Unspeakable

by Sandra Brown

  Only then did he become aware of the throbbing pain in his right arm. “Well I’ll be damned.” Actually he was glad to know Carl had shot him. He thought he had dropped his weapon out of carelessness or just plain old age.

  He laughed, causing the young paramedic to regard him with alarm. “No, young lady, I’m not delirious,” he told her. He also refused to be placed on a gurney for the short distance to the ambulance. “I can walk it.”

  “Hey, Ezzy!” Sheriff Ron Foster jogged toward him and fell into step. “Are you all right?”

  “Can’t complain.”

  “You did a hell of a job, Ezzy. A hell of a job.”

  Dismissing the compliment, he asked. “How’s Steve Jones?”

  “He’ll need a lot of physical therapy once they rebuild his knee, but he’ll make it.”

  “He’s a good officer. Too bad about Jim.”

  “Yeah.”

  “How ’bout him?” He watched as the man who’d saved his life was loaded into an ambulance. Anna Corbett and her boy climbed in behind the gurney.

  “Hanging on to consciousness. Could be internal injuries. He’s a wait-and-see.”

  Ezzy nodded grimly and his throat felt thick. “I’d be dead, weren’t for him.”

  “Soon as the doctors have patched your arm and you feel up to it, I need to know what happened.”

  “I don’t know what went on inside,” he told Foster. “But it must’ve been bad. It’s a wonder they survived.”

  It wasn’t much farther to the ambulance. He wouldn’t humiliate himself now by asking for a gurney that he’d refused, but he was feeling a little woozy. He’d lost more blood than he thought. It took some concentration to get his legs to work right.

  Foster was saying, “I can’t question Mrs. Corbett until we get an interpreter, but when I asked the boy what happened he said that the mean man had shot Mr. Lomax and hit Jack, and that his mother had stabbed the mean man in the leg.”

  “Anna stabbed him?”

  “With Jack’s knife.”

  “The infamous knife,” Ezzy muttered.

  “Pardon?”

  “Nothing.” Ezzy saw no point in mentioning the incident between the hired hand and Emory Lomax. Their rivalry—if there ever had been one—was irrelevant now.

  “Sheriff Foster?”

  A deputy joined them. “Coroner said to give you this. It was plugged into Carl Herbold’s chest tighter’n a cork.” He handed Foster a plastic evidence bag with the bloody knife sealed inside.

  “Thanks.” Foster held up the bag and studied the weapon. “This son of a bitch would do a body harm, all right.”

  “Can I see it?”

  The sheriff passed the bag to Ezzy. The knife was as unusual as Lomax’s secretary had described it. Mrs. Presley had said it had a bone handle, although to Ezzy it looked more like stag antler. He had thought she was daft when she tried to describe the blade, but damned if it wasn’t an iridescent dark blue, and rippled, like the surface of a deep glacier lake stirred by a high wind.

  “Hmm. Isn’t your run-of-the-mill hunting knife, is it?”

  “I’d hate to be on the receiving end of it,” Foster replied.

  “I’ve only seen one other knife made like this,” Ezzy said. “Years ago a guy here in town had one. Name of John—”

  Suddenly Ezzy couldn’t catch his breath and his footsteps faltered. He must’ve swayed dizzily, because Foster reached out to lend support. “Ma’am, I think he’s gonna faint.”

  The paramedic slid her arm around Ezzy. “I knew he should’ve had a gurney.”

  Ezzy struggled to shake her off. “What do they call this?” he rasped, running his finger along the patterned blade of the knife inside the plastic bag.

  “Come on, Ezzy. All aboard,” the younger sheriff said in a patronizing tone that would have annoyed Ezzy at any time, but never more so than now.

  Even with the two of them trying to move him along, he stiffened his legs and refused to budge. “There’s a term for this among knife makers, isn’t there? What is it?” He didn’t want to get his hopes up if he wasn’t right. He wanted someone else to confirm that he was right.

  But he knew he was right.

  “Ezzy—”

  “Answer me, goddammit!”

  “Uh, it’s, uh…” Rapidly snapping his fingers, Foster groped for the word. “Flinting. It’s called flinting. Because the Indians used to make knives like this out of flint.”

  Chapter Fifty

  I don’t think you’re supposed to get up, Mr. Hardge.”

  The nurse trainee had entered his room to find him sitting on the edge of the hospital bed.

  “I’m fairly sure I’m not supposed to, but I’m going to anyway.”

  “l’m calling the nurse.”

  “You’re minding your own business,” Ezzy snapped. “I got shot in the arm. Nothing to it. No reason I can’t walk.”

  “But you had surgery. You’re on an IV.”

  “I’m fine.” He lowered his feet to the floor and stood. “See? Fine. I just want to take a walk down the hall. I’ll be back before anybody misses me. So just keep quiet about it, okay?”

  The rolling IV stand helped support him as he shuffled toward the door. The tile floor was cold on the soles of his feet. With his free hand, he reached behind him to hold together the flimsy hospital gown.

  Leaving his room, he turned left down the corridor. He glanced behind him at the young nurse, who was wringing her hands with indecision. He gave her a reassuring thumbs-up.

  By the time the ambulance had reached the hospital yesterday afternoon, he was high on whatever they’d put into the IV en route. Cora had always said he couldn’t take half an aspirin tablet without catching a buzz. In the emergency room he vaguely remembered being probed and prodded, x-rayed and examined, and told that the bullet had passed through his arm without doing too much damage. Nevertheless, they had to operate to clear out debris and bone splinters, assess and repair any muscle damage, and so on. Ezzy lost interest and consciousness at approximately the same time.

  This morning he had awakened with a bandage around his arm, all-over achiness, a muzziness in his head, and a fire in his belly to speak with the patient in a room down the hall. No LVN or RN or any other kind of N was going to keep him from it.

  He made it down the corridor without being stopped. When he reached the door he sought, he pushed it open and went in. The only sound in the room came from his IV stand; one of the wheels was squeaky. The patient turned his head toward the sound. He looked like he’d been rode hard and put up wet, but Ezzy got the impression that he wasn’t sleeping even though his eyes had been closed. Ezzy also got the impression that he wasn’t surprised to see him.

  He said, “Sheriff Hardge.”

  “Hello, Johnny.”

  Jack Sawyer smiled ruefully. “I haven’t been called that in a while.”

  “When did you change your name from John Junior?”

  He turned his eyes toward the ceiling, giving Ezzy his profile. The resemblance that had escaped Ezzy up till now was so apparent he wondered how he’d missed it. Of course he hadn’t been looking for it.

  Sawyer continued to stare at the ceiling for several moments. Finally he turned back to Ezzy. “I stopped going by Johnny after that night.” Following a short pause, he added, “That night changed more than my name. It changed a lot of things.”

  The two men shared a long stare, each struck by the magnitude of that understatement.

  The moment was interrupted when Anna Corbett came in carrying a cup of coffee. Unlike Jack Sawyer, she seemed shocked to see Ezzy. “Good morning, Anna.”

  She smiled at him and, after setting her coffee on the bed tray, wrote something on a tablet and extended it to him. “You don’t have to thank me,” he said after reading her note. “I’m just glad you and your boy made it out okay. That’s the important thing. How’s he this morning?”

  “He’s staying with Marjorie Baker,” Jack told him. “She
consulted a child psychologist on Anna’s behalf. David’ll likely need some counseling.”

  “After a time, he’ll be all right. Kids are resilient.”

  Anna wrote another message for Ezzy on her tablet. “He’s worried about Jack and angry at me for not letting him come to the hospital to see him.”

  Ezzy looked at Jack. “He likes you, huh?”

  “And I like him. He’s a great kid. I hate like hell he was there yesterday, seeing all that, hearing all the filthy things Carl said.” His regret was obvious, and so was his concern for the boy. “Anna should be with him instead of hanging around here fussing over me.” He looked up at her. “But she refuses to leave.”

  They gazed at each other with such blatant affection and desire that Ezzy felt himself blushing. Jack took her hand, lifted it to his mouth and kept it there a long time, his eyes tightly closed. When he opened them, Ezzy noticed tears. “I guess it’s the anesthesia,” he explained in a gruff, self-conscious voice. “The nurse told me it makes some people emotional. It’s just… every time I think of how it might have turned out yesterday…”

  He didn’t have to say more. Anna bent down and kissed his lips softly, then dragged a chair forward and pressed Ezzy’s shoulder. More light-headed than he had expected to be, he sat down gratefully. Anna draped a blanket across his shoulders.

  “Thanks.”

  She motioned toward his arm, a question in her eyes.

  “It’s okay. Might throw off my horseshoe game a bit, but other than that…” He shrugged.

  She sat down on the edge of the hospital bed and took Jack’s hand.

  Ezzy said, “I haven’t asked about you yet. How’s your wound?”

  “Hurts like hell, but the doctor told me I was damned lucky. Bullet missed my spine and vital organs. Another fraction of an inch one way or the other, and I could have been paralyzed or dead.”

  “Ah, well, that’s good.”

  That exchange was followed by an awkward silence. Anna began to sense it and divided a curious look between them. She wrote a note to Jack. He said, “No, you don’t have to go. In fact, you might just as well hear this now. Then if you want to leave, I’ll understand.”

  A vertical worry line appeared between her eyebrows as she wrote on her tablet. After showing the message to Jack, he said, “No, it’s got nothing to do with the poisoned cows. It’s more serious than that.”

  “Y’all’ve lost me. Poisoned cows?”

  “It’s insignificant,” Jack told Ezzy.

  Their dialogue only increased Anna’s confusion and concern. Jack Sawyer squeezed her hand. “It’ll be okay, Anna.” He turned to Ezzy, locked eyes with him, hesitated a moment, then said, “That day you walked into the Dairy Queen and spoke to Delray, I nearly shit.”

  “I didn’t recognize you, Johnny. You’d grown up, become a man. But even if I had known you on sight, it wouldn’t have mattered. I didn’t make the connection until yesterday.”

  “For all I knew, you had a twenty-two-year-old arrest warrant for me.”

  “No.”

  Jack looked at Anna, reached up and touched her cheek. “I took a real chance coming back to Blewer, but I… I had to. As long as Carl was in prison, my conscience stayed clear. He deserved the sentence he got for killing that off-duty cop during the convenience store holdup. But as soon as I heard he had escaped, I knew I had to be on hand in case he tried to make good his threat to kill Delray.”

  Anna made a quick sign.

  “Why?” Jack said. “Because it’s my fault that Carl issued that threat. Delray blamed Carl for something he didn’t do. He thought his stepsons were connected to the death of a girl named Patsy McCorkle. They weren’t. And I knew it.”

  Her lips parted in wordless surprise. She looked quickly at Ezzy. He lowered his eyes to his lap, where his hands were lying loosely clasped. The band of pressure he had felt around his chest for almost a quarter of a century began to shake loose.

  “See, Anna,” Jack was saying, “my mom raised me practically by herself. Occasionally my daddy would put in an appearance, but when he did there was always trouble. He’d get drunk. She’d whine. He’d get caught with another man’s wife. There’d be a row. She’d cry. He’d flaunt his lovers. They’d have terrible fights.”

  He paused for a moment, and Ezzy could see the torment behind his eyes as he remembered unhappy times. “I won’t bore you with the details. Bottom line, my old man was worthless. A lousy husband and a worse father. But don’t feel too sorry for my mother. She put up with it. That was her choice. She loved her misery more than she loved either him or me.

  “After she died, I was placed in foster care. My old man left me in the system for a while, then decided he wanted me to be with him. Not out of the goodness of his heart, or because he gave a damn what happened to me. He needed a playmate, an errand boy. He landed a job as a roughneck and was sent up here to Blewer. He made pretty good money. Things were all right.

  “In fact, life got to be fun. Life with my mother had been drudgery. But with my old man, it was a constant party. More often as not, people thought we were brothers. He didn’t look old enough to be my dad—he wasn’t old enough to be my dad, except biologically.

  “Discipline wasn’t in his vocabulary. He let me do whatever I pleased, and after living with a couple of foster families where correction had been harsh, I loved the freedom. He never made me go to school. Once, when a truancy agent came by, he charmed her and they wound up in bed together that same afternoon.

  “He took me out drinking with him nearly every night. For my fifteenth birthday he gave me a night with one of his girlfriends. After that, we shared women with no more regard than we’d split a candy bar. At sixteen I formally quit school and got a job with the same drilling outfit he worked for.”

  “I guess that’s about the time I met y’all,” Ezzy interjected.

  Jack nodded. “Daddy hadn’t cleaned up his act any. He still got drunk and disorderly sometimes. On more than one occasion you brought him home, Ezzy. Remember?”

  Ezzy nodded.

  “One night he got in a fight over a woman in a bar. You called me to come get him or else you were going to put him in jail.”

  “You had a lot of responsibility for a boy that age.”

  “As I said, it was fun. For a while. And then, I don’t know what happened exactly. I can’t recall a specific event that woke me up to what a sordid life we were living. I guess the realization crept up on me. Gradually our lifestyle no longer seemed so sweet. In fact it turned sour.

  “The older Daddy got, the younger the women he chased. His sexual innuendos and seduction techniques didn’t seem clever and naughty to me anymore, just distasteful. The harder he worked at satisfying his appetites, the more it took to satisfy them.

  “One night we brought this girl home with us. Daddy got rough and she got scared. I said I wanted no part of that kinky stuff. He cussed me out, called me a wimp, a pussy, an embarrassment to him. While he was ranting and raving, the girl gathered her clothes and ran out. After he sobered up, I don’t think he even remembered what he’d tried to do to her.”

  He paused and stared straight ahead. Ezzy figured he was too ashamed to look at either Anna or him.

  “We met Pasty McCorkle at the Wagon Wheel. She ran around with a wild crowd, including the Herbold brothers. They hung out in the same taverns as Daddy and me, but they always meant trouble. Already they had spent time in reform school and in your jail, Ezzy, and were destined for bigger and better things. I steered clear of them.

  “Patsy wasn’t a pretty girl, but she had a spirit of adventure that appealed to my old man. He was way too old for her, but she was flattered by his attention. The first time they were together it was in the backseat of our car on the Wagon Wheel’s parking lot. Later he described it to me in detail and told me that I shouldn’t be put off by her looks, that I didn’t know what I was missing, that if I closed my eyes it didn’t matter what she looked like. Things like that,
only in much cruder language. Looking back, I think he favored women who were emotionally needy, like my mother, like Patsy, because they fed his ego.”

  “What happened that night, Johnny?”

  “Daddy had forgot to make the payments, so our car had been repossessed several days earlier. He was pissed and depressed, but he wanted to go out and party, take his mind off his troubles. When we got to the bar, it was already crowded. Daddy’s mood didn’t improve when he saw Patsy carrying on with the Herbolds. He tried to woo her away, but she had eyes only for them that night.

  “Daddy drank steadily, until he had spent all the money in his pocket. When he ran out, he offered to sell this guy his knife for cash. Everybody was familiar with that knife because it was so unusual. He liked to brag about how it had been handed down through several generations of Sawyers. Whether or not that was true, I don’t know. He probably stole it, but he’d had it for as long as I could remember.

  “In any event, the guy wasn’t interested in buying it, and Daddy took that as an insult to his family. They got into a shouting match. The bartender—I think he owned the place—”

  “He did. Parker Gee,” Ezzy interjected.

  “Before they could come to blows, he told me to take Daddy outside. Try and cool him down. We were still out there when Patsy staggered out with the Herbolds. She was drunk, but not so drunk that she didn’t realize they were dumping her. She expected to leave with them and continue the party somewhere else. They said they had business to attend to and she couldn’t go.”

  “So their alibi was sound.”

  “I guess so, Ezzy. Because they left the Wagon Wheel without Patsy.”

  “She offered you and your daddy a ride.”

  “More or less. The details are foggy, but we left with her. To my knowledge no one saw us getting into her car.”

  “But every last person I questioned testified that she had left with the Herbolds. Including you.”

  “Yeah,” he admitted, on an expulsion of breath. “I lied to you, Ezzy. She walked out with Carl and Cecil. But she drove away with my old man and me.”