Hump rolled around, tossing the moth-eaten sheet off him, raising the nine-millimeter toward Byrnes.
“What the fuck, Milo, you piece of—”
But he couldn’t finish the sentence because Byrnes had come armed, too, and plunged a serrated kitchen knife into Hump’s belly. Hump reached out with his left hand, grabbing onto Byrnes’s sweat-soaked T-shirt that hung off the tweaker like a tent. He pulled Byrnes close to him, put the muzzle of the gun into the flat of the bony man’s abdomen, and fired. He fired again. Again. The third bullet went right through the bag of bones and skin and into the wall of the closet-sized bedroom. Some of the noise was swallowed up by Byrnes’s now-lifeless body. Hump tossed the almost weightless dead man aside like an old foam pillow.
Ears ringing, light-headed, he stood. When he did, he collapsed back onto the bed. He noticed his shirt was slowly turning red, soaking with blood, and that the kitchen knife was still stuck in his belly. He laughed at his situation, wincing in pain as he did. The knife was going to have to come out, and when it did, it was going to hurt like a bastard. That wasn’t the worst of it. He knew that when he pulled it out, the serrated edge would do more damage and the bleeding would get much worse.
Hump forced himself to get up again, tossing the gun down on the bed. He found his way into the filthy bathroom, going through the cabinets for anything that might work as an antiseptic, for gauze or cotton, anything he could use to stanch the wound, and tape to hold the makeshift bandage to the wound. What he found in the bathroom was some cotton wadding and toilet paper. Nothing else. In Byrnes’s room, he found a syringe Milo had readied for himself and a pint bottle of cheap vodka with a few swallows left inside.
Hump took a swig of vodka, tied off his left biceps with the piece of rubber tubing Milo had meant to use for himself, poured a stream of vodka onto the syringe, and then stuck the needle into a bulging vein at the bend of his left arm. The jolt was immediate, intense. Hump’s whole body clenched, his eyes widened, the noise on the street below turned into the buzzing of a million mosquito wings. In a single motion he tore his shirt off as if it were made of tissue paper. Strangely, what had frightened him so only a few seconds before — the thought of yanking the knife out of his gut — now seemed like something he couldn’t wait to try. Without hesitating, he grabbed the knife’s handle, took a few deep breaths, and pulled.
He collapsed to his knees, the weirdest thought going through his head. Is this what getting hit by lightning feels like? Lightning always frightened him. As bad as the pain was, it almost felt like it was happening to someone else. When he managed to get to his feet, Hump realized he was still holding the knife. He laughed at it, dropped it. He noticed the blood now pouring out of him and onto his pants. He poured the remainder of the vodka onto the wound, lightning striking a second time. Then he wadded up the cotton and shoved it into the mouth of the wound. He covered the cotton with sheets of toilet paper and pressed his hand hard against it. He found Milo’s meth stash and pocketed it.
Hump went back into his room, rigged strapping out of some torn shirts, changed the bandage, and used the strapping to hold the new bandage to the wound. He got into different jeans, threw on a shirt and, in spite of the heat, a sweatshirt over that. He wiped off the bloody gun on the bedsheet, tucked it at the small of his back, and grabbed the Baggie of meth out of his old jeans. He thought about taking his duffel bag with him but decided not to try it. He had to travel light and move fast. Instead he collected the pair of socks in which he’d hidden the dragonfly ring. He had no choice now. He had to get to Dennis’s Place and find Mickey Coyle.
73
Jesse didn’t make a habit of driving over to the county morgue unless it was business. When he and Tamara were building their friendship, he avoided seeing her at work. He had spent too many hours at morgues and hospitals, spent too many hours with the dead and the dying. It was different at the murder scene. The bodies there were somehow less human when they were part of the crime scene, but when they were laid out naked on stainless-steel tables or slid out of a refrigerator, you could really get a sense of the violence and of what had been taken from them.
“Spend too much time with the dead, Stone, and you get dead inside,” his first detective partner said to him as they watched the autopsy of a fifteen-year-old girl. “Never become so familiar with it that you don’t see it.”
Those days in L.A. now seemed like they happened a long time ago and to someone else. Jesse hadn’t understood what his partner meant back then. He understood it now.
He’d sat outside in the parking lot for an hour going through Flint’s old accordion file. Jesse couldn’t find anything the Yarmouth PD had done that he wouldn’t have done or something they should have done that they didn’t do. What was pretty clear through all of it was that no one, from Stan White to the guy who owned the recording studio, was very anxious to discuss the recording sessions or who had participated.
Given the status of the musicians Roscoe Niles had listed for him, the ones rumored to have been part of the recording of The Hangman’s Sonnet, it was unlikely any of them would have taken the tape. But they certainly would have been people Jesse would have interviewed. It wasn’t as if the Yarmouth PD hadn’t tried. It was impossible to know what someone might have seen or overheard. One of the musicians might have knowledge about the theft that they weren’t even aware of. Yet White refused to release the names of the musicians involved, saying that they had only participated in the recording of the album under the promise of strict confidentiality and that he would never break his word to them. In Flint’s interview notes, there was a quote from White:
“Look, if it was up to me, I would cooperate with you and give you the names. But if I give you even one of their names, I can have the crap sued out of me and Terry. These musicians, they may all seem like drug-addled hippies to you, but believe me, they are anything but. They are sharks, and sharks with managers, lawyers, and agents. Besides, all the musicians were gone before the tape went missing.”
In the file was a blank copy of the confidentiality agreement. Jesse was no lawyer, but the agreement did seem ironclad. There were also many, many photographs in the file. Photos of the studio, of the box in which the tape had been stored, of Evan Updike and Stan White, of Terry Jester. Jesse had seen Jester’s face before, but the shots of Jester on his album covers were vastly different from the shots in the file. On his album covers, Jester usually wore a knowing smirk as if he was winking at the person looking at the album cover. You and me, we know the truth. The photos in the file depicted a man buried deep within his own head or of someone losing it, if not lost. Now what Stan White had confided to him earlier about Jester’s state of mind made more sense.
Jesse’s cell started buzzing like mad, but he didn’t answer the calls. They were from Nita, from the mayor, from Stan White, from Bella. He looked at his watch. Roscoe Niles had been on the air for an hour. Jesse wondered how many times he had read The Hangman’s Sonnet on the air by now. He turned on the radio, and with a Terry Jester song playing in the background, Roscoe was reading the poem. And by the time tomorrow morning’s Globe hit the streets, the story would explode. Jesse hoped his career wouldn’t explode with it. He shut off the radio and got out of the Explorer.
Tamara tried to hide her smile when he walked into her office. It was futile. She lit up, but her expression quickly turned to sadness.