World of Trouble by Ben H. Winters Read Free Book Online

the bag, looping down through its tubing, through the bars and into the girl’s arm. When we left Police House, the Night Bird assembled a first-aid kit for me: reams of gauze and boxes of aspirin and bottles of hydrogen peroxide, plus two liters of saline in two one-liter bags and an IV start kit. When I told her I had no idea how to administer it, she scoffed and said just follow the instructions on the kit. She said it practically administers itself.
    Cortez follows my gaze up to the bag of fluid. “Doesn’t look like it’s coming out, does it?”
    “Well, it’s dripping at the top, see?”
    “Did you do it right?”
    “I don’t know. But it’s dripping.”
    “What happens if you did it wrong?”
    I don’t respond, but the answer is that she won’t get fluid and she’ll die. I check the Casio and it’s 4:45 in the afternoon. The watch was given to me, along with a rushed hug, by Trish McConnell’s daughter Kelli. “Mom is mad at you,” she said, and I said, “I know,” and she said, “I am, too,” but nevertheless she snuck the watch into my pocket, and I’ve been wearing it. When you pressthe side button it glows a pleasant blue-green. I love the watch.
    This girl does not appear to have been sexually assaulted. I checked—swiftly and gingerly and with the minimum possible physical contact, murmuring apologies, but I checked. Neither does she have abrasions at the wrists or elbows that would be consistent with having been bound. Just the throat, plus the contusions and lacerations to the face, along with other signs of violent struggle: bruises on her knuckles and shins, two torn fingernails. I collected tissue samples from under her nails with a tweezer and placed them carefully in one of the sandwich bags. Detective Palace’s Miniature Roving Evidence Locker. I cleaned and dressed the wound to her throat, applying Neosporin in a thin glaze along the wide obscene mouth of the cut. I ended up using too much gauze, extending the bandaging on either side well beyond the edges of the wound, reaching around to the back of her neck. It looks like her head has been cut off and reattached. The girl’s hair is perfectly black, falling away in two matted curtains from her face.
    I stand up from the toilet, turn away for a minute, waver on my feet. I’m starving. Exhausted. In my hand is the sleeping girl’s bracelet. It was in her shirt-front pocket, not on her wrist. Delicate fake gold, the sort of cheap token you get at a mall chain store, the kind of thing boys buy for girls in high school. There are charms dangling from it: a music note, a pair of ballet slippers. A tiny silver cluster of flowers, delicate and lovely.
    “Irises?” I murmur to myself.
    “Lilies,” says Cortez.
    “You think?” I feel the small weight of the chain in my palm.“Maybe they’re roses.”
    “Lilies,” he says again and yawns.
    I study the girl’s blank face and decide that her name is Lily. That’s why she has the bracelet. I need for her to have a name, for right now.
    “My name is Henry Palace,” I whisper to Lily, who can’t hear. Cortez gazes at me with amusement. I ignore him. “I need to ask you a few questions.”
    She doesn’t answer. She’s unconscious. I’m not sure what else to do. I have a weird sudden need to lie down on that mattress myself; a weird wish that it was me instead of her. I watch her breathing: shallow breath in, shallow breath out. I hold the bracelet in my palm, dull in the dirty gold light of the small gray cell.
    Cortez pushes off from the wall and leans against the bars and starts talking, absently, casually.
    “My mother was in a coma once. State hospital. Just two days. They brought her lunch and dinner, even though she was eating through a tube. Oversight, I guess. Or some dumb rule. Me and my brother ate it. It was good, too, compared to the food she usually provided for us.”
    He laughs. I give him a half smile. I am never quite sure, when Cortez rolls out one of his