The Devil in Silver

Loochie shook her head and thrust the card back at him. “I’m not …” she began, but couldn’t finish. She raised her free hand, balled into a fist, and hit him in the chest, but there wasn’t any power in it. She hit him again.

“Come on now,” Pepper said.

She looked up at him. “I’m scared to go alone.”

Pepper went down on one knee. He looped his fingers so she could put one foot in them. “You put that card and that article in your pocket,” he said clearly and loudly. She was so stunned that, probably for the first time since grade school, she just did what an adult told her to do.

“Now give me your foot.”

Loochie did that, too. And next thing, she was climbing into the air duct. Scrambling really. She had enough space that, if she curled herself tight, she could turn herself around. She did that, and looked down at Pepper.

Being inside the air duct, hearing the tinny echo of her movements, caused a panic to rise in Loochie. It felt like bile climbing up her throat. She shook. She almost felt angry. “Why are you doing this!” she shouted. She didn’t concern herself with whether or not the staff on the first floor might hear her. “Just come on. We can both make it. Why won’t you leave?!”

Far behind them there was a second howl. Even louder and, somehow, wetter. Like someone was screaming underwater. Pepper looked over his shoulder, then back to Loochie.

“I gotta go help,” he said.

Loochie looked past Pepper, down the long hallway.

“You let me know that you got there,” Pepper said. He waved one hand in front of her face to get her attention back. “That’s how you repay me.”

Loochie couldn’t speak. She only nodded.

Pepper saw that, with the wig on, Loochie really looked like a new version of herself. If she walked right past him in another context, he doubted he’d even recognize her. In a way, Loochie’s mother had supplied her daughter with a great disguise.

“Turn around now,” he said.

Loochie focused on his face. Her eyes became less cloudy, her lips firm. “Don’t tell me what to do,” she whispered.

Pepper grinned. “That’s the Loochie I know.”

She slowly turned herself around in the air duct again. She crept forward on her belly.

Pepper watched her go. It took less than a minute before he couldn’t see her in there. He listened to the squeak of her sneakers as she inched ahead. Finally Pepper turned away.

He retraced his steps.

He went back in.

40

PEPPER AND LOOCHIE had been right earlier, that the second floor of the unit was surprisingly critter-free. No water bugs. No gnats. No rats. (Plural.)

There was one rat in the entire two-story. Pepper had seen it come tumbling from the ceiling in Glenn’s room. A single common rat roamed. His name was LeClair.

LeClair the Rat.

And he was old.

That point is less about his age than his inflexibility. LeClair had been at Northwest his entire life, four years. Now that might not sound so amazing, but the average rat life span is two to three years. So roughly speaking, LeClair had lived the equivalent of 120 human years.

He hadn’t seen another rat, though, in over a year. (That’s thirty human years.) Long ago, they’d bred on the second floor like, yes, rats. The females, called does, matured like rats everywhere do, reaching puberty at only six to eight weeks old. They went into heat every four to five days, for about twenty-four hours at a time. The average litter size was twelve. So you want to talk about a population explosion? If you’re talking about rats, it’s not even an explosion, it’s an expectation.

And yet the back spaces of Northwest were barren. Why? There were three reasons: 1) New Hyde Hospital didn’t make a habit of spending its money, as staff salaries and the profoundly wack-ass computer at the nurses’ station should attest; but there was one expenditure that did enjoy New Hyde’s enthusiastic financial support. Besides administrative salaries, which were astronomical at the very top, New Hyde paid for pest control. Nothing shuts down a hospital faster than vermin, so New Hyde paid for exterminators without hesitation. Practically had the trucks on standby. Northwest’s second floor got bombarded with nerve toxin–type poisons at least twice a year. (Don’t mention that to the patients on the first floor.) That’s reason number one for why the second floor was so lifeless.