A Man Named Doll by Jonathan Ames (popular books to read TXT) 📗

closed my eyes and he went to the bathroom. He came back with a cold compress and dabbed it against my brow.

I looked at him and said: “How’s Monica?”

“Jesus. Don’t start that again.”

“I want to start it again. What does Madvig have planned for her?”

He looked at me and smiled. “Okay. You want to drive yourself crazy, I’m gonna tell you. Next week we’re gonna need half her liver. The good news is it will grow back if we need more.”

I closed my eyes again. Then I said, looking at him: “It’s not too late. You could let her go. You got me. Just keep cutting me up.”

“She’s a different blood type, asshole. B positive. We need her.” Then he put the ball gag back in my mouth to shut me up and played with my IV. “Since I’m a nice guy,” he said, “I got you morphine. Make you feel good.”

A few hours later, he woke me up and got the catheter out, which felt like a razor was being drawn across the inside of my penis, even with the morphine in my system. Then he had me urinate in the toilet and I was weak as hell, and he said, “You got good waterworks.”

Then he strapped me back into the bed and turned my brain off with the morphine, knocking me out, and I was glad to go away.

The next time I woke up it was night and the door was open and a shaft of light was coming in from the hallway, and Sarah was standing over me in the half darkness and her hands were on my shoulders, shaking me, and I said, “I’m so glad you came back.”

And she said: “Can you sit up?” Her voice was a panicked whisper and I realized that there was blood all over her face.

“What happened to you?” I said, concerned.

And she said, whispering fiercely: “Happy, wake up! Wake up!”

And then she turned toward the door, afraid, thinking she heard something, and some light caught her profile and I saw a scar, and I realized it wasn’t Sarah. It was Monica!

“Monica,” I said, and I wasn’t dreaming. Not at all. Monica was in a paper gown just like mine except her gown was covered in blood.

She turned back to me and said: “Can you get out of bed?”

I nodded yes, and she put her arm around my shoulders and helped me get to a sitting position. She had already undone my straps and I wasn’t connected to the IV.

“What’s happened?” I said, slowly coming more awake.

“We have to get out of here,” she said, her eyes wild. “I killed the son. I killed him. We have to go!”

She helped me stand and I was a little wobbly but I could move.

We made our way down the hall. “Faster, Happy,” she said, and I tried, and we were both in our bare feet, and we got to the living room and headed for the front door—light from the pool outside, with its underwater bulbs, made the room glow—and she said, “Come on, Happy, let’s go, let’s go,” and I was trying to move as fast as I could, but I was still half drugged, and then there was an explosion of sound, a gunshot, and the living-room window blew out, there were shards all around us, and Monica dove behind the couch, and I turned, frozen. I was standing next to the fireplace, and John was at the top of the stairs, naked.

He was holding his gun in his left hand and his right hand was on his neck and there was blood all over his torso, leaking from a gash just below his jawline.

“Don’t fucking move,” he said, and a cold ocean wind blew through the demolished window, waking me more, startling me, and I was next to the little stand that held the tools for the fireplace: a poker, a shovel, a small ash broom.

John came down to the bottom of the stairs, holding the gun on me, and said: “That fucking bitch.”

And I grabbed the poker and flung it at him.

I got lucky and it winged just right and struck him across the chest, scaring the hell out of him, and he dropped the gun, and we both went for it.

I moved quickly, adrenaline surging, but he got there first and as he leaned over for it, one hand still on his neck, I tackled him, and we both went down, and he didn’t have the gun, and then we were fighting for it, it was right in front of us, and his body was slick with blood, and the incision in my side ripped open, and then Monica was standing over us with the poker and she brought it down on his head three times, real fast, and he stopped moving and would never move again. She said: “He tried to rape me.”

Then she helped me up and I got the gun, his .22, and then we both heard something and turned and through the shattered window, we could see Ben.

He was wearing sweatpants and sneakers—the spotlight had been turned on—and he was running down the driveway from the front house, a double-barrel sawed-off shotgun in his hand, and Madvig was behind him, in a robe, trying to walk quickly, and he had a rifle. Even with the wind, they must have heard, across the lawn, the sound of the shot and the broken glass, and then Ben fired and the shotgun blast slammed into the house.

“We have to go out the back,” I screamed, and I fired once through the broken window, but the .22 was no good at that distance, and we ran for the French doors to the left of the surgical tent.

On the other side of the doors was a back patio with chairs and a table, and it was tucked at the bottom of a sloping hill. There was a spotlight on the patio, casting an arc about twenty yards up the slope,