The Hardest Thing

going concern. Well,
there might be something to clothe me in one of them, even if it was only a moldy old janitor’s coat. I tried each door—locked, locked, locked. And the final one? Open an inch or two into deeper blackness within. I stopped and listened and sniffed. It smelled of shit. Damn it—some homeless guy, perhaps. I didn’t much want to find out. I was about to turn away when my eyes, adjusting to the darkness, caught sight of something pale on the ground. White, and dirty. A glove, I thought at first. No. A hand, palm up, on the filthy floor.
    I felt sick, and I was shaking as I pushed the door. It wouldn’t move much, of course; the body was behind it. But I shifted it enough to slip inside and crouch down, and I knew, even in the near-darkness of that stinking room, that it was Jody.

The Sting 11
    Half an hour later, Jody was in an ambulance speeding its way to the nearest emergency room—which turned out to be in Trenton, New Jersey, another state to add to my itinerary of the last week—and I was in the back of a police car on the way to New York City being debriefed over the telephone while a paramedic attempted to strap up my chest and clean my wounds.
    You can achieve a lot in half an hour if you put your mind to it. I was naked, bleeding heavily and in a great deal of pain from a broken rib; I’d also just discovered Jody at death’s door, which might have been harder to deal with had I not encountered death so frequently in my military career. However, getting help when you’re naked in enemy territory isn’t that easy. I covered Jody with some old plastic sheeting and ran out to the yard. Tire tracks in the dirt led me to a twelve-foot-high gate in the chain-link perimeter fence, topped off with razor wire. I had no particular desire to lose my balls, and unless I was very lucky no passing motorist was going to stop for a crazy bleeding naked guy. I needed pants.

    “Hey!”
    A guy with a gun was running toward me. Most people would see that as a threat. I just saw it as a suit of clothes with an inconvenient body inside.
    “Stop or I’ll shoot!”
    I stopped. There was nothing to fear. If he was worth anything as a guard he’d have shot on sight. Tut tut, Marshall, hiring amateurs. Bad move. I put my hands up.
    “What the fuck you doing?” He approached me with caution, waving the gun. He was young and scrawny, midtwenties, I guess, a mean little gangster.
    I did my best wild, confused stare, and even managed to dribble a bit. A drug-fucked loony. What possible harm could I do? I bent my legs, tensed the muscles.
    “Fucking freak,” he said, laughing through a nose that was soon going to be mashed into his ugly skull. “I’m going to kick your—”
    I never found out which part of me he was intending to kick, because as soon as the gun was pointing away from my head I sprang, brought him down on his back and punched repeatedly into his face. Blood spurted out of his nostrils. I disarmed him and used the butt of the gun to knock him out—what we used to call a field anesthetic. Within five minutes I was fully dressed and climbing over the fence. I still looked pretty scary—black sweater, black boots, khaki combat pants, the usual pseudo-military shit—but at least you couldn’t see my dick, and the only thing that got torn on the razor wire was the seat of my pants. The road was a quarter of a mile away, and it didn’t take long to flag down a truck. Truck drivers, I guess, are less nervous than commuters hurrying home to their wives.

    There was no time for pleasantries; I didn’t even ask where the fuck I was.
    “I need to call the cops. Right now.”
    He was the silent type—just dialed 911 and handed me his phone.
    Like I said, one call was all it took. A few key words—among them “Julian Marshall”—and things happened fast. I left the driver to explain our whereabouts, checked that the guard was still unconscious and ran back to Jody. He was alive, but if an ambulance didn’t get here pretty damn quick he might not last for long. I stripped off, lay down beside him and piled the clothes and plastic sheeting on top of us. The least I could do was warm him up. I held him gently and waited for the sirens. He was barely breathing when the ambulance arrived.
    I didn’t much care what happened to me. When the cops arrived I half expected them to arrest me for nearly killing the would-be assassin in the Starlight Motel. I was holding out my wrists for the