Countdown

by Susan Rogers Cooper

  Anthony got a call from Milt. ‘We’re going in,’ Milt said. ‘Except the son, Earl Blanton, is outside in the hall and he’s armed. Can you check that out and get back to me? See how we should approach this dude.’

  ‘Got it, Milt,’ Anthony said and hung up his cell phone. He went to the door, opened it just a crack and peered out toward the door of suite 214.

  Earl Blanton was standing in the hallway, all right, his ear to the door of suite 214, his shotgun propped against the opposite wall and his face pointed in the other direction.

  Anthony took off his shoes, readied his weapon and walked silently up to Eunice Blanton’s only surviving son.

  ‘Hands up. You’re under arrest. You have the right to—’

  Back inside suite 214, Marge Blanton handed her weapon to Jasmine Hopkins. ‘Here ya go,’ Marge said. ‘I was coerced into this. Wasn’t none of my doing.’

  She looked at her mother, who was bent over, sobbing fit to beat the band. ‘Mama just has this thing for Darrell, is all.’ Marge shook her head. ‘It’s always been like that. Darrell just hung the moon as far as Mama’s concerned.’

  Eunice stood up and slapped Marge’s face. ‘Don’t you talk about my boy like that! He’s dead!’ And she fell back down, sobbing.

  ‘Sorry about that, Mama,’ Marge said. ‘But you got two other children and you done ruined our lives because of him. I hope you’re happy!’ Marge swung around and went to her own daughter who was lying on the floor, panting and alternately screaming.

  The door burst open and Anthony came in, pushing a frazzled Earl in front of him. ‘Mama!’ Earl cried. ‘This black guy is arresting me!’

  Eunice paid no attention, but Maryanne Dobbins jumped up from the sofa where she’d been sitting next to the old bat and ran toward her husband. Seeing that, Jasmine turned, pocketed the gun Marge had given her and advanced on Earl. ‘I’ll take him,’ she said to Anthony. She grinned. ‘You take your wife.’

  And he did – hugging her so tight that Maryanne felt she might break, but she didn’t really care.

  We weren’t far behind Anthony, me and everybody else from downstairs, with Dalton pushing through to the front. Holly was on him in a New York minute, arms and legs entwined around him. Emmett helped his wife with her prisoner and Will and Nita Skitteridge found each other.

  I didn’t see Jean. I screamed her name at the top of my lungs, my eyes not leaving the corpse covered by a sheet over by the wet bar.

  Marge stood up from behind the sofa. ‘Sheriff, she’s back here with my daughter. We need an ambulance bad.’

  I rushed around to where Mike Reynolds and Jean were bent over the pregnant girl. ‘There are no ambulances,’ I told Jean. ‘There was a real bad tornado in Bishop and everybody in the county’s up there. We’ll have to drive her in a squad car.’

  Jean grabbed my arm. ‘John?’ she whispered.

  I shook my head. ‘I don’t know. I haven’t been able to get hold of Jewel. You and me will drop Mike and the girl off at the hospital and head to Bishop.’

  Jean nodded.

  Marge said, ‘I’m going with my daughter!’

  ‘No, ma’am!’ I said, ready to cold-cock this woman if she said another word. ‘As I understand it, you assaulted a police officer—’

  ‘Ah, Sheriff,’ Mike Reynolds said, standing up. ‘This lady’s gonna be my mother-in-law so let’s just put all that down to a domestic squabble, OK?’

  I looked from him to Marge to the pregnant girl on the floor. ‘Ah, hell, whatever. Y’all get downstairs. We gotta go. Guys! Y’all pick this girl up!’

  So Dalton got her head, Anthony got her feet, Mike took her heavy middle and we all headed out, leaving Charlie Smith to clean the place up – after all, it was his jurisdiction.

  It took but a minute or two to get the teenaged boy down from the tree. The rescue squad figured this was an easy one.

  Both boys pointed at the teenager and started talking on top of each other.

  Johnny Mac: ‘He’s why we were in here—’

  Matt: ‘He was trying to kill the dog—’

  Teenager: ‘No, I wasn’t.’

  ‘OK, guys,’ Bobby Potter, Matt’s dad, said, ruffling his son’s hair. ‘We’ll sort all this out once we get this kid to the hospital.’

  ‘But, Dad—’ Matt started.

  ‘Let’s get you home. Your mama’s pretty upset,’ Bobby said.

  Matt looked sheepish. ‘Bet she’s more than upset,’ he said.

  ‘She’s about a minute away from qualifying for a straitjacket, but she’ll be OK once she sees you.’

  Carolyn McIntosh was roused by Drew Gleeson and smelling salts. Drew and Jasper already had Cody on a stretcher, an oxygen mask on his face.

  ‘My boy—’ Carolyn started.

  ‘He’s OK,’ Drew told her. ‘Can you stand up?’

  Carolyn nodded and Drew helped her to a standing position. ‘I take it you wanna ride in the ambulance with him?’ he asked her.

  Carolyn just gave him a look, since the word ‘duh’ was now out of favor.

  Mike Reynolds rode up front with me, while Jean and the mama rode in the back with the pregnant girl stretched out over them, her head in her mama’s lap and her pelvic area in Jean’s, while Jean tried to stop the baby from pushing out.

  We were about ten minutes away from the hospital, but when we got there we saw two ambulances in the bay and no one came running out to help.

  ‘Mike, run in and get a gurney! Quick!’ I said.

  Which he did, coming out followed by a five-foot-nothing, eighty-five-pound nurse who was yelling at him and who looked like she could take him out no problem at that moment. I was at the back door of the squad car, but left it to stop the nurse.

  ‘Sheriff Kovak,’ I told her. ‘We got a pregnant girl with the cord around the baby’s neck.’

  She moved into action, telling me and Mike how to get Chandra on the gurney and making us push it in past the other gurneys lined up like cords of wood in the hallways of the ER. Some held bleeding patients who bitched and moaned, while some held people who were out cold and not bitching at all. But mostly it was pure mayhem, plain and simple.

  An orderly grabbed my side of the gurney and I stopped, letting Mike and Marge continue on. I turned and headed for the front door, where my wife waited in the car. Now we were off to find our son.

  Johnny Mac feared for his ribs as his aunt Jewel tried to squeeze the life out of him. He knew it was just an exuberant hug, but still and all, it kinda hurt – especially after the day he’d had.

  ‘If you ever try that again, young man—’ she started once she’d stopped hugging him.

  But Uncle Harmon intervened. ‘Not now, Jewel Anne. Let’s just be grateful he’s OK.’

  Aunt Jewel nodded her head. ‘Oh, I am,’ she said, ‘I am,’ and squeezed him again.

  ‘We got any phones working yet?’ Uncle Harmon asked the room. Negative responses were all he got. Turning to Jewel and pulling her away from Johnny Mac, he whispered, ‘We gotta let Milt and Jean know he’s OK.’

  ‘I know. Should we use your car and take him home or what?’ Jewel asked. ‘We can’t use mine. It’s under the rubble that used to be our garage.’

  ‘Just don’t think about it,’ Harmon said, holding her close. ‘We’re gonna take this one hour at a time. As for taking Johnny Mac to Milt and Jean, I think it’s best if we stay put. They’ll come to us.’

  Jewel went back to holding her nephew, while Johnny Mac and Matt – who was in a similar situation with his mother – just looked at each other and rolled their eyes.

  I’ve witnessed a few tornadoes, growing up in Oklahoma and all, but the devastation from this one wasn’t like anything I’d ever seen before. As I used the sirens and lights on Mike’s city squad car the roadsides were lit up as we sped past and I saw tossed farm equipment – a ten-ton tractor sitting on its butt like a dog begging for a bone – cars tossed hither and yon and dead cattle here and there. As we neare
d Bishop I turned on the searchlight and turned off the siren and strobe lights, moving the searchlight this way and that to see what was there.

  It wasn’t pretty, and my stomach was heaving at the thought that my son could be somewhere in all this wreckage. It looked like a nuclear bomb had gone off – rubble everywhere. What used to be a Chevy dealership on the south end of town was now gone, and if you didn’t know it had been there you certainly wouldn’t know now. A tire store on the other side of the road had a broken glass picture window and a Toyota Celica sitting upside down on its roof. Billboards – on the outskirts of Bishop only, they weren’t allowed inside the city limits – were long gone, not even their posts stuck up now. As we moved into town, I could see that the north side of the town square – that used to house a fancy boutique, an organic produce store, a jewelry store so expensive I’d have to take out a government loan to buy my wife the cheapest thing in there, and a men’s haberdashery – was nothing but a memory. The east side had lost at least half its shops, with only the post office and half a dry cleaning establishment still standing. The west side had a twenty-four-foot inboard motorboat sticking out of the front of what used to be a real estate office, and the State Farm office next to it had no front at all. The south side, however, was totally untouched. Tornadoes are curious things.

  The middle of the square used to house a gazebo, picnic tables and benches and tall, old trees, flowerbeds and such, but now there were only people milling about, a fire truck, an ambulance and a man with a clipboard. I drove up to him in the squad car and stuck my badge out the window.

  ‘Sheriff Kovak,’ I said. ‘Me and my deputy here are headed up to Lazy Hill Lane. Any problems up there?’

  ‘Yeah, the Longbranch ambulance just took a kid off to the hospital from there.’

  ‘A kid?’ I said, my stomach heaving even more.

  ‘Yeah, him and his mom, and somebody needs to give that lady a sedative, know what I mean?’

  My stomach settled, but I felt for the mama. I nodded my head. ‘Yeah, I know what you mean. OK if we head up that way?’ I asked him.

  ‘Just be careful. It’s a mess up there. Pretty hard hit,’ he said.

  My stomach did its thing again and Jean – my deputy – and I headed up the hill. We passed a street with two fire trucks fighting a pretty bad blaze and kept going higher up. There was rubble and debris everywhere, with only an occasional standing house. In this neighborhood the bill was gonna run into the hundreds of millions.

  Jean was holding my hand so tight I thought she’d break a finger, but I didn’t complain. I was too damned scared to say a word. All I could think was my boy, my boy … My mind wouldn’t allow me to go any further than that.

  Then we were on Lazy Hill Lane, the cul-de-sac where my sister and her husband lived. Except there was no house there. Just rubble and a swimming pool empty of water but full of debris, including my sister’s fancy black-and-gold toilet from the master bath.

  Jean and I jumped out of the squad car and screamed Johnny Mac’s name and my sister’s name at the tops of our lungs, holding on to each other like we’d fly away if we weren’t grounded by each other’s need. Tears were streaming down my wife’s face, and I knew I wasn’t far behind in the tear stakes, when the door to the house next door burst open and our son came running out.

  Lucinda stood outside pizza guy Ronnie Jacobs’ hospital room, talking to the doctor about her beloved’s condition. ‘But is he gonna be OK, Doctor?’ she asked.

  ‘He should be fine, young lady,’ the doctor answered. ‘But he has a concussion and a possible head injury, and he’s lost a lot of blood from the head wound so we need to keep him here for a while.’

  ‘How long?’ Lucinda whined.

  ‘Maybe a week,’ the doctor answered. ‘We’re at a crucial point right now – he could still slip into a coma so he needs around-the-clock attention. That’s why he’s still in ICU.’

  ‘But they won’t let me stay with him!’ Lucinda cried, a tear slowly leaking from her baby blue eyes and traveling down her peaches-and-cream cheek.

  The doctor patted her on the arm, not at all immune to her charms – or the thirty-six Ds peeking out of her low-cut blouse. ‘I’ll see what I can do. Are you two legally married?’ he asked.

  Lucinda shook her head as another tear threatened to stain her lovely face. ‘Not yet. We’re fixin’ to, though.’

  The doctor sighed. ‘Well, I’ll do my best.’ He squeezed her arm then walked off, and Lucinda went back into Ronnie Jacobs’ room.

  She leaned down and kissed him on the lips. ‘Honey bear, I’m not sure they’re gonna let me stay,’ she said, more tears blotting her cheeks. ‘They’re gonna keep you in this eye-see-you place ’cause you’re so sick.’

  Ronnie tried to sit up. ‘I’m sick?’ he said. ‘What’s wrong with me?’

  ‘Your head, honey-bunch. Remember?’

  ‘What happened to my head?’ Ronnie asked, touching the top of his head with his hand and feeling only bandages. ‘Is there something wrong with my head?’

  Lucinda said, ‘Uh oh,’ and began to cry in earnest.

  TEN

  Three days later, things had begun to calm down. We had Johnny Mac home with us where he belonged, and my sister and her husband were in the guest room upstairs. Their house was totally demolished and they had to wait for the insurance inspector and all the crap that comes with a major tornado. The town of Bishop had been declared a disaster area by the governor, and although I hadn’t voted for him, I had to agree with him on this. The whole place was pretty much a disaster.

  My sister’s kids – Leonard, Marlene and Carl – had all been calling non-stop, checking on their mama and Harmon and us, too. Leonard was married and living in Houston where he was apprenticing with Jewel’s old neighbor, Chuck Lancaster, at his insurance office. Since Chuck’s mother (who played the part of Chuck’s secretary/receptionist) had passed on, I don’t think Leonard was much more than that, but Chuck kept promising Leonard that he’d let him take over the agency when it was time for Chuck to retire.

  Marlene was living in Dallas where she was some high-up muckity-muck with Southwest Airlines. She was married and had a baby girl. Her husband, I think his name is Jordan or George, I’m never sure, also works at the airlines, and before the baby came along they spent as much time as possible anywhere but in Dallas, which is easy to do, I hear, if you work for an airline.

  Carl was in his last year at OU in Norman, studying accounting, hoping to become a CPA like his dead daddy. He was the closest of the three to Prophesy County, and the one who wanted to come home the most, but since his mom and stepdad were bunking with us Jewel kept telling him there wasn’t room and he needed to stay where he was, but that she and Harmon would come up over the weekend to see him. Jewel was worried she’d hurt his feelings, but as Harmon told me, when Jewel was out of hearing range, ‘That boy’s too sensitive. He needs to grow a pair.’

  I couldn’t say I disagreed.

  All in all, the body count wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Since the tornado hit on a Saturday, most kids were at home and not in the schools, one of which had been demolished. Most people got to their shelters and took in folks who didn’t have one. There were plenty of injured – most treated and released – some serious. So far, on this third day, we had six dead and two hundred and thirty-three injured. The other boy who had been with Johnny Mac on their misadventure – Cody, the one whose leg got broken so bad – was still in the hospital, but the broken leg was his only real injury (if you ignored the bruises and abrasions that all three boys had), and the doctors operated and put in pins and other stuff and said he’d be walking with a cast and crutches at least until Christmas, if not longer.

  The teenaged boy Johnny Mac and his friend Matt had found was still in the hospital, having slipped into a coma from his head injury, and his mama told me when I asked that it didn’t look good.

  Somehow, and I’m not sure exactly how, the giant dog t
hat had helped or hindered – depending on who you talked to – the boys was lying in front of the cold fireplace in my living room, waiting, I suppose, for someone to build a fire. I told Johnny Mac that we needed to put a notice in the paper that we’d found him, but that if nobody called in a month we’d have to make other arrangements. Johnny Mac is pretty set on those other arrangements being us keeping him. I’m not sure – considering what he’s consumed so far – that we could afford to keep him. Johnny Mac named him, of course. I kept telling him not to, that there might be an owner out there somewhere, but Johnny Mac ignored me and started calling him Tornado – or Nado, for short. Evinrude, my tabby cat I’ve had since before Johnny Mac was born, is not so sure about Tornado. The first day the dog came to our house, Evinrude took one look and bolted. The only way I know he’s been around is that his bowl is empty, but even though we moved it to a high counter, I think that dog could be the one emptying it out. I did see a glimpse of the cat yesterday, peeking around the edge of the garage. When he saw me he hissed and ran off. I think, as far as Evinrude is concerned, I’m in the doghouse. Excuse the pun.

  Jean had been charged with doing the very hardest thing I ever have to do in my job – mainly notifying the next of kin for her friend Paula Carmichael. I told her I’d do it, but she said she had to. I’m not sure why, but I left her to it. It was obviously something she felt she needed to do, and I made sure she was alone in our bedroom so she could make the call.

  Eunice and Earl Blanton were partaking of our guest quarters in the county jail, although, as I’d told Mike Reynolds, I hadn’t arrested Marge Blanton. When it came right down to it she was the one that got the whole thing stopped in the first place, so I figured – even though I still considered her almost as guilty as the others – I should let her go. She was pretty busy – as were Mike and Chandra – with the bouncing eight pound and four ounce baby boy that Chandra had delivered just minutes after Jean and I had hightailed it out the hospital.

  Now I had one little old thing left on my plate: namely figuring out who the hell had killed Darrell Blanton. The state lab boys had to run extra blood tests, but finally found a poison akin to digitalis, which is a type of drug used for congestive heart failure. As far as his mama knew, Darrell Blanton didn’t have a heart condition of any kind.