The Wake-Up Read Free Page A

ER butchers try doing
that.” He shook his head. “You tell Billy we’re even now.”
    Thorpe closed his eyes. Stretched out on the table, an IV in his arm, he wasn’t
about to tell the surgeon that Billy was retired. He could feel the man’s fingers
probing his flesh.
    “That hurt?” asked the surgeon. “I had to be cautious with the anesthetic;
it’s not my area of expertise.” He chuckled. “I can promise you a beautiful scar,
however.”
    “I’m a lucky man.”
    “Told you.”
    The lights were bright, even through his closed eyelids, but something
nagged at Thorpe. It had been bothering him the whole drive over, but he just
couldn’t remember what it was. The surgeon chattered away, but Thorpe was
drifting, hearing bullets whizzing past him in the parking lot, and car doors
slamming. He remembered racing through traffic, and the Engineer turning
around to see if they were being followed. He must have groaned out loud with
the memory.
    “Hang on,” said the surgeon.
    Thorpe could still see Kimberly leaning against the Jeep, and lying there in
the operating room, he got a whiff of her perfume. He fought to stay awake.
Her fragrance was fainter now, and he tried to hang on to her, but she was
walking away, walking back to the safe house with the Engineer. Thorpe sat
up. The surgeon tried to push him down, but Thorpe shook him off, grabbed
his cell phone from the counter.
    “Are you trying to kill yourself?” asked the surgeon.
    Thorpe listened to the phone ring. The Engineer’s gait had changed slightly
as he and Kimberly approached the house, become almost jaunty, and at the top
of the steps, he had looked back at Thorpe. It had lasted only a moment, and
Thorpe was bleeding and desperate to leave, but there was something wrong
with his expression.
    The surgeon fiddled with the anesthetic drip that ran into Thorpe’s arm.
    The phone clicked. “Kimberly!” Thorpe’s tongue felt thick. “The Engineer.
He’s not . . . he’s not right.”
    “None of us are,” said the Engineer. He had lost all trace of his Italian
accent. “Look at Kimberly. A little liar, that’s all she was. And you, Frank,
so cocky before, all that razzle-dazzle. You don’t sound so fearless now.”
    “Let me . . . speak to Kimberly.”
    “Say ‘Please.’ ”
    “Please, don’t hurt her.” Thorpe dragged the surgeon closer. “The safe
house . . . 911.”
    “Where are you, Frank?” asked the Engineer.
    Thorpe licked his lips. “The Fuck You Hilton.”
    “That’s the spirit.”
    Thorpe floated on a vast black lake. He felt the surgeon take the phone from
him. Someone was sobbing, the sound sending ripples across the water.
    “Mister?” The woman at the coffee stand was holding out his three dollars. “I told you—your coffee is free.”
    Thorpe shoved the money into his pocket, walked away without a word, still hearing the Engineer’s last words. He sat down at one of the nearby tables, more convinced than ever that this vacation was a mistake, a retreat, not a respite. Kimberly was dead and the Engineer was alive, and no vacation was going to change that. Not that staying home presented much hope. He had laid out the bait for the Engineer, offered himself up without success, and Thorpe had grown tired of waiting.
    Thorpe sipped the thick sweetened coffee and watched the people streaming past. Commuters double-timing it, laptops swinging with every step. Grandmothers with too many carry-on plastic bags, tissues tucked into their sleeves. College girls in Stanford sweatshirts, sorority tattoos discreetly stitched onto their ankles, easily hidden when they joined the PTA in a few years. A woman caught his attention, a middle-aged woman sitting at a nearby table, her cup of frozen yogurt melting while she tracked the line waiting at the security checkpoint. An earpiece was almost hidden by her hair. Ten demerits for the
almost.
She looked over, but he didn’t react, his expression of practiced boredom deflecting any