Coates, Deborah - [Wide Open 03] - Strange Country

by Deborah Coates

  “He called me to say,” Hallie spoke slowly, trying to keep her own strain from showing. Shouldn’t they be worrying about Laddie, here? Wasn’t he the one who’d been shot? “That he had some information, something he wanted me to know. But something happened before we could get here and before he could tell me.”

  Gerson looked at her long and hard. Finally, she gave a quick nod that was more like a jerk. “Okay,” she said. “Thank you.” Then, “Deputy,” her voice was sharp. “Have you photographed the entire area?” She stepped between Hallie and Boyd and walked quickly over to Mazzolo and Laddie’s car.

  Boyd pulled Hallie back toward the road. “Did Laddie tell you something on the phone?” he asked.

  “Yes. But I don’t know what he meant. It’s related. It’s all related, that’s the only thing I’m sure of. He called because of the explosion last night and because of something that happened twenty years ago. Some connection between those two things. I think he knew what too many stones too close together would do. I should—I don’t know—I should have forced him to tell me when we talked the first time, right after Prue died.”

  “Don’t,” Boyd said. “You can’t change what’s already happened.”

  “You don’t actually even know if that’s true, given what happens around here on a fairly regular basis. Maybe we can change what’s happened. Maybe we just have to figure out how.”

  Boyd shook his head. “I don’t think that’s a road we want to go down.”

  “I didn’t want to go down any road, not from the very beginning. I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t want it. And look how it’s turned out.”

  “It’s the hand we’ve got,” Boyd said.

  “Well, it’s a pretty goddamned lousy hand.”

  21

  “Deputy Davies!” Agent Gerson’s voice sounded high-pitched and brittle. Boyd glanced at Hallie, but she was looking down the road, like she could see all the way to Templeton and Laddie in the clinic.

  “Do you know who these people are?” Gerson asked Boyd when he approached her. She showed him a faded photograph, preserved in a plastic bag; one corner of the photograph had been bent up, and within the triangle of the bend, the picture contained what Boyd figured were the original colors, but the rest had gone sepia-toned. He took it from Gerson’s outstretched hand and examined it carefully.

  The photograph looked like it had been taken fifteen or maybe even twenty years earlier, judging by the haircuts, the clothes, and the car they were standing in front of. There were four men and two women in the picture, and though three out of the five looked different than, say, the way they’d look today, Boyd recognized Prue Stalking Horse, Tel Sigurdson, and Laddie. The two remaining—a woman with a thick braid pulled forward over her shoulder and a scarf worn like a cowboy’s kerchief around her neck, her hair so light, it looked nearly white in the faded tones of the photograph; and a thickset man with dark hair in a severe crew cut, a heavy five-o’clock shadow, and his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his leather jacket, Boyd didn’t know either of them, although the woman looked familiar in some way he couldn’t quite place. He couldn’t tell where the picture had been taken. There was a building wall just visible at the right edge of the photograph—brick and the hint of a cornerstone, though he couldn’t read the date.

  He pointed at the three people he knew. “That’s Prue Stalking Horse,” he said. “Laddie Kennedy next to her, and Tel Sigurdson on the far left. He’s the big rancher out northeast of Prairie City.”

  “What about the others?” Gerson asked him. “What about him?” She pointed to the third man.

  Boyd shook his head. “No.”

  “You don’t know him?” Gerson persisted.

  “No.”

  “It’s William Packer,” Gerson said.

  “The body in the cellar?”

  “Yes.” Gerson’s response was clipped. “The woman?” she asked again before Boyd could ask more questions about William Packer, about who he was and why he was in a photograph with Laddie Kennedy and Prue Stalking Horse.

  “I don’t know. She looks familiar.” He showed the photograph to Hallie, though Gerson made an aborted move to take it back from him before Hallie could look.

  Holding the photo in one hand, Hallie said, “No, I’ve never seen either of them. That building, though. It’s the old schoolhouse in West PC, I think.” She flipped it over and looked at the back. “What does this mean?” she asked. In a thick hand, someone had written—All the talents.

  “Talents? What? Like they can play the piano or something?”

  “Where did you find this?” Boyd asked Gerson. “On the seat? In the glove box? How do you think it’s related?” Boyd thought the photograph was probably the reason Laddie had called Hallie. Or a piece of it. Right time frame—at least, twenty years ago seemed to come up over and over, and he’d sure be happy to know what had happened back then.

  “You’re certain you don’t know the other two people in this photograph?” Gerson looked at him intently, like she suspected he knew something he wasn’t telling her. She probably looked at everyone like that in the middle of an investigation, but it was a contrast to the last time they’d been together, and he wondered exactly what had happened between when he last saw her and now.

  “Never seen them before,” he said. “Do you have a theory?”

  She didn’t answer, but turned to Mazzolo and said, “Log everything and get someone out here to tow this car back to town.” To Boyd, she said, “Tell me where to find the clinic in Templeton. I want to talk to this Mr. Kennedy as soon as possible, if it’s possible.” She grimaced. “I understand he spoke with our murder victim a few hours before she died. He should have been interviewed days ago.”

  “He was,” Boyd said. “The sheriff was working on the follow-ups. He’s sent you updates.”

  She frowned. “All right. Maybe I missed a message. In any case, we don’t have much time to waste. Can you finish here?”

  Behind them, Mazzolo cleared her throat. Boyd nodded. “I’ll take care of it,” he said.

  “Tell me how to get to this clinic,” Gerson said.

  “Go back the way you came,” Boyd began.

  “I’ll come with you,” Hallie said.

  Gerson looked like she wanted to say no, and Hallie added. “It’ll be quicker. I can show you.”

  Hallie took hold of Boyd’s arm by the sleeve, pulled him back a step, and said quietly, “Maker was here.”

  Maker was often around. Boyd wasn’t sure why Hallie was pointing it out now.

  “He was here and now he’s gone,” Hallie said. She paused. “I think it’s Laddie.”

  “Harbinger,” Boyd said quietly. He had seen Maker once, when he and Hallie were in the under. He remembered it like a particularly vivid dream. He remembered details from that time—what things looked like and even what they smelled like. He remembered that it had seemed so much like Iowa, like the home he grew up in, that it hadn’t occurred to him to question it until Hallie showed up. He remembered, but it didn’t feel like a memory, not like meeting Hallie for the first time, or getting married when he was nineteen. Not quite real and not exactly a dream, that was how the under—and Maker—felt to him.

  “Yes,” Hallie said, “Harbinger of death.”

  He touched her cheek. “Be careful,” he said.

  She didn’t reply.

  Gerson started back to her car, but Boyd stopped her. “What?” she said impatiently.

  “The photograph.” Boyd gestured toward the picture in her hand. “Don’t you want to log it with the rest of the evidence?”

  “No,” she said. “I’ll ask Kennedy about it, if I can. We’ll log it later.”

  Boyd frowned, but let it go.

  “I’ll be there as soon as I can,” he said to Hallie, a promise and a reminder.

  * * *

  Hallie hadn’t realized how cold she was until she got into Gerson’s car. The interior of the car itself was barely above freezing, eve
n though it hadn’t been parked long, and when Gerson started the engine, cold air came out of the vents with a muffled roar. No wind in the car and it still felt colder, or made Hallie feel colder than the air outside.

  Gerson didn’t talk and Hallie was fine with that. Halfway to Templeton, snow began to fall hard. Hallie didn’t think it would last, but it was one more thing. The windshield wipers went back and forth, back and forth. All she could think was—Laddie. Jesus, Laddie. Why didn’t you just let me help?

  “You can’t see him,” Gerson said as she pulled into the clinic parking lot. “If he’s awake, I need to question him.”

  “Oh, I can see him,” Hallie said. She had her seat belt off and was out of the car as soon as Gerson stopped.

  “Hey!” Gerson said, but she was still fumbling with her own seat belt, and Hallie was already inside the clinic. It was weirdly quiet, no one up front and she couldn’t hear any sound from the back. The door closed behind her with the nearly silent whoosh of a pneumatic release. She rounded the front counter and headed down the hall. The first two rooms were empty, but she found them in the last door on the left.

  No one moved. The young EMT looked at his hands. The other EMT, whom Hallie hadn’t seen out at the church and who she thought now was Charlie Bishop, who ran the only shoe store in Templeton, sat on a stool with his head buried in his hands. A woman in a white lab coat, who Hallie presumed was the doctor, stood in the middle of the room with her hands at her side. Her coat was streaked with blood, and she was still wearing gloves.

  Opposite the door, Laddie lay on a narrow hospital bed with a thin sheet pulled halfway up his chest. There was an impossible amount of blood, IVs still running into both arms, but the monitors were off and the room was silent.

  The chill Hallie felt ran all the way up her spine and hit the back of her head like an arctic blast. She recognized this look, this attitude, this silence. She’d seen it before.

  “Goddamnit,” she said. No one even looked at her.

  She crossed the room and took Laddie’s hand in hers. It was already turning cold.

  Oh, Laddie.

  She wanted to cry, but she was too angry to cry. Wanted to hit something, wanted to punish the person who’d done this—why had they done this? To Laddie, who never hurt anyone, who never had any luck, who never would have any luck now.

  “Who are you?”

  The doctor’s voice sounded shrill in the stark, sterile room.

  Hallie ignored her. There was so much blood that she couldn’t tell exactly where Laddie had been shot. Just above the heart, she finally decided.

  “You can’t just walk in here,” the doctor said.

  “I just did,” Hallie told her.

  Special Agent Gerson strode into the room. “What did you think—?” then stopped when she saw them all.

  “Get out,” Hallie said without turning away from Laddie. “All of you. Just get out of here right now.” Her voice was low without much inflection, but it must have been effective because a moment later she heard the soft whoosh of air as the door closed.

  She hadn’t known Laddie long at all, had really known him only the last couple of months, but she’d liked him. He’d been quiet and not particularly comfortable with what life had handed him, his fortune-telling abilities, the dead talking to him. All he’d ever wanted as far as she could tell was a ranch to run his cattle on and to maybe do something that mattered.

  Goddamnit.

  She sat with him for a few more minutes, just because she didn’t want him to be alone even though whatever made him Laddie was already gone. Then she grimaced and went through his pockets, his shirt and jacket, which had been cut off and thrown on the floor, already gone stiff with drying blood. She found the stone in his front shirt pocket. It was hot when she picked it up, like it had been in a coal fire, and she almost dropped it, but it cooled quickly, though it still glowed blue-white along several thin cracks. There was dried blood, like old paint across the flat top of the stone.

  Hallie didn’t care about the blood, thought it was right that it should be bloody, thought Laddie deserved for it not to be neat and clean and as if he hadn’t died. She stuck it in her pocket, brushed the hair off Laddie’s forehead, and kissed him gently on the cheek.

  Then she walked across the room and opened the door.

  22

  The two EMTs, Charlie Bishop and the young man Hallie didn’t know, stood behind the front counter, just stood there, like they’d been frozen. The doctor typed something on a keyboard attached to a wall-mounted monitor.

  “Where’s Agent Gerson?” Hallie asked. Her voice sounded so loud and unexpected that she startled herself. The two EMTs turned their heads almost in unison and stared at her as if they couldn’t quite remember who she was. People must have died before, she thought, maybe not like this, but certainly in car crashes and farm implements. Messy deaths, because lots of deaths were messy.

  But maybe they’d never gotten used to it.

  Hallie never had.

  “Who?” the doctor sounded angry, but Hallie didn’t think she was angry at her.

  “Special Agent Gerson. From the state.” She cleared her throat, surprised at how rough she sounded. “She was just here.”

  The EMTs looked at the doctor, who scowled and said, “Oh, her. She went outside.”

  Hallie looked outside. It was still snowing. She pulled open the door and stepped out. She could see Gerson puffing furiously on a cigarette, talking on her phone and pacing. Hallie stepped back inside. “Did she say anything?” she asked.

  “She said nobody leaves, nobody touches the body, and nobody goes back in that room,” the doctor said, then gave an exasperated sigh, like all this had been designed to inconvenience her, slapped off the wall monitor, stalked down the hall to the first door on the right, went inside, and closed the door.

  Hallie crossed to the far side of the room, to a bank of plastic chairs hooked together. She didn’t sit down, didn’t feel as if she could sit down, like her knees refused to bend. She pulled out her phone and called Boyd.

  “Laddie’s dead,” she said when he answered. She didn’t know another way to say it, just flat out, because nothing could soften or make it better.

  Boyd swore.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I know he was your friend.”

  That was painful, like a blade to the heart, because you knew it, knew it all the way down, but you didn’t say it. Saying it made it public, put it right out in front of people. Saying it made you want to actually cry.

  “Yeah,” she said. Like, don’t talk about it anymore. “What the hell is happening?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, and again, he sounded uncharacteristically tired.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Waiting for a tow truck,” he said.

  “Did you find anything? Any idea who did this? What they want? Why?”

  “Hallie,” Boyd said in that quiet way that made her feel both better and worse. “I don’t know.”

  “Yeah,” Hallie said. By which she meant, goddamnit.

  She hung up. Charlie Bishop had gone outside, was standing right in front of the glass doors, smoking a cigarette and, Hallie judged by the direction of his gaze, watching Gerson pace and talk on the phone.

  The younger of the two EMTs sat in one of the chairs near Hallie. Just sat there, with his elbows on his knees and his clasped hands between them.

  Hallie went and sat beside him, leaving one empty chair between.

  “What’s your name?” Hallie asked him. He really did look as if he was about eighteen, which he probably was.

  He cleared his throat, sniffed a couple of times, and said, “Gatsby Waters.”

  “Gatsby?”

  He winced. “My dad, he grew up in Wyoming and he had this horse. Killed a mountain lion, he said. Saved his life. He named me after the horse.”

  “At least he didn’t name you after the mountain lion.”

  “Yeah.” Like
he hadn’t really heard her. “I go by Gats mostly. Or just Waters.” He stared at the far wall, like something might appear there, something that would make the day, this particular run, make sense. But Hallie knew that would never happen. “I’m sorry,” he said finally. “I’m sorry we couldn’t save him.”

  “I’m not mad at you,” Hallie said. “You didn’t shoot him.”

  Maker trotted into the reception area, stopped and looked at Hallie; then it crossed the room and sat beside her. Maker didn’t shoot Laddie either, she told herself. It was just there, like Death or reapers or the inevitability of time. No one killed Laddie but the person with the rifle. She put her hand on Maker’s head, which she’d never done before. It was cold, but not uncomfortable. Maker lay down and rested its head on her boot.

  “It isn’t that I think I can save everyone,” Gats was saying.

  Yes, you do, Hallie thought. You do think that. Because that was the kind of thing you thought when you were eighteen. She knew, because she’d thought that way at eighteen herself. She still did.

  “I mean … I just. I guess it nicked an artery because it looked bad, but it didn’t look that bad. Maybe if we’d gotten there faster or gotten out of there faster or if we’d been closer to Rapid City. Maybe if…” He trailed off because none of those things mattered. He couldn’t go back and do it over or find a way for Laddie to be shot right in front of the hospital. He couldn’t change the way things had happened, though Hallie knew what it was like, that wish that you could try.

  Special Agent Gerson came back inside in a swirl of cold air and tiny snowflakes, dry as dust. She crossed the room to where Hallie and the young Gatsby Waters were sitting. Maker stretched out its neck and sniffed at her pants leg.

  “I’m sorry,” Gerson said. “I understand he was a friend of yours.”

  “Thank you,” Hallie said. “He didn’t kill Prue Stalking Horse.”

  “No,” said Gerson, considering. “If he had, he wouldn’t be dead now.”

  Hallie winced, though she figured Gerson was right.