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“I know. I just hope it happens soon.”
“It’s what we want.”
“I love you, Foster.”
“And I love you.” Then he drew her head to his chest again, saying, “It’s what we want.”
A week after the beating, Griff began to think he would live. For the previous six days, he hadn’t been so sure.
The sons of bitches hadn’t even been kind enough to beat him unconscious. And that had been deliberate. They’d wanted him awake to feel every punch, grind, and gouge. They’d wanted him conscious so that when they lifted up his head by his hair and pointed out to him a car parked nearby, he would recognize it as Rodarte’s olive drab sedan and see the cute flashing of its headlights. They didn’t want him muzzy or confused. They wanted him to remember the beating and who was behind it.
They’d given him a concussion. He’d suffered a couple in football, so he recognized the symptoms.
Even though he didn’t experience the amnesia that sometimes accompanies a concussion, the nausea, dizziness, and blurred vision had plagued him for twenty-four hours.
By rights, he shouldn’t have moved, except to use his cell phone to call 911, summoning an ambulance to the parking lot. But a trip to the emergency room would have involved paperwork, the police. God only knew what else.
Somehow he’d managed to climb into his car and drive himself home before his eyes swelled shut. Since then, he’d been popping ibuprofen tablets every couple hours and trying to find one position in which to lie that didn’t cause throbbing pain. He didn’t worry about internal injuries. The pros knew how to damage him so he would feel it, but they didn’t want a murder on their hands. If they did, he’d be dead. They’d only wanted him praying for death so he’d feel better.
He got up solely to pee, and not until his bladder was full to bursting. When he did leave the bed, he walked like an old man, bent at the waist, shuffling because every time he tried to lift his feet, a knifing pain in his lower back brought tears to his eyes.
Yesterday his mobility had improved a bit. This morning, he’d worked up enough courage to get in the shower. The hot water had actually felt good, easing some of the aches and pains.
The bedroom stank of him because he hadn’t been up to the task of changing the sheets. Sick of looking at the same four walls, he left the room for the first time in a week. Coffee sounded good. He realized he was ravenously hungry. Things were looking up.
He was scooping scrambled eggs straight from the skillet into his mouth when his doorbell rang. “Who the hell?” He couldn’t think of anyone who would come calling.
He made it to his front door and looked through the peephole. “You gotta be kidding,” he muttered. Then, “Shit!”
“Griff?”
Griff hung his head, shaking it in wonderment at his fuck-all rotten luck. “Yeah. Just a minute.” He fumbled with the locks, which he’d had the wherewithal to secure when he returned home the night of the beating, fearing that Rodarte’s thugs might show up for round two.
He pulled the door open. “Hi.”
His probation officer gaped at him. “Holy shit. What happened to you?”
He’d met Jerry Arnold in his office a week after speaking to him on the telephone. Griff had figured that a person-to-person meeting might win him some favor. When he’d left the ten-minute meeting, he knew he’d earned a few points.
Now Arnold’s good opinion of him was in jeopardy. Ordinarily Griff would tower over the short, stocky black man. Today, since Griff was standing at a sixty-degree angle at best, they were roughly eye to eye. “What happened?” Arnold repeated.
This being the longest time Griff had been out of bed in a week, he’d begun to feel light-headed and shaky. “Come in.” Turning his back on his guest, he slowly made his way to the nearest chair and lowered himself into it as carefully as possible. Even so, every ache and pain that had been lulled by his hot shower was jarred awake again. “Take a load off, Jerry,” he said, indicating another chair.
Arnold dressed and conducted himself like a bureaucrat and looked like a man with huge responsibilities and a lot on his mind—a wife, a mortgage, a few kids to rear on a government employee’s salary. And unreliable ex-cons to babysit. He placed his hands on his hips, reminiscent of Coach. “You gonna tell me, or what?”
“I got thrown into the gorilla cage at the zoo. Those fuckers can get testy.”
Arnold wasn’t amused.
Griff sighed, in resignation and pain. “I ran into some former fans. Last, hmm, Thursday, I think.”
“And you still look this bad?”
“Don’t worry. It hurts a lot worse than it looks.” He grinned, but the other man’s frown stayed in place.
“Did you go to the emergency room? Has a doctor seen you?”
Griff shook his head. “I didn’t report it to the police, either. It was just a couple of drunks. They jumped me in the parking lot of a restaurant.” He made a gesture that dismissed the incident’s importance. “I didn’t fight back, so you don’t have to worry about them filing assault charges against me.”
