The Devil in Silver

Kofi had stopped calling for Dorry to give him the nurse’s keys. He wasn’t actually thinking at all in this moment. He was so confused. He’d been sure he had the solution to their collective dilemma, but with each second he felt stupider for having made that phone call. For having faith that someone else would fix everything. How silly he’d been. How naïve. How crazy. A new desperation filled him now. It made Kofi feel powerful in an ugly way. A fierceness fueled by disappointment. Which is why Kofi stopped asking Dorry for the keys to the locked drawers of the nurses’ station. He didn’t need them. In his desperation Kofi found access to that Crazy Strength. He tore each of those locked fucking drawers right out of the desk.

He dumped the contents of each drawer onto the ground as Pepper and Loochie wrestled the Devil. Finally he found the right drawer. Where the staff stored the syringes used on unruly patients. Kofi grabbed the largest ones he could find: 18-gauge Seldinger needles. Coffee tore two of them from their plastic wrapping and moved out of the nurses’ station. It looked like he held a tiny fencing saber in each hand.

He reached Dorry at the lip of Northwest 4. The old woman remained impassive. Mumbling to herself. She’d dropped the keys and they’d landed on her right foot. The keys looked like a small brass spider, about to crawl up her leg. She still clutched the clipboard, but it wouldn’t serve as much of a shield.

“Now what?!” Pepper shouted. “Now what?!”

Kofi raised his hands. Pepper saw the syringes and smiled.

Then there was a new sound, someone rattling the big door on Northwest 1.

“Police!” a man shouted. “We are entering the premises!”

“Hurry, Coffee!” Loochie grunted, straining to hold the Devil’s head up.

Kofi moved past Dorry. Down the hall. “I’m going to stab out its eyes.”

“Do it fast!” Pepper begged from the floor.

The police slammed at the front door, using a two-man Stinger battering ram. The sound like a series of small explosions.

“Hurry now,” Loochie muttered. The blood from her wounded hand had soaked her shirtsleeve and half her back.

And the Devil?

It stopped bucking. It almost seemed to wilt. Its legs went limp and the head stopped twisting. The Devil actually whimpered. A quiet little bleat, like a sheep. Not even a sheep. Like a lamb.

Kofi spoke to himself as he approached it. “I came all this way. I came all this way.” He looked at the Devil. “I can go a little farther.”

The front door of the unit thumped even louder now. The strain on the lock could be heard. It creaked, almost in tune with the Devil’s bleating. Both about to break.

Finally Dorry came out of her slumber. Just as the secure door flew open. She heard the cops—a tactical squad—clomping down Northwest 1. They’d be on the group soon. Dorry looked around, still slightly dazed. What to do? What to do? Dorry had the clipboard. No other weapon in hand.

“Hold them off!” Pepper shouted to her.

“Just another minute!” Loochie said.

The Devil kept bleating, a kind of pleading. Dorry lifted the clipboard over her head. Her best chance of delaying the cops was probably to cause pure confusion. No one was going to shoot an old woman, right?

She saw the black uniforms of the tactical force. They were carrying guns, though she could hardly discern them. They were just figures—phantoms—filling the oval room. The Devil’s cries rose behind her, even louder, desperate. Dorry ran. Waving the clipboard. But she wasn’t racing toward the cops.

She moved down Northwest 4. A dozen steps. Until she was behind Kofi. Then she slammed the clipboard against the back of Kofi’s head.

Dorry hit him once. Twice.

Loochie shrieked.

And Kofi turned toward his attacker. Such confusion on his smooth round face. He held the syringes up but no longer seemed sure of how to use them. Or who to use them on.

“I can’t let you kill him!” Dorry shouted. “I can’t!”

Kofi opened his mouth to ask the question—Why?—but she bashed him with the clipboard for a third time.

“He’s mine!” Dorry moaned, desperate and inconsolable.

The Devil bleated again, a babe calling out for protection.

“He’s my son.”

By then the tactical force had reached Northwest 4.

And what did they find? Kofi waving two large gauge syringes at Dorry.

An old white woman fighting off an armed black attacker? That’s not a difficult equation to solve. You can do it at home, without a calculator.

Kofi saw it happening. Time moved more slowly for him than for all the rest.

One of the officers ran forward and tackled the old woman out of the way. The rest fired on the crazed man. Him.

Kofi thought, Why have you forsaken me?

Then the cops fired forty-one shots.

The assailant was hit nineteen times.

Kofi Acholi died of his wounds later that night.

22

WELL, FUCK.

The black guy did die first after all.

(Excluding Sam and, possibly, Sammy, yes. Amiable white folks that they were.)