Then I came back hard to the chair.
“Excuse me, could you say that again?” I asked. “I didn’t quite hear it.”
The doctor looked to Kara and then at me. “What I said is that she’s in recovery, but so far, she’s not responsive. It appears that she suffered some severe trauma to the head … and as of this moment, she’s in a coma.”
Kara’s voice was bleak. “How long?”
Dr. Hanratty said, “We just don’t know. It could be a day or two. Or more than that. If it goes on beyond a week … we’ll be very, very concerned, and we’ll be looking at other options.”
“What other options?” Kara demanded.
“Options that we don’t need to discuss at the moment,” she said, but I knew what those options were going to be: an eventual transfer to a long-term-care rehabilitation facility, as whatever passed for Diane Woods in the recesses of her brain flickered and died, and her strong body withered and curled up and looked like an adult fetus, staying alive year after year through tubes and humming machinery.
“Can we see her?” I asked.
The doctor shook her head. “Not right now. She’s in recovery, and will be there for a few hours. Then she’ll be transferred to the intensive care unit. Your best bet will be to come back sometime tomorrow—but your visit will have to be a short one, you understand.”
I’m sure Kara understood, but her face was set, tears streaming down her cheeks. Dr. Hanratty got up and passed over a business card. “We’re doing all that we can … and I’m sorry, right now I have to brief the Tyler police chief. She went through surgery better than we anticipated … so keep that in mind.”
Kara nodded, and Dr. Hanratty walked out, and I stayed with Kara as she cried some more.
* * *
Later we ate something in the hospital’s cafeteria, and Kara said, “I called my brother. He’s coming up here to be with me … and I don’t plan to leave this place. I mean, what if she wakes up and asks for me?”
I wasn’t going to crush her illusion, so I said, “I hate to do this, Kara, but I’ve got to leave. I don’t want to, but there are things going on.”
She stared right through me and said, “I think I understand. I really do. So go and do what has to be done … and thanks, Lewis. Thanks for being here.”
I got up from the cafeteria table. “I couldn’t be anywhere else.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
After making an ATM run in Exonia and traveling as fast as I could without being pulled over, I was in a small motel on the outskirts of Concord, New Hampshire’s capital, where I paid in cash and registered as Kelly Smith. Earlier I had made a quick stop at a nearby Walmart and had taped up the rear opening the best I could with duct tape and plastic sheeting. Now I was lying on top of the motel’s lumpy bed, a McDonald’s plain cheeseburger and fries balanced on my chest as I watched and rewatched the news coverage of the day’s disaster from the three Boston channels, the Manchester channel, and the small but proud New England Cable News Network.
I ate without tasting a damn thing as I kept track of the coverage. The current numbers showed nearly fifty protesters arrested, two dead, and several injured. There were also a half dozen officers injured, one critically, said officer being Diane Woods. Ron Shelton, the plant spokesman, looked about as calm as a French noble approaching a wooden wheeled cart in 1795 in Paris, and there was some controversy over how the two protesters—a young man from Maine and another young man from Pennsylvania—had been shot and killed, since some of the arrested protesters were found to be carrying firearms.
There was also an alert to locate and arrest one Curt Chesak, of the Nuclear Freedom Front, for trespass, assault, and incitement to riot. Only one television news camera had caught Diane’s beating from Curt, but that one camera did enough: I saw that video about a half dozen times that evening, and seeing it didn’t help me get to sleep at all.
Neither did seeing one other thing on the video: a shape in the foreground, not moving, who looked an awful lot like me, and who didn’t do anything to help out his beaten friend.
With lights and my cell phone off, I spent most of the next several hours staring up at the ceiling, thinking and planning a lot.
* * *
At 9:01 A.M. the next day, I presented myself at the headquarters of the New Hampshire State Police in Concord, located in a collection of state office buildings on Hazen Drive. Among the roadways and parking lots, there were a number of wooded areas. I went into the lobby, found the offices of the Major Crime Unit, and told the accommodating secretary that I wanted to see Detective Pete Renzi. I took an elevator up to the third floor and met Renzi right outside the elevator doors. He was a bit better dressed than the last time I saw him, but not by much. His hair was still cut short and his skin was still light olive, and he said, “How’s Diane?”
“Not good,” I said. “In critical condition. Look, you got a minute?”
“Sure,” he said, gesturing with an arm. “Come on back to my office.”
“I could really use a cigarette,” I said.
His gaze was steady. “All right. A cigarette it is.”
We took the elevator to the ground floor in silence, and we walked across the parking lot to a grove of trees. He turned and said, “Here we go.”
“Not having a smoke?”
“Trying to quit for the sixth time this year. Now go on. What’s up?”
“Curt Chesak. What can you tell me about him?”
Renzi said, “Not much. Seemed to come out of nowhere a year ago, hooked up with the Nuclear Freedom Front, which at the time was about a half dozen college students, former anarchists who thought fighting for safe energy was the way to go.”
“Anything else?”
“Not sure what you’re driving at, Lewis.”
I said, “Diane is my oldest and best friend. I want to know everything I can about Curt Chesak.”
That seemed to get his attention. We stood there among the big old tall pines, and he reached into his coat, pulled out a pack of Marlboros, and lit one up. “Shit. Off the wagon again.” He took a deep puff, let it out, and said, “Based on what you did with the Bronson Toles matter, I suppose this shouldn’t come as any surprise—but are you sure?”
“Very sure,” I said.
Another deep drag. “I told you earlier that I know Diane. Know her very well. In fact … you could say we travel in similar circles. So I’ve trusted her for a very, very long time. So you have that going for you. You were lucky with the Toles case; you could have ended up in a swamp somewhere, with your brain matter being picked over by seagulls. So what I need to know is this: Are you going to do the right thing with any information I give you?”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning that there’s no blowback, nothing to connect you with me or the New Hampshire State Police. Because by talking to you right here, I’ve crossed a line, and I’m trusting you to make sure that nobody else knows that this line has been crossed.”
“Nobody will. Guaranteed.”
Another puff of the cigarette. “This Chesak character … like I said, not much known about him. Came out of the darkness and took over the NFF and built it right up, in a matter of months. The only lead we have is that he’s associated with a college professor in Boston, a history teacher at B.U., but that history professor, a sharp guy, won’t say one goddamn thing. So there you go.”
“That’s it?”
Renzi said, “Stay here a couple of minutes, and I’ll come back out with a few sheets of paper that contain all we have on that squirrelly bastard. So you mind sticking around?”
“Not at all.”
He lifted up a foot, carefully stubbed out the cigarette on the sole of his shoe, and went back into the office building. I stayed there in the trees, waiting. I could hear the hum of traffic from the nearby I-393. Just another workday for lots of people, but not for me. Renzi came back a couple of minutes later and passed over a thin brown envelope. I took it, and he
said, “Anything else?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I think the Falconer police and the security folks at the power plant are looking for me. Any chance you could intervene, get them off my back for a while?”
“What did you do?”
“Left the power plant property without proper permission.”
“Doesn’t sound like much.”
I said, “I seem to have destroyed a chain-link fence gate along the way.”
“Oh,” Renzi said. “Yeah, that’ll piss off some people. Sure, I’ll make a couple of phone calls. That detective in Falconer, Thornton, he’s a good guy. I’ll … I’ll talk to him, maybe share a cigarette or two. The Falconer power plant folks, I don’t know … I don’t know how long I can hold them off for. Maybe a day or two.”
I held up the envelope to him in a salute. “That will be plenty of time. I won’t be around in a day or two.”
* * *
On the drive back to the seacoast on Route 101, the two-lane highway stretching from the ocean to Vermont, I switched on my cell phone, and like magic, it started ringing. I answered the phone and was immediately rewarded by a blast of irritated woman, so loud it was like she was in my backseat and not in Boston.
“Lewis!” Denise shouted. “Where in hell is that copy you owe me? Remember? A thousand words last night about the demo?”
“Guess it slipped my mind,” I said.
I know it’s not nice to say a woman screeched when her voice reaches a certain level, but it was certainly the case with Denise, who went on and said, “A major demonstration! Protesters shot! Cops beaten up! The plant terrorized! And you didn’t file a goddamn thing—even though I told you how important it was, for the magazine’s future, and the venture capitalists who are—”
“Denise?”
“What?”
“Can I say something here?”
“If it’s another one of your lame apologies or goddamn jokes, then no, you can’t say anything, because—”
“Denise,” I said. “I quit.”
There was some static on the other end, and I thought maybe she had hung up or the line had gone dead. I passed a truck hauling a Walmart trailer and said, “You still there, Denise?”
“Lewis—”
“I quit, I resign, I depart, I am now leaving the employ of Shoreline magazine. Have I made that clear enough?”
“Don’t you dare.”
“I just did.”
“Then I’ll come after you,” she said. “For back wages. For getting paid by us illegally when you should have been paid by the government. For defrauding the magazine. What do you think of that?”
I passed another Walmart truck. I briefly wondered if they were hiring. “Gee, that sounds awful,” I said, “and you know what? Fine by me. I still quit.”
Then I hung up, switched off the phone, and tossed it to the seat beside me.
CHAPTER THIRTY
At home I made a list and started working my way down, packing things, getting the utilities paid in advance, and a bunch of other little irritating details. I made a phone call to another friend and was very pleased that I wasn’t interrogated at length: I was just asked one question, about time and place, which I answered. Then I had to drive out to the Tyler Post Office—still bravely stuck in the nineteenth century, I couldn’t get my mail held without going there in person—and when I got back home, I found something on my concrete doorstep: a small cardboard shoe box from Timberland, with nothing on the outside as a message.
Inside, though, were two messages. One was with two typed words on a plain piece of white paper: Good luck.
The other message was my 9 mm Beretta, returned after being taken into custody by Detective Mike Thornton of the Falconer Police Department.
* * *
Later that night, my list, which had grown as the night progressed, ended up with only one item left, and after a series of unanswered phone calls, the phone was finally answered at 1:00 A.M. as I sat on the couch and watched a Discovery Channel program about crab fishermen.
“Lewis,” she said.
“Annie,” I said.
“Late night for you,” she said.
“You, too?”
She yawned. “I have a staff meeting in thirty minutes, so what do you think?”
“I think this campaign has gone on too long for you, me, and the rest of Western civilization. That’s what I think.”
“No argument here. What’s going on?”
On the television screen the crab fishermen were exhausted and nearly frozen, ice-water spray dunking them over and over again as they hauled in pots weighing hundreds of pounds. Right about now, from where I was, it looked like a lot of fun.
“Your last message, you said you were looking for something from me. A commitment … as to whether a commitment was going to be made.”
I waited. No reply. I said, “Something’s come up … and it can go a number of ways, and if it goes bad, I want you to be able to say with a clear conscience that you had no idea what I was up to. In a few hours I’m leaving Tyler, and I don’t know how and when I’m coming back … but in the meantime, I want to ensure that there’s nothing going on that connects you with me … as I do this thing.”
Her voice had no emotion. “Can it wait?”
“No.”
“Lewis, you know what I have facing me in these next few days. You can’t delay this … secret mission of yours to help me out?”
“Again, I’m sorry, no.”
I heard a deep breath from her side of the phone. “I don’t want to get into an argument … a discussion … or pleading … it’s just that for a moment, I thought we had something special, something we could build on … and I see I was wrong.”
“You weren’t wrong, Annie. It’s the circumstances that were wrong. That’s all.”
“So you’re asking me to wait?”
“I am. You’re … you’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me, in a very long time … and something this special … it has to be protected … but at the same time…”
“Duty calls, eh?”
“Yes, it does.”
A long silence. “Then you be damn careful, all right? And if you don’t come back and tell me everything that has gone on, and then talk to me about where we go from here, then I’ll break your arms.”
“Deal,” I said.
“Don’t think I’m joking. In this campaign—I’ve gotten to know people.”
“I know you have.”
There was a click-click sound, and she said, “Shit, another call coming in. I’ll have to call you back.”
“Sure,” I said, and I hung up and stretched out on the couch, knowing Annie, and knowing that call would never come.
* * *
The morning October air was cool as I walked up my dirt driveway carrying two zippered black duffel bags. I looked back at my solitary house and the cove from where it kept view, and maybe it was the cold or what had gone on before, but that normal happy sight seemed empty to me, like a barren cove, void of joy and happiness.
In the parking lot of the Lafayette House, Felix Tinios waited for me, in a black Cadillac Escalade SUV. He helped me put in my luggage, and I got into the warm front seat.
“Not your usual wheels,” I said.
Felix had on a nice gray wool coat, black trousers, and a white turtleneck. His own luggage and gear were in the rear. He drove us out to Atlantic Avenue and said, “Got it from a friend of a friend … not traceable to you or me. Where to?”
“Boston, eventually,” I said, “but first, Exonia.”
“All right.”
* * *
At the Exonia Hospital, the intensive care unit was on the third floor, and I was admitted into the room only after promising to stay just five minutes and not say or do a damn thing. Outside the ICU, on a long couch, Kara Miles had been sleeping, and I let her be. In the ICU room I didn’t sit down; I just stood there and watched, and remembered.
I had first met Diane
Woods when she had been the sole police detective for Tyler and I had moved to New Hampshire after my career at the Department of Defense had come to an early and disastrous end. While working through my long recovery in Tyler, I found an urge, a quest, to get involved and do things, and make them right when I could. When that process had started, I had at first bumped heads with Diane, until we had gotten to know each other when she realized I would try so very hard never to put her into jeopardy, or to betray her.
Over the years there had been ski trips, many meals in places from hot dog stands at Tyler Beach to five-star restaurants in Boston, tips given from her and cases solved from me, sailing trips on her boat, and just a deep, strong, and devoted friendship between us, a friendship that had weathered a lot of things along the way.
Now she was silent, in a bed, a ventilator tube breathing for her. Her face was swollen and had no resemblance to her usual appearance. Both eyes were blackened, her head was covered in bandages, and a drain was running out of one side. Her hands and arms were still, and IV tubes ran out from both of them to bags of fluid hanging from metal poles. Overhead were monitors that beeped and whirred, and I just stood there, watching her chest slowly rise up and then come down. Over and over again. There were two empty chairs in the room, and a locker, and a window that gave a view of some oak trees, their leaves bright red and orange.
I knew time was slipping away, and I knew I had to leave, but it was like I was frozen to the shiny clean floor. I wanted her to stir. I wanted her eyes to flicker open. I wanted her to yank out the ventilator tube and look to me and say, “Lewis, what the hell is going on here?”
Nothing happened.
The machinery clicked and whirred. Her chest rose up and down.
I squeezed her hand, kissed her where I could, and then left.
* * *
In the parking lot of the hospital, I rejoined Felix and wiped at my eyes. “Thanks,” I said. “I appreciate it.”
“No problem.”
He drove us out of the parking lot, and I said, “No, Felix. I mean … this is taking you away from your paying union gig and who knows what else.”
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