweedledee warning him to keep his mouth shut unless he wants to end up in a ditch with most of his head missing. Trent seems like a smart lad but if he babbles the wrong thing, this situation could turn too messy for our liking. We inch a tendril into the base of his skull (Trent wincing, his hand rising toward his neck), wrap it around the correct gland, and give it a squeeze. A faint trickle of bliss-inducing dopamine hits Trent’s bloodstream.

Trent’s heart slows, and he takes deeper breaths. “I’m very sorry to hear that,” he says. “I didn’t see much. My uncle was having some kind of fight in a car? The officer was pointing a gun at him?”

Detective Mott leans against the wall beneath the television, his arms folded over his epic chest. “That ‘officer’ was Detective Frank Smith,” he says. “He worked Homicide, and he was damn good at his job. Have you considered that maybe he was attempting to arrest your uncle?”

“Bill never killed anyone.”

“Or maybe your uncle was an informant? An uncooperative one?”

“My uncle never mentioned anything like that. I don’t know what to tell you.”

From his inner jacket pocket, Detective Mott retrieves his phone. As he does, we catch a glimpse of his shoulder holster and its big black pistol. Tapping an app to life, he places the phone on the small table to Trent’s right. “You mind if I record this?”

“Uh, yeah.” Trent swallows. “Shouldn’t I get a lawyer or something?”

“Why, you guilty of something? You not telling me the truth here?” Mott steps closer. “If you want a lawyer, that’s your choice. I can formally arrest you, take you down to the station, shove you in a windowless room, and we can have ourselves a good, old-fashioned interrogation. You want that?”

“Um, no?”

“I didn’t think so. You’re not a suspect in anything.” That shark-smile again. “This is just a friendly chat, because we need to know what happened to Frank. Got that?”

“Okay.”

“Go.”

“Like I said, they were fighting in the car, and then the officer—sorry, detective—was pointing a gun at him. Then they crashed their car into my car, and the detective came through the windshield?”

We might be a parasite, but we’ve watched enough cop shows through Bill’s eyes to know that Trent’s statement will never hold up to deeper examination. And that’s before we consider the body in the trunk. When is Mott going to bring that up?

“Have you ever met Detective Smith before?” Mott asks.

Trent shakes his head.

“You sure? Your uncle never threw a party at his house, Frank happened to come around?”

“My uncle didn’t really throw . . . parties.”

We could take issue with that assertion: Bill often threw parties for himself, consuming enough pills and whiskey to put a fraternity house in a collective coma (“Why share?” he sometimes muttered to the ceiling. “Ungrateful assholes.”). Try not to blame him: after what we’ve seen in the basements of some restaurants in this fair city, we’d drink to forget, too. And let’s not forget his dead wife.    

Trying too hard to act casual, Mott says: “He ever mention Frank’s mother?”

“Um, no? I saw my uncle get pushed into the car by some guy. I followed him in case I could help. I got too close, and they crashed into me. That’s everything.”

“You didn’t think to dial 911?”

Trent shakes his head. “I did. It said all operators busy.”

“That’s city infrastructure for you. Before this car chase, what were you doing?”

“I was just hanging out with my uncle, and he said we had to stop by a bar. I thought it was kind of weird, because we were having family time? Then he comes out of the bar with the detective, and, um, yeah, all that bad stuff started.”

It’s a sweet sentiment, Trent referring to a morning of grifting with Bill as “family time.” We squeeze more dopamine into Trent’s blood, enough to keep him happy but not too happy, and he smiles.

The door opens again, and a short woman with a buzzed-blonde scalp steps through, unsmiling. She wears jeans and a button-down blue shirt, her belt loaded down with pistol and extra clips and gold shield. “Sorry I’m late,” she says, shutting the door behind her. “Had trouble parking the beast.”

They exchange a look. Private joke, or a signal of some kind? Impossible to tell. The woman strides forward and crushes Trent’s hand in a powerful grip: “Detective Banks.”

“Trent,” he squeaks.

“Nice pearl necklace you got there, kid.” After a final mushing of the knuckles, Banks releases his hand and takes a small step back. “Do you know what your uncle did for a living?”

Trent straightens his jewelry. “He was a health inspector.”

“That’s right. You spent a lot of time with him, I take it?”

“Not as much as I’d have liked. My uncle Bill is a good man. Sometimes he might not know it, but he really is.”

Mott sighs. “You’re so young, aren’t you?”

“Seventeen. Almost.”  

Banks checks her watch. “It’s not close to three o’ clock yet. Or is it a school holiday today? I can never remember.”

Mott shrugs. “Actually, it’s a holiday.”

“You shitting me?” Banks cocks an eyebrow at him.

“It’s the Great Holiday of Saint Numbnuts.” Mott manages to keep a straight face.

Ignoring her partner’s attempt at humor, Banks jabs a finger into Trent’s shoulder. “After this, you’re going back to school. Understand?”

“Absolutely, sure, okay.” We don’t need to read Trent’s thoughts to know he’ll say anything to escape these two.

“Now that my partner’s done with being a comedian, I have another question,” Banks says. “Your uncle ever mention anything about taking gifts? Food, cash, anything like that?”

Trent shakes his head. “No.”

“Are you absolutely sure?”

“Why would he tell me anything?”

“Because you’re blood,” Detective Mott says. “He ever give you presents? Maybe a little spending money?”

“No.”

Mott turns to Banks. “He says he didn’t know anything about what happened to Frank. Saw them fighting, then there was an accident, Frank went through the windshield.”

Banks smirks. “You believe him?”

“Maybe.” Mott winks at Trent, like they share a secret.

“Well, we’ll have more questions.” Banks fishes a card from her pocket, hands it to Trent. “Don’t go far.”

“You’re done?” Trent asks.

“For now.” Mott regards comatose Bill. “We came because we hoped he’d be awake.”

“He took a lot of damage.” Trent wipes an eye. “They don’t know when he might wake up. He wasn’t . . . in the best of shape before.”

Does Trent know if they’ve discovered Bill’s tumor? That’s the key thing here, we want to yell. Fixing the bullet holes and broken bones and vessels won’t matter if nobody notes the ogre that’s taken up residence inside Bill’s skull.

“Yeah, real sob tale.” Banks heads for the door. “Let’s get out of here, I’m hungry.”

After the detectives leave, Trent spends another few minutes in the chair, his pulse slowing to normal. He reaches over and squeezes Bill’s cold hand. “You’re going to make it,” he tells his comatose uncle. “I believe in you, even if nobody else does.”

It might be a trick of the harsh lighting, or the relentless flickering of the screens beyond Bill’s bed, but Bill’s left eyelid seems to slide open a fraction. Trent gasps and leans in, only to find Bill’s eyes firmly closed. Was it a hallucination? We have no idea. For a moment, it really did appear that Bill was watching us. And judging.