Page 81 of Puck Me Like You Own Me

“No.”

He hits me in the face.

The left side goes white. Then the light in the hall doubles. The porch, the gravel, the black field behind it, all split into two. I go over sideways against the frame. My cheekbone isn’t where it was.

What stays with me is that he doesn’t enjoy it. There’s no anger in him at all. He’s doing a job. When I’m on my back half in and half out of the door with my legs on the steps, he crouches down to look at me.

“He’s in the back room,” he says.

“Yes.”

He waits. I have one hand around the doorframe at the bottom, hooked on it. I can’t get any air in past the right side of my chest. I lie on a cold step and hold on to a piece of wood. The bolt is still across the back-room door. I hear nothing from Fin.

Roth looks at the hall. Then at me.

“You should’ve moved,” he says.

Then he stands, puts his hands in his pockets, and goes down the three steps toward the road. The car door shuts. The engine starts. Headlights sweep across the front of the house and disappear.

I’m on the steps for a while.

The bolt goes at some point. Feet move in the hall behind me. Then Fin Doyle is on his knees on the gravel, both hands held out without touching me. He says my name, says oh Christ, says it over and over. What I remember is the bad hand held wrong in the dark, the fourth finger standing off from the others where it won’t close.

“Don’t lift me.”

“I’m not lifting you.”

“Get the car keys out of my coat.”

“I’ve got a truck.” He’s crying while he talks, doing neither well. “Marek. Marek. He was in the house, was he in the house?”

“He didn’t go in.”

Getting into the truck takes eleven minutes. I make a noise going up into the seat that I’ve never made before. He drives with one hand on the wheel and one on the gearshift. The bad hand does the shifting because the good one is holding my shoulder against the seat back.

Three broken ribs on the right side. A fracture of the bone under the left eye, which they X-ray twice and show me on a screen. A doctor tells me I’ll be breathing shallowly for six weeks and not to blow my nose, which is the single strangest medical instruction of my life.

They ask what happened.

“I fell down three steps.”

They write it down. Fin stands against the wall of the cubicle with his arms folded. He doesn’t say one word. Afterward, in the corridor, he says, “I’m going to tell Kieran.”

They want me to stay overnight for the eye. Fin goes out to shift the truck off the ambulance apron. I go out with him for the air. He leaves me on a bollard and says he’ll be four minutes.

I sit in the ambulance bay at twenty past one in the morning in a coat with gravel in the collar and get my wallet out with my left hand.

It’s been behind the dentist’s card for weeks, ever since a corridor at the arena, when a general manager introduced me to a woman in a gray suit. I shook her hand, answered two questions about my practice, and put her card away. Then I didn’t decide anything about it for four weeks.

FRANCES YEARDLEY. INTEGRITY, THE LEAGUE. A number, and a second number under it in pen, hers, added by hand.

I dial the second one.

It rings twice.

“Yeardley.”

“My name is Marek Brandt,” I say. “We met in March. I’m Kieran Doyle’s financial manager, and I’ve been on the payroll of the people you’re looking for since November. I have all of it, and I want to come in.”