by Sarah Graves
Great. Like that made it okay.
“But I didn’t,” he pleaded, “know how bad it would be, with people doing crimes to get the money for it. I just thought, hey, dumb kids want to get high, what do I care? And there isn’t going to be any more. So I thought, what’s the point of wasting it? But I don’t know anything about any of that other stuff. Tim and Kenny, or the girl.”
“Hallie,” I said. “Having some trouble remembering, are you, Ned?”
He nodded hard. “Well, I’m nervous. If any of this gets out, I could be in a lot of trouble. Even though all I did, all I did, was drive Mr. Willoughby’s truck. Hey, after it got loaded in New York, I never even looked inside.”
He looked back and forth at Ellie and me. “Never even,” he implored, “got out of the truck while I was down there. No,” he emphasized, “personal involvement.”
“So who killed them—Ken, Hallie, and Tim?”
“Ike Forepaugh,” he replied reluctantly. “It must have been him. Way I figure, Willoughby hired him to do it.”
“Why?” Ellie demanded. “Why would Willoughby want Ken dead?”
Ned sighed heavily. “I think he figured Ike was a better guy in the long run to do those boat runs. He was tougher and smarter. Not, you know, like Ken. And if any bigger things came up, problems, Ike was equipped. He’s a real bad dude.”
“Willoughby didn’t want Ken around after he fired him,” Ellie theorized aloud. “Ken might talk about the whole thing, and get Willoughby in trouble. So he wanted to get rid of him.”
Ned nodded sorrowfully. “I guess that must have been it.”
“What about Tim and Hallie?” I pressed. “Why would Ike kill them? Was it also on Willoughby’s orders?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know about the girl. But maybe Willoughby told Ike to get Tim, too, in case Ken had been talking to the old man.”
Tim had indeed been blabbering about Ken’s “big deal.” It was possible Willoughby had gotten wind of this.
“Bottom line, you drove a little truck and you sold a little heroin, and that was it,” I said.
Ned began nodding again. “That’s right. I just—”
A sound from the cellar steps interrupted him. “Isn’t that enough?” Peter Mulligan inquired harshly.
He was carrying a hunting rifle.
“Peter,” I said gently, much more calmly than I felt. “Peter, where did you get that?”
He glanced at me, annoyed. “Upstairs. I found it.”
“Here?” That couldn’t be right. Wade secured firearms, his own and any repair items in the house, at least as thoroughly as I did. So I thought Peter was confused, which considering the size of the weapon he was wielding did not reassure me.
But where he’d gotten it was less important than what he meant to do with it, just at the present moment.
“Peter, I want you to put the gun down.”
He didn’t, and he didn’t take his eyes off Ned, either. “You killed her. Ultimately, you’re the reason she died. And because of you my life is over, too. I lived,” he declaimed tragically, “for Hallie Quinn.”
Ned’s eyes looked ready to pop out on springs. “What do you want?” he sputtered frightenedly.
“Shut up. I’ve been listening to you,” Mulligan said. “I’ve heard what I needed to hear, that you sold heroin to Hallie. I begged her to get off it, and after Ken Mumford turned up dead, I thought finally she would. No more supply. But you”—he spat the final word venomously—“you kept selling it to her.”
He aimed the rifle. “You were behind the drugs all along.”
Which made, actually, no sense whatsoever. Until he got the job driving for Willoughby, Montague hadn’t had two extra pennies to rub together.
And neither had Ken. But Hallie had.
That glove box, I thought, in that old car. Ken’s trailer, so isolated, would have been perfect. Her room’s expensive decor, her not selling the silver medallion, yet having enough money to buy drugs and go regularly to Portland …
Ken had been doing the smuggling part, all right. But Hallie had been the brains of the operation, I’d have bet anything.
“I told her,” Mulligan ranted, waving the gun around, “I told her what would happen. That night on the seawall, I tried telling her one last time. But—”
“Peter,” I interrupted, “You didn’t tell me you talked to Hallie that night. You said you heard her arguing with someone else.”
Nobody had mentioned finding the medallion on Hallie’s body, either. “But it wasn’t someone else. It was you, wasn’t it? She was on the seawall that night, arguing with you.”
Suddenly he looked trapped. But fortified by the firepower he was holding, he tried bulling his way through it. “He was the reason. I told her how much I loved her, I tried to make her see. She didn’t want to stop using and it was because of him.”
But I didn’t think so. “What did you do to convince her, Peter? Did you touch her? Maybe slap her, try waking her up to reality the way you did Corey Banks? Did you,” I proceeded carefully, “try pounding some sense into her?”
Just for an instant, that dead face came back to the land of the living. Peter looked at me, the way a drowning man looks at a life ring.
“Did your hands end up around her neck somehow? And somehow, by the time you had finished trying to convince Hallie to listen to you—Peter?” I asked it very gently.
“Peter, when you looked into her face for the last time, to see if she believed you … Peter, was that when you realized that Hallie was dead? Did you take the medallion, to remember her by?”
His face crumpled. “Hallie,” he muttered.
“Peter, do you have it now?”
Montague made a move.
“Get away!” Peter yelled, swinging the rifle at Montague.
“You’re lying,” I snapped at the boy, trying to bring him back to me. “Hallie wanted off drugs. She just didn’t want you.”
I was lying, too, partly. She hadn’t wanted anything but a way out of the small town she was stuck in, and she thought the money she was making would give it to her, with a little assist from Ken Mumford.
But if Peter would turn towards me, Ellie could jump him. Or if push really came to shove I could shoot him. The little .25 semiauto was right there in my pocket, and loaded; after the previous night, I thought I might never go anywhere without it again.
The Bisley was out, too; even full of dummies, it looked plenty threatening, which I’d thought might come in handy. Trouble was, right now it was upstairs in my bag.
Besides, I didn’t want to point any gun at this kid unless I had to.
“I read your letters to her, Peter. Kind of short on things to amuse yourself with, aren’t you? Nothing to do but follow her around, spy on her. Like one of those stalkers you read about in the papers. That’s what people will say. Just another pathetic, delusional little sap.”
“Shut up!” He screamed it, his adolescent face taut with rage as he turned to me. “He made it happen, it wasn’t my fault, it was all because of him!”
He started toward Montague again, the rifle swinging wildly. Suddenly Ned moved faster than I’d have thought possible, seizing one of the heavy wooden shutters I’d been working on and bringing it down with a sickening crack onto Mulligan’s head.
Mulligan dropped as if shot, a trickle of blood leaking from his nose and another from his ear.
“Oh, my God,” Montague breathed. “He was going to shoot me!”
“Well, he’s not going to shoot you now, is he?” I snapped. “Get upstairs and call an ambulance.”
I knelt over Mulligan as Montague hesitated. “Listen, all the things we were talking about. Can we maybe forget about all that?”
“Get up there!” I bellowed at him, and he started to. But just then, a familiar voice sounded from the top of the stairs.
“Good heavens. What in the world are you people doing?”
It was Victor.
“The boy is hurt,�
�� I told him. “Can you help him? We can call him an ambulance, but—”
But how long would it be before it got here, and once it got here, where would it take Mulligan? The nearest big-time surgical facility was, as I had emphasized to Victor in another context entirely, three hours away. Looking at Mulligan, it was clear to me that by then he wouldn’t be a candidate for any kind of surgery other than the variety performed on autopsy tables.
Montague pushed past Victor, going to make the call.
“Wait. I’ll need you to tell them some things, when you talk to them.” Victor surveyed Mulligan, then came down the stairs and crouched over him, glancing at the broken shutter.
“This is blunt trauma?”
“Uh-huh. The kid was waving a rifle, not making much sense. So Montague bonked him. He hit him,” I added, “pretty hard.”
“No harder than I needed to,” Montague protested injuredly. “No harder than I needed to, to defend myself.”
“Shut up,” Victor advised him pleasantly. “Or I’ll cut out your lingua glossa.”
“That,” I informed Ned Montague, “is your tongue. Now get on that telephone, before I—”
“I’ll give the orders here,” Victor said. But his tone was meditative, and he wasn’t actually doing anything.
“Where were you?” I said it quietly.
“Sitting in an old house,” he replied. “Thinking.”
He kept looking at Peter Mulligan, seeing, I supposed, the other boy: the one who died on his operating table. If I’d had a cattle prod, I’d have zapped Victor with it to get him moving.
Also, I just wanted to hurt him. “I told Sam all about your heart attack,” I said.
That got him. “You what? I thought we weren’t going to—”
“Badmouth each other,” I finished. “I changed my mind.”
He wasn’t used to this sort of thing from me. “Look here, Jacobia, if you think you can make me do anything I don’t want to—”
But suddenly that was just what I thought I could do. Victor had been manipulating me, counting on my view of myself as the good guy, as Sam’s protector. But what had I ended up protecting, except my fine opinion of myself?
The truth was that I’d been so worried about my own image, I’d let Sam walk right into an emotional munitions dump.
I opened my mouth. The words came out fast, as if they’d been waiting for the chance.
“I don’t care what happened to you in New York. I don’t care about the self-indulgent drama you’ve worked up over it. I don’t care if you drop dead right here in this basement. I’ll bury you where the coal bin used to be, and get on with my life.”
He stared at me, dumb with shock.
“You’re going to help this kid here right this minute,” I said, “or I’ll tell Sam what you did that time in Central Park.”
Victor winced; even he didn’t think making a homeless man sing for a dollar was very praiseworthy.
“How about it?” I demanded. “And then there was the time—”
“All right.” He frowned impatiently, trying to minimize what I was doing to him. “I swear I don’t know what’s wrong with you, lately, Jacobia.”
“There’s nothing wrong with me. There’s something wrong with him.” I gestured at Mulligan. “Get to it.”
Whereupon Victor gave in and thumbed Peter Mulligan’s eyelids open. “Look there,” he commanded, trying to regain some semblance of his dignity. “Tell me what you observe.”
“One of his pupils,” I said, “is larger than the other. Not much larger.”
“Not yet,” Victor agreed. “But it will be. Soon.”
Upstairs, we could hear Ned Montague gabbling into the phone. Ellie had gone up too; now she brought towels and a pan of water.
“I couldn’t think of what else you might need,” she said.
Peter Mulligan began making harsh, gasping sounds. Absently, Victor lifted the kid’s chin up, and Mulligan’s breathing eased. In the distance, a siren approached; Henahan, coming to confront his real-life demons.
“Victor,” I said urgently. “What’s going to happen?”
“If the pressure inside the skull isn’t relieved, the brain in there will get crushed to death. He could survive. But he would have the functioning potential of a rutabaga. I said,” he went on as if to himself, “that I wasn’t going to do this stuff, anymore. And under the circumstances …”
He glanced around at the primitive cellar, still stalling. “Under the circumstances, I doubt that anyone would fault me for sticking to my resolution,” he finished.
And that really was just the absolute final straw: Victor, looking down at this kid who might die and wondering how it would affect him.
“You never meant to do neurosurgery here, did you? Your idea of moving here—besides just annoying me—it was so you wouldn’t have to. You knew the hospital here wasn’t equipped for your kind of work. All your talk about it, that was just blowing smoke.”
“You don’t—” he began indignantly.
I ignored him. “Because your other patient died,” I said, “and you’re afraid it was your fault. Or worse, that people think it was. That’s why you don’t want to do anything, now. It reminds you of your embarrassment. And of your fear.”
He fell silent, his face expressing surprise that I knew.
“Victor,” I rushed on, “do you think there’s something special about you that means you’re never going to fail at anything? That you’re never going to lose anyone who might possibly have been saved?”
He answered slowly. “No, Jacobia. I know about losing people. I just never knew that I knew it. Until,” he added quietly, “I came here and saw how happy you and Sam have turned out to be. And saw what I’d lost. When Sam faced up to me and made his case to me last night, that’s when it all fell together for me.”
He shook his head ruefully. “Sam’s his own man, now. He proved it. I won’t make him go to college if he doesn’t want to.”
Well, you could have knocked me over with a feather. To cover my confusion, I went right on being furious with him.
“Victor, you do what you have to for this kid on the floor, and you do it right now or I’ll make you sorry.”
I thought hard for a second. “I’ll tell Sam about the time you FedExed your mother a fetal pig with a wooden stake in its heart, because she wouldn’t stop sending me birthday cards after our divorce.”
A little rueful smile played around his lips, reminding me of the old days when I’d first met him, before I was hip-deep in his pathology and only knew him as bright and charming.
“Playing hardball, huh? Same old Jake,” he said, kneeling by Mulligan.
As he did so, a shiny object peeped from his pocket, and it occurred to me suddenly that something else unusual might have happened, the night before. Sam had said that he’d looked in on his father, that Victor had been sleeping like the dead.
“What woke you up?” I asked. “Last night, when you got up and went out …”
Victor laughed oddly. “Why, I rolled over onto this.”
He put his hand in his pocket, and I knew what was coming.
He brought out the silver teaspoon. “Did you put it there? In my bed? As a sort of joke, or something?”
“No.” I stared at it. “It must have fallen into the laundry.”
That was an unlikely explanation, but not as unlikely as the truth, which I had no intention of offering.
“Just do what you have to for Mulligan,” I said, taking the spoon from him as Montague came to the top of the stairs.
“Right.” Victor turned back to the business at hand. “Ellie, spread those towels over here. Montague, run and get my shaving kit. Make sure you bring along the straight razor.”
Everybody leapt to obey as he bent over the injured boy; his name isn’t Victor for nothing.
“You,” he snapped as Arnold appeared on the cellar stairs. “You somebody official?”
Arnold nodded, bemused at Vict
or’s tone.
“Get that helicopter from the airfield over here,” Victor ordered, “tell ’em we’re going to Portland. Tell the guy from the ambulance he’s going, too.”
Montague hustled back with the shaving kit. Swiftly, Victor began removing Mulligan’s hair. “I’ll need an IV setup for this kid, and an oxygen tank. Move it. We haven’t got all day.”
Moments later, Victor had exposed Mulligan’s scalp. “Get in here,” he told Ellie, “with one of those towels.”
She complied: looking like a flower does not prevent her from having the tensile strength of steel cable, in emergencies.
Swiftly, Victor made a cut with the straight razor, producing a wash of blood, then probed delicately with his finger. “Uh-huh. Well, I guess there’s no doubt about it.”
He checked Mulligan’s pupils again, and saw, apparently, what he expected to see. Then he looked up, searching for something.
“There it is. Jacobia,” he ordered, and when I saw what he was looking at my stomach took a lurch. But he was definite about what he wanted.
“Jacobia, hand me that power drill,” Victor said.
46 “Good golly bejesus,” said Ned Montague for the fifteenth or twentieth time, sitting at the kitchen table drinking a beer. “Did you ever see anything like that before in your life?”
Arnold had accompanied the ambulance to the airfield and supervised loading the helicopter. But he’d said that he wanted to hear Ned’s story as soon as he got back, and that if Ned told it properly—no hiding things, no embroidering—Arnold would see that Ned didn’t get into too much trouble over it. Stay put, Arnold had told Ned firmly.
So Ned had obeyed, but Arnold hadn’t returned immediately, as I’d expected. Probably one thing had led to another as it often did in Arnold’s busy—too busy, lately—day. As a result, Ned had been hanging around for hours; I hoped he wasn’t expecting to be invited for dinner.
Speaking of which, it was nearly time for it and Sam wasn’t home yet.
“Ellie? Did you ever see anything like that?”
“No,” Ellie replied shortly to Ned. “I’m going to find George and fix him some supper,” she told me.