by Chuck Logan
"Wow," Earl said, starting to grin again.
"You did that to Hank?" Jolene balled her fists.
Allen went on in his patient voice. "And Earl did that to Stovall and you were ready to do it to Amy and Broker. And here we all are."
"Jolene, listen," Earl said, "he's got this really cool idea. We hide the bodies in plain sight."
"And the Ketamine only gives me ten to fifteen minutes to set it up," Allen again offered them the box of Latex gloves.
"Set what up?" Jolene asked.
"Her suicide. See, she feels so bad about what she did to Hank, she just can't live with it. Allen will stage it with drugs and stuff to make it look exactly the way an anesthetist would do it," Earl said.
Allen, less patient, now shook the box of gloves.
Jolene and Earl exchanged questioning glances.
"Fingerprints," Allen said. "You have to wipe this place down while we take care of Broker. Anything you touched."
Jolene and Earl pulled on the tight rubber gloves. A knot of birch popped in the fireplace, showering the hearth with sparks, and they jumped. Allen, focused and calm, did not.
"Broker," Jolene said.
"We were thinking, so we stopped at a liquor store," Earl said. He pulled a brown paper bag from his trench-coat pocket with his
good hand and removed a fifth of Johnny Walker Red Label scotch. "We prime him with this stuff, we dress him less than perfect for the weather, and put him in his truck, take him in the woods, stage a crash, and leave him for the cold."
"And Hank?" Jolene almost whispered.
Allen was taking items out of his bag and arranging them on a rough coffee table. "When we finish here, and get Hank back to town, I'll inject his eyelids with something that will numb them so he can't blink." The drug was Botox—botulism toxin. It was commonly used in cosmetic surgery to smooth out wrinkles. Allen would inject it in the levator muscles to immobilize the eyelids.
Jolene stared at him. "Something?"
Allen smiled. "I could have brought it along and done it here but then you wouldn't need me anymore, and maybe Earl would shoot me and dump me in the woods because I know too much."
"Not bad," Jolene said.
"Now," Allen said. "Amy was an anesthesia provider, so she'd have some sophisticated ideas about getting high. I'm going to give her a long run for a short slide." He and Earl each took one of Amy's arms and lifted her to the fold-out couch. They dropped her next to Hank and their shoulders touched. Her weight shifted and her long hair drifted across her face.
"Wait a minute," Jolene said, touching her own short hair nervously. For the first time she noticed that Amy had taken off her sweater and was wearing a kind of neat print blouse, with a bluepatterned cave painting of stick figures on gray and gold. Her fingernails were painted this deep purple. "You're going to leave her there?"
Allen and Earl stared at her.
Jolene said, "I mean, if I have to clean up, I don't want to watch while she . . ."
"Okay, let's put her in a bedroom," Allen said. They struggled through the kitchen and down a hall. Arms folded across her chest, Jolene followed them.
The bedroom was cold and musty; there was just an antique mahogany four-poster bed and matching dresser. There were used
prescription pill bottles on the dresser and a World War II picture. A tube of Ben Gay lay on the night table. It was the kind of room where an old guy lived alone.
Allen and Earl hoisted Amy to the bed and arranged her with pillows behind her back, to make her appear comfortable. Allen went back for his bag.
Earl said, "So, we thought—if they're traveling together, they could be romantically involved."
"That'd be my guess," Jolene said dryly.
"Then what if the lodge is found in some disarray, evidence of drugs scattered around in the wake of Amy's suicide. And some booze. It might look like Broker was distraught over Amy. He finds her dead, he gets high, drinks too much, and takes off on a fuck-theworld drive too fast; he goes off the road, knocks himself out, shatters the windshield . . ." Earl grinned.
Allen's calm voice continued behind her, in the doorway. "Then we clean up after ourselves, go back home, and no one knows we were here. We read about them in the newspapers. North-woods lovers claimed by suicide and grief." He paused. "What do you think?"
"You're the doctor," Jolene said.
Chapter Forty-six
Jolene had remained mostly quiet. Now she turned and studied Allen's face, which looked haggard, with a day's growth of beard.
Anticipating her question, Allen said, "Someday, when this is over, when the money is in the bank, when Hank is in the ground, and you and Earl have worked out the terms of your relationship— perhaps we could see each other."
Earl snickered. "C'mon, you guys, let's keep it clean."
They were gone, out of his range of vision, somewhere else in the house to where they'd taken Amy. It was just about over. For Amy, for Broker, for him. It infuriated him that Allen, Jolene, and Earl were going to win.
Hank's thoughts were just embers, but the thing that was coming for him was clearer now. Almost distinct.
But at this moment he was riveted to the story unfolding in front of him.
Allen's patient courtship of Jolene was based on bad math. Allen had factored in three deaths: Amy's, Broker's, and, eventually, Hank's.
The expression on Earl's face corrected the arithmetic. When the time was right, Earl would add Allen to the total.
And Jolene was the catalyst, the fire, thought Hank, that we
have all swarmed to. And being a drunk, she would always backslide to Earl in moments of crisis.
Hank had heard everything since they came inside. He could not see Amy and Broker, but he understood the play. He had glimpsed Allen, Earl, and Jolene through lidded eyes as they caucused in front of the fire at the foot of his bed.
Allen was very thorough on details and methods, but he should have stayed with working inside immobile, drugged bodies. The outsides of alert moving bodies were still beyond his aptitude. Allen wasn't ten words into his brilliant plan when Hank realized that Earl was going to kill him. Earl, who knew a good thing, would assist Allen in staging Amy's suicide and leaving Broker out in the cold. He'd watch approvingly while Allen destroyed Hank's eyelids. He'd wait until Allen had outlived his usefulness, presumably after the malpractice case was resolved, and after Allen had quietly finished the job of murdering Hank in a medically plausible way.
Then Earl would make Allen disappear.
And at the every end, Jolene would figure out a way to pension off Earl and seize the last, highest grip on the situation—eagle claws.
Too bad. Jolene, Earl, and Allen held great potential as characters if only he could script them before Allen came at his eyes with the needle.
Of the three, the only one he held any hopes of redemption for was Jolene. Of course, he was biased.
Allen came back from the bathroom down the hall where he'd emptied two square lactated plastic ringer bags. After he passed them through the fingers of Amy's right hand to acquire her fingerprints, he hung the bags from a handy tine on the left antler of a European-mounted twelve-point white-tail deer rack on the wall over the bed.
He took two long, glistening lengths of plastic tubing from his bag. Again the trick with the fingers, like she was handling them. They were jointed and each had a blue clip with a white wheel. Then he did something with needles, hooking one tube to the other at a joint.
"The hard thing is starting your own IV," Allen said. He took out a strip of rubber tourniquet and he tied it around her arm above
the elbow. Then he turned Amy's left hand, evaluating the network of now-plump blue veins feeding between her knuckles. As her fingers spread open a tightly folded piece of paper fell on her lap.
Allen paused to unfold it.
"It's the alphabet thing," Jolene said.
"Crude," Allen said, smoothing the paper on Amy's jeans. "All wrong. The letter
s shouldn't be arranged in normal sequence. They should be grouped according to priority of which letters are most frequently used in speech."
"Well, it worked good enough," Jolene said.
Allen folded the paper and slipped it in his pocket.
Agitated, Jolene said, "Allen, for Christ's sake, she's waking up."
Amy moaned softly, her eyes revolved as Allen placed his needle, checked his blood back-flash into the IV, removed the actual needle, left the IV stent in place, and hooked it to the tubing.
"She's semiconscious, she won't really be aware. Because—" he opened a bottle containing a white liquid and poured it into the bag on the left—"she's about to really relax with five hundred cc's of Propofal in a slow drip."
The white stuff dripped down the tubing and Allen raised Amy's right hand and used her fingers to thumb the wheel on the blue roller clamp.
Amy sighed and rolled her eyes up into her forehead. Allen pursed his lips and patted her leg. In a remote voice, he said, "You won't feel a thing. I couldn't let them shoot you, could I?"
Then he held up a glass ampule full of clear liquid and swiftly cracked it open between the two red lines on its nozzle and deposited the contents in the bag on the right.
Jolene, watching his nimble fingers, was reminded of someone who was adept at assembling things that came in boxes, good at reading instructions.
"Now, this is one hundred cc's of Fentanyl, a very potent narcotic and the anesthetist's drug of choice. They're famous for abusing it and miscalculating their highs, so a lot of them OD on the stuff," Allen said. "We leave the clamp closed on this drip for right now, let her loll around in the induction agent, then I'll open this clamp all the way, it'll feed through the port into the other IV tube, and in a minute she'll be apneic."
"Apneic?" Jolene said.
"Stop breathing."
They left the bedroom, put on their coats, and joined Earl on the front porch. Earl had rummaged around in Broker's travel bag and replaced Broker's boots with tennis shoes. He found a light fall jacket on the coat rack by the door and pulled it loosely over Broker's shoulders. Broker was turned over on his back and he kept instinctively cringing into a fetal position in an effort to keep warm.
Seeing that, Jolene looked away.
"I managed to get a third of the bottle into him," Earl said. "But I think the drug is wearing off. What if he wakes up?"
"We don't want him totally overdosed. He's got to drive, remember?" Allen said. "Now, go bring our cars down here, transfer Hank's bedding to the van, and then put Broker in the Jeep. You can drive him," he said to Earl. "I'll follow in my car." He tossed his car keys to Earl, who handed them to Jolene.
Broker flopped back and forth on the porch, Ketamine going out, the scotch coming in.
"See," Allen said. "It's like he's drunk. You can probably coax him to his feet and walk him to the car."
This last idea genuinely excited Earl, who began to address Broker in a deeply sympathetic tone. "Come on, buddy. Time to get up. We gotta go feed the ostriches."
"Cut the shit," Jolene said.
"Aw, why? I kinda like the idea of him walking to his reward. Better'n me having to carry the sucker."
The two of them managed to get Broker to his feet and walked him down the steps. Allen watched them stagger off toward the Jeep. Then he went back inside and stood for a moment, warming his hands at the fire. He turned and found himself staring directly in Hank's very open, alert, angry eyes.
"Well, hello," Allen said, curious.
Very deliberately, Hank cocked his left eye at Allen and winked.
Chapter Forty-seven
Hank was resolved to go out on his kind of play; he'd bet it all on one gesture. Either he'd get the needle or a response.
Allen was startled and his hands began to shake—from excitement, he told himself. This was exciting. So he smiled stiffly and studied Hank. "So you really are in there? Have you been eavesdropping again?" He couldn't help giving in to a twitch of clinical fascination.
Hank blinked twice.
"Two means yes," Allen said. "Okay. Just a minute then." He dug Amy's famous crumpled alphabet paper out of his pocket, smoothed it out, and held it up. Hank's sneering eyes fixed on it and Allen granted their hot wish. "You want to talk?"
Two blinks.
Allen let his finger rove the groups and Hank began to blink.
"P"
"U"
"S"
"S"
"Y"
Hank shut his eyes.
"Bravo, Hank; crude to the end," Allen said, but a film of
sweat started to form across his forehead and on his upper lip. After everything he'd accomplished he was back where he'd started; the object of Hank's offhand contempt. Allen felt an impulse to plunge his thumbs into those eyes and squash them like grapes.
Hank's eyes popped open. Now he was sweating, too. They glared at each other.
"I win; you lose. Top that," Allen smiled kindly and then he swept his upturned hand to the letter groups like a waiter indicating the way to a table.
"D"
"U"
"M"
"Who? Me? Really. I'd think the opposite was true."
"T"
"H"
"E"
"Y"
. . .
"U"
"S"
"E"
. . .
"U"
. . .
"K"
"I"
"L"
. . .
"U"
"You mean Earl?" Allen's voice quavered a bit. He heard car motors turn off. Doors slam. A drop of his sweat fell on the paper, blurring some of Amy's letters.
Two blinks.
". . . And Jolene?" Allen's voice turned dry and he swallowed a stammer; the novelty was wearing off, this pointing and blinking.
Two blinks.
The door opened and Allen dropped the paper. His hurried gesture held Earl and Jolene's attention for a beat.
"What's going on?" Earl asked.
"Nothing," Allen said.
Earl eyed him for another moment, then said, "We have him in the Jeep. Now what?"
"Like I said, you drive the Jeep, I'll follow in my car. We find a spot for him to go off the road. Jolene, you start wiping the place down. Anywhere you touched before we got here. We come back, do a walk-through, load Hank, and that's it."
Then Allen walked back to the bedroom and thumbed the white plastic gauge open to the bottom of the roller clamp and the Fentanyl started to flow into Amy's IV.
Jolene watched him do it.
Efficient, practical; he could have been turning off the lights.
She watched the narcotic streamline into Amy's blood. Her hips raised into a wanton arch on the bed, her head thrust back, her eyes revolving up. The euphoric spasm collapsed as Allen and Earl went out the front door and she watched Amy writhe, chin on chest, tongue protruding, drool starting to flow down her chin into a curl of thick, white-blond hair trapped beneath her cheek.
Jolene turned away and resented them for leaving her alone with this. And she shut her eyes and saw cops and lawyers and judges. She saw matrons forcing her to strip and sticking their fingers in her and making her put on prison cottons.
And THAT was the future if she didn't do THIS.
Goddamn Broker shouldn't have lied to me, she told herself.
But she couldn't take her eyes off Amy, couldn't stop watching her breaths getting shallow and coming further and further apart.
Never hurt anybody when I was sober before.
She spun and stalked into the living room, fished in her coat pocket, took out her cigarettes, lit up, and paced in front of the fireplace. About three drags into her Marlboro she darted a glance at Hank.
Hank looked back.
Great, she thought, now he's awake and watching. Maybe he'd been listening all along.
Maybe he knew Amy was in the next room with a slack, stoned grin on her face, dying; that they w
ere parking Broker in the woods where he'd freeze to death; that Allen was going to kill Hank's eyes.