فصل 07 - بخش 08

7

Jack Hoskins had considered asking for sick time for his sunburn, emphasizing that skin cancer ran in his family, and decided it was a bad idea. Terrible, in fact. Chief Geller would almost certainly tell him to get out of his office, and when word got around (Rodney Geller wasn’t the close-mouthed sort), Detective Hoskins would become a laughingstock in the department. In the unlikely event that the chief agreed, he would be expected to go to the doctor, and Jack wasn’t ready for that.

He had been called back in three days early, however, which wasn’t fair when his damn vacation had been on the roster board since May. Feeling this made it his right (his perfect right) to turn those three days into what Ralph Anderson would have called a stay-cation, he spent that Wednesday afternoon bar-hopping. By his third stop, he had managed to mostly forget about the spooky interlude out in Canning Township, and by the fourth, he had stopped worrying quite so much about the sunburn, and the peculiar fact that he seemed to have come by it at night.

His fifth stop was at Shorty’s Pub. There he asked the bartender – a very pretty lady whose name now slipped his mind, although not the entrancing length of her legs in tight Wrangler jeans – to look at the back of his neck and tell him what she saw. She obliged.

‘It’s a sunburn,’ she said.

‘Just a sunburn, right?’

‘Yeah, just a sunburn.’ Then, after a pause: ‘But a pretty bad one. Got a few little blisters there. You should put some—’

‘Aloe on it, yeah. I heard.’

After five vodka-tonics (or maybe it had been six), he drove home at exactly the speed limit, bolt upright and peering over the wheel. Wouldn’t be good to get stopped. The legal limit in this state was .08.

He arrived at the old hacienda about the same time Holly Gibney was beginning her presentation in Howard Gold’s conference room. He stripped to his undershorts, remembered to lock all the doors, and went in the bathroom to tap a kidney that badly needed tapping. With that chore accomplished, he once more used the hand-mirror to check out the back of his neck. Surely the sunburn was getting better by now, probably starting to flake. But no. The burn had turned black. Deep fissures crisscrossed the nape of his neck. Pearly rivulets of pus dribbled from two of them. He moaned, closed his eyes, then opened them again and breathed a sigh of relief. No black skin. No fissures. No pus. But the nape was bright red, and yes, there were some blisters. It didn’t hurt as much to touch it as it had earlier, but why would it, when he had a skinful of Russian anesthetic?

I have to stop drinking so much, he thought. Seeing shit that’s not there is a pretty clear signal. You could even call it a warning.

He had no aloe vera ointment, so he slathered the burn with some arnica gel. That stung, but the pain soon went away (or at least subsided to a dull throb). That was good, right? He took a hand towel to drape over his pillow so it wouldn’t get all stained, lay down, and turned out the light. But the dark was no good. It seemed he could feel the pain more in the dark, and it was all too easy to imagine something in the room with him. The something that had been behind him out there at that abandoned barn.

The only thing out there was my imagination. The way that black skin was my imagination. And the cracks. And the pus.

All true, but it was also true that when he turned on the bedside lamp, he felt better. His final thought was that a good night’s sleep would put everything right.