Black Heart (22 page)

“Uh-huh,” I say, crossing the green, hoping that Wharton is still in his office. Hoping that I’m wrong about Mina’s plans. Hoping that Sam is somewhere burning those photos, even though I’m pretty sure he’s too busy being devastated, and even if he wasn’t, he has no reason to think we’re in trouble. “Maybe he’ll get over it.”

It’s pointless to think about the fact that neither of them getting over things is what broke them up in the first place. He’s going to be furious with her and doubly furious at me for not telling him about Barron. Which, predictably, I deserve.

“No,
listen
. I left the room for a minute, and when I got back—Well, Barron must have texted me. And Sam read it—and read the other ones too. He started screaming at me. It was really ugly.”

I pause. “Are you okay?”

“I don’t know.” She sounds like she’s trying to fight back more tears. “Sam’s always been so gentle—sweet. I just never thought he could be that angry. He scared me.”

“Did he hurt you?” I am pushing open the doors of the administrative building, trying to think.

“No—nothing like that.”

I head for the steps. No one’s in any of the offices. My footfalls are loud in the hallways. The only sounds I can hear are the ones I’m making. Everyone’s home for the weekend. My heart starts to race. Wharton’s gone, and Mina has probably already told him that Sam and I are blackmailing him. He’ll toss our room, and if he does, he’s going to
find the pictures
. . . and, oh God, the gun. He’s going to find the gun.

“Sam threw his books across the room, and then he got really cold, really distant,” Daneca is saying, although it’s hard to focus on her words. “It was like something just switched off inside him. He told me that he was supposed to meet you and he didn’t care if you didn’t show. He said that he’d take care of things, for once. He said he had a—”

“Wait. What?” I ask, snapping to attention.
“What did he say he had?”

A shot rings through the stairwell from the floor above me, echoing through the empty building.

I don’t know what I expect to see when I burst into Wharton’s office, but it’s not Sam and the Headmaster grappling on the antique oriental rug. Wharton is crawling across the
floor, toward a gun that seems to have skittered away from both of them, while Sam’s trying to pin him down.

I go for the gun.

Wharton looks at me dazedly when I swing the barrel in his direction. His white hair is sticking up all over the place. Sam slumps bonelessly, with a moan. That’s when I realize that the red stain surrounding Sam isn’t part of the pattern of the carpet.

“You shot him,” I say to Wharton, in disbelief.

“I’m sorry,” Sam gets out between locked teeth. “I screwed up, Cassel. I really screwed up.”

“You’re going to be fine, Sam,” I say.

“Mr. Sharpe, you are
twenty minutes late
for your detention,” Dean Wharton says from the floor. I wonder if he’s in shock. “If you don’t want to be in more trouble than you already are, I suggest that you give me that gun.”

“You’re kidding me, right? I’m calling an ambulance.” I cross to Wharton’s burled wood desk. The photos of Mina are there, on top of the other papers.

“No!” Wharton says, pushing himself to his feet. He lunges for the phone cord and pulls it out of the wall with a violent jerk. He’s breathing hard, looking at me with glazed eyes. “I forbid it. I absolutely forbid it. You don’t understand. If the board finds out about this—Well, you just don’t understand the difficult position that will put me in.”

“I can imagine,” I say, pulling out my cell with one hand. I can’t quite work out how to dial and keep the gun trained on him at the same time.

Wharton staggers toward me. “You can’t call anyone. Put that phone down.”

“You shot him!” I yell. “Stay back or I’ll shoot you!”

Sam moans again. “It really hurts, Cassel. It really hurts.”

“This can’t be happening,” Wharton says. Then he looks at me again. “I’ll tell them that you did it! I’ll say that you both came here to rob me and you two got into an argument, and then you shot him.”

“I should know who shot me,” says Sam. He winces as he puts pressure on his leg. “I’m not going to say it was Cassel.”

“That won’t matter. Whose gun is that, Mr. Sharpe?” Wharton says. “Yours, I’ll wager.”

“Nope,” I say. “I stole it.”

He gives me a sudden blank look. He is used to good boys in tidy uniforms who only play at being troublemakers before doing what they’re told, and the sudden suspicion that I’m nothing like that seems to disorient him. Then his mouth twists. “That’s right. Everyone knows your background. Who are they going to believe—you or me? I am a respectable member of the community.”

“Not when they see the pictures of you and Mina Lange. That’s pretty sketchy stuff. You’re not going to look good. You’re sick, right? Brain starting to go. First you forget small things, then bigger ones, and the doctor gives you the news that it only gets worse from here. Time to resign from Wallingford. Not much you can do legally—but
illegally
—Well, now we’re talking. You can buy children, little girls like Mina, and she can’t cure you because it’s degenerative, but she can give you the next best thing.

“So you don’t get any worse and she starts getting sick. At first you rationalize it. She’s young. She’ll get better. So she misses some classes? That’s nothing for her to be upset about. After all, you’ve gotten her a scholarship to Wallingford, a prestigious prep school, so that you could have her on hand whenever you needed her.

“When she told you we had the pictures, you probably were willing to pay. But then when Sam comes in here, he says something that makes you realize the money is for Mina. And that puts you in a tough spot. If she goes, you get sick again. And if anyone sees the pictures, you lose your job. You can’t have that, so you go for the gun.”

Wharton looks toward the desk as though he wants to make a mad grab for the photos. Sweat is beading on his forehead. “She was in on it?”

“She
orchestrated
this. She took those pictures. The only thing she didn’t expect was someone to actually try to help her. Sam did, because he’s a good guy. See what it got him. Now I am making this call and you’re not going to stop me.”

“No,” Wharton says.

I glance at Sam. He looks very pale. I wonder how much blood he’s already lost.

“Look, I don’t care about Mina or the money or you losing your mind,” I say. “Take the photos. Keep your secret. Tell the ambulance people whatever you want when they come. But he’s really hurt.”

“Okay. Let me think. You must know someone,” the dean says in a low, pleading voice. “The kind of doctor who won’t report a shooting.”

“You want me to call a
mob doctor
?”

The eagerness on his face is exaggerated, manic. “Please. Please. I’ll give you anything. You can both graduate with a 4.0. You can blow off all your classes. If you make this go away, as far as I’m concerned, you can do whatever you want.”

“And no more demerits,” says Sam weakly.

“Are you sure?” I ask Sam. “This doctor’s not going to have all the stuff that a real hospital—”

“Cassel,
think about it
,” Sam says. “If an ambulance comes, we’re all in trouble. We all lose.”

I hesitate.

“My parents,” he says. “I can’t—they can’t find out.” I look at him for a long moment and then remember that Sam was the one who brought a gun into the dean’s office and threatened him with it. Normal parents probably frown on that kind of thing. I bet judges don’t like it either. This isn’t a zero-sum game for the dean, Sam, and me. There’s plenty of trouble to go around.

With a sigh I flick the safety on, shove the gun into my pocket, and make the call.

The doctor with the crooked teeth arrives a half hour later. His answering service never asked for a name from me and never gave one for him, either. In my head I am still calling him Dr. Doctor.

He’s wearing a similar outfit to the one I saw him in the last time—sweatshirt and jeans. I notice he’s got on sneakers with no socks and there’s a scab of some kind
on his ankle. His cheeks look more sunken than I remember, and he’s smoking a cigarette. I wonder how old he is. He looks like he’s maybe in his thirties with a full head of unruly curls and the scruff of a man who can’t be bothered to shave every day. The only thing that indicates he’s a doctor at all is the black bag he’s carrying.

I’ve elevated Sam’s leg and padded it with my T-shirt. I am sitting on the floor, applying pressure. Dean Wharton wrapped Sam in my coat to stop him from shivering. We’ve done our awful best, and I am feeling like the worst friend in the world for not insisting we take him immediately to the hospital, whatever the consequences.

“You got a bathroom?” the doctor says, glancing around.

“Through those doors and down the hall,” says Dean Wharton, frowning at the doctor’s cigarette disapprovingly, still apparently trying to stay in control of the situation. “This is a no smoking building.”

The doctor gives him an incredulous look. “I’ve got to scrub in. Clear off the desk while I’m gone. We’re going to have to get the patient up there. And get some more lights. I need to see what I’m doing.”

“Do you trust that man?” Dean Wharton asks me as he lifts stacks of papers and shoves them into his filing cabinet haphazardly.

“No,” I say.

Sam makes a choked sound.

“I didn’t mean it that way,” I say. “You’re going to be fine. I’m just pissed off. Mostly at myself—no, scratch that, mostly at Wharton.”

The dean drags a floor lamp to his now clear desk and flips it on. He manages to position a couple of other lights on the bookshelves, tilting their flexible necks to point bulbs at the table, like faces all turned toward a performance.

“Help me get him up,” I say.

“Don’t lift me,” Sam says, slurring the words slightly. “I can hop.”

This seems like a terrible idea, but I am not arguing with a wounded man. Putting his arm around my neck, I haul him up. He makes a low sound in the back of his throat, like he’s biting back a scream. His gloved fingers dig into my bare arm. His face contorts with pain and concentration, his eyes closing tightly.

“Don’t put any weight on it,” I remind him.

“Screw you,” he says through gritted teeth, which I take to mean that he’s doing okay.

We move across the room, his body half-slumped on mine. My T-shirt slides off his leg, and blood seeps sluggishly from the hole as he climbs up onto the desk.

“Lie down,” I say, reaching for the shirt. I have no idea how clean anything is, but I try to mop up the worst of the blood and reapply pressure.

Wharton stands back, watching us with what looks like a mixture of distaste and terror. Possibly he’s mourning the ruination of his desk.

The doctor comes back into the room, his cigarette gone. He’s got on what looks like a plastic poncho and gloves. His hair has been pulled back with a bandana.

Sam moans. “What—what is he going to do?”

“I am going to need an assistant for this,” the doctor says, looking at me. “You okay with blood?”

I nod.

“You’re lucky. My last job wasn’t too far from here. Sometimes I can get pretty backed up.”

“I bet,” I say. I wish he would stop talking.

He nods. “So . . . I need the money. It’s going to be five hundred up front, like my answering service said. Maybe more, depending on how things go, but I’ll need to have that now.”

I look over at Wharton, and he fusses around with one of the drawers in his desk. He must be used to paying other people in cash, because he unlocks some section inside a lower part and counts out a wad of bills.

“Here’s a grand,” the dean says, his hand shaking as he holds out the cash. “Let’s make sure things go well. No complications, do you understand?”

“Money soaks up germs. It’s dirty stuff. You take it, kid,” Dr. Doctor says. “Put it in my bag. And take out the bottle of iodine. Then, before you do anything else, I want you to go wash your hands.”

“My gloves?” I ask.

“Your
hands
,” he tells me. “You’re going to wear a pair of plastic gloves. Those are ruined.”

In the bathroom I scrub furiously. My hands. My arms. He’s right about my leather gloves. They are so sodden with blood that my hands were stained red underneath. I splash water onto my face for good measure. Bare to the waist, I
feel like I should try to cover up somehow, but there’s nothing to cover up with. My T-shirt is a disgusting mess. My coat is still on the floor of the other room.

I return to the dean’s office to find the doctor has his bag open. It’s a mess of bottles, cloths, and clamps. He’s taking out sharp, scary metal instruments and laying them out on a side table he’s dragged over. I put on a pair of thin plastic gloves and get out the iodine.

“Cassel,” Sam says faintly. “I’m going to be okay, right?”

I nod. “I swear.”

“Tell Daneca I’m sorry.” Tears are welling up in the corners of his eyes. “Tell my mom—”

“Shut up, Sam,” I say fiercely. “I said you were going to be fine.”

The doctor grunts. “Get me one of the swabs, soak it in the iodine, and wipe off the bullet hole.”

“But—,” I say, not sure how to proceed.

“Cut off his pants.” He sounds exasperated, and I can see that he’s taking out a brown vial and a large needle.

I try to keep my hand steady as I take out the scissors from the kit and slice open Sam’s cargo pants. The material rips wide, to his thigh, and I see the actual wound, just above his knee, small and welling with blood.

When my fingers touch his skin, brushing it with brown medicine, he twitches.

“It’s fine, Sam,” I say.

Across the room Wharton sits down heavily in a chair and puts his head in his hands.

The doctor walks over to Sam, holding up a syringe. He
taps it, like he’s trying to get the air out. “This is morphine. It should help with the pain.”

Sam’s eyes go wide.

“You’re going to need to be sedated for this,” the doctor says.

Sam swallows and, visibly steeling himself, nods.