by David Stout
“Wolf,” a man’s voice said. “Get back, Wolf.”
The dog went away. Then Jamie felt a man’s hand reach under his head and lift it, saw the cup in front of his face. He recognized the smell in the cup. His father sometimes drank in front of the fireplace at night, just before he put Jamie to bed.
“Drink, Jason. You’ll feel better. Drink.”
Why did the man keep calling him Jason? The man tipped Jamie’s head up, then brought the cup close to his face. Jamie filled his mouth with the strong, sweet taste. He swallowed, and his throat started to feel better. The man’s hand brought the cup up again (the fingers smelled like wood and dirt and dog and smoke), and Jamie drank some more. It felt warm and good in his stomach.
The man’s hand was not behind his head anymore. Jamie lay down, felt his eyes getting fuzzy. The warmth in his stomach was spreading to his toes. He wasn’t shivering anymore. His chest was warm inside; the cough had gone away.
Something big bumped Jamie and rolled up against him. Jamie could smell the dog’s fur. The dog was cuddling up next to him! Jamie liked the dog.
He heard a voice; it sounded far away: “Lie still, Wolf. Lie still, boy. Go to sleep, Jason.”
Why did the man keep calling him Jason? Where was his father?
Jamie slept again.
The only drug the hermit still did was whiskey. The hard stuff from his long ago had painted mind pictures that lasted for days. But this was real. The boy sleeping by the fire was real. And out there was someone mean enough to bury him alive. Just to be mean? But inside the foul-smelling tube (the hermit was pretty sure it was an old hot-water tank), there had been a flashlight, a bottle, and some food scraps. Had someone left him there just for a while as punishment?
That made no sense at all. But as he thought that, the hermit touched the scars on his forehead. He thought of the long-ago fire that had killed Jo. Someone had been mean enough to set that fire; someone had been mean enough to put a little boy in the ground. There wasn’t any explanation; none was needed.
Someone out there was mean enough. Hell, I saw him, the hermit thought. I saw the man who put the boy in the ground. Had he been coming back to dig him up? Or to shovel dirt down the pipe and bury him forever? Whatever he had meant to do, the man might come back. It would take some doing to find the hermit’s cabin, unless he found it by accident. Suppose there was more than one man next time.…
All right. The hermit knew the woods better than anyone. Wolf could hear almost anything that moved outside. And the hermit had plenty of ammunition.
Jamie was coming up out of sleep again. The blankets stuck to him as he moved. He had been shivering and sweating at the same time. Now he didn’t feel cold anymore. He coughed, but it didn’t hurt. His throat was not as sore.
Dog. The dog was not there now. Jamie was now awake, but he still didn’t know where he was.
Jamie listened as hard as he could. He was alone. The man wasn’t there anymore. But a log in the fireplace was still burning; Jamie felt the heat on his hair and shoulders.
He sat up; the blankets fell away, reminding him of his nakedness. He did not want the man to see him naked. Oh! He already had. Where was his father? Where was he?
The hermit was almost done stringing the line. In a rough circle, he had wrapped the twine from tree to tree, about waist-high and fifty feet or so from the cabin. Pairs of tin cans dangled every several feet.
“Pretty neat huh, Wolf?”
Lying contentedly under a tree, the dog looked at him with a puzzled “if you say so” look.
Snap went a branch on the hillside. Wolf’s ears stood up, and the hermit grabbed his rifle. For a second, the hermit saw a tan and white blur, then nothing. Deer.
“Okay, Wolf.”
The sky looked as if it might be gathering rain—or snow. The air was an in-between cold. Some morning soon, he would wake up and there’d be half a foot of snow on the ground and the rain barrel would have ice on top.
Thinking of the weather, the hermit got angry: Who would leave a little boy buried in the ground this time of year? Anytime, for that matter, but, with weather like this, it was only luck that the boy hadn’t frozen.
The hermit tugged on the twine, and the cans jangled. If someone sneaked up at night, the hermit would hear it. Even if he didn’t, Wolf would.
Jamie sat up, looked all around, and was afraid. This was the first good look he had had at where he was. He had never seen, or even imagined, such a place. He was in a cabin with walls of rough dark wood. Though the cabin was small, it seemed to be stuffed full of things. Jamie’s eyes swept all around; he saw bed, fireplace, small wooden table and chair, wood stove near a sink on steel legs. There was one window, near the foot of the bunk; a door next to the window; and a second door next to the sink.
There were shelves on all the walls, and they were full of cans and boxes of food, blankets, folded clothes, flashlights, bottles of whiskey, cans of dog food—more different things than Jamie could count, more than he had ever seen in such a small place.
The place smelled like a barn. Or almost. The cabin had the smells of a grown-up’s sweat and dirty socks; of wood smoke and cooking; of mud and leaves and firewood (there were logs behind the stove and next to the fireplace); of kerosene from the lanterns hanging from hooks; of dog.
Jamie didn’t want to stay in this place. He wanted to put his clothes on, with no one watching him, and go home with his father.
Jamie started to cry. Thinking of his father made him feel even worse, and he let out a sob that turned into a scream.
A door banged open. There was the great big dog. And there was the man, whose face Jamie had not seen clearly before. Jamie looked at the man’s face and screamed again.
Nineteen
In the dim vestibule, Heather Casey pressed the button marked LUNA, CARMINE. She leaned close to the microphone as she pressed the buzzer again. Will hadn’t suggested it, but he was glad she was going to talk to Carmine first. He was sure Carmine would never see him otherwise.
A third time she pressed the buzzer. Nothing.
Shit, Will thought.
Heather Casey looked at him with raised eyebrows that said, Now what?
“As long as you went to the trouble to come here with me, let’s try the super,” Will said. He pressed the button for the building superintendent.
After a few seconds, the inner door opened. The man in the doorway was short, slim, over sixty, and his flannel shirt smelled of cigar smoke. “Yeah?” he said.
“Sorry to bother—”
“We’re here to see Carmine Luna,” Heather Casey interrupted forcefully. “I work with him at the hospital, and he didn’t show up today.”
The super opened the door to let them in. “I think I heard him go out a couple hours ago,” the super said.
“Did you hear him come back?” Will said.
“I ain’t even sure it was him goin’ out. But let’s go have a look.”
They followed the super up a foul-smelling dark staircase whose apple green walls were peeling. Will remembered the guilt he’d felt when his wife had chided him for going after Carmine. Now, seeing the drabness that was Carmine’s apartment building, Will felt sorry for the man. Then he remembered how Fran had looked in the hospital bed, and the feeling went away.
“I hope he’s in,” Will said.
The super led them partway down a short brown and yellow corridor on the second floor, stopped in front of a door, and knocked loudly. After several seconds of silence, he knocked again. Nothing. “Ain’t here,” the super said.
“Could you please check,” Casey said. “I wouldn’t want him to lose his job. Or fall behind on his rent.”
The thought of lost money shone briefly in the super’s eyes, and he took a giant key ring from his belt.
The super opened the door; flicked on a light inside, and stepped in. In the moment before they followed him, Casey looked at Will and whispered, “The hospital doesn’t pay people like Car
mine very much.”
Dust balls rolled like tumbleweeds where the brown wood floor met the gray plaster walls. A table and chair stood on a throw rug in the middle of the room.
Will’s first impression was that the room was like countless others lived in by young bachelors.
“Anyone home?” the super said. “Guess not.”
The place smelled of dust, old food, and stale breath. Along the wall farthest from the door were a sink, small stove, and refrigerator. As Will reached the middle of the room, he caught a sour odor from the dirty pots and dishes piled in the sink and strewn along the counter.
Will’s mind went back two decades, to his own days as a single man. He had let his dishes and laundry pile up, but what he was seeing (and smelling) now was different. It was not just clutter; it was filth. On just about every square inch of shelf, there were encrusted dishes, empty beer cans, grease-stained cardboard containers from take-out meals eaten many days ago.
“Well?” the super said impatiently.
“This place is a sty,” Will said.
“Hey,” the super said. “I don’t provide maid service. Okay? How he lives is his business.”
“Right,” Will said.
But there was something about Carmine’s living space that spelled sickness, decay, corruption.
Without asking permission, Casey walked to the door on the left wall, which obviously led to the bedroom and bath-room. She pushed it open and turned on a light. “Carmine?” she said, knocking on the nearest closed door. “It’s Heather Casey.”
“Look,” the super said. “You can tell he ain’t here. All right?”
“Carmine?” Casey turned the doorknob and pushed. “It’s stuck.”
Will held his breath. For no logical reason, he half-expected the bathroom door to bump against a body if Casey pushed on it again. She did, and the door gave.
Heather Casey turned on the bathroom light. Will was standing over her shoulder, still holding his breath. Will exhaled in relief when he saw the wrinkled towel still partly jammed under the door.
“Time to go, folks.”
“He doesn’t keep a very neat place, does he?” Heather Casey said, ignoring the super.
Dust and hair lurked in the corners of the bathroom, along with dirty towels and underwear. Will was thankful that the toilet lid was down; that way, only a hint of an awful smell reached his nostrils.
Will edged past the superintendent and stood next to Heather Casey in the tiny hallway illuminated weakly by the light from the bathroom. They faced another closed door. This time, Will tried the knob. Locked.
“Suppose he’s takin’ a nap?” the super said with annoyance.
Ignoring him again, Casey knocked loudly. “Carmine? Carmine!”
Will looked at the super. “I think you should check in there.”
“Suppose he’s sleepin’ off a drunk or somethin’? He’s entitled.”
“Something’s not right,” Casey said sternly. “Please open the door.”
The super produced his key ring, fumbled for a moment, and unlocked the door. Heather Casey opened it but deferred to the super, who reached around her to find the wall switch.
Again, Will held his breath and was relieved when the light showed an unmade bed, a dresser of dirty unpainted wood, and clothes strewn everywhere. The window was open a few inches, but the air in the room was foul. It smelled of dust, dirty laundry, and…
Heather Casey noticed it first: The bed was slightly cock-eyed, and the covers had been pulled down on the side facing the wall, as though something or someone had rolled off the bed into the narrow space and caused the bed to slide.
The nurse stepped into the room far enough to see between the bed and wall. Will saw her recoil in shock, but only for a second, before her professional control took over. “We’ll have to call the police,” she said coolly.
Will tiptoed to her side and looked between the wall and bed. Carmine was there, lying on his back, his head toward the foot of the bed. He was wearing pants but was barefoot and shirtless. A belt was wrapped tightly around his left arm. His right arm lay across his chest, the hand near the bulging left biceps, where the hypodermic needle was embedded. Carmine’s eyes were half open and death-glazed, the lips drawn back from clenched teeth, almost as though he had steeled himself for the final leap.
The room smelled of dust, dirty laundry—and death.
They waited for the police in the building super’s office. Will had never gotten used to death, and the sight of Carmine lying on the floor with his eyes empty was burned into his mind as clearly as a snapshot.
He avoided Heather Casey’s eyes, afraid that he would see in them an accusation—that if Will hadn’t confronted him, Carmine would still be alive. But that was crazy. Wasn’t it?
The police arrived: two uniformed patrolmen and a detective. Will, Casey, and the super told the detective how they had found the body. They were all sure they hadn’t touched anything except light switches and doorknobs.
“Doesn’t much matter,” the detective said. “Never saw a plainer overdose.”
He said it in such an indifferent, almost contemptuous way that Will was pleased when Heather Casey said quietly, “Carmine worked at the hospital, where I work, and he was a human being. Like all of us.”
Will studied the detective: a big man, with some fat but also thick slabs of muscle, reddish face, dark curly hair. Why was there something vaguely familiar about him? Will didn’t think he’d run into him at police headquarters.
In bored, perfunctory tones, the detective questioned the three of them. Most of the questions were directed to the building superintendent, and they had to do with whether he had seen any other recent visitors to Carmine Luna’s apartment (no) and whether he had heard any strange noises from there (no).
Will continued to study the detective’s face, still trying to figure why it was vaguely familiar. Finally, the detective looked at Heather Casey. For the first time, he smiled. “I didn’t mean to sound like such a hard ass. I remember you now. It’s been a while. How have you been?”
“Fine, thank you. It has been a while. Since before you were a detective.” The nurse’s tone was a bit softer.
“Right. And you came here just now because Carmine didn’t show up for work?”
“That’s right. I just wanted to check up on him.”
“And he called in sick?”
“Yes.”
“And you wanted to be sure he was all right?”
“Yes.”
The detective looked puzzled, maybe even skeptical. “Well, my guess is that he couldn’t wait for a fix. He got it, all right.”
Heather Casey shook her head sadly. “It’s not like I was a friend of Carmine’s. I wasn’t. But it’s such a sad thing. Such a … waste.”
“It is that,” the detective agreed. “But I’m not quite clear why you came by to check on him—the two of you—when he wasn’t even a friend.”
Will decided he had let Heather Casey carry the ball for him long enough. “I wanted to see Carmine,” he said.
“What about?”
The moment of truth, Will thought. What to tell, what to hold back? To hell with it. “I’m a newspaperman from Bessemer, here to follow the Brokaw kidnapping. One of my colleagues, a reporter, was fatally injured the night before Thanksgiving. An automobile accident.”
“I know the wreck you mean. And now I know who you are. You worked with that guy, huh?”
“Yes.”
“What’s that got to do with the late”—here, the detective had to check his notes—“Carmine Luna?”
Casey came to Will’s aid again. “Carmine was a lab tech. He did the blood test on Mr. Shafer’s friend after the accident. I drew the blood.”
“Which had plenty of booze in it, if I remember right,” the detective said to Will. “Your friend was drunk.”
“I have reason to think otherwise,” Will said.
“Meaning what?” A challenge.
&n
bsp; “Meaning I think Carmine monkeyed around with the blood test one way or the other.”
“And what makes you think that?”
Will told him as succinctly as he could about Fran Spicer’s drinking habits and the time of his stop at the liquor store and the time of the accident, and how it all didn’t add up.
When Will was finished, the detective looked at him with cold, hard eyes and spoke quietly. “Some people would say you’re interfering with police business.”
“That’s not my intention.” Like hell, Will thought. “But I don’t want my friend remembered as a man who died a drunk.”
The detective studied Will, who studied him back. Will still wondered why the face was familiar.
“And just why would Carmine, or anyone else, screw up a blood test?”
“I don’t know that.”
“You don’t know that,” the detective mocked. Then he turned to Heather Casey. “You know anything about this?”
“Mr. Shafer has shared his feelings with me, yes,” she said evenly. “And I must say, I do have some misgivings myself.”
God bless Heather Casey, Will thought.
The detective shrugged, looked at Will, and said, “For whose benefit would this Carmine guy do something like that?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know. You’re the one making the accusation.”
“I’m not accusing…” But I am, Will thought; I am accusing somebody. “I don’t know for whose benefit.”
Just then, there were heavy steps in the corridor outside. The blanket-covered body of Carmine Luna was being carried out on a stretcher. A patrolman leaned into the room and said to the detective, “Nothing special upstairs. A couple bucks on the dresser, is all. And no drugs. He probably bought a bag and popped it all at once.”
“So,” the detective said to Will, “unless the deceased has a big bank account, which I strongly doubt…”
“I don’t have the answers,” Will said. “Only questions.”
“That’s fair enough. As I recall, the other person involved in the accident was a woman from town.”