With what? she wondered as she looked out at the wall of pine trees flashing past the window. What the hell exactly was happening between them? He certainly wasn’t any Brad Phillips, but you could never tell.
“It’s coming right up,” Donna said.
Dale eased up on the gas, and realized he had been lost in his own thoughts, completely unmindful of why he was driving out here. Maybe, he thought, it has something to do with the winding road. It does sort of hypnotize you.
“Just over this crest. There on the left.”
Dale checked his rear view mirror to make sure there were no cars behind him before pulling over to the left side of the road and stopping right in front of the rock that marked Casey’s Curve. He killed the engine, and he and Donna got out.
Dale noticed that here, so short a distance out of town, the forest began to reassert itself. Dyer was surrounded to the north and west by large expanses of potato fields, but to the south and east, towards Canada, it was all heavy forest, primarily towering spruce and pine. The wind swayed the tall tops of the trees which hissed like steam. The slanting sun had almost no chance of cutting through the thick growth, and everything was cast in deep shadow.
As they walked from the car toward the rock, three crows took flight from the pile of litter where they had been picking. Cawing rough protests at being disturbed, they wheeled overhead once and then vanished into the woods.
“Great omen,” Dale said. He was a bit surprised at himself for sounding so superstitious—first Rodgers and his evil eye, and now three crows! Good way to end up in the funny farm, he told himself.
The boulder on the side of the road was much larger than Dale had imagined it from Winfield’s description. It was twelve feet tall and covered an area of ground larger than three full-sized dump trucks. Rusted beer and soda cans, along with candy wrappers and empty potato chip bags, which the crows had been picking ranged the base of the rock like a filthy necklace.
Dale whistled between his teeth as he looked up at the rock. “Looks like the kids in these parts like to party out there,” he said.
Donna nodded. “It was the same back when I was in school. They like to sit up at the top at night, drinking beer or smoking pot, waiting to see if there’d be an accident.
“They’re not ambulance chasers; they let the ambulance come to them. Sounds like great fun!” Dale said, kicking up a clump of crumpled, sun-bleached litter.
Winfield had been right about one thing, though; the kids from surrounding towns had had a field day, spray-painting messages and pictures on the face of the rock. Terry luvs Debbie—(The “luvs” had been X-ed over and replaced with “rubs”), Houlton Hornets Suck Shit, Eat The Rich; You can take away my Gusto, just keep your hands off my Busch, along with the symbols of several high school fraternities and sororities and what Dale guessed were the logos of some current heavy metal bands. One particular drawing caught his eye: a scaly white snake, swallowing its own tail.
“I guess you couldn’t miss this in the dark,” Dale said, glancing at Donna.
She was lost in her own memories, thinking about the time, long ago, when Ralph Hutchins had painted Ralph Loves Donna on the rock. He had used Latex paint, and the message didn’t even survive one winter. But that was longer than the romance had lasted, she thought with a laugh.
“The thing is, it comes up kind of fast on you because of the crest back there,” she said, hiking her thumb back the way they had come.
Dale wandered around the rock, stumbling over the torn-open bag of garbage that was the departed crows’ supper. When he saw the swath Larry’s car had carved out of the woods, a thick lump formed in his throat and almost choked him. One edge of the rock looked freshly chipped, and at a sharp angle from there, a seven-foot-wide strip cut more than twenty feet into the brush. The trees that had finally stopped Larry’s progress had fresh gashes, like trail blazes left by a vicious woodsman.
“Goddamn!” Dale said when Donna came up behind him and slid her arm around his waist. “He must’ve been going sixty or seventy miles an hour to do this kind of damage.”
Donna said nothing; she simply stood there, shaking her head. Dale broke away from her and carefully walked the length of the clearing made by Larry’s car. Smaller trees were flattened, and the mulchy ground had twin runnels, several layers deep where the tires had skidded. He could see the deep tire imprints where the tow truck must have backed in to haul out Larry’s car.
For the next few minutes, Dale walked back and forth across the cleared area, bending low and carefully observing the ground. He really didn’t know what he was looking for; it certainly looked as though the police had done a thorough job of cleaning up. The woods would take its own time to heal the rest of the wounds.
“You know, one thing just keeps coming back to me,” Dale said when he rejoined Donna, who was still waiting at the edge of the road.
“What’s that?”
“How really God-damned pitiful it is that the reason Larry was up in this area in the first place was the reason he died. It was roads like this that the state wants to improve. We’ve certainly had enough complaints to warrant some improvements up here.”
Donna nodded. “Yeah, but I don’t think it’s just the curves in the road that cause accidents. If you’ve ever driven a long stretch of this road, you’d know it’s the monotony that gets you more than anything else. Just trees, and trees, and more trees! It can all sort of lull you, until you come to a sharp curve. Sometimes on a straight away, a logging truck will pull out on to the road from some timber road, and whammo! That’s it. You’re history. Of course, some people sort of add to it.”
“What do you mean?”
Donna shrugged and looked fearfully down the dark stretch of road. “Lots of people insist this stretch of road is haunted. You’ve got to admit, it is kind of creepy.”
“I suppose so,” Dale said, nodding agreement. He stood there silently for a moment, his chin in his hand, contemplating. At last, with a deep sigh, he said, “Yeah, but Larry was just heading out of town. He’d been on the road for what, a few minutes? He didn’t have time to get ‘highway-hypnotized.’ ”
“It was late at night,” Donna said. “Maybe he was overtired and shouldn’t have been driving.”
Dale shook his head. “Another thing I wonder is, why was he going so damned fast? I knew Larry. He wasn’t a hot-rodder. As a matter of fact, when he would drive me out to a construction site or something, I’d get frustrated at how slow he went. I always said he drove like an old lady. It just wasn’t like him to speed.”
“Yeah, but you’re forgetting how fast this turn comes up on you after that crest back there,” Donna said.
“And you’re forgetting that Larry grew up here. He knew this curve and this rock were here just as well as you did! You were in the same class as Larry, right?”
Donna nodded.
“How old were you when Casey totaled the school bus here?”
“I don’t know, maybe five or six.”
“But old enough to remember it, right?” Dale said.
“Oh, sure.”
“So,” Dale said, clapping his hands to his sides. “Larry wasn’t a dummy. He knew the curve and the rock were here. So why… why wasn’t he more careful? Unless maybe he was being followed. Or maybe chased?”
“Right,” Donna said, snorting with laughter. “He was—I’ve got it; he was running drugs from Canada, and the Mounties were after him. He died in the crash, and they confiscated the drugs, so there was a big cover-up. Starting with Jeff Winfield, who was getting a kickback from some Canadian drug lord. Right?”
Dale’s frown let her know immediately that he wasn’t amused. “I was thinking more along the lines of Franklin Rodgers,” he said. He tried, but wasn’t successful in keeping the image of Rodgers’ blue eye and dilated pupil from rising in his mind.
“Oh, yeah. Sure,” Donna went on, “Rodgers was in on the drugs. Larry was so pumped up, the last thing the authorities
wanted was an autopsy, so Rodgers forced the closed casket on Mildred to hush everyone up.”
“That isn’t close to funny!” Dale shouted, suddenly turning on Donna with a blast of anger. “My best friend died here! And if you’re going to stand there making jokes about it, you can… you can…”
“Hey! Come on,” Donna said. She came up close to him and slid both arms around his waist. “I was just trying to make you see how silly it is for you to be getting all worked up about this.” She pulled his face down toward hers and gave him a long, slow kiss. Her tongue darted into his mouth, and she made a soft moaning sound as she hugged him closer.
“There, is that better?” she asked when they finally broke off the kiss.
Dale nodded, but she could tell by the tension in his body that it wasn’t better, not by a long shot!
“I was thinking, one thing we could do is pick up where we left off last night,” she said, her voice low and husky close to his ear. “I don’t want to sound too easy, but I’m willing to go all the way.’”
Dale looked at her, and her eyes were sparkling with humor at her use of such an old-fashioned phrase; but beneath the humor, there was a smoldering longing, a need to be loved. His heart thumped heavily in his chest.
“One thing before we go,” he said, backing away from her. “I want to walk up to the crest there and take a look around.”
Donna sighed deeply, and as he turned to go, reached out and snagged him by the arm. “And after that, you’ll let it drop?”
Dale looked her squarely in the eyes and said, “After that I will. I promise.”
Donna smiled and nodded. “Well, then, while you do that, I think I’ll just wait in the car and have a cigarette if it’s all right with you.”
“Just make sure you open the window,” Dale said, frowning.
VII
The hospital doors slammed open, and the Medcu emergency team quickly rolled the stretcher into the emergency room.
“Get someone here. Stat!” one of the men shouted when the desk nurse came over toward them. But before she could respond, a thin man with black hair and thick glasses came out of the doctors’ station. The name on his badge read: Steven Wayne—Physician’s Assistant.
“Steve!” one of the Medcu team shouted as soon as he saw him.
“What have you got?” Steve said as he quickly scanned the man lying on the stretcher. He was young, probably around thirty years old, had sandy hair and a fairly hefty build. Right now, Steve saw, he was alive and conscious, but obviously in a great deal of pain. “Did you get vitals?”
The Medcu man nodded. “Pulse and BP are all right. His name’s Reginald Perry, from Mars Hill. He was out harvesting on a farm along Bates Ridge. He stumbled and fell, and a tractor ran over his chest. From what I could gather, he was damned lucky. He fell in between two rows, and the tractor tire sort of pressed him into the ground. It was soft where it had just been dug. Otherwise, we could’ve just slipped him under the door at Rodgers’.”
“Oh—gee,” the man on the stretcher said, gasping loudly. “Thanks for the—” He coughed, high and tight, and his voice cut off with a gasp.
“Don’t worry, Mr. Perry,” Steve said. “You’re going to be just fine.” He peeled back each eyelid in turn and held a penlight close to check pupil dilation. Then he took an ear scope and checked for bleeding inside the ears. After a quick stethoscope check, Steve nodded to the Medcu team.
“We’re looking okay,” he said. “No cuts or serious contusions. Get him down to X-ray right away. My only concern right now is any lung punctures. There’s probably a cracked rib or two.”
“It—hurts—like—hell—to breathe,” Perry said. His eyes were tiny slits; when he tried to cough again, the best he could make was a watery rattling sound.
“Let’s get him down to X-ray,” Steve said. He backed away as the Medcu team and two nurses shifted Perry onto a hospital stretcher.
“My insurance card is in my wallet,” Perry gasped.
“We’ll take care of everything. Don’t worry,” Steve said as watched Perry get wheeled away. “I want to see him as soon as he’s through in X-ray,” he called out just as the stretcher rounded the corner and was gone. The Medcu team turned and rolled their stretcher back out to the van; then one of them came back to fill in the necessary emergency forms.
An hour later, with a tube stuck down his throat to keep his throat clear, an IV line jabbed into the back of his hand, an oxygen mask over his nose, and a strong jolt of painkiller doing cartwheels in his system, Reginald Perry resting about as comfortably as possible, considering the internal damage he had suffered. The room where he was sleeping was silent except for the steady beep of the monitors that registered his pulse and other vital functions. Late afternoon sunlight, sliced into thin bars by the closed Venetian blinds, reached across the floor and up onto his bed. Perry wasn’t sleeping deeply, merely hovering somewhere in a drugged haze of pain.
The door to Perry’s room, Room 217, swung slowly open. Steve Wayne quickly entered and hushed the door shut behind himself. For a few seconds, he stood there motionless, watching his sleeping patient and listening to the steady beep of the monitors. He had his left hand in the pocket of his white doctor’s jacket; his other hand repeatedly swiped at the sheen of sweat that glistened like dew on his forehead and upper lip.
Prison bars, he thought as his eyes focused on the narrow bands of light crossing the bed. Great… just great…
He took the padded chair from the corner of the room and slid it over in front of the door, bracing it so the top was jammed up under the handle. He gave the door a hefty tug to make sure it would stay shut, then went over to the bed.
Reginald Perry’s breathing was short and shallow, and Steve could hear a slurping sound from deep inside the breathing tube. With his left hand still in his jacket pocket, he gingerly peeled back the blanket covering the sleeping man. The thickly-muscled arm, tanned a deep brown, lay heavily on the clean, white sheet. Twisting blue veins twined over the inside of Perry’s forearm.
“I promise you,” Steve whispered hoarsely, “this won’t hurt you at all.”
Saying that, he gave the sleeping man’s arm a squeeze just below the biceps, probing until he found the artery he wanted. Then he withdrew his left hand from his jacket pocket and held an empty syringe up to the light. The clear barrel caught a ray of sunlight and reflected it. As Steve slowly drew back the plunger, the needle tip made a thin whistling sound. Steve froze when Perry stirred on the bed, but the man’s eyes remained shut, and his breathing remained shallow.
“Almost ready,” Steve said softly. He held the needle poised and then slid it into Perry’s arm with a quick jab.
“Auggh!” Perry cried, his eyes snapping open and widening with fright as Steve pressed in the plunger and shot a bubble of air into Perry’s brachial artery.
Steve reached over and turned the monitor volume down, but not off. That would look suspicious. He stood back, a thin smile playing across his lips while he waited for the effect he knew was due within seconds. The bubble of air, no larger than a BB pellet, would rush to Reginald Perry’s brain and pop! one dead emergency room patient!
Steve quickly pocketed the blood-tipped syringe, pushed the chair back into the corner of the room, and, calmly as he could, walked out into the hospital corridor. He let go a hissing sigh of relief when he saw that the corridor was deserted; no one had seen him either enter or, more importantly, leave Perry’s room.
So far, so good, he thought as he walked briskly down the corridor. Just beside the waiting room was a bank of pay phones. Dr. Joseph Foster, the emergency room director, had made it clear on several occasions that he didn’t want the personnel using the hospital phones for personal use, so he knew it wouldn’t look unusual when he entered one of the booths and swung the door shut. He wanted to be sure he could make this call without being overheard!
His fingers were shaking as he fished change out of his pocket, counted out two dime
s, and dropped them into the slot. As soon as he heard the dial tone, he punched the buttons for a number he had dialed more times than he cared to remember. While he waited for the other party to answer the phone, he thought, again, of the bars of light slicing across the bed in Room 217.
Prison bars! he thought... If they ever find out about this, that’s what I’ll be looking at.
“Hello?” a gruff voice said on the other end of the line.
“Hello. This is Steve Wayne, up at Northern Med.”
“Yesss…” The voice drew the single word out in a long sibilance.
“I’ve got a fresh one for you,” Steve said, cupping the mouthpiece with his hand. His eyes kept flicking out in to the corridor every time someone walked past the phone booth. Already, the booth was heating up, filled with the sticky stench of sweat.
“Oh? You do?” the voice said, almost purring.
“Just came in a little while ago,” Steve said, glancing nervously at his watch. It had been almost three hours since they had wheeled Reginald Perry into the Emergency Room; less than five minutes since the air bubble had popped into his artery. By now, there should be a nice, solid flat line on his monitors.
A sudden flurry of activity outside the phone booth caught his attention, and Steve watched, almost smiling, as two nurses hurried down the corridor. He opened the phone booth just a crack, and then smiled when he heard a voice on the public address say, “Code nine. Room 217. Code nine. Room 217.”
“They just found him,” Steve whispered into the receiver. His left hand was tucked down into his jacket pocket, clenched around the smooth barrel of the hypodermic needle. He knew he had to get rid of that soon; he wouldn’t want to be found holding onto an empty, blood-tipped needle, especially not when the blood matched that of the recently deceased.
“Well, then,” the voice on the phone said softly, “I suppose I should hang up, now. I assume I will be getting a call soon from the hospital.”
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