“You got a phone call coming to you. Ask somebody else for a favor. I’m a little pissed right now. No, a lot pissed.”
“Okay, but only you can do this one,” Morgan said. “Ask Tubby Gertz if the mortuary’s back door was wedged closed from the outside when he got there. Why would we have blocked our only escape route?”
CHAPTER NINE
Claire Morgan bailed her husband out of the Perry County Jail as the sun peeked over the eastern edge of the vast, empty prairie grasslands that surrounded Winchester, Wyoming.
Morgan hadn’t slept in more than a day, and although his body was drained, his bleary mind frothed and stewed like rancid meat in an unwashed stew pot. He was burned, arrested and humiliated in his town, and it was press day.
The jail nurse had already bandaged his burns and smeared some industrial-strength cortisone gel on his scarlet face, where small, watery blisters had already erupted. His shoulder throbbed, but X-rays would have to wait for more professional care than a seldom-used, small-town jail could provide.
Claire said almost nothing as they drove to the hospital to see Shawn Cowper. She only asked once, and in a small voice freighted with disappointment: “Why?”
He had no more and no better answers for his wife than he had for Trey Kerrigan, who had booked him on misdemeanor trespassing while he investigated charges of breaking and entering, and arson. Rather than say something stupid, he said nothing.
His arraignment was scheduled later in the day before Justice of the Peace Rayfield O’Brien, who loved to editorialize from the bench and who happened to be married — unfortunately for Morgan — to Carter McWayne’s first cousin, Gwinny.
Morgan had been in courtrooms on a thousand days, but always as an observer, never in the dock. He’d often smirked when some skell had been laid raw by a judge’s tongue-lashing, and now as an accused felon — not to mention an incisive editorial writer who had occasionally railed at and ridiculed certain injustices in the justice system — he would stand naked before the whip himself.
Morgan walked down the long, echoing hallway, past the nurses’ station and radiology, to ICU. He had always hated the antiseptic smell of hospitals, where they tried to cover up the scent of illness and death, to wipe it away. Not like cemeteries, where the odor was more honest.
Shawn Cowper occupied a private room in the intensive care ward. His body was wrecked hamburger, chopped, sliced and braised, then sutured, stitched, glued and salved. He had drifted in and out of consciousness since he arrived a few hours before.
Dr. Ravi Pradesh, the new emergency doc, fingered the beeping, blinking machines connected to the wires and tubes that tapped into Cowper’s nerves and veins, and tried to explain Cowper’s condition in a hash of Indian accent and laborious terminology. Educated offshore like so many of the young doctors who came to small towns in the American hinterlands, he knew the words he’d read in medical textbooks, but not the words people needed to hear.
“The chemical burn to the airways has many, uh, manifestations. His mucosal irritation will continue, and he will develop bronchorrhea, so he will be, uh, coughing and expectorating,” Dr. Pradesh said just as Cowper hacked a glob of sooty sputum into his mask.
“Bacteria are inside, and they are gathering … like a team, yes? When his damaged mucosa becomes necrotic, it will fall off, and as his air pipe becomes inflamed, we will be watching very closely for the edema. That makes it very, very hard for him to breathe, which will make him fatigued and, how you’d say … not breathing easy.”
“Will he be okay, doctor?” Morgan asked.
“The combination of the chemicals burning in his lungs and the fire on his body are, uh, very, very bad,” the young doctor said in his chopped English. “If we can control the infection … maybe okay, maybe not. I’m sorry.”
Morgan listened, but didn’t need an interpretation of the ponderous, pidgin medico-speak: Shawn’s lungs were baked from the inside out, flensed by the paring blades of chemicals and smoke. Except when coughing blackish goo, his weak, wounded breath heaved a vapor on the inside of his clear plastic oxygen mask, which dissipated every time he breathed in. Like doughboys who breathed mustard gas in World War I, the delicate sacs of his lungs had been melted and disfigured, and he would likely not take another painless breath for the rest of his life.
But he was alive.
Dr. Pradesh left the room, looking uncertain if he should or not. Morgan glanced at Cowper’s chart, on which someone had noted that police were to be notified if and when he was conscious and speaking. Kerrigan hadn’t posted any guards outside the room, so apparently he wasn’t too worried his suspect would flee. And nobody stopped Morgan from going in, even though the town was most certainly abuzz by the time he arrived.
From Cowper’s hospital room window on the second floor of the squat little hospital, Morgan could see a thin spiral of smoke coming from the tranquil, tree-lined neighborhood where McWayne’s Funeral Home had stood less than twelve hours before. The fire had burned all night, booming and belching fire every time a vat or tank of some unknown chemical was consumed. By now, Morgan knew the state hazmat crews in their sealed space suits would be sampling the caustic air and sifting through the debris in the hot zone, hunting for remnant toxins.
In the daylight, it all seemed so absurd now.
A fantasy about a mythic outlaw’s lover leads to an obsession about the identity of a mutilated corpse which leads to a sheriff’s iniquitous hanging which leads to a nebulous drug conspiracy which leads to an ill-advised breakin which leads to jail.
Morgan would have laughed if the pain in his shoulder and his heart hadn’t been so venomous. And he would have stayed right here in this room with his friend if he didn’t suddenly realize that somebody out there was still trying to kill him.
The newsroom of the Winchester Bullet wasn’t just Morgan’s church. It was his obsession, his compulsion, his passion. And on Wednesdays, it was his sanctuary.
He went back there from the hospital, his clothes still pungent with smoke, sweat and shame. Half the morning was gone, deadline loomed, and he’d literally inhaled the biggest story of the week. He was more the story than the reporter now, but he must make a newspaper anyway, even if it was like writing his own obituary.
Morgan parked in the alley behind the Bullet and came in through the back door. Crows mocked him from the tall, ancient cottonwoods. The morning was already hot, and when he opened the heavy steel door, cool air rushed out to embrace him. The smell of ink hung like a vapor, not acrid and not sweet. It comforted him.
A safety bell, not unlike a short school bell or an apartment buzzer in a big city, rang on the press whenever the rollers inched forward for a new plate, warning anyone standing close enough that a finger, a tie, a sleeve might get snagged in the past week’s news if proper care wasn’t taken. As the plates came faster and the press deadline neared, the bell rang more insistently as the hulking black Goss press, smeared by years of inky hands, steeled itself for the task of spewing The Bullet.
Cal Nussbaum was preparing the press for the day’s run.
At top speed, the week’s full edition of two thousand papers would be printed in seven minutes, but Cal was a gentler printer than most. He treated the web of newsprint like a continuous sheet of tissue paper, protected from ripping by its uniform tautness from the half-ton rolls that fed each unit. As a pressman, Cal was a Sunday driver, a slow hand who preferred the low, rhythmic thrum of the machine to the speed of the journey.
Printing a newspaper was an art in itself for Cal Nussbaum, the beginning of the week, not the end. He was in no hurry, and the week’s run of The Bullet might take more than a half hour to roll off the press.
Cal applied the ink in ethereal layers, rather than slathering it in thick, black gobs, because it was not only an expensive petroleum product he bought in fifty-five-gallon drums, but because he hated it when the Friday-night boys at the Elks Club complained about the inky residue it left on their wives�
� fingers. Every newspaper smudges, Cal told them, and he knew the man who invented a smudge-free newspaper ink would become a billionaire overnight, but he hated thinking of the gentle ladies of Winchester going to Wednesday night church with hands like auto mechanics in calico dresses. It was a point of pride for him to keep the smudging ladylike.
For Cal himself, the smudges on his fingers were permanent. The ink had seeped into every microscopic fissure and crevasse in his paw-like hands. Its distinctive tattoo could never be scrubbed off, even if he’d wanted to … and he didn’t. The newspaper business had marked him indelibly for the rest of his life, and likely for the eternity of death.
Once, in an uncharacteristic moment of sentimentality abetted by several beers, Cal told Morgan he wished to be cremated after he died and some of his ashes stirred into the press’s ink fountains. That way, he said, he’d truly become part of the weekly newspaper he’d printed since he was a kid back in the Forties. Morgan respected the simple charm of Cal’s passion, and he fervently hoped he’d never have to explain someday to a state health inspector how a man’s mortal remains had been thrown on every doorstep in town.
Cal was hunkered under the press unit, fastening a printing plate to the press, and looked up when he heard the back door close. He raised his chin toward his boss, more greeting than friendship. The best he could manage for Morgan was a crumpled smile, more pity than greeting.
“We’re late,” Cal grumbled.
“Yeah, sorry. What’s still out?”
“Damn near everything. No sports, no living, no editorial, no front,” the old pressman said, as if he’d said it a thousand times before. And he likely had. “Those damn kids don’t know what to do without you ridin’ herd.”
The burns on Morgan’s face tingled as the blood rose in him. He glanced at his watch: ten-thirty. A half-hour before the press was to start.
“Yeah, well, sorry,” he said. “Let’s see what we can do in the next two hours. If we can put it to bed by one, we’ll still have time to get to the Post Office.”
It would also allow Morgan an hour to find a lawyer for his two o’clock arraignment.
“Wouldn’ta happened with Old Bell,” Cal complained, as if invoking a saint. And to Cal, the old editor was a saint.
Morgan fixed a steely stare on Cal, who’d already turned back to his tinkering on the press.
No, it wouldn’t, Morgan wanted to say out loud. Old Bell wouldn’t have been so stupid.
The Bullet’s three young reporters didn’t look up when Morgan walked in, but they knew he was there. Although they should have been in the final, fervent moments before deadline, they simply tapped away at their keyboards with a logy distraction. Never mind their editor was now the topic of the police blotter as well as street-corner gossip. It wasn’t their paper.
Morgan stopped beside Josh’s cluttered desk. Josh kept his nose down.
“What do we have on the mortuary fire?” he asked the kid.
Josh flipped through his notebook.
“Uh. Started about four o’clock. No fatalities, dead or alive. Two injured, one critical. Arson suspected. Structure totally destroyed.”
Morgan stopped being a suspect and started being an editor.
“Give me fifteen inches in twenty minutes,” he said, “but it’s ‘deaths,’ not fatalities. And dead people can’t die again. And if something is destroyed, it’s total. ‘Totally destroyed’ is redundant.”
“Right, Chief,” Josh said. “How am I supposed to handle your, um, well, you know.”
“I was arrested at the scene. Get the sheriff’s report and write it straight.”
“No quote from you?”
“You have a question?”
Josh puzzled for a moment.
“Yeah,” he said without looking at Morgan directly. “Did you do it?”
“No.”
“Can I quote you?”
“You’re a goddamned reporter, aren’t you?”
Josh shrugged, and Morgan wondered if the biggest mistake he ever made was going into McWayne’s mortuary in the dead of night with Shawn Cowper — or becoming an editor.
He settled into his own chair and booted up his computer. Exhausted, reeking of smoke, disgraced by his crime, and haunted by an invisible assassin, the last thing on his mind should have been journalism. But journalism was never far from any thought that passed through his brain.
He rubbed his burning, tired eyes. The caustic scent of his hand made his gut clench.
Morgan found Cowper’s business card beneath the papers on his desk and called the pathology department at South Florida University, but nobody answered. It was two hours ahead, summer break and Cowper had advised his team to take a couple weeks off. He hung up, intending to find the university’s main number, where he could at least deliver the news to someone who might contact Cowper’s family, wherever they might be.
But when he looked up, Josh was standing beside the desk.
“So what did you want me to do with this dog-ticket list, Chief?”
“What?”
“You told me to compare the list of dog tickets with the hacked data in the city computer. And just for yucks, I looked to see whose dogs were impounded last week.”
“I did?” Morgan vaguely remembered the assignment, but not the reason. “Why?”
“I don’t know,” Josh shrugged again.
“You don’t know why?”
“Hey, I just do what you told me, Chief.”
“Yeah, right,” Morgan huffed. “Okay, what’d you find?”
“Four names,” Josh thumbed through his notebook and listed them off. “Evangeline Horner. Ray Pittman. Grady Stilwell. Eugene Peach.”
“Who are they?”
“All of ‘em had recent animal-control beefs. Runaways, chicken-killers, barkers, sidewalk-poopers and such. Nothing big.”
Morgan’s mind was still a swirl of smoke and flame, fingerprinting and the sobering antiseptic smell of a hospital. He couldn’t think, and deadline was more pressing.
“OK, fine,” he said. “Give me the list, get that fire story done, and stop calling me chief.”
Josh ripped the narrow sheet from his reporter’s pad and handed it to Morgan, who glanced at the names, all in Josh’s infantile scrawl and all in fountain ink. It was a good thing Josh had read them off, for his handwriting would have been indecipherable if it weren’t so illegible.
“You use a fountain pen?” Morgan asked.
“You bet, Chief,” the kid said. “Graduation gift.”
“Use a pencil. It won’t ruin your shirts.”
Then again, Morgan thought, this is a kid who smuggles butter in his pants. He looked at the list of names.
Evangeline Horner was ninety if she was a day, and timeless. When Morgan was just a kid in Winchester, Evangeline Horner was ninety, and her yappy Chihuahua was a noisy little sack of gristle. Without a doubt, Evangeline’s equally immortal dog had survived two more generations of kids who tormented him by walking down the opposite side of the street.
But Evangeline was no hacker. She had nothing more technical in her home than a pressure cooker.
Eugene Peach raised Bassett hounds in his enormous backyard. He was a much-decorated World War Two Marine, wounded at Tarawa and Guadalcanal, who came home to the inexorable quiet of Winchester and began to go slowly, steadily insane. He was always haunted by battle and by his left hand, which was missing. Everyone assumed it was a war wound, but he never talked about it.
Peach, the one-handed flag-bearer at the VFW, was no hacker either. It’s more likely one of his bassets slipped his leash and wandered around the neighborhood, looking desperately sad and pissing on everything.
Ray Pittman, the north-county rancher and amateur paranoiac who decorated his ranch fenceposts with old boots, owned a perpetually hungry mutt he hated. He might imagine a grand conspiracy against ranch dogs, but it was doubtful he’d threaten municipal terrorism if the dog were jailed. He might celebrate by popp
ing a Coors, but not by blowing up the Town Hall.
Morgan didn’t know Grady Stillwell.
He picked up Winchester’s thin phonebook — nobody in this town ever imagined how a child might be boosted at the dinner table by sitting on a phonebook — and leafed to the S’s, which were on the same page as the Q’s and the T’s. He traced his index finger down to the four Stillwells.
No Grady.
But beneath the name of Willard Stillwell — a former classmate of Morgan’s better known as “Speed” because he was always the first to arrive at the high school keggers — was another number at the same house: children.
Was Speed Stillwell’s kid a dog-loving hacker who muddled the Town Hall computers?
It was a question that would have to wait until after deadline and, for Morgan, until after he was arraigned for arson and breaking-and-entering the McWayne Mortuary, now ashes.
Dode Hicks wasn’t the most expensive lawyer in town, just the smartest. He didn’t do much criminal work, but only because there weren’t enough criminals in Winchester, Wyoming, to support a thriving practice. Mostly, Dode Hicks wrote wills and trusts, arranged land transactions, presided over the Rotary Club, and thought about running for the state Legislature someday. And everyone presumed he’d do it, too, maybe even be the governor, but his name was never actually on the ballot.
Now he was Morgan’s lawyer.
Dode’s office was tucked in a corner of the otherwise vacant floor above the First Wyoming Bank, an antique Main Street building put up in the Thirties with a magnificent brick façade and decorative tin ceilings. The bank downstairs had erased the historic charm by renovating with cubicles, glass walls and imported marble floors, but Dode’s offices were still delightfully ancient, with ceiling fans, sagging bookshelves, braided rugs over worn wood floors, and the lofty pressed-tin ceilings of old.
Dode Hicks liked to refer to himself as a simple country lawyer, but he wasn’t in some significant ways. True, he liked simple things, but he understood the country folk in his practice — and more importantly, on his occasional jury — better than any big-city barrister.
The Obituary (Jefferson Morgan Mysteries Book 2) Page 14