The Devil in Silver

SATURDAY MORNING, PEPPER woke up to find himself alone in the room and its door halfway open. Since his bed sat right beside the hidden door in the wall, he’d taken to touching it at the bulge where the handle used to be. In the last two days, he’d probably rubbed the spot two dozen times. The motion had become reassuring, soothing, as he tried to decide what he’d do tonight. Pepper touched it now but, in a flash, saw this behavior as if watching himself from across the room. He thought of Coffee at the phones, dialing and dialing. Or Loochie, pulling out her own hair on so many nights. Obsessive ticks. Maybe he was developing one, too. Pepper pulled his hand away. He jumped out of bed. He needed to do something else, to focus on anything else.

Pepper closed the door. He went across the room to Coffee’s dresser, and slid it away from the wall. He wanted to see if there was a door outlined under the paint here, too. But when Pepper moved the dresser, he found all these small black droppings on the floor. Rat turds. Wonderful.

Pepper rested one arm on Coffee’s dresser, which made the flimsy thing slide toward Coffee’s bed. When it connected, he heard a rattling sound. Pepper stooped and pulled open the bottom drawer and found pills. Handfuls of them. He’d seen Coffee dump some of his meds down the bathroom sink for the past few days, but who knew how many were assigned to the man each day? Pepper had been kept on a steady diet of two pills, three times a day, so he’d assumed that was about normal. In fact, there were patients on the unit who took six, seven, nine pills per meal. Imagine that. Twenty-seven doses a day. Coffee was one of those. This drawer full of pills represented just five days of abstaining.

The sight made Pepper downright nostalgic for the days of Coffee pestering him for coins. It was a wonder Coffee had been able to do that much with this many pharmaceuticals in his blood. Nickels, dimes, and quarters. For a moment Pepper was reminded of the simple—stupid!—pleasure he used to take in gathering up his coins and going to a Coinstar machine at the Key Food near his apartment. Feeding the change into that swiss-cheese grill and listening to it all rattle as the machine counted up the currency. Sometimes he’d even forget to take the slip to the register and redeem it for cash right away. The joy had been in finding out how much he’d collected. That’s the kind of thing that being inside the unit made a person miss.

As Pepper slid the drawer shut again, he wondered if, and when, the police would ever return for him. When they’d bring him before a judge. When he’d receive sentencing. Or was this the sentence? Not what they’d intended when they picked him up but just as good. He wondered where he might be in the NYPD’s system. How long after the paperwork was filed before Huey, Dewey, and Louie would return for him? In books, movies, television, the justice system worked with a ruthless efficiency. Arrest, arraignment, trial, and verdict, all in forty-six minutes and forty-eight seconds.

Not here.

Since the conversation under the maple tree, Pepper had been evading the other members of his revolutionary cell. When Coffee went out to “take” his meds and get breakfast, Pepper pretended to still be sleeping. Yesterday, he didn’t eat one meal with Coffee or Dorry or Loochie. If they’d noticed, they didn’t stress him about it. All that mattered, for their purposes, was what he’d do tonight. But he still didn’t know.

Before leaving the room, Pepper went to his dresser and took out his street clothes. The slacks and socks had dried. They were a little stale, but they didn’t stink. They now showed large orange splotches where the dirty water had soaked through and stained. On the right butt cheek of his slacks, and in spots down both legs. The heels of both socks, too. And yet Pepper put them on. His shirt had been ruined so he still had to wear the pajama top.

With those spotted clothes on he almost looked like a man wearing desert camouflage pants. He even put on his boots again.

Pepper walked to the nurses’ station after all the other patients had been there and gone. Miss Chris and Josephine had been on duty together, but only Miss Chris stood waiting for him now. Josephine sat in front of the computer again. The screen glowed slightly green, and she stared at it with an expression beyond confusion, beyond frustration. Josephine almost looked serene as she watched the screen. Her arms were crossed, as if waiting for the computer to address her. As if it might offer an ingot of wisdom if she sat there long enough.

Miss Chris, on the other hand, waggled the clipboard at Pepper when he entered the oval room. “This the one I waiting on.” She took one look at his stained, spotty slacks but said nothing. At least he wasn’t walking around without them.

Pepper reached the nurses’ station and stretched out his right hand for his pills.

“Eh-heh, just like that? You come late-late and don’t even apologize?”