Fourth Row Watcher

Chapter 6: Four Feet

He heard the door open before he heard the voice.

Then the voice, young and high, going up at the end of every word. "Oh my God. Oh my God, get out, get out, we hit somebody—"

Shoes on the road. Two pairs, quick and light, not a man's. Ellis stayed where he was, one hand flat on Otis's shoulder, his mouth close to the old man's ear. Otis's other shoe was still lying behind him, upside down, and the blood at the corner of his mouth had gone dark and thick.

Ellis lifted his head.

Black Porsche, sitting a little sideways in the lane. Engine running. Cold air coming out of the open door and dying a foot from the car. The girl was already out and standing with her hands up by her face, eighteen or nineteen, in a dress for a party at four in the afternoon. The crowd had its phones up already. Two or three of them moved in closer anyway.

"Is he breathing? Is somebody—"

"Piper." The second one came around the back of the car. "I told you not to drive. I said it twice. It isn't even your car."

Then she looked down.

Ellis knew her face the way you know a face from the far side of a gym. She looked past him at the old man, and then past the old man at the front of the car, at the four feet of empty road between the bumper and Otis's shoulder. She looked at that for a while.

Four feet. The old man had gone down four feet early. There wasn't a mark on the bumper.

"You're at the gym," she said.

Ellis said nothing.

"Third row up. You leave before it's over. Every time." Her arms folded. "And now here you are."

Under Ellis's hand, Otis's shoulder moved. His eyes came open a slit and slid sideways and closed again.

"Dad," Ellis said. Louder, for the crowd. "Look at him. Look at what you did to him. He can't stand up."

The groan went up a notch and stayed there. Pleased. Ellis could hear that it was pleased, and the crowd could not, and that was one more thing he'd have to say something about later.

He looked at the car. Somebody else was in the back of it — a shoulder, the edge of a hand, nothing else — and whoever it was hadn't gotten out. People who didn't get out were in a hurry. People in a hurry paid. Otis had gone down in front of the best car he'd ever gone down in front of.

"We're late," the girl said. "We are so late. I'll call 911. All right? I'll call right now. How much — just tell me a number, and I'll give it to you."

The groaning got louder, which was the wrong thing to do, and Ellis knew exactly why it had gotten louder.

"Two thousand," he said.

"Two thousand?" She almost laughed. "Fine. Fine. Two thousand." She went around the driver's door and leaned in for her bag.

"Wait." The other one hadn't moved. "Wait. You say we hit him."

"I'm not doing this—"

"There's a dash cam in this car. Front and back, and it's on. We can look at it right now."

Otis's groaning stopped in the middle of a breath. His eye found Ellis and blinked, slow, and stayed on him.

"Eight hundred," Ellis said.

"Oh—" Piper turned and pointed at Ellis, then at the road. "He did it himself. Delia, he did it himself, I said it. He came around the front of the car and then he was on the ground. He rolled. Look at the car. There's not a mark on the car."

"Get him up," Delia said. "We're going."

Nine cars were stacked up behind them by then, and one of them had been leaning on the horn since the girl got out.

"Eight hundred," Ellis said again. "He can't stand up. Eight hundred and you can go."

They had the car. The girl had shoes on that hadn't been rained on. All three of them had somewhere to be. Eight hundred dollars was not the most expensive thing in their afternoon. It couldn't be. People like this paid, because the hour it took to argue cost more than the money, and this one had already cost them twenty minutes.

"There's no eight hundred," Delia said. "Get him out of the road."

Piper had her bag open. She came up with a fold of bills between two fingers — twenties, a fifty, the corner of a hundred — and she had her arm back to throw it when another arm came across her and stopped her.

The third one got out of the back seat.

Black coat, no jewelry, hair pulled back so tight it shone. In a street where a purse cost what a purse cost, she was the only one Ellis couldn't have put a number on.

The smell came with her. Cold and dry, cedar or the inside of a new suitcase, and Ellis's back teeth ached the way they did around a certain kind of alpha. He breathed through his mouth and kept his face where it was.

She looked at him. Not at Otis, not at the car, not at the phones. At Ellis, and she kept looking past the point where a stranger looks, and her eyebrows came together, and her mouth started a word and changed it, and her face went somewhere Ellis couldn't follow. Then she wasn't looking at him anymore.

"He's hurt," she said. "He gets looked at. Whatever it costs."

Delia turned her head. She looked at the woman beside her and kept looking a second too long, the way you look at somebody who has just said something out of character.

"Linnea." Piper's hands came down. Delia took the bills out of them, folded them once, put them back in the bag and shut it. "They're waiting for us at the winery. Everybody's already there, we're not even — and he's not hurt, look at him, he's not hurt, he's a liar with a cane."

Linnea looked at Otis, all the way down, and stopped at his leg. "He's bleeding."

Ellis looked.

There was a cut on the front of the old man's shin, an inch or two, down in the gray hair, and the blood on it had gone brown at the edges and begun to lift where it dried. It had been there a while. Otis had come down by the front of the car and caught his leg on the plate and opened it up, and he hadn't said anything about it, because it hadn't started to hurt yet.

Real blood, and it was on the road now, and it had cost the old man something to put there. Ellis dropped the price anyway.

Otis had begun to shake. It came up through his shoulder into Ellis's palm, small and fast, and it wasn't the other shaking, the performance. His fingers found the inside of Ellis's thigh and closed and twisted through the denim. Get me up. Get me out of here. His mouth didn't move at all.

A man who got into a car like that went where the car went, and nobody standing on this corner would be able to say where that was.

"No," Ellis said. "No, hey. Nobody's going anywhere." He got his hand flat on Otis's chest. "Nobody needs a doctor. Five hundred."

"There's no five hundred," Delia said.

"Urgent care." Linnea said it without turning her head. "Two blocks up on Main, the one with the yellow sign. We take him in, we pay for it, and then we go."

Urgent care.

That meant a desk. A woman behind the desk with a clipboard, and a form with a box for a name and a box for a date of birth and a box under that for a number that belonged to somebody else, and then a second page for the people who had that number, and Ellis had never once in his life been one of those people.

He had a wallet. There was money in it. There was nothing in it with his name on it that a stranger could read.

"Five hundred," he said.

Linnea didn't answer him. She was still looking at the leg.

"Linnea," Delia said. "We are going to be an hour late as it is."

"Five hundred dollars," Ellis said, "and nobody gets in anybody's car."

"Really," he said. "It's fine. We're fine. We're going."

He got his knee under himself, and it had gone numb and then come back wrong, and he pushed up off it and got his hands under Otis's arm and hauled. The old man came up in stages the way he always did, complaining into Ellis's shoulder in a voice that was mostly breath, and then his weight came down on the cut leg and he made a sound that wasn't for anybody and switched to the other one.

The cane was still out in the road. Ellis picked it up, and there was grit in the handle where it had been lying, and he knocked it out against his palm twice and put it into Otis's hand. The shoe was a few feet further on. Ellis went back for it and set it down by the old man's foot and Otis stepped into it without a word.

Behind them, car doors. Delia went around the front and got in on the driver's side this time, and Piper got in the back with her bag against her chest, and Linnea stood by the open door a second longer than the others, one hand on the roof, looking at the crowd and not at him. Then she got in, and the doors shut, and the black car pulled around them, wide, and went down the block.

"That's a hundred-thousand-dollar car," Otis said.

"They had a dash cam."

"You had them at five."

"You had them at five hundred," Ellis said. "Then you started shaking."

"They were going to put me in a car."

"You take the money," Ellis said, "and then you don't get in the car."

"You take the money."

His bag was still in the gutter where it had gone. One bottle was somewhere under the grate, and the other was in the bag with a crack down one side, and the water had come out of the crack and made a dark soft shape in the paper. He picked it up and carried it.

The black car was stopped at the light. The back window was down an inch. The woman in the back seat had her head turned around, and she wasn't looking at the old man.

It was three twenty-five. He had the hill to walk and the car on the drive at seven thirty-five, and four dollars and thirty-two cents less in his pocket than he'd had at three o'clock, and one bottle of water, cracked down one side, leaking through the paper.