“Rude. Okay, fine—let me wash up.” She remembers, scrounges in another pocket. “Oh, and here, I brought you a clean shirt and some Vicodin.”
“Thank you,” he says fervently, and he puts the shirt aside, swallows two pills with a slug from a bottle of Mountain Dew.
He uses the numbing cream again, this time on himself, and sends her out to the drugstore on Jane between Eighth Avenue and Hudson to look for some larger dressings. But she suspects it’s to get her out of the way while he starts the stitching, and sure enough, by the time she returns, he’s already completed six of the stitches he’ll need.
Nomi walks into the bathroom again just as he’s drawing the needle through for the next one, the top edge of skin stretched and gaping red. She turns her face away, cheeks hot like she’s walked in while he’s getting dressed. “Jesus, Simon.”
“You’re right about this numbing cream. It’s not really adequate.” Sweat is beaded on his forehead. “Talk to me? Distract me.”
Nomi draws over a plastic chair that someone stacked in the corner of the bathroom, takes a seat. “Okay, so Balter and the guys from Tenth think Lamonte and his men were attacked by a rival mob group. The Westies and the Gambino family both operate in Chelsea and Hell’s Kitchen, and there’s been a lot of shifting alliances. People get killed—it happens.”
“Wow.” He ties off a stitch.
“Yeah.” Her voice echoes strangely in here, with all the tile. She examines her own face in the bathroom mirror, winces at the streak of gunpowder on her cheek: It looks like bad club makeup. “Gaffney said, with the amount of damage inflicted on the four bodies, it was probablythe work of a few guys. I mean, speaking personally, I heard a couple different voices when I was locked in the storage room with Brittany, but it was hard to clearly identify anyone ...”
“Uh-huh.” Simon rinses blood off his fingers in a bowl of boiled water, goes back to work. “Did Brittany get home to her mother?”
“Yeah,” Nomi says softly. “That was really good.”
“So it was worth it.”
He looks like he’s in a considerable amount of pain, although his pupils are shrinking, which means the Vicodin’s kicking in. Nomi wonders how it works, with head-injury amnesia. Does Simon’s persona from the last five years just float away or go to sleep when his serial-killer side comes out? Is it a Jekyll-and-Hyde thing? Is there a trick she can employ to call him back, like ringing a bell at the end of a hypnosis session?
Or maybe it’s nothing like that. Maybe they’re a gestalt now, the two halves of him finally joined up: the sociopath in him becoming ascendant whenever it’s needed, fading when the crisis is over.
But aren’t we all like that? She isn’t a stubborn-assed bitch all the time, is she? Geez, maybe she is. Whoops.
However Simon’s psychology works, it served its purpose: Brittany needed rescuing, Simon rescued her. He even lied through his teeth to Nomi to make it happen. She’s not thrilled about that part, but she can appreciate why he did it. And once again, she realizes that she’s decided: She’s not going to turn him in. She’s not going to say anything. She can’t dredge up any guilt over the murders of a bunch of mafia creeps—not after what she’s lived through today—and she knows from her own experience that sometimes there’s a chasm between justice and the law. So if Simon is going to restrict his murderous urges to the creeps of the world, then ...
Then maybe she’s just messed up enough to be okay with that.
She watches Simon snip the ends of another stitch: one more to go. “Brittany remembers you. She remembers what you did—some of what you did. But while we were in the storage room together, before Balterand his guys arrived, I told her it would be best for you if we didn’t mention anything about you to anyone. She’s her mother’s daughter, she gets it.”
“I mean, she’s just a kid. I guess we’ll see if she’s able to stay quiet.” He glances over. “One of these days, I’ll be caught on the radar, though.”
“And that will be a problem, one of these days,” Nomi says. “But not today.”
His hands have a fine tremor as he ties off the final stitch, and he blows out air once it’s all done. Nomi helps him to get clean and to apply Neosporin and dressings to the stitched cut, plus his torture injuries and the slash on his left inner forearm. She does, after all, have some personal experience with wound treatment.
Getting Simon’s arms through the sleeves of his black button-up is complicated, but then he can fasten the front himself. When he slides off the countertop, he sways; Nomi steadies him at his waist, as he puts a warm hand on her shoulder. He seems vaguely surprised that she’s comfortable enough to get this close.
“Are you still scared of me?” He drops his hand, leans on the edge of the countertop, giving her space. His blue eyes are slightly glassy, slightly wary. “You’ve seen what I am now. You didn’t lie to Lamonte—I’m a killer. It’s in my blood somehow.”
“But when I told you to stop, you did,” Nomi points out. “I don’t think you have a split personality, Simon. There’s no ‘other you’—you’re just you. And you chose to stop.”
“I only stopped when Lamonte was dead.”
“Listen, I wasgladyou killed Lamonte.” She feels strangely compelled to shake him out of any lingering funk. “D’you really believe Lamonte, or any of those guys, would’ve given us a single thought after they killed us? No. And instead, we killed them. We do the things we need to do to survive. I mean, you know what I do. What I am. Does that revolt you?”
“No.” His gaze is scanning over her face. “We’re both ... creatures of appetite.”
“That’s right. And I set rules for my appetite. I exercise control over it. I’ve learned to deal with it. If I can live with myself, so can you.”
His expression goes soft. “Concentrate on being the man I want to become, huh?”
“Yes.” Nomi moves to lean beside him, takes a swig of his soda. “And, I don’t know ... Keep busy. Work with me.”
“What?”
